scattered dream remnants
It feels like an age since I've written a journal entry. I'll start with last night's dream, what I remember of it. The world was post-epic disaster, a manmade disaster. There were cities empty of everything except for strangle trees, moss and cows, but there were also cities just like cities today. Full of Fast Food junk, fusion restaurants (I may be hungry right now, so I may be projecting) and museums. Full of dangerous streets and apartment buildings, full of cars and people going somewhere, full of schools and churches. There were also mages, people who had the ability to scry somebody in a reflective surface or to pull a ghost out of an inanimate object. When the ghost was in an animate object, the mage was sh*t out of luck. The mage had inclinations, intuitions that others didn't; the really good mages could find new ways of travelling from point A to point B. They were pretty mysterious, but not in an "ooh, I wear cloaked robes" sort of way. Blah, blah. Things happened, events were invented. I fell in with a group of people on the move/on the run. Drat, I knew I shouldn't have taken a shower before writing this down; it was so clear as soon as I woke up, and it stayed clear until I washed it away. But I fell in with this group, and we were travelling, and many were the dangers on the road, yaddayadda. I think we were about five; maybe six. One of them looked like a cross between Simon Tam and the younger guy from House of Flying Daggers, and if such a man existed in reality, I would probably be hopelessly in crush; in the dream, I was concerned because he'd re-arranged his mind to be like tablets, and he'd lost some important information, like who he was and who he loved. Another of them looked vaguely like the lead singer of Paramore: tiny, skinny, long-monkey-limbed with an incorrigible smile and hair shaggy orange and red. Flame-hair. She was a mage, and a good friend. There was another guy, uber-responsible, short hair-cut, I can hardly remember his face; he was the one who made most of the decisions, when I wasn't the one who made most of the decisions. And someone else, and someone else.
We found this city, or rather we were rescued and brought to this city. I remember being all impressed at the city, because we'd been far-flung from actually-still-civilized cities for ages. Redhead chick revealed that she didn't plan on sticking around, that she just wanted to get to Los Angeles because she thought she'd fit in. Leaderguy was cynical and an asshole about this decision, and so was otherchick. Had he been planning to be a priest? Maybe. Point is: this city. They had electric gates that worked, which was impressive, and they were pretty damned fortified -- it was less a city than a university campus turned into a bastion of stability. We fixed their gates, and they let us in on the tragic history of the place, which was tragic indeed. Sometimes, the dead came back as machine-ghosts, and when they were machine-ghosts, all they wanted was to either do violence unto the living and drink their blood or remove all emotion from the living and make the living like they were, calm. The machine-ghosts had a goal, and that was to make people who could pass for living people. When these machine-ghosts came out, the whole 'city' went into lockdown. Rah, why am I having vague memories of pumpkin fields and scarecrows and redredred rags tied to treebranches like prayers or warnings or flags? Anyway, the 'city' was far from perfectly safe, but it was pretty sweet. Leaving the city in any real way was a problem, since most of the roads to actual civilization had bombed out at this point, but a few people still tried. There was grafitti, old warnings about caravans that might be coming at thus and thus point, and redhead chick (I may have been her for this scene) was thinking seriously about taking one.
But this image of this kid came to life, and delivered a message about how he was waiting for his trial and blahdeeblah hadn't meant to do whatever crime had been done -- or in fact hadn't done whatever crime had been done to get him imprisoned in X building. The dream became about how he actually had been forgotten about in the upheaval, so he was still in lockdown in a building nobody's cracked for years, and although I wondered how he could have survived, it was clear that he did, because the image-that-came-to-life was his school photo on file, projected over the image-banners, like floating advertisements, the city still had, and we figured out how he could manage to do that, but not get out of his prison. The dream became about how we were going to get him out, and it was complicated and full of suck; his story also somehow entwined with the leaving-for-Los-Angeles story, and when I finally got to him, he looked a lot older, a lot more broken. Not the smarmy debate club president who'd been framed for whatever in his picture, and maybe he wasn't all there, either. Oh, and also, it turned out he'd been infected by the machine ghosts. Him, and this other girl named Lolli, who was relevant to his particular story in some way I no longer remember. The smell of nailpolish remover brought out their violentviolentviolent sides and then, if there was a lot of it, acted as a sedative -- like the violence reached a point at which it could only collapse. I had the joy of talking to this poor guy about his transformation and how we'd try to figure out something and how he couldn't go out yet because we needed to make sure his latent machine-ghost tendencies wouldn't take control again and make him take out the city's security and/or any people he ran across.
The talk went about as well as you could expect, and after I left, he found his own way out and approached the ... Board? The president's board? This board that had power and was the remnant of the folk who'd consigned him to that quarantined building then forgotten about him, and he was ready to be all dazzlingly argumentative, to clear his case once and for all, the case that nobody cared about, but then somebody sat in "his" seat. There was a flashback, from his point-of-view. Then he went machine-ghost, and the rest of the dream was about re-containment. Then there was a breach in the city's defenses, and the bus that was supposed to go to Los Angeles was full of bones, was found in a ditch on the road outofthere, annnnnd whilst in the midst of dealing with the crisis --
Hawaii? Yes, Hawaii was starting to be mentioned in the dream as a safe haven
-- I woke up.
We found this city, or rather we were rescued and brought to this city. I remember being all impressed at the city, because we'd been far-flung from actually-still-civilized cities for ages. Redhead chick revealed that she didn't plan on sticking around, that she just wanted to get to Los Angeles because she thought she'd fit in. Leaderguy was cynical and an asshole about this decision, and so was otherchick. Had he been planning to be a priest? Maybe. Point is: this city. They had electric gates that worked, which was impressive, and they were pretty damned fortified -- it was less a city than a university campus turned into a bastion of stability. We fixed their gates, and they let us in on the tragic history of the place, which was tragic indeed. Sometimes, the dead came back as machine-ghosts, and when they were machine-ghosts, all they wanted was to either do violence unto the living and drink their blood or remove all emotion from the living and make the living like they were, calm. The machine-ghosts had a goal, and that was to make people who could pass for living people. When these machine-ghosts came out, the whole 'city' went into lockdown. Rah, why am I having vague memories of pumpkin fields and scarecrows and redredred rags tied to treebranches like prayers or warnings or flags? Anyway, the 'city' was far from perfectly safe, but it was pretty sweet. Leaving the city in any real way was a problem, since most of the roads to actual civilization had bombed out at this point, but a few people still tried. There was grafitti, old warnings about caravans that might be coming at thus and thus point, and redhead chick (I may have been her for this scene) was thinking seriously about taking one.
But this image of this kid came to life, and delivered a message about how he was waiting for his trial and blahdeeblah hadn't meant to do whatever crime had been done -- or in fact hadn't done whatever crime had been done to get him imprisoned in X building. The dream became about how he actually had been forgotten about in the upheaval, so he was still in lockdown in a building nobody's cracked for years, and although I wondered how he could have survived, it was clear that he did, because the image-that-came-to-life was his school photo on file, projected over the image-banners, like floating advertisements, the city still had, and we figured out how he could manage to do that, but not get out of his prison. The dream became about how we were going to get him out, and it was complicated and full of suck; his story also somehow entwined with the leaving-for-Los-Angeles story, and when I finally got to him, he looked a lot older, a lot more broken. Not the smarmy debate club president who'd been framed for whatever in his picture, and maybe he wasn't all there, either. Oh, and also, it turned out he'd been infected by the machine ghosts. Him, and this other girl named Lolli, who was relevant to his particular story in some way I no longer remember. The smell of nailpolish remover brought out their violentviolentviolent sides and then, if there was a lot of it, acted as a sedative -- like the violence reached a point at which it could only collapse. I had the joy of talking to this poor guy about his transformation and how we'd try to figure out something and how he couldn't go out yet because we needed to make sure his latent machine-ghost tendencies wouldn't take control again and make him take out the city's security and/or any people he ran across.
The talk went about as well as you could expect, and after I left, he found his own way out and approached the ... Board? The president's board? This board that had power and was the remnant of the folk who'd consigned him to that quarantined building then forgotten about him, and he was ready to be all dazzlingly argumentative, to clear his case once and for all, the case that nobody cared about, but then somebody sat in "his" seat. There was a flashback, from his point-of-view. Then he went machine-ghost, and the rest of the dream was about re-containment. Then there was a breach in the city's defenses, and the bus that was supposed to go to Los Angeles was full of bones, was found in a ditch on the road outofthere, annnnnd whilst in the midst of dealing with the crisis --
Hawaii? Yes, Hawaii was starting to be mentioned in the dream as a safe haven
-- I woke up.