Dreams 10/2/09
The earliest back I can remember, it all started as a play. The ship was just a poorly-produced stage, no more than twenty feet across, and the curtains hung at the fore of the ship-- entirely the wrong direction for our audience, if we'd had one. I think it was a rehearsal. Furthermore, nobody seemed to know any of the original lines of the play,so we were just improvising along the lines we thought it was supposed to go. But, as it was a dream, the story managed to escape the pretense of the play, the stage became the ship, the curtains became its sails, and our costumes and characters became real. Not in any burst of magic; I just forgot it was a play and continued onward with the dream.
The play itself was some sort of Gilbert and Sullivan thing, if Gilbert and Sullivan had ever written anything that wasn't musical (though everyone was speaking sort of lyrically). Or if they'd ever written anything high-fantasy. The important thing is we were a group of ridiculous and incompetent sailors with British accents, outlandish uniforms and an undying urge to fulfill our duty and explore the twenty-seven seas, all of which were uncharted.
When I say we were incompetent, I mean that the entirety of the opening act was us talking (and singing) about how we weren't particularly good at sailing, swimming, exploring, or adventuring... with the exception of the Captain, who was the noblest, smartest, soundest soul anyone had ever met. The Captain was sad, in the sort of way that only a romantic soldier surrounded by buffoons could be.
As an example of our incompetence, early on in the play I jumped off of the aft of the ship because there was a shiny thing in the water, which turned out to be "Just another sword in the engine! Probably not good for either of them, but damn if I can think of another way to stop the ship!" So, apparently, the ship had both sails AND an engine. Equally apparently, we couldn't find the anchor, jammed a sword in the engine to stop the ship (as if we wouldn't freely drift in that case), FORGOT we had done that, and had a propensity to leap into the water if we saw something amiss down there.
It was implied that the chain of command had slightly less goofily incompetent men at the top of it, and the biggest screw ups at the bottom. (Which is another divergence from Gilbert and Sullivan, where the opposite is always true--Authority, with them, confers idiocy).
I was the second mate, and also a High Honorable Deckhand (there were two ranking systems, one of which was dream-nonsense) and my brother was the third mate, and an Honorable Deckhand. I forget what the first adventure in the dream was, because it was over so quickly. But afterwards my brother and I had a musical number, wherein he told me of his ambitions to become a captain, and thereby have his own ship. He said I could be his second-mate. I told him that, as I was a HIGH Honorable Deckhand, instead of but a lowly (yet respectable) Honorable Deckhand, I would likely be promoted to Captain long before him. He was sad about this, but comically happy to be offered a position as third mate on my ship. And then I launched into refrain about how I would one day be an ADMIRAL (an Admiral? An admiral!) and wear an enormous hat and have a clean blue suit and wouldn't I look dashing?
Tomfoolery.
Meanwhile, the captain had managed, despite being the only smart one, to fall in love with some sort of mystical sea woman.
I should explain. Over the course of the play so far (which was no longer really a play) we'd left our mooring and explored one island. Now we were drifting off in the DEAD middle of nowhere. Nobody could read the map, which was just as well, because I was aware that we weren't keeping our course at all-- the waves were turning the ship and nobody was making sure we had any heading but "Onward!"
Out in this nowhere, there was an inexplicable woman in a white-green dress SWIMMING away from the ship. She was probably a mermaid or siren or other dangerous creature, but she seemed to have human legs, and she seemed equally as mournful as the captain, albeit in a distant and magical way.
Despite the apparent danger, the Captain immediately fell in love with her, and sang briefly about how perfect she way in every way, and how sad he was that she was outstripping his men.
Taking heart, I and another crewman decided to help the Captain. We couldn't catch her, we said, because the ship was too big and therefore too slow (the ship probably would have been fast enough, had its engines and sails been utilized properly, or if it could sail in a straight line for more than a second). Clearly we had to stop the ship and swim out to where the woman was, ourselves. Only a swimmer can catch a swimmer, after all.
So the captain, the other sailor and I all headed out towards the woman, who we now saw had stopped amid the waves. She was sitting on something just a foot below the surface of the waves-- something yellow with several uneven peaks, stretching down a good distance (someone later called it "The Yellow Castle," but that's all I heard of it.
The Captain didn't want to approach. He was too nervous. What should he even say? "Funny seeing you here, out in the ocean?"
I decided to approach her on his behalf. I got about three feet from her, but when I spoke she moved slightly like she was annoyed and suddenly an inexorable force WOVE THROUGH THE WATER AND LIFTED ME BODILY OUT OF THE OCEAN, flinging me hundreds of feet through the air, back onto our ship.
I tried to keep watch of what was happening. I watched the other crewmember approach the woman, and had a sinking suspicion I knew what was going to happen. I was right. As soon as he said something to betray his presence the woman sprang on him, driving him beneath the water. I thought maybe she was a mermaid, after all, and strained to see if she was eating him, but it was no use. We were drifting away from the Yellow Castle, and fast.
I reassured the nearest Low But Respectable Deckhand that everything would be fine: The Captain would win the lady's heart and they would come find the ship. How would he find us, with us drifting away? Well, don't worry, I said, we'll just stay near THAT COAST THAT IS APPEARING! If we stick to one place the captain will find us in no time. He was a genius, after all.
We had something of a conversation about all the virtues the captain had that we lacked in bright and optimistic tones, and when next I looked, something was wrong.
The vessel was in a completely different place. A woodland stream, to be exact. I had NO IDEA how we'd gotten there. I suspected we'd been teleported somehow, but it's entirely possible that nobody was paying any attention and we'd drifted up the mouth of a river, and then down different ways into the island we'd just been off the coast of.
Well, I reasoned, we should just follow the water upstream, which would take us to the source of all water, which was undeniably the ocean. The boat drifted upstream, but this was difficult. First of all, the one stream was part of a criss-crossing network of MANY, some of which were only inches deep, and the boat scraped unnervingly on the gravel at the bottom of these. Second, we were batting our way against the current, and there were frequently tall slopes I had the good sense, at least, not to try to sail up.
All in all, we were hopelessly lost.
Eventually we came to a bunch of buildings, in the middle of the woods. It seemed sort of familiar, but none of us could place the source of those feelings. I said I would go aboard, and took a radio-light to tell my brother, on the ship, what I found.
(This trend of the most competent figures leaving the boat, and the boat drifting away without their leadership, was, I am sure, a running gag of the play.)
After poking around the buildings, I realized, suddenly, that it was the Maritime Exploration Academy, where we'd all gone to school to learn to be adventurers and how to sail a ship. Furthermore, it was the military command center from which all of our explorations were coordinated. I don't think all of the Academy's crews were like us, but I DO think that the crew of the Tomfoolery had been assembled by the Academy Council intentionally, out of some genre-savviness on their part. A crew of fools is BOUND to have incredible adventures.
The strange thing was that the Academy was abandoned. All of the windows to classrooms and cafes and dorm common rooms revealed an empty, haunted campus. Everything was made of mahogany and redwood and cedar, I am pretty sure. Everything. Buildings, chairs, tables, walls. And there was this loud buzzing sound that I, the Second Mate, didn't recognize but which I, Michael Grant, knew was a chainsaw.
I radioed in what I'd found so far, and as I was doing so, I could hear that the buzzing was coming from around the next corner. I ducked into the nearest building and climbed to the second floor.
The interiors had weird things going on with them. Parts of the walls and floors had been replaced by brown paper, taped to them, and the doorways and windows sometimes had black and silver plastic, like garbage bags, taped over them, but in a way where you could ostensibly walk through the door into a bag.
In any case, I manuevered myself until I found that the building was now a U-shape, with the inside of the U missing the walls that face one another. I maneuvered carefully to see the source of the noise without it seeing me.
Standing the the space of the U was a giant man. He was two stories tall. He had various artificial things about him-- he seemed to be made of stone and metal ores pressed into shape, with weird pumps artificial muscle sinewed around him. Much of him was also wooden. Difficult to see, because he was all-over painted the same dark red as mahogany. I didn't get a very good look because I was peering around from behind a wall.
One of his arms was a chainsaw, which he was using to surgically cut away parts of the building.
"What are you doing to the academy?!" I cried, and the robot said, "Academy?! Academy!? This academy is useless!"
I took offense at this, but decided it was a good idea to hide, since the robot could see me and had started to saw away at the building directly around me. I ran back inside. The thing could tell where I was because it caused the building to sag. So I jumped a huge jump to a new hiding place in a more stable part of the building.
But I wasn't very smart, so I kept blowing my cover by saying, "Useless? Why, if you'd been taught your proper calculations, you could have known instantly where I'd gone based on the angle of the sagging floorboard when I jumped!"
And then the robot would become enraged and attack the part of the building I was in. But apparently I was gifted with the ability to jump absurd distances? So I kept jumping to new places he couldn't see or sense me, until I was on the roof.
Then I jumped for the roof of a different building, a plan forming in my head of how to defeat the robot (I think the idea was to get him to collapse the buildings on his own head?), and also all the while wondering what had happened to everyone IN the Academy. I got the sense that one of them built the machine, since it was similar in composition to the academy and similar to our ship in terms of technology level.
But then I woke up, so I didn't find out.
I think my dreams have been getting more visual lately. Possibly because I have been paying more attention to visual stimulus?
The play itself was some sort of Gilbert and Sullivan thing, if Gilbert and Sullivan had ever written anything that wasn't musical (though everyone was speaking sort of lyrically). Or if they'd ever written anything high-fantasy. The important thing is we were a group of ridiculous and incompetent sailors with British accents, outlandish uniforms and an undying urge to fulfill our duty and explore the twenty-seven seas, all of which were uncharted.
When I say we were incompetent, I mean that the entirety of the opening act was us talking (and singing) about how we weren't particularly good at sailing, swimming, exploring, or adventuring... with the exception of the Captain, who was the noblest, smartest, soundest soul anyone had ever met. The Captain was sad, in the sort of way that only a romantic soldier surrounded by buffoons could be.
As an example of our incompetence, early on in the play I jumped off of the aft of the ship because there was a shiny thing in the water, which turned out to be "Just another sword in the engine! Probably not good for either of them, but damn if I can think of another way to stop the ship!" So, apparently, the ship had both sails AND an engine. Equally apparently, we couldn't find the anchor, jammed a sword in the engine to stop the ship (as if we wouldn't freely drift in that case), FORGOT we had done that, and had a propensity to leap into the water if we saw something amiss down there.
It was implied that the chain of command had slightly less goofily incompetent men at the top of it, and the biggest screw ups at the bottom. (Which is another divergence from Gilbert and Sullivan, where the opposite is always true--Authority, with them, confers idiocy).
I was the second mate, and also a High Honorable Deckhand (there were two ranking systems, one of which was dream-nonsense) and my brother was the third mate, and an Honorable Deckhand. I forget what the first adventure in the dream was, because it was over so quickly. But afterwards my brother and I had a musical number, wherein he told me of his ambitions to become a captain, and thereby have his own ship. He said I could be his second-mate. I told him that, as I was a HIGH Honorable Deckhand, instead of but a lowly (yet respectable) Honorable Deckhand, I would likely be promoted to Captain long before him. He was sad about this, but comically happy to be offered a position as third mate on my ship. And then I launched into refrain about how I would one day be an ADMIRAL (an Admiral? An admiral!) and wear an enormous hat and have a clean blue suit and wouldn't I look dashing?
Tomfoolery.
Meanwhile, the captain had managed, despite being the only smart one, to fall in love with some sort of mystical sea woman.
I should explain. Over the course of the play so far (which was no longer really a play) we'd left our mooring and explored one island. Now we were drifting off in the DEAD middle of nowhere. Nobody could read the map, which was just as well, because I was aware that we weren't keeping our course at all-- the waves were turning the ship and nobody was making sure we had any heading but "Onward!"
Out in this nowhere, there was an inexplicable woman in a white-green dress SWIMMING away from the ship. She was probably a mermaid or siren or other dangerous creature, but she seemed to have human legs, and she seemed equally as mournful as the captain, albeit in a distant and magical way.
Despite the apparent danger, the Captain immediately fell in love with her, and sang briefly about how perfect she way in every way, and how sad he was that she was outstripping his men.
Taking heart, I and another crewman decided to help the Captain. We couldn't catch her, we said, because the ship was too big and therefore too slow (the ship probably would have been fast enough, had its engines and sails been utilized properly, or if it could sail in a straight line for more than a second). Clearly we had to stop the ship and swim out to where the woman was, ourselves. Only a swimmer can catch a swimmer, after all.
So the captain, the other sailor and I all headed out towards the woman, who we now saw had stopped amid the waves. She was sitting on something just a foot below the surface of the waves-- something yellow with several uneven peaks, stretching down a good distance (someone later called it "The Yellow Castle," but that's all I heard of it.
The Captain didn't want to approach. He was too nervous. What should he even say? "Funny seeing you here, out in the ocean?"
I decided to approach her on his behalf. I got about three feet from her, but when I spoke she moved slightly like she was annoyed and suddenly an inexorable force WOVE THROUGH THE WATER AND LIFTED ME BODILY OUT OF THE OCEAN, flinging me hundreds of feet through the air, back onto our ship.
I tried to keep watch of what was happening. I watched the other crewmember approach the woman, and had a sinking suspicion I knew what was going to happen. I was right. As soon as he said something to betray his presence the woman sprang on him, driving him beneath the water. I thought maybe she was a mermaid, after all, and strained to see if she was eating him, but it was no use. We were drifting away from the Yellow Castle, and fast.
I reassured the nearest Low But Respectable Deckhand that everything would be fine: The Captain would win the lady's heart and they would come find the ship. How would he find us, with us drifting away? Well, don't worry, I said, we'll just stay near THAT COAST THAT IS APPEARING! If we stick to one place the captain will find us in no time. He was a genius, after all.
We had something of a conversation about all the virtues the captain had that we lacked in bright and optimistic tones, and when next I looked, something was wrong.
The vessel was in a completely different place. A woodland stream, to be exact. I had NO IDEA how we'd gotten there. I suspected we'd been teleported somehow, but it's entirely possible that nobody was paying any attention and we'd drifted up the mouth of a river, and then down different ways into the island we'd just been off the coast of.
Well, I reasoned, we should just follow the water upstream, which would take us to the source of all water, which was undeniably the ocean. The boat drifted upstream, but this was difficult. First of all, the one stream was part of a criss-crossing network of MANY, some of which were only inches deep, and the boat scraped unnervingly on the gravel at the bottom of these. Second, we were batting our way against the current, and there were frequently tall slopes I had the good sense, at least, not to try to sail up.
All in all, we were hopelessly lost.
Eventually we came to a bunch of buildings, in the middle of the woods. It seemed sort of familiar, but none of us could place the source of those feelings. I said I would go aboard, and took a radio-light to tell my brother, on the ship, what I found.
(This trend of the most competent figures leaving the boat, and the boat drifting away without their leadership, was, I am sure, a running gag of the play.)
After poking around the buildings, I realized, suddenly, that it was the Maritime Exploration Academy, where we'd all gone to school to learn to be adventurers and how to sail a ship. Furthermore, it was the military command center from which all of our explorations were coordinated. I don't think all of the Academy's crews were like us, but I DO think that the crew of the Tomfoolery had been assembled by the Academy Council intentionally, out of some genre-savviness on their part. A crew of fools is BOUND to have incredible adventures.
The strange thing was that the Academy was abandoned. All of the windows to classrooms and cafes and dorm common rooms revealed an empty, haunted campus. Everything was made of mahogany and redwood and cedar, I am pretty sure. Everything. Buildings, chairs, tables, walls. And there was this loud buzzing sound that I, the Second Mate, didn't recognize but which I, Michael Grant, knew was a chainsaw.
I radioed in what I'd found so far, and as I was doing so, I could hear that the buzzing was coming from around the next corner. I ducked into the nearest building and climbed to the second floor.
The interiors had weird things going on with them. Parts of the walls and floors had been replaced by brown paper, taped to them, and the doorways and windows sometimes had black and silver plastic, like garbage bags, taped over them, but in a way where you could ostensibly walk through the door into a bag.
In any case, I manuevered myself until I found that the building was now a U-shape, with the inside of the U missing the walls that face one another. I maneuvered carefully to see the source of the noise without it seeing me.
Standing the the space of the U was a giant man. He was two stories tall. He had various artificial things about him-- he seemed to be made of stone and metal ores pressed into shape, with weird pumps artificial muscle sinewed around him. Much of him was also wooden. Difficult to see, because he was all-over painted the same dark red as mahogany. I didn't get a very good look because I was peering around from behind a wall.
One of his arms was a chainsaw, which he was using to surgically cut away parts of the building.
"What are you doing to the academy?!" I cried, and the robot said, "Academy?! Academy!? This academy is useless!"
I took offense at this, but decided it was a good idea to hide, since the robot could see me and had started to saw away at the building directly around me. I ran back inside. The thing could tell where I was because it caused the building to sag. So I jumped a huge jump to a new hiding place in a more stable part of the building.
But I wasn't very smart, so I kept blowing my cover by saying, "Useless? Why, if you'd been taught your proper calculations, you could have known instantly where I'd gone based on the angle of the sagging floorboard when I jumped!"
And then the robot would become enraged and attack the part of the building I was in. But apparently I was gifted with the ability to jump absurd distances? So I kept jumping to new places he couldn't see or sense me, until I was on the roof.
Then I jumped for the roof of a different building, a plan forming in my head of how to defeat the robot (I think the idea was to get him to collapse the buildings on his own head?), and also all the while wondering what had happened to everyone IN the Academy. I got the sense that one of them built the machine, since it was similar in composition to the academy and similar to our ship in terms of technology level.
But then I woke up, so I didn't find out.
I think my dreams have been getting more visual lately. Possibly because I have been paying more attention to visual stimulus?