Out, you dream-sickness carrion!
I haven't been getting enough sleep lately. It's just my own bad planning. Consequently, I've been waking up with dreamsickness the last couple of mornings. It's the feeling that I haven't had enough dreaming/nightmare time during the course of the six hours I spent in bed, and the dreams will consequently follow me around for half an hour or so, making reality seem less vivid than the images in my head.
They're mostly things that wouldn't sound like much if I told them here. Flying; going to the opera in Boston with people around me in the audience whom I desperately wanted to avoid; wandering in a garden. They were all full of strong emotions that, in the way of dreams, had nothing obvious to do with the images. The only disturbing one was where I was being chased in broad daylight by a guy I know from gaming. Needless to say, the guy in real life isn't at all scary. I like being around him. The other thing that made the dream so disturbing was that he was wearing a giant mask of a monster's head, gray, with long gaping jaws and fangs. He looked like one of the shinigami from Death Note, which is odd in that I haven't watched Death Note aside from a very funny AMV that lignota showed me once.
The important part of this is that I made a weird discovery during the overcrowded dreams of the last few nights. When writers talk about their muse, do they mean what I mean by the word? What I've always meant by "muse" is the creative, well-hidden part of your mind that comes up with good ideas, after which you write them down and work them out on paper. The word gets flung around so much, though, that I try to avoid using it. In fact, I've always thought it sounded a trifle affected, or like a religious belief sneaking around disguised as a psychological concept.
Well, I have a muse. He looks like Colin Clive. Yeah. I know. I watch too many movies. But it really does seem to be the case. It was rather an awkward set of interviews. Several times, during the last few nights of sleep, I've found myself talking to a tall, skinny guy--in the most recent installment, we were sitting at a table in a sidewalk cafe--who looked like this guy: British, cranky, overly caffeinated, conceited, and yet kind of shy. (Okay, Dr. Frankenstein isn't quite the image I have in mind, but it'll do. I just spent half an hour looking for a picture of Colin Clive as Stephen Orlac, since that was exactly how he looked, but I can't find a single decent one. Oh, internets, you have failed me. It was an enjoyable waste of half an hour, though.) Anyway, he had invited me to the cafe to very politely chew me out. I sat there and ate a croissant while he told me that he had been coming up with all kinds of good stuff lately, so why wasn't I writing any of it down? I made feeble bleating noises of self-justification and said that I'd been busy. He wasn't having any of that. He insisted that I was letting down my end of the bargain. "We are a team, after all. Aren't we?" "Yes! Oh, yes, of course we are!" "Mmhmm. Well, then."
I think I have to get some writing in today.
They're mostly things that wouldn't sound like much if I told them here. Flying; going to the opera in Boston with people around me in the audience whom I desperately wanted to avoid; wandering in a garden. They were all full of strong emotions that, in the way of dreams, had nothing obvious to do with the images. The only disturbing one was where I was being chased in broad daylight by a guy I know from gaming. Needless to say, the guy in real life isn't at all scary. I like being around him. The other thing that made the dream so disturbing was that he was wearing a giant mask of a monster's head, gray, with long gaping jaws and fangs. He looked like one of the shinigami from Death Note, which is odd in that I haven't watched Death Note aside from a very funny AMV that lignota showed me once.
The important part of this is that I made a weird discovery during the overcrowded dreams of the last few nights. When writers talk about their muse, do they mean what I mean by the word? What I've always meant by "muse" is the creative, well-hidden part of your mind that comes up with good ideas, after which you write them down and work them out on paper. The word gets flung around so much, though, that I try to avoid using it. In fact, I've always thought it sounded a trifle affected, or like a religious belief sneaking around disguised as a psychological concept.
Well, I have a muse. He looks like Colin Clive. Yeah. I know. I watch too many movies. But it really does seem to be the case. It was rather an awkward set of interviews. Several times, during the last few nights of sleep, I've found myself talking to a tall, skinny guy--in the most recent installment, we were sitting at a table in a sidewalk cafe--who looked like this guy: British, cranky, overly caffeinated, conceited, and yet kind of shy. (Okay, Dr. Frankenstein isn't quite the image I have in mind, but it'll do. I just spent half an hour looking for a picture of Colin Clive as Stephen Orlac, since that was exactly how he looked, but I can't find a single decent one. Oh, internets, you have failed me. It was an enjoyable waste of half an hour, though.) Anyway, he had invited me to the cafe to very politely chew me out. I sat there and ate a croissant while he told me that he had been coming up with all kinds of good stuff lately, so why wasn't I writing any of it down? I made feeble bleating noises of self-justification and said that I'd been busy. He wasn't having any of that. He insisted that I was letting down my end of the bargain. "We are a team, after all. Aren't we?" "Yes! Oh, yes, of course we are!" "Mmhmm. Well, then."
I think I have to get some writing in today.