In the mythlands 'good' is always synonymous with 'wise'. Pah.
Okay, so I mentioned my thing where battle or conflict dreams are water-based, yeah?
Well, I was about to launch into a rambling entry about last night's dream, in which the enemy wasn't water-dwelling, but then I realised that it wasn't actually a battle or conflict dream and they weren't the enemy.
Sure, it was a foreign army (by 'foreign' I mean 'alien' except native to Earth so a sort of simultaneous evolution thing) and my task was to infiltrate them and sabotage or spy or...something...but I vastly preferred them to the dickheads among my own people. I don't recall that I completed my mission, either, before the dream forgot what it was doing and meandered down a different path. I don't think I wound up acting against the Other, although it was clear that they didn't have anything like my full loyalty.
I was male. Corporal Kune in an army without corporals. (A squillion of Ensigns and a few scattered titles above them. Essentially, an army of grunts, and a small number of titled gentry giving orders. Gentry is the wrong word because it was very much those who had clawed (literally) their way up, but...they were granted that sort of undeniable authority. Hmm. Hives. Queens and soldiers. But the queens were lords. There may have been an emperor.)
For a while I dodged giving them a name (because I hadn't quite invented it yet), and they thought my dodgery was slick, and called me Corporal Slick. I told that to the Rock DJ (in-dream) and he was amused (long story) and went undercover himself to either back me up or cause me strife, depending on the whim of the moment.
Before any loyalty was really tested, though, the dreamline shifted. I was searching a military building that belonged to this army. Searching hospital-type corridors deeper and deeper underground. I know I was moving downwards. I came to the bottom, and I opened it up, and stepped through. I should have been falling but I wasn't permitted to feel it; I merely arrived below at the next world. Small...like the planet of Le Petit Prince. An island in space/time. I dropped through a couple of these, dealing with the inhabitants, knowing that each was a little closer to the heart of the universe and the secrets there. The meaning of it all.
One of the inhabitants I came to was a woman. In the end, I could only travel a few of these small worlds. (I think one of them did have a battle, and water. Possibly I fought a pirate ship.) I wasn't able to travel further from my home...place. I think it would have been lethal? The woman had to continue on for me. She could go further...she could go all the way.
(One of the places she dropped to -- always going down -- was a construction, something in between a building and a maze. No land, entirely artificial.)
Of course, I woke before she reached the bottom and all that meaning-of-the-universe stuff. However, some things did occur to me.
First: In any dream in which two or more characters must complete some quest, one character -- and only one -- will be female. It's the token female of the fantasy trope, just in case the book needs a romantic interest.
Second: In any dream in which two or more characters must complete some quest, the character I identify as 'me' -- the first-person point of view -- will be male. Only in the fantasy trope, and no, I have no idea why I'm only a boy in fantasy stories. I'll figure it out later.
Third: I thought she was the token female. I thought she was the romantic interest. Of course, I was wrong. The female in the group is also me. I was fooled because she has never, in a fantasy-trope dream, been first-person. She has often, however, been the figure who seems useless (there as a token gesture to angry feminists) but turns out to be vital to the success of the quest. There's something only that face of me can accomplish.
I think I should work on that. I think that, the more confident I become in my own personhood, in standing tall and allowing myself to bloom, the more likely it is that I will identify more evenly with both of these sides of me in the dreams. (Side-note: odds are strong that the division has very little to do with any gender issues I may have, but I am amused nonetheless.)
...God, I do wank on when I'm in one of these pretentious moods. *grin*
Well, I was about to launch into a rambling entry about last night's dream, in which the enemy wasn't water-dwelling, but then I realised that it wasn't actually a battle or conflict dream and they weren't the enemy.
Sure, it was a foreign army (by 'foreign' I mean 'alien' except native to Earth so a sort of simultaneous evolution thing) and my task was to infiltrate them and sabotage or spy or...something...but I vastly preferred them to the dickheads among my own people. I don't recall that I completed my mission, either, before the dream forgot what it was doing and meandered down a different path. I don't think I wound up acting against the Other, although it was clear that they didn't have anything like my full loyalty.
I was male. Corporal Kune in an army without corporals. (A squillion of Ensigns and a few scattered titles above them. Essentially, an army of grunts, and a small number of titled gentry giving orders. Gentry is the wrong word because it was very much those who had clawed (literally) their way up, but...they were granted that sort of undeniable authority. Hmm. Hives. Queens and soldiers. But the queens were lords. There may have been an emperor.)
For a while I dodged giving them a name (because I hadn't quite invented it yet), and they thought my dodgery was slick, and called me Corporal Slick. I told that to the Rock DJ (in-dream) and he was amused (long story) and went undercover himself to either back me up or cause me strife, depending on the whim of the moment.
Before any loyalty was really tested, though, the dreamline shifted. I was searching a military building that belonged to this army. Searching hospital-type corridors deeper and deeper underground. I know I was moving downwards. I came to the bottom, and I opened it up, and stepped through. I should have been falling but I wasn't permitted to feel it; I merely arrived below at the next world. Small...like the planet of Le Petit Prince. An island in space/time. I dropped through a couple of these, dealing with the inhabitants, knowing that each was a little closer to the heart of the universe and the secrets there. The meaning of it all.
One of the inhabitants I came to was a woman. In the end, I could only travel a few of these small worlds. (I think one of them did have a battle, and water. Possibly I fought a pirate ship.) I wasn't able to travel further from my home...place. I think it would have been lethal? The woman had to continue on for me. She could go further...she could go all the way.
(One of the places she dropped to -- always going down -- was a construction, something in between a building and a maze. No land, entirely artificial.)
Of course, I woke before she reached the bottom and all that meaning-of-the-universe stuff. However, some things did occur to me.
First: In any dream in which two or more characters must complete some quest, one character -- and only one -- will be female. It's the token female of the fantasy trope, just in case the book needs a romantic interest.
Second: In any dream in which two or more characters must complete some quest, the character I identify as 'me' -- the first-person point of view -- will be male. Only in the fantasy trope, and no, I have no idea why I'm only a boy in fantasy stories. I'll figure it out later.
Third: I thought she was the token female. I thought she was the romantic interest. Of course, I was wrong. The female in the group is also me. I was fooled because she has never, in a fantasy-trope dream, been first-person. She has often, however, been the figure who seems useless (there as a token gesture to angry feminists) but turns out to be vital to the success of the quest. There's something only that face of me can accomplish.
I think I should work on that. I think that, the more confident I become in my own personhood, in standing tall and allowing myself to bloom, the more likely it is that I will identify more evenly with both of these sides of me in the dreams. (Side-note: odds are strong that the division has very little to do with any gender issues I may have, but I am amused nonetheless.)
...God, I do wank on when I'm in one of these pretentious moods. *grin*