![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Set me adrift and I'm lost over there
I dreamed that I was visiting an alternate present.
It was not quite a tour, but all the other travelers were strangers to me; the building in which we had assembled reminded me of a cross between a bus terminal and an elementary school, or something that was simultaneously brisk and institutional and paneled inside with mellow-varnished wood, awning windows, those chain-link glass doors. It was too hot even with all the windows cranked open to the winter outside, the kind of raw soaking chill that usually gets in through any crack, and I kept shedding layers as we waited until I was down to my shoved-up shirtsleeves, everything else bundled over my arm. The bus, when it came, looked very much like a nineteenth-century train carriage, or perhaps that's what it was. It had green trim, seats too narrowly spaced down the aisle. Before we boarded, the man who was not quite our guide warned us one last time that, even though all applicants were carefully screened ahead of time for mental and physical compatibility with the process of travel and the other present, not everyone made the transition successfully. Some fourth-dimensional rotation was involved: "unsuccessfully," in this case, therefore seemed to mean that your eyes could wind up coming out your feet. We had all signed the necessary papers. Some nausea and disorientation at the moment of transition was normal. I remember no movement, but I remember landscape passing outside the windows, forested and sunny and much too green for the time of year, otherwise unremarkable. I don't think I was sick. Coming out of the terminal in the other world, barrel-vaulted skylights overhead and polished granite underfoot, I had to change some money at the nearest kiosk, which was also a café run by a young woman dressed like any coffeeshop employee. The menu on the chalkboard was written in English, but the letters were shaped differently. I couldn't tell how far back the divergence went. With a ten-dollar bill, I bought something that was not quite ice cream, although it was cold and tasted milky, with hot shreds of something that was not quite coconut on top, although it had almost the same buttery sweetness. The change I got back was in the local currency, whatever country I was in, I don't remember and I'm not even sure if I knew its name: five or six bills like short strips of stiff ribbon, gold, dark green, magenta; I knew that each color signified a different denomination, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out which. They creased easily and folded up like origami, but couldn't be torn. While I was standing there at the kiosk, attempting to determine how much pocket money this meant I actually had (and eat my not quite ice cream before it melted out of its cup, which was made of waxed cardboard and not even remotely alien), a man came up who was a judicial or political authority of some sort; I could tell from his clothes, which were royal purple and charcoal grey and cut like a suit that really wanted to be a cap and gown. Before he ordered anything, he asked the young woman, "When is it appropriate to feel very strange?" She replied, "In the middle of great changes." And he nodded, as though she had given him the right answer to a challenge or a riddle, and he paid for his not quite ice cream, and I woke up.
Diana Wynne Jones is so going to sue my subconscious. I'm going back to bed.
It was not quite a tour, but all the other travelers were strangers to me; the building in which we had assembled reminded me of a cross between a bus terminal and an elementary school, or something that was simultaneously brisk and institutional and paneled inside with mellow-varnished wood, awning windows, those chain-link glass doors. It was too hot even with all the windows cranked open to the winter outside, the kind of raw soaking chill that usually gets in through any crack, and I kept shedding layers as we waited until I was down to my shoved-up shirtsleeves, everything else bundled over my arm. The bus, when it came, looked very much like a nineteenth-century train carriage, or perhaps that's what it was. It had green trim, seats too narrowly spaced down the aisle. Before we boarded, the man who was not quite our guide warned us one last time that, even though all applicants were carefully screened ahead of time for mental and physical compatibility with the process of travel and the other present, not everyone made the transition successfully. Some fourth-dimensional rotation was involved: "unsuccessfully," in this case, therefore seemed to mean that your eyes could wind up coming out your feet. We had all signed the necessary papers. Some nausea and disorientation at the moment of transition was normal. I remember no movement, but I remember landscape passing outside the windows, forested and sunny and much too green for the time of year, otherwise unremarkable. I don't think I was sick. Coming out of the terminal in the other world, barrel-vaulted skylights overhead and polished granite underfoot, I had to change some money at the nearest kiosk, which was also a café run by a young woman dressed like any coffeeshop employee. The menu on the chalkboard was written in English, but the letters were shaped differently. I couldn't tell how far back the divergence went. With a ten-dollar bill, I bought something that was not quite ice cream, although it was cold and tasted milky, with hot shreds of something that was not quite coconut on top, although it had almost the same buttery sweetness. The change I got back was in the local currency, whatever country I was in, I don't remember and I'm not even sure if I knew its name: five or six bills like short strips of stiff ribbon, gold, dark green, magenta; I knew that each color signified a different denomination, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out which. They creased easily and folded up like origami, but couldn't be torn. While I was standing there at the kiosk, attempting to determine how much pocket money this meant I actually had (and eat my not quite ice cream before it melted out of its cup, which was made of waxed cardboard and not even remotely alien), a man came up who was a judicial or political authority of some sort; I could tell from his clothes, which were royal purple and charcoal grey and cut like a suit that really wanted to be a cap and gown. Before he ordered anything, he asked the young woman, "When is it appropriate to feel very strange?" She replied, "In the middle of great changes." And he nodded, as though she had given him the right answer to a challenge or a riddle, and he paid for his not quite ice cream, and I woke up.
Diana Wynne Jones is so going to sue my subconscious. I'm going back to bed.
no subject
I was thinking Ray Bradbury, actually. Though obviously not quite the same thing . . . Nice dream, in any case. As a fan of cocoanut, I'd very much like to try the not quite cocoanut.
no subject
no subject
no subject
That's awesome.
no subject
I always write down the ones I can remember. There was a stretch of several months last year when I couldn't remember any of my dreams, or even tell when I woke up whether I had been dreaming at all, but recently there's been a spate of very vivid ones. I'm hoping they'll provide stories or poems one of these days.
no subject
Why so?
no subject
These days, the market is rough for a Sybil. You gotta take the day jobs as they come. *shrug*
no subject
I don't know if that's what she was. The exchange had almost the tone of a formal greeting, except that I don't think she knew in advance what he was going to ask. Hm.
no subject
It kind of reminded me of "A Sound of Thunder".
no subject
I love the not-ice cream, and the strange shape of the currency, and the different shape to the letters (Any specifics? Were they more Greekish, or sort of runic, or...?).
Then again, I adore DWJ's no-clear-single-POD-but-very-different-to-our-world style of alternate history. I just wish I could do it myself. My own alternates tend to be too much wish-fulfillment, places where English still has medial gutterals and normal vowels and the letter thorn and Mary of Scots kept her throne and Jean Calvin and John Knox were both smoort in their cradles and the three Olympic fencing weapons are backsword, longsword, and rapier.
Do books impinge on your dreams ever? I've had a goodly number of dreams set in something like the world of SM Stirling's _Dies the Fire_, except an absurdist version directed by someone who watched lots of Monty Python but never understood it was meant to be funny.
There was one where the mock-Norman feudal kingdom of the Portland Protectorate was shoehorned into a late-seventies concrete-block college dorm, and another where a riverbarge full of old cutlery and cheap metal toys capsised and lost its cargo and my party made sure to mark it on the maps as our descendents would be able to make a fortune by recovering it once there was enough civilisation to find such things valuable again. And another where, after months of struggling through the post-high-energy-technological world, myself and my neo-nomadic friends encountered a petty chieftain with a hill fort who had a working vacuum cleaner. All I could think was "Electrical appliances don't work since the Change! Stop cheating, people!"