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Oh, lady, will you weep for me? Lady, tell me true
I dreamed this morning about a middle-aged man who ran a thrift store in a small town in New Hampshire or Vermont, one of these little saltbox and brick-built places on a steep-dropping river that had been a mill town a hundred and fifty years ago; mostly it was poor now, but it had a man who could walk through a stand of cornstalks and they doubled and whispered heavily behind him, I watched from the next street up the hill as he circled a rowan tree in a stranger's backyard and its twigs bloomed with berries like pomegranate seeds. His lover was a barber and the same sullen high-school kids came in for haircuts and brightened up picking through old D'Oyly Carte records in his store, but it was a closer-kept secret that they were lovers than that one of them was a witch, or whatever he was, and the pack of strangers who might have been crows—only one of them was dark-haired and they dressed as motley in denim and chinos as anyone else in the dream, but they were fast-talking and raucous and they ate whatever was left out, even if not for them; the one with reddish hair had an owl's wing she used to twirl like a conductor's baton as she spoke, until she started to pick it apart from boredom and her fingers were speckled with blood and soft feathers all the time after that—blew apart all their secrets simply because they could, and the secrets of anyone who interfered. I don't even remember what the mayor's hidden life was, but I remember him crying on a slope of sugar maple and white ash with the album cover for Iolanthe between his hands. And whether the situation was precipitated by the well-meaning strangers who arrived in town a few days before the might-have-been-crows, or whether they simply made everything worse once the trouble had started, I couldn't tell you, but I like to think that the thrift-store owner might not have vanished—died or disappeared, I don't know, and I'm not sure I even knew in the dream, except that something shy and precious had clearly been destroyed—if he had not been so clearly slanted toward the tragic by their presence. Because there were more complexities, misplaced trusts and attractions and betrayals, ironically metaphorical witch-hunts and high-school kids on their own are quite capable of hurting whatever looks vulnerable simply because they can, without any supernatural encouragement at all, but the strangers with their damning good intentions were from Star Trek, and nothing says lessons learned from some other culture's disaster like William Shatner. I woke up and I thought, I cannot remember enough of this fast enough to write it down (and What the hell was Star Trek doing in that dream?), and I haven't. But it's more than I thought would stick, at least.
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I would, too! I just don't know how I'm going to write it!
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I have no explanation. I wouldn't have thought twice about it if they had been characters from G & S . . .
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Thank you! Although I never feel that I can take credit for this stuff . . .
"out of car parts a raven made a nest inside my skin."
I never remember my own dreams, and so I don't believe in other people's.
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I do not always remember my own dreams. About once a month (although not always the same time each month), I get dreams I wish I could remember better. They do not usually generate stories, but I keep hoping.
"out of car parts a raven made a nest inside my skin."
I love that song so much.
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but that happens.. once a year? While I'm sleeping, I might as well be dead.
Which is probably why I hate dream sequences in fiction so much.
Re: TSNZ: It seemed to me the theme song for your dream, somehow.
Also, I hope that you find the story in this one. Because it seems like it's almost there already.
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Thank you. I hope to write them.
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Oh, I like that.
>> nothing says lessons learned from some other culture's disaster like William Shatner <<
Very true! And so is the observation about high school kids and the harm of which they are capable.
Star Trek may have become an archetypical reprsentation of the interfering do-gooder who means well but inadvertently precipitates a disaster.
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Yes. Although I feel as though there's another very well-known one that my brain is currently too fried to remember. This is what happens when it decides to write plot all night instead . . .
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I hope you write this one.
Nine
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Nine
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I'm not sure it's an opera. It might be a play or a short film. I do not want any kind of moral to eat the characters, either—I blame Star Trek for the threatening didacticism.
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I am hoping it will develop the language for me to; I can't write from what-if or plot, no matter (or especially) how well sketched in advance. And I am not as conversant with former mill towns as with the sea.
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*snerk*
You must make a story of that, if you can. Because I need to hold a book that has those things in my hands.
It's very important.
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I will see what I can do.
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I hardly ever remember my dreams, especially in any detail. Which makes everyone else's even more interesting, particularly the people who can tell their dreams as an engaging and surreal story. (I know some people who recite their dreams as a laundry list of "and then I did this," and it gets tiresome very fast. Perhaps not for dream analysts, though, which some of them are; I'm not, and I'm in life for the stories.)
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I am not often the primary figure in my own dreams, which is what makes most of them so interesting to me. It's like dipping into other people's worlds.
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My most interesting dreams tend to (exception of the lanterns and child murderer in Sovaysport one) follow that as well. The one that became Mr. Boogey was like that.
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I've usually said that we dream in a pool which is fed by waters from ourselves and many other, curious origins. While many of our common dreams and nightmares are usually merely the result of wading in our own waters, occasionally the currents bring us strange distillations from unknowable sources.