Spin the wheel and I'm a king reborn

For the last few weeks, I have not been dreaming at all. Or I have been waking up with a sense of absent time, but no intervening memories, which I find more disconcerting than nightmares. But a few nights ago, I dreamed I was up in the mountains at a cross between a university and a sort of scientists' commune with an older person of completely indeterminable gender—whichever they dressed as, they looked more like the opposite; both or neither, I never asked—and a soldier named Lev who did not use to be human. He made me think sometimes of a fisher; he looked as though he should have been crouching among pine branches when he was only folding his arms on a concrete-walled overlook. Whatever he reminded me of, it was lithe and untrusting and tightly wound, faintly amused at his own tension. I never asked him, either. I remember a ski lift over an autumn forest, children below with a dog that looked more like a dire wolf. As soon as I woke up, I felt a lot better about my brain. (This even after I realized it had probably just presented me with a sleep-deprived mashup of Skin Horse and X-Men.) Then the night before last, I dreamed of a boy named Alexandria. We were not in Ostia Naye; ostensibly it was the sixth century CE, except there were too many computers. I can recapture none of the plot, but the mise-en-scène was grainfields and a kind of dome-and-ziggurat skyline, books like old ivy in the dry stones of a wall. An illuminated manuscript version of The Gammage Cup is not the weirdest object I have ever dreamed about, but it's certainly memorable. And last night, I dreamed about disaster sites and choristers like professional mourners and a girl who was posing as one of the dead. This may be brain-static, but it makes me much more comfortable than night after night with a dead-black screen. Also, I have a better chance of getting fiction out of it.

On that note: copies of Sybil's Garage #6, containing my poem "Σκιαδάς" and a shout-out to Consonant, are now available! I have not yet received one myself, but the table of contents is a thing of great promise. I like the scarecrow at the subway station, too. I'm a little surprised one of those has never showed up in my dreams.