sovay: (I Claudius)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2009-05-20 01:49 pm

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.

[identity profile] ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com 2009-05-20 06:31 pm (UTC)(link)
Fascinating dreams, these. I'm sorry for the disconcerting feeling in the weeks previous.

I wanted a pet dire wolf as a child, for some reason. (Today I'd rather have a chalicothere.)

An illuminated manuscript version of The Gammage Cup is not the weirdest object I have ever dreamed about, but it's certainly memorable.

Fascinating idea, that. I'd not thought of that book in years.

I don't often remember dreams for very long after I wake. Reading about yours helps make up for that, slightly.

[identity profile] ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com 2009-05-20 08:36 pm (UTC)(link)
I find myself wanting to read it again. Perhaps there's a copy somewhere in the house. I remember being about eight, and being mesmerised with it--being taken to shop for shoes, which I've never liked, anyhow, and simply wanting to get back to the book, ducking back in to read another few pages at every opportunity...

If I have not already posted about it, I should do that someday.

I don't believe you have done. I do think that you should.