And I am dreaming in blood-red color

[sovay]

This morning I had nightmares so bad I had to look at my cellphone to see whether they'd happened. If it was Saturday, they hadn't; if it was Sunday, they had. It was Saturday, so I fell back asleep and dreamed I had tickets to a production of Julius Caesar that was about two-thirds the one Harriet Walter is currently starring in, but the events of the first nightmare had still happened. I am waiting for e-mails and worried about technology. I am sleeping hours less than I have since before Florida and dreaming badly when I do.

I need to write something.

Comments

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I dreamed I was at a wedding where everybody but the bride and groom hated each other, and one person was infected with a living virus; whenever that person bled, the blood itself would chase whoever was nearest, trying to infect them. Soon, we were all strangling each other.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I totally agree about needing to write, though!;)

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

Writing is the Antidote-- for sure. Florida is enough to give anyone nightmares.

[sovay]

whenever that person bled, the blood itself would chase whoever was nearest, trying to infect them. Soon, we were all strangling each other.

It's probably just the wedding and the blood, but I'm reminded of Vindice's flashback in Alex Cox's Revengers Tragedy (2002). The conscious contagion, though, is very much the sort of thing I think you'd write even if awake.

[sovay]

I totally agree about needing to write, though!

It's December. This time last year I was miserable and I still finished my Turing/Morcom poem. I don't feel like I have done anything involving my brain in weeks.

[sovay]

Writing is the Antidote-- for sure.

Anything in particular you want to see written?

Florida is enough to give anyone nightmares.

Florida in this case was great—I rode eleven coasters and walked everywhere in sunshine. I wouldn't like to live somewhere the seasons never changed, but traveling is fine and it was particularly lovely this winter with derspatchel. Then we came back and I don't know if it's just that we were catapulted into the holidays with yahrzeit or what, but my ability to sleep has just crashed and my dreams are terrible. It always worries me, relapse. I spent years like this; I don't want to spend more.

[chomiji]

*hugs*

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Nightmares, avaunt! They didn't happen.

There's a good chance writing would channel them: all that fury would drive amazing wheels within wheels of story or skysails of poetry.

*hugs* if you'll have them.

Nine

[irisbleufic.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

I'm glad it was Saturday.

[sovay]

There's a good chance writing would channel them: all that fury would drive amazing wheels within wheels of story or skysails of poetry.

They weren't that kind of nightmare, but thank you.

I went to Barnes & Noble and with the gift certificate my brother gave me for Christmas bought sight unseen this book because of the title and the first page I opened to, which began with the line "Two days short of the winter solstice; the turn of the year's tide." Then I turned a few more pages and got Wittgenstein, striding the floors of Russell's rooms at Cambridge and the shores of the Skjolden fjords; a few more pages and mention of A Canterbury Tale in context of timeslip and way-walking as a healing from war; a few more pages and a passage from Edward Thomas, whom I feel coincidence is conspiring to get me to read. The index is organized alphabetically by subject with headers like "Artefacts & Artworks," "Illusions & Mirages," "Maps & Map-Making," "Seafaring, Sea Roads & Vessels," "Songs & Music," "Weather." I have already called my brother to thank him.

[sovay]

*hugs*

Accepted.

[sovay]

I'm glad it was Saturday.

*hugs*

Thank you.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

I'm glad it was Saturday. Sorry for the nightmares, especially the continuation.

I hope that e-mails will come and that technology will not betray you, not this time. I'm sorry for your lack of sleep and terrible dreams.

I dreamt of being stuck on a balcony of something like a cathedral, with no easy way down. The cathedral was supported by an elaborate wooden structure, which at one moment looked like vast library shelves and at another like a series of honeycomb-shaped lattices. I'm not sure how I got down--I was thinking out how I'd do it with a rope, but it would've been chancy and I don't think I had the rope. But somehow I did, and then I found myself in a kitchen, watching a cartoon that was in some unspecified manner a parody of the situation I'd been in. A man was drifting down through the sky, too slowly to be falling in our gravity, with occasional help from birds and creatures that looked like some sort of dinosaur (generic quadrupeds in variants of orange and green, cartoonish, friendly-looking) but which somehow managed to fly. Every so often he'd lightly kiss one of the dinosaurs on the beak or the forehead.

I had the feeling that it had been made by small-o orthodox artists as a mocking commentary on a story told of some non-canonical saint, possibly a Saint Blacke or Blaque. I read a page of commentary about the matter, in small print in a hardbacked book, much the size of one of those little eighteenth century volumes, although the paper, typeface, and layout looked more like something from the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. On waking I couldn't remember anything significant of what I read.

I need to write something.

Sometimes that's the best thing. I hope you'll be able to.

[sovay]

A man was drifting down through the sky, too slowly to be falling in our gravity, with occasional help from birds and creatures that looked like some sort of dinosaur (generic quadrupeds in variants of orange and green, cartoonish, friendly-looking) but which somehow managed to fly. Every so often he'd lightly kiss one of the dinosaurs on the beak or the forehead.

I like that a lot.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I'm relieved that the worst I had to deal with in last night's dreams was a dance-club with overly-loud music and flashing lights. As I complained, later on, to a man in a red tartan suit, "why do all the songs they play have to be in 16/16?"

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

O my. That book sounds amazing. And you must read Edward Thomas. He's very much your sort of thing, hedgerow and trench.

Nine

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

*hugs*, dude.

I had a pretty bad nightmare two nights ago; it started out with Bradbury narrating an English Martian Chronicles, and rockets thawing the frost in a country graveyard, then dissolved into some nasty dystopian shit. This flatblock had become a rotting mental hospital: sidelong grins in the dark, a murderer in a chrysalis. The ending was so disturbing that I had to blot it out. I don't know what Ray did to me to deserve doing *that* voiceover.

[sovay]

O my. That book sounds amazing.

It is the best travel writing I've read since Patrick Leigh Fermor. The page I'm on right now, as the author and his friend David walk the Broomway ("allegedly 'the deadliest' path in Britain and certainly the unearthliest path I have ever walked") across the Maplin Sands from Wakering Stairs to Foulness:

Several years ago the sculptor Antony Gormley buried a full-size iron cast of his own body upside down in the grounds of Cambridge's Archaeological Research Institute. Only the undersides of the iron man's feet show on the surface. Two days before coming to walk the Broomway I'd slipped off my shoes and socks and stood barefoot in the rusty prints, sole to sole with that buried body. Now that act of doubling had itself been unexpecedly repeated out here on the sands. Everywhere I looked were pivot-points and fulcrums, symmetries and proliferations: the thorax points of a winged world. Sand mimicked water, water mimicked sand, and the air duplicated the textures of both. Hinged cuckoo-calls; razor shells and cockle shells; our own reflections; a profusion of suns; the glide of transparent over solid. When I think back to the outer miles of that walk, I now recall a strong disorder of perception that caused illusions of the spirit as well as the eye. I recall thought becoming sensational; the substance of landscape so influencing mind that mind's own substance was altered.

But just in case you think it is all going to dissolve into philosophy, here's the next block:

You enter the mirror-world by a causeway and you leave it by one. From Asplin Head, a rubble jetty as wide as a farm track reaches out over the Black Grounds, offering safe passage to shore. As we approached the jetty the sand began to give way underfoot, and we broke through into sucking black mud. It was like striking oil—the glittering rich ooze gouting up around our feet. We slurped onwards to the causeway, the rubble of which had been colonized by a lurid green weed. Sea lavender and samphire thrived in the salt marsh.

I walked alongside the causeway rather than on it, finding that if I kept moving over the mud I didn't sink.

This is one of the pages without much science or history or literary archaeology; Macfarlane is very good at identifying not only the ghosts he sees in any path he walks (or that others have seen before him), but why he sees them there in the first place, and whether they were left consciously, and what it means that humans are almost incapable of seeing place without seeing time. I wasn't looking for it, but it is a good book for a year in which I wrote a lot of ghosts.

And you must read Edward Thomas. He's very much your sort of thing, hedgerow and trench.

I was intrigued by reviews of the play about him earlier this fall, and then I remembered reading an article about a year earlier—Robert Frost I recognized, nothing about the other guy. So I will look him up.

[sovay]

As I complained, later on, to a man in a red tartan suit, "why do all the songs they play have to be in 16/16?"

All of those things plus the red tartan suit is just unkind.

[sovay]

it started out with Bradbury narrating an English Martian Chronicles, and rockets thawing the frost in a country graveyard, then dissolved into some nasty dystopian shit. This flatblock had become a rotting mental hospital: sidelong grins in the dark, a murderer in a chrysalis.

If you can do anything with that, damn. Otherwise I'm just glad you got your head out of there.

*hugs accepted and returned*

[gwynnega]

Sorry about the nightmare. I had some spectacular nightmares a few nights ago (about my ex-mother-in-law!).

[sovay]

I had some spectacular nightmares a few nights ago (about my ex-mother-in-law!).

At least she was still ex when you woke up?

[gwynnega]

Yes, that was a relief! But I think I dreamed of her two nights in a row (and this is a woman I haven't had contact with since 1995).

[three-magpies.livejournal.com]

I hope you sleep better tonight!

If you have jasmine or anise, put them in a little bag under your pillow - they calm nightmares. Lemon verbena chases away dreams all together.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I need to write something

... Can you write the nightmare?