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Had a variety of interesting, continuous dreams last night, mostly to the backdrop of the Firefly theme.
There was a kind of pre-dream, which I think was just as detailed as the rest, but all I can remember is that there was a lift which didn't have any controls; you stepped into it, the doors closed (it was a translucent blue lift in a kind of weird SF shape) and you *dropped*, and at a certain height you whizzed off sideways, just skimming the top of things in this huge conference chamber, and it opened back up in the foyer, after a very carnival-ride like experience. There was lots of running around vaguely hi-tech brushed-steel buildings. It had the soundtrack of the verses of 'I Wish I Was A Girl' by Counting Crows: "The devil's in the dreaming / you see yourself descending / from the building to the ground / you watch the sky receding / and you spin to see the traffic / rising up and it's so quiet / you're suprised and then you wake".
I woke up and went through my email, to find out that there was some kind of second year project I was meant to have been working on all year and was due in a week. Looking back frantically, I found the original email, which said that there was meant to be a team of six of us, investigating something near the bridge in Bridgeton, and that we were meant to pick up companions that looked like small, cat-sized sheep. I wandered outside my door (it appears that I was living in the first row of graduate accomodation as you come in from Churchill Road) and sure enough, there was a small white fluffy thing cowering in the bushes. I picked it up and stroked it soothingly, and as I did so, someone else from my course, who looked like a cross between Bryony and Imoen, showed up with their own white fluffy thing and an apologetic smile.
"Where are the others?" I asked.
"Even later than us," she said, ruefully. "Come on, let's go."
As we walked down the sunny, grassy footpath to Bridgeton, around the edges of fields and over stiles, three more members of the party caught up with us, all either carrying or leading sheep-like things. Mine was now walking along beside me happily, although when we got to the road and started walking down it, it asked to be carried so it didn't hurt its feet.
Bridgeton was an unremarkable little village with a bridge; we weren't sure what to do, but there was a tavern, and it was 3pm and I hadn't had lunch yet, due to all of the confusion. So I suggested we go inside and see what we could find out, and meanwhile get some food. It was agreed this was an excellent plan; they were only serving one thing, but it was 'large lumps of meat and yams', so that was acceptable fare. I ate my lunch while we discussed what on earth we were meant to be doing here. Someone suggested that they'd read something about the mill pond being important, so after I'd finished we all trooped down to the pond to take a look.
Somewhere in the middle of this sequence I panicked because I had a hair appointment at 4:55pm, then looked at my watch and discovered it was 5.55pm, and put it out of my mind.
It was your traditional stagnant mill pond, with nothing alive in it; we walked around the edge until we found that half of it was fenced off, and walked around the fence until we came to the front gate of some industrial establishment (quite old-fashioned looking and brick-built) with big wooden signs on. They said things like "Better Late Than Never" and "Team Bridgeton: Slowest Team Award"; there were three, arranged with half a billboard in the middle (but a little taller) and two thinner displays angled slightly each side.
We walked right into the gates, because they were open, and into the courtyard of the industrial complex. I went to peer around the doors which were open, but almost got spotted by office guards. The little sheep were getting restless, and when I put mine down it said "Thanks; this is our bit," and turned into a cat, all the better to sneak into the offices. I was slightly put out that mine was ginger and Imoen's was tortoishell. We wandered around the dripping wet courtyard, which contained brightly coloured puddles of suspicous chemicals, for a bit; someone might have had the sense to start taking samples.
One of the members of the team, who had resolved into Marnanel by this stage, didn't have their cat run away; instead the small black cat leapt onto his shoulder and began to tell him things. A page flashed up in front of me, as if he was filling in a form; 'safety risks', including a risk assessment of being hung. He disappeared through a door which had not been there a moment before, and there was a cut-scene in which there was surgery which somehow reduced him to a slithering brain with a miniture heart sticking out and beating, and then he infiltrated the complex and found the CEO, who was very tiny and riding a mouse, and who proceeded to torture him until his cat came and rescued him, slaying the CEO. The Firefly theme was very much in evidence in this section of the dream.
Then Tom showed up, one of those enormous fluffy tabbies around his neck, and announced that he'd solved the problem; there was a cut-scene showing him convincing a board of something or other that Cornish West, some kind of local group, should take over the premesis from Countryside, mostly on general nationalistic grounds, but it appears the tabby had got some data from the other cats by telepathy, too.
The signs on the way out read "About Sodding Time", and similar terms of endearment.
I had just got back to my room, intending to look up how I was meant to write the whole thing up, when I woke up. Well, that had been a quite interesting dream, I thought, and I was glad that I wasn't getting marked on it. I opened up my email again, and there was a notice about an exam that we were having this morning, with an incomprehensible list of critera attached. I had a quick glance through them, which seemed to be all about scenes and tabs and questions to ask, and one really incomprehensible bit about a familiar, and then suddenly I woke up again and I was in an exam hall with the paper in front of me.
The invigilator called the hall to attention, and asked everyone who had been suffering from smallpox to put up their hands. "If you have been having many dislocating dreams, and don't believe you've ever heard of this exam before, you probably have," she said, by way of explanation. I put up my hand. "Right," she said, taking notes of numbers, "we'll give you people special consideration. You may begin."
I looked at the front sheet of the exam paper, hoping it would give me some clue as to what I was doing; it instructed me to write a movie, although later it said that I would only have time to describe the first scene, and that there should be nothing 'objectionable, difficult, controversial or scary' in the movie. I discovered that I had the notes for the exam next to me, so began to read them hungrily, but the invigilator came past and took them away, scolding me. Then I discovered I didn't have a pen, so I wandered around in search of a pen, once meaning to steal someone's spare pen from where it had fallen on the floor but giving it back when I noticed it had gold colour on the tip of the lid and the bottom to identify it as theirs, until the invigilator gave me a pencil because she'd run out of pens. (The next person got a shorter, double-ended pencil. The invigilator had a tin full of various stationary, but as in all such tins most of it was broken or otherwise useless.)
I had a few ideas but decided they were all too scary, and started to write about the adventure I'd just had in my dream, except with a bit of Bearaboutia mixed in. (For reference, Bearaboutia is the fantasy world I created for myself with my teddy-bear collection when I was a small child.) Then the world lurched sideways again and I was with an important-looking guy in a suit and his lackeys, who kept asking me awkward questions about how much it would cost to make and what kind of audience I was aiming for. At one point we were walking down the bank of almost a river, but it was just another bit of the building moving slightly in relation to this bit, at walking pace. We were talking to a girl the other side. I had written while I was still writing that the production would soak up some of the surplus of small girls who wanted to act, and here was one. I saved her somehow by doing something to the river underneath her part of the building, which earned me a few "Excellent!" type messages printed in white over the scene and a "Familiar Gained!" message. I found myself with, well, it wanted to be called a mouse. It was like a mouse whose torso and head had been seperately flattened, with its legs and neck and tail left intact, but still alive and happy about this despite it looking like a couple of little floppy meaty pancakes.
After this success, we went into a movie theatre where my movie was to be shown - but I hadn't designed it yet! I sat down next to the lady who had sat next to the man (she'd been in our party all along but hadn't done anything but radiate slight disapproval). Some kind of random teen movie called something vaguely offensive like "The Farting Adventures of Billy Fart's Club" started up, with a title screen and then a chapter selection screen like a DVD. I stood up and said "No, no, this is the 12-rated movie I made earlier, show the U-rated one. It was called You And Bearaboutia, and featured a brightly coloured landscape." The title page immediately changed to 'You And Bearaboutia' in one of those 'friendly' and slightly 'hippie' fonts, in pink, against a Teletubbies-style landscape. "And there were small girls," (some girls appeared on stage, the props on which were just a pile of crates with some microphones dotted around) "who had brightly coloured skin," (the girls developed face-paint) "and were looking for something - the place was awfully quiet without the animals of the land." The girls started doing a drama-school style 'looking for something' exercise, and a vague suggestion of brightly coloured landscape was formed. "You see, the girls are just normal girls, but they come here in their dreams." The girls then lined up in front of the audience so we could see they only had one eye each and looked quite odd. Then they bowed and the curtain came down.
When that happened, I was back in the exam hall and the invigilator said "Pens down, please." I appeared to have filled most of the booklet with writing, but I had no idea what I had written. Then the world stepped sideways again to show me.
I was a young boy walking out of a village of mostly girls. The village was slightly fairytale and slightly makeshift; it appeared that a community of ten-year-olds had been 'maintaining' a fairytale village on their own for a bit. Some of the girls were brightly coloured, but everyone here, I knew that it was very important, was *free*.
We were going to free some more.
There was a patch of the ground in which the druid plants grew. It was quite difficult to pick a druid plant properly, because some of them were tough and you had to get all the roots out, or they'd regrow. Also, the druids would come and get you if you took too long about it. The druids were the ones that controlled the animals, and they came in several levels; the toughest druid plant here today was third-level, although there were quite a few of them. Although they required quite a lot of raw strength to uproot, they tended to come away with their roots, although one of them managed to leave its roots in the ground and we had to dig them out, and weren't sure we'd got it all. Then there were second-level and first-level ones; the last ones were the most difficult because they had little white spidery roots rather than a big woody taproot and stubby underground branches, and also because picking one of them would destroy a druid and that made it more likely for them to come and fight back. (The other ones just reduced the druid in level.)
We pulled up quite a few without incident, but then we saw an animal watching us, so we had to flee back to the village as fast as we could run. The viewpoint followed the animal, which went one step underground (although this whole place was underground; the sky was not a sky, but a steel roof, although there seemed to be sunlight all the same; this next level just had electric lighting.)
Underground, a young man with touseled black hair sat at a bank of computers. The animal, which was some kind of small fox, went over to him and he stroked it absent-mindedly whilst doing whatever he was doing. There was a girl with shoulder-length, dead-straight brown hair and determined blue eyes, feeding a printer. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement; there was a trail of paper leading back under the boy's desk and off somewhere into the darkness, and it was moving and growing and assimilating things.
"Snake!" she cried, launching herself across the room to try and find the end-point of this thing. Sure enough, it was the other side of the computer, coming through the floor under a nice thick book. She only had a split second to decide how to deal with it before it became all the paper in the room; on a music stand there stood a burning book, which burned forever, and she leapt upon the book and bore it down to the ground on top of where the snake was entering their room. She was horribly burned, but barely felt it in the exultation as the snake cut itself into bits along the lines of the paper it had picked up, and died or at least left them alone. She picked the book up in her bare hands and put it back on the stand.
"Thank you," commented the boy absent-mindedly, but the girl was lost in thought. If the snakes came from below, maybe there was something she could kill down there. It beat fighting with the printer, anyway. She picked up a box of matches.
"See you in a minute," she said to the boy.
"Serenity, I don't think..." began the boy, but she just shook her head, said, "No, of course you don't," and headed out of the room in which they had been relatively safe for many years.
The boy looked confused, and petted his magical animal, which smiled the smile of evil triumphant.
Unfortunately as Serenity began to wander off to adventures unknown, I woke up properly (or, at least, this world seems quite devoid of magical animals and unexpected exams as of yet). But I decided it couldn't go un-written-up.
My rendition of the lyrics of the Firefly theme tune appears to be slightly innaccurate, but as usual I prefer my version:
Take my love, take my land
Leave me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I'm not coming back
Burn the land, boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me
There's no place I can't be
Since I found Serenity
You can't take the sky from me
You can't take the sky from me...
There was a kind of pre-dream, which I think was just as detailed as the rest, but all I can remember is that there was a lift which didn't have any controls; you stepped into it, the doors closed (it was a translucent blue lift in a kind of weird SF shape) and you *dropped*, and at a certain height you whizzed off sideways, just skimming the top of things in this huge conference chamber, and it opened back up in the foyer, after a very carnival-ride like experience. There was lots of running around vaguely hi-tech brushed-steel buildings. It had the soundtrack of the verses of 'I Wish I Was A Girl' by Counting Crows: "The devil's in the dreaming / you see yourself descending / from the building to the ground / you watch the sky receding / and you spin to see the traffic / rising up and it's so quiet / you're suprised and then you wake".
I woke up and went through my email, to find out that there was some kind of second year project I was meant to have been working on all year and was due in a week. Looking back frantically, I found the original email, which said that there was meant to be a team of six of us, investigating something near the bridge in Bridgeton, and that we were meant to pick up companions that looked like small, cat-sized sheep. I wandered outside my door (it appears that I was living in the first row of graduate accomodation as you come in from Churchill Road) and sure enough, there was a small white fluffy thing cowering in the bushes. I picked it up and stroked it soothingly, and as I did so, someone else from my course, who looked like a cross between Bryony and Imoen, showed up with their own white fluffy thing and an apologetic smile.
"Where are the others?" I asked.
"Even later than us," she said, ruefully. "Come on, let's go."
As we walked down the sunny, grassy footpath to Bridgeton, around the edges of fields and over stiles, three more members of the party caught up with us, all either carrying or leading sheep-like things. Mine was now walking along beside me happily, although when we got to the road and started walking down it, it asked to be carried so it didn't hurt its feet.
Bridgeton was an unremarkable little village with a bridge; we weren't sure what to do, but there was a tavern, and it was 3pm and I hadn't had lunch yet, due to all of the confusion. So I suggested we go inside and see what we could find out, and meanwhile get some food. It was agreed this was an excellent plan; they were only serving one thing, but it was 'large lumps of meat and yams', so that was acceptable fare. I ate my lunch while we discussed what on earth we were meant to be doing here. Someone suggested that they'd read something about the mill pond being important, so after I'd finished we all trooped down to the pond to take a look.
Somewhere in the middle of this sequence I panicked because I had a hair appointment at 4:55pm, then looked at my watch and discovered it was 5.55pm, and put it out of my mind.
It was your traditional stagnant mill pond, with nothing alive in it; we walked around the edge until we found that half of it was fenced off, and walked around the fence until we came to the front gate of some industrial establishment (quite old-fashioned looking and brick-built) with big wooden signs on. They said things like "Better Late Than Never" and "Team Bridgeton: Slowest Team Award"; there were three, arranged with half a billboard in the middle (but a little taller) and two thinner displays angled slightly each side.
We walked right into the gates, because they were open, and into the courtyard of the industrial complex. I went to peer around the doors which were open, but almost got spotted by office guards. The little sheep were getting restless, and when I put mine down it said "Thanks; this is our bit," and turned into a cat, all the better to sneak into the offices. I was slightly put out that mine was ginger and Imoen's was tortoishell. We wandered around the dripping wet courtyard, which contained brightly coloured puddles of suspicous chemicals, for a bit; someone might have had the sense to start taking samples.
One of the members of the team, who had resolved into Marnanel by this stage, didn't have their cat run away; instead the small black cat leapt onto his shoulder and began to tell him things. A page flashed up in front of me, as if he was filling in a form; 'safety risks', including a risk assessment of being hung. He disappeared through a door which had not been there a moment before, and there was a cut-scene in which there was surgery which somehow reduced him to a slithering brain with a miniture heart sticking out and beating, and then he infiltrated the complex and found the CEO, who was very tiny and riding a mouse, and who proceeded to torture him until his cat came and rescued him, slaying the CEO. The Firefly theme was very much in evidence in this section of the dream.
Then Tom showed up, one of those enormous fluffy tabbies around his neck, and announced that he'd solved the problem; there was a cut-scene showing him convincing a board of something or other that Cornish West, some kind of local group, should take over the premesis from Countryside, mostly on general nationalistic grounds, but it appears the tabby had got some data from the other cats by telepathy, too.
The signs on the way out read "About Sodding Time", and similar terms of endearment.
I had just got back to my room, intending to look up how I was meant to write the whole thing up, when I woke up. Well, that had been a quite interesting dream, I thought, and I was glad that I wasn't getting marked on it. I opened up my email again, and there was a notice about an exam that we were having this morning, with an incomprehensible list of critera attached. I had a quick glance through them, which seemed to be all about scenes and tabs and questions to ask, and one really incomprehensible bit about a familiar, and then suddenly I woke up again and I was in an exam hall with the paper in front of me.
The invigilator called the hall to attention, and asked everyone who had been suffering from smallpox to put up their hands. "If you have been having many dislocating dreams, and don't believe you've ever heard of this exam before, you probably have," she said, by way of explanation. I put up my hand. "Right," she said, taking notes of numbers, "we'll give you people special consideration. You may begin."
I looked at the front sheet of the exam paper, hoping it would give me some clue as to what I was doing; it instructed me to write a movie, although later it said that I would only have time to describe the first scene, and that there should be nothing 'objectionable, difficult, controversial or scary' in the movie. I discovered that I had the notes for the exam next to me, so began to read them hungrily, but the invigilator came past and took them away, scolding me. Then I discovered I didn't have a pen, so I wandered around in search of a pen, once meaning to steal someone's spare pen from where it had fallen on the floor but giving it back when I noticed it had gold colour on the tip of the lid and the bottom to identify it as theirs, until the invigilator gave me a pencil because she'd run out of pens. (The next person got a shorter, double-ended pencil. The invigilator had a tin full of various stationary, but as in all such tins most of it was broken or otherwise useless.)
I had a few ideas but decided they were all too scary, and started to write about the adventure I'd just had in my dream, except with a bit of Bearaboutia mixed in. (For reference, Bearaboutia is the fantasy world I created for myself with my teddy-bear collection when I was a small child.) Then the world lurched sideways again and I was with an important-looking guy in a suit and his lackeys, who kept asking me awkward questions about how much it would cost to make and what kind of audience I was aiming for. At one point we were walking down the bank of almost a river, but it was just another bit of the building moving slightly in relation to this bit, at walking pace. We were talking to a girl the other side. I had written while I was still writing that the production would soak up some of the surplus of small girls who wanted to act, and here was one. I saved her somehow by doing something to the river underneath her part of the building, which earned me a few "Excellent!" type messages printed in white over the scene and a "Familiar Gained!" message. I found myself with, well, it wanted to be called a mouse. It was like a mouse whose torso and head had been seperately flattened, with its legs and neck and tail left intact, but still alive and happy about this despite it looking like a couple of little floppy meaty pancakes.
After this success, we went into a movie theatre where my movie was to be shown - but I hadn't designed it yet! I sat down next to the lady who had sat next to the man (she'd been in our party all along but hadn't done anything but radiate slight disapproval). Some kind of random teen movie called something vaguely offensive like "The Farting Adventures of Billy Fart's Club" started up, with a title screen and then a chapter selection screen like a DVD. I stood up and said "No, no, this is the 12-rated movie I made earlier, show the U-rated one. It was called You And Bearaboutia, and featured a brightly coloured landscape." The title page immediately changed to 'You And Bearaboutia' in one of those 'friendly' and slightly 'hippie' fonts, in pink, against a Teletubbies-style landscape. "And there were small girls," (some girls appeared on stage, the props on which were just a pile of crates with some microphones dotted around) "who had brightly coloured skin," (the girls developed face-paint) "and were looking for something - the place was awfully quiet without the animals of the land." The girls started doing a drama-school style 'looking for something' exercise, and a vague suggestion of brightly coloured landscape was formed. "You see, the girls are just normal girls, but they come here in their dreams." The girls then lined up in front of the audience so we could see they only had one eye each and looked quite odd. Then they bowed and the curtain came down.
When that happened, I was back in the exam hall and the invigilator said "Pens down, please." I appeared to have filled most of the booklet with writing, but I had no idea what I had written. Then the world stepped sideways again to show me.
I was a young boy walking out of a village of mostly girls. The village was slightly fairytale and slightly makeshift; it appeared that a community of ten-year-olds had been 'maintaining' a fairytale village on their own for a bit. Some of the girls were brightly coloured, but everyone here, I knew that it was very important, was *free*.
We were going to free some more.
There was a patch of the ground in which the druid plants grew. It was quite difficult to pick a druid plant properly, because some of them were tough and you had to get all the roots out, or they'd regrow. Also, the druids would come and get you if you took too long about it. The druids were the ones that controlled the animals, and they came in several levels; the toughest druid plant here today was third-level, although there were quite a few of them. Although they required quite a lot of raw strength to uproot, they tended to come away with their roots, although one of them managed to leave its roots in the ground and we had to dig them out, and weren't sure we'd got it all. Then there were second-level and first-level ones; the last ones were the most difficult because they had little white spidery roots rather than a big woody taproot and stubby underground branches, and also because picking one of them would destroy a druid and that made it more likely for them to come and fight back. (The other ones just reduced the druid in level.)
We pulled up quite a few without incident, but then we saw an animal watching us, so we had to flee back to the village as fast as we could run. The viewpoint followed the animal, which went one step underground (although this whole place was underground; the sky was not a sky, but a steel roof, although there seemed to be sunlight all the same; this next level just had electric lighting.)
Underground, a young man with touseled black hair sat at a bank of computers. The animal, which was some kind of small fox, went over to him and he stroked it absent-mindedly whilst doing whatever he was doing. There was a girl with shoulder-length, dead-straight brown hair and determined blue eyes, feeding a printer. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement; there was a trail of paper leading back under the boy's desk and off somewhere into the darkness, and it was moving and growing and assimilating things.
"Snake!" she cried, launching herself across the room to try and find the end-point of this thing. Sure enough, it was the other side of the computer, coming through the floor under a nice thick book. She only had a split second to decide how to deal with it before it became all the paper in the room; on a music stand there stood a burning book, which burned forever, and she leapt upon the book and bore it down to the ground on top of where the snake was entering their room. She was horribly burned, but barely felt it in the exultation as the snake cut itself into bits along the lines of the paper it had picked up, and died or at least left them alone. She picked the book up in her bare hands and put it back on the stand.
"Thank you," commented the boy absent-mindedly, but the girl was lost in thought. If the snakes came from below, maybe there was something she could kill down there. It beat fighting with the printer, anyway. She picked up a box of matches.
"See you in a minute," she said to the boy.
"Serenity, I don't think..." began the boy, but she just shook her head, said, "No, of course you don't," and headed out of the room in which they had been relatively safe for many years.
The boy looked confused, and petted his magical animal, which smiled the smile of evil triumphant.
Unfortunately as Serenity began to wander off to adventures unknown, I woke up properly (or, at least, this world seems quite devoid of magical animals and unexpected exams as of yet). But I decided it couldn't go un-written-up.
My rendition of the lyrics of the Firefly theme tune appears to be slightly innaccurate, but as usual I prefer my version:
Take my love, take my land
Leave me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I'm not coming back
Burn the land, boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me
There's no place I can't be
Since I found Serenity
You can't take the sky from me
You can't take the sky from me...
