7.8.03
Dreams.
The third week of battling against HAL 2000, the sentient, malevolent, intelligent photocopier, a ditzy blonde printer, and a human unintelligence has, it seems, squeezed my creativity dry.
Fortunately for me, my brain seems to be something like a tube of toothpaste. I haven't dried up, but it's worming out in unexpected places, and out of pinpricks I didn't know I had.
I'm dreaming strangely. Not lucidly, but vividly. The light has a strange texture; it feels like liquid. It is as if I could curl up inside the colours.
There is the forest dream, which is entirely in a blue sepia-effect. The trees are ancient, growing in on themselves, blocking the light, choking on their own vines and on each other. I, and the other animals - squirrels that are sometimes human, a catish bird, a flock of ravens, horses that look for all the world like horses but are not, sit in the trees, and crouch on the ground. We parcel up our stores of light and trade them in the dark. We watch the most beautiful creature in the world (which looks like a manatee, but believe me, when you have this dream, it will be beautiful, and blue) starve itself to death because the men from the city came, like Russian clockwork soldiers, and stole back a girl who ran away.
The forest is dying, and dark, and slightly evil. So is the city, but it is also unnatural.
The dream ends with a soldier returning the girl, but she is at the end of a chain, and there is a bullring through her nose, and there is blood on it. She reaches out to the manatee, and it cries.
There is a the desert dream. I have not read Dune in years, but I dream of tribes in the desert, and a great peregrination. We ride on the backs of the giant worm-gods. We strap sunsails to their backs - great squares of blood orange, and wide-sky blue, dead-leaf green, to help their great thrumming tails propel us through the sand dunes. We churn up a low-lying dust storm that stretches from horizon to horizon. I am at the front of one worm; god-riding; shouting ... something.
There is the ocean dream - and this I remember the least about. There is a ship made of bone, and a great many people are dead. The air is difficult to breathe. Still, somehow, even this dream seems more real than HAL, or Daisy (the ditz).
As someone who makes up names for mundane office equipment, I should be well aware of the dangers of an overactive imagination made desperate by boredom. I should have grown beyond pretending these are fragments of other lives, from some other place, long ago. Although, see above, perils of a desperate imagination.
And anyway, anyone reading this should be glad I'm dreaming. I don't have anything else to say. Apathy, apathy, and a photocopier that needs to be shot.
The third week of battling against HAL 2000, the sentient, malevolent, intelligent photocopier, a ditzy blonde printer, and a human unintelligence has, it seems, squeezed my creativity dry.
Fortunately for me, my brain seems to be something like a tube of toothpaste. I haven't dried up, but it's worming out in unexpected places, and out of pinpricks I didn't know I had.
I'm dreaming strangely. Not lucidly, but vividly. The light has a strange texture; it feels like liquid. It is as if I could curl up inside the colours.
There is the forest dream, which is entirely in a blue sepia-effect. The trees are ancient, growing in on themselves, blocking the light, choking on their own vines and on each other. I, and the other animals - squirrels that are sometimes human, a catish bird, a flock of ravens, horses that look for all the world like horses but are not, sit in the trees, and crouch on the ground. We parcel up our stores of light and trade them in the dark. We watch the most beautiful creature in the world (which looks like a manatee, but believe me, when you have this dream, it will be beautiful, and blue) starve itself to death because the men from the city came, like Russian clockwork soldiers, and stole back a girl who ran away.
The forest is dying, and dark, and slightly evil. So is the city, but it is also unnatural.
The dream ends with a soldier returning the girl, but she is at the end of a chain, and there is a bullring through her nose, and there is blood on it. She reaches out to the manatee, and it cries.
There is a the desert dream. I have not read Dune in years, but I dream of tribes in the desert, and a great peregrination. We ride on the backs of the giant worm-gods. We strap sunsails to their backs - great squares of blood orange, and wide-sky blue, dead-leaf green, to help their great thrumming tails propel us through the sand dunes. We churn up a low-lying dust storm that stretches from horizon to horizon. I am at the front of one worm; god-riding; shouting ... something.
There is the ocean dream - and this I remember the least about. There is a ship made of bone, and a great many people are dead. The air is difficult to breathe. Still, somehow, even this dream seems more real than HAL, or Daisy (the ditz).
As someone who makes up names for mundane office equipment, I should be well aware of the dangers of an overactive imagination made desperate by boredom. I should have grown beyond pretending these are fragments of other lives, from some other place, long ago. Although, see above, perils of a desperate imagination.
And anyway, anyone reading this should be glad I'm dreaming. I don't have anything else to say. Apathy, apathy, and a photocopier that needs to be shot.
