Cthulhu Lies Dreaming

Let's do some gaming stuff.

At the recent GameHole Con (Quick review - great convention in Madison, you should go), I ran a part of a Call of Cthulhu campaign I had done years ago. Then characters were all underclassmen at Miskatonic University in March of 1925, when, according to Lovecraft's original short story, The Call of Cthulhu, the Great Old One stirred in his sleep, disturbing the dreams of people throughout the world.

And for this I created some pregens, gave them backgrounds, and had them make a POW check. Those that succeeded got strange dreams. Then I asked them what their term project was in the class.  Here are the characters:

Frank Johnson was our athelete, a football hero playing with the Miskatonic Badgers.
Deborah Blaine was our "New Woman" journalist.
Virginia Frink was our science student - her parents disappeared at Devil's Reef, near Innsmouth
Skip Cavanaugh was our dilettante, changing majors six times in six semesters.
Jedediah Wright comes from a long lines of Congregationalist ministers. He is studying theology.
Samuel Whately is pre-med, and comes from a farming community in Vermont. He interns at St. Mary's in Arkham.

Some made their Power Check, some didn't, but it was an interesting writing challenge. Here are their dreams

Frank Johnson’s Dream

You are in the woods, a thick pine woods. It is a summer night, but a full moon provides ghostly illumination, and the stars twinkle overhead. Your path leads west, towards a clearing. As you approach, white flowers glow in the field below you glow like fireflies, and the stars are obscured by a mounting thunderhead. You watch its moon-limned edges grow on the horizon, until it looms over you.

Then the thunderhead turns, and you see two huge yellow eyes emerging from the mass, and you know the towering creature is no cloud. It screams and you scream and you are awake.

Please make a SAN check.

Deborah Blaine’s Dream

You are at a trendy party, mingling with guests in tux and tails, or sequined gowns. There are waiter carrying trays of champagne and appetizers, and no one seems to care about Prohibition. There is jazz music playing in the distant in an odd minor key. You walk towards people and they turn away from you, some in disinterest, some in fear. You are concerned and try to join small groups that break up as soon as you arrive, and soon you are moving quickly from person to person, only to find the other guests flee from you. Something is wrong with your face.  

You reach a mirror and recoil in horror at yourself. Your face has melted, the skin gathered in on itself to form long, looping tendrils around you nose and mouth. You try to scream, but you cannot – the tendrils themselves coil of their own volition. You reach out to the mirror and your reflection touches you as well, but it reaches through the mirror and grasps you by the wrist, seeking to pull you inside. You awaken in a cold sweat.

Please make a SAN Check

Virginia Frink’s Dream

You are in an old house. Belonging to your parents? You are not quite sure. It’s night, and the ocean thunders outside, and you know without looking that the house is up on a cliff (your parents’ house was nowhere near the shore). There are shouts outside, but you know (someone warned you?) not to look out the windows. The sound of the surf grows louder, and with it the groaning of ancient timbers under sail, and the shouts grow louder as well.

You finally look out the window to see a great sailing ship breaking up on the rocks. The crew is abandoning it, and other dark figures are swarming over it like ants, killing the seamen they encounter and shredding the sails. Behind the wrecked ship is a great wave rising out of the ocean, a single pinnacle of water streaming off all sides.

Then the wave parts and reveals the tip of a huge leathery wing, the ocean itself draining off its flesh. The creature it belongs to, some massive dragon, turns towards you and you sudden awaken.

Please Make a SAN check.

Skip Cavanaugh’s Dream

You dream of a strange, burning city. Even on fire, its buildings seem to flicker and fade into and out of phase with the world, and twist inwards on themselves in patterns that seem to make sense but deny all reality. The buildings are huge, built by ancient giants, and you see people like ants trying to scale them, climbing up their burning sides to avoid the waters below.

Waters. Yes. You are now waist-deep in thick, salty waters. The tide is coming in. No. The city itself is sinking, and the ocean is coming in. You try to run to one of the towering, flaming structures, but you are trapped in mud. Not mud. You are ensnared by tentacles, looping round your legs like strong ropes, holding you in place and dragging you beneath the surface. You open your mouth to scream and salt water pours into your throat.

Please make a SAN check.

Jedidiah Wright’s Dream

You are in a church. Anglican, you would guess, from the amount of decoration and stained glass, and the smell of incense and heavily oiled wooden pews. There are parishioners in the benches, but you have a hard time focusing on them. They seem to fade in and out like ghosts. The stained glass seems to shimmer as well, and its scenes are aquatic in nature – coral, tropical fish, and octopi.

The minister is your father, or your grandfather, with a full white beard and wild white hair, gesticulating and shouting loudly. His words are unclear, but it is a hellfire speech. As you walk up the aisle, you see that he is bleeding from the eyes, the blood running down into his beard. And then you realize it is not a beard at all, but rather a nest of snakes, coiling and coiling like tendrils round his saw-toothed, lamprey-like mouth.

You awaken with a start. Please make a SAN check.

Samuel Whately’s Dream

You are in the morgue in the basement of St. Mary’s. It doesn’t look like the morgue you know, but you are sure of it. Instead of a small room with a bank of drawers holding the deceased you are in a great marble-shod palace, the biers of the dead laid out with military precision in all directions, each body covers in a translucent white sheet. Somewhere, far in the distance, a gong sounds.

The gong sounds again, and the cadavers begin to stir. The gossamer sheets slide from them and you see they are monstrosities, partially unmade through partial autopsies and botched studies. Great surgical wounds crisscross their forms, the skin pulling away from the stitches to reveal the oozing muscles beneath, the organs straining to escape. You run, but there is no place to run, the dead are everywhere.

You awaken in your bed, breathing hard. You catch your breath, and hear you roommate snoring across the room. In the distance you hear the university bell tower. Then the arms of the dead things reach up from beneath your bed and seize you dragging you down beneath the floorboards to join them. You awaken again, but are unsure if you are truly awake.

Please make a SAN check.


More later,

Book: Midsummer Night's Dreamquest

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson, TOR Books, 2016

Provenance: Kij Johnson was a colleague at Wizards of the Coast and one of the ringleaders of a writer's group I belonged to (The Thousand Monkeys) more than a decade ago. I saw mention of the novella on the book of Face and the Lovely Bride ordered it from Amazon as a Christmas present. I am glad I got it in hard copy so I may press it upon friends to read it as well.

I have spoken of Lovecraft before. I love his cosmic vision, enjoy his prose, tolerate his poetry, and detest his racism. But I have also said that it is the nature of creation to have other creators arrive and develop, add, and subtract. That is what Kij Johnson has done here, to amazing effect.

Vellit Boe is a professor at the Ulthar Women's College in the Dreamlands. One of her students, Clarie Jurat, the daughter of a major supporter, has run off with a man from the Waking World, a dreamer, Vellit Boe must find Clarie and convince her to return before her father finds out. That sets Vellit off on a mission that leads from the stairs to the Waking World to the court of King Randolph Carter to the ghoul warrens below, as the situation becomes more dire with every step.

And it works. Vellit Boe's dreamlands is a "real" world with its shapechanging sky, few stars, monstrous inhabitants, capricious gods and questionable geography. It is a dreamworld with a grounded sense, a trust in its own mutability.  It has its own rules - they are just unlike ours, and change at a whim.

It is a world with its own gender issues - this is the Dreamlands shown from a female perspective. It does not negate what has gone before, but recognizes that it is a male viewpoint with male heroes and male interactions. The women were always there, it says, but confined to the scenery, to the background, to the support team. Kij brings these women forward, aware of the hurdles before them  - Dorothy Sayers' Harriet Vane would be comfortable in Johnson's Ulthar. Exceptional women are still considered unusual. The timeline is also advanced, to say that the Dreamlands exists in a hundred years back - the Women's College is a new thing, and there are steam engines and mechanical farm equipment in this version.

Yet while even subverting it, Johnson remains true to the work. There are the zoogs and the gugs, and the world pivots on the caprices of the gods sleeping in distant Kadash. The seriousness of the situation, and the doom that hangs upon Vellit Boe, deepens the further she goes on the hunt. It lacks the nihilism of Lovecraft, but does not shy from the hard choices.

And the tale is a perfect novella. Love or loathe Lovecraft's style, it often involves ornate flourishes and arcane terminology. Vellit Boe's language is tight and precise and the book is just as long as it needs to be. It could have been a short story, but a little cramped, ticking off locations, more paean than prose. And it could have been a thumping large fantasy epic, or even a trilogy, where you are ten chapters in even before Claria disappears. But  it is not, and its economy serves it well.

This is a contender for the Hugos and Nebuli this year, barring any further weirdness from the Sad Bunnies and their ilk for whom good fiction is unrecognizable and anathema. Read it now and avoid the rush.

More later,

Adventure: Pulp Tentacles VIII - A (P)Review

Starfall Over the Plateau of Leng by Jon Hook, an Age of Cthulhu Adventure from Goodman Games.

This is an interesting situation. Those readers who have hung on through this blog through thin and thinner know that I will review adventures, but primarily adventures that I have run, which for the past few years has been the Age of Cthulhu adventures from Goodman Games. But because I want to run them first before reviewing them, such reviews usually trail the release of the product by months.

Not so in this case. After swatting Goodman Games about the head and shoulders, one of the authors finally got in contact with me and asked if my group would playtest the next upcoming adventure. We did so, and delivered a healthy chunk of advice, comments, and nit-picking, I was more recently asked if I wanted to do a review of the mostly-finished product, since they are currently doing a kickstarter to get the thing printed. As a result of all this, this review has a different tone than others that have appeared in this space. Previously I have been comfortable of issuing a spoiler warning and then going off on my merry way, since so much time has passed that most of those who initially purchased the adventure would have time to play it. Here I must be more circumspect, in that I don't want to give too much away. I am going to try to keep the facts revealed to those on the Kickstarter page itself.

Here is the short version - It was a very good adventure in the initial draft, and it is even better now. The changes made involved some tucking in of historical nits, answering a few open questions, and sharpening up some NPC motivations. It gives the players an excellent doorway into the Dreamlands, Lovecraft's semi-medieval dimension world that lays alongside our own reality.

The adventure opens with an assignment - the investigators are charged by a historical society, IHAS (no cheeseburger jokes - we told them all already) to track down an artist who has gone suspiciously silent. IHAS stands for International Historical and Archaeological Society, and serves as a starting point for investigators from diverse backgrounds to operate under a common origin. Such societies are a bit perilous in games, in that if they are too knowledgeable about the mythos, the players tend to treat them as a crutch, going to them whenever they need info. If they are too much in the dark, they tend to be useless. This one strikes the balance between monster and whirlpool and provides a solid launching point for the adventure.

For my ongoing group, I had already brought them together as a group, so this was less a worry. The group currently consists of the The Writer, Her Heroic Subject, the Secret Agent/Photographer, the Archaeology Student, the Wealthy Dilettante and the Mobster. They are based out of London as opposed to Arkham, so I managed a little shifting about that seemed to work out well. IHAS operates out of a London Club within my universe, and I have previously used club society as a way to introduce other NPCs for adventures.

Back to the plot. IHAS was dealing with an artist, but the artist had a major mental crackup, and was sent away for a cure in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Now no word is coming out the sleep clinic she was bundled off to, and would the characters be so kind as to give a look-in? For my group, this had the added benefit that the Mobster was on the run from Chicago organization, so going back to the states involved some sleight-of-hand and laying low. For the adventure, it gives you a great deal of information on the path between Arkham and Eureka Springs, including rules for thumbing a lift.

Eureka Springs has its horrors, but the investigators' path ultimately leads to the Dreamlands and its fabled Plateau of Leng (its in the title - I give nothing away here). The challenge for any Dreamlands adventure is getting the player there in the first place, and Starfall gives it to you in spades. In the course of play I sent one character there physically, one by use of a new skill, one who drank the dream brew, and the remainder with a mystic ceremony. Oh, and one I spiked his chicory when nothing else worked. The adventure leads, by twists and turns, to the Pharos of Leng, a mighty lighthouse that is bringing down upon it the destruction of both Dreamlands and reality.

So how does it all come together? It is less the blazing pulp of the previous previous Indian adventure, and is a good intro to Dreamlands without getting too deep into the separate world (ownership of any of the various editions of the Chaosium Dreamlands book is helpful but not required). The adventure itself is neatly self-contained and does not commit your adventurers to a long-term campaign in the Dreamlands (unless, of course, they want it).

For my own group's adventures, I would mention the Mobster playing hide-and-seek with other members of the Chicago Outfit, the point the group was almost defeated by a staircase, the fact they could actually use the Tibetian they had learned in a previous adventure, experiments with the Dreaming Skill, the Writer in mourning over the death of her Heroic Subject and the Heroic Subject dressed in a kilt made of Zoog pelts. But to say more would involve spoilers.

One thing that I am inordinately pleased about is the maps and illos. Bradley K. McDevitt does his usual wonders with the black and white art style, and Tom Martin gets the nod for the maps. But this adventure gets kudos for avoiding the traditional "Curse of Cthulhu" - maps which are unclear, or contrary to the text they are supposed to co-ordinate with. Nicely done on that.

As mentioned above, Goodman Games is doing a Kickstarter, and at the time of this writing it has a week to run. It has already made its nut, and is now reaching for stretch goals - at the moment, the reward is a mini-adventure for Eureka Springs, which would a cool thing to have if your group is the type that needs to cool its heels while translating something from Polish, or something similar. Its worth checking out and supporting, because this is an excellent entry into Lovecraft's Dreamlands.

More later,

Film: Engineering Project

The Wind Rises written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki.

I have an off-again, on-again relationship with Japanese animation. As a child, I was not exposed to Macross or Star Blazers, but I got more than a double dose of Kimba, the White Lion through Paul Shannon's Adventure Time. In college I remained immune to the rising force of manga, though I read all of the english translations of Akira. I have good friends who are anime fans and work on translations, and through those I get a semi-regular dose of animation on the small screen, but it has been years since I have been in a theater for the medium (Akira again, at the Oriental Theater in Milwaukee).

But last night was an excellent occasion to renew the habit. The Wind Rises is reported to be the last film of writer and director Hayao Miyazaki, who has built up the powerful Studio Ghibli over the years. And it is a retrospective, not of his life life, but rather a fictionalized account of Jiro Horikoshi, who designed the Mitsubishi Zero fighter plane. And it is magical fictionalization, grounded in the reality of the modernizing Japan of the Showa period, but taken leaps of dreams and imagination.

Jiro Dreams of Biplanes

We meet Jiro as a boy, nearsighted but dreaming of flight. In his dreams, he is met by the Italian aircraft designer Giovanni Battista Caproni, who becomes his spirit animal, guiding and exhorting him to pursue his dream. We follow the youth through school (and the Great Tokyo Earthquake), to his job at Mitsubishi (and the collapse of the banks) to visiting Germany (and the rising militarism of the '30s). And his desire for flight is matched in description of both the rising Japanese desire for modernity and the relentless technological advancement created by war. He meets and re-meets his bride, perfects his aircraft, and suffers the loss both personal and national.

And through it all Hayao's dream supports him. He is the portrayed against a backdrop of glum, if not grim, fellow Japanese. No one else is smiling, yet he is amused, buoyed by his dreams. He performs small acts of heroism, but for the most part dodges the worst of his world. The other major characters have their ups and downs, their rages and tears, but Jiro remains a calm island. The exception to the glum companions comes late in the film, where he lectures a group of younger engineers, and there we see the laughter and wonder of others sharing the same mission.

Miyazaki gets engineering right in presenting it as a form of creativity. As a former civil engineer, I do not dream of flying (well, I rarely do), but I do dream in maps, in floor plans. Within my topological dreams I know exactly my location, even when the ground shifts. I assume this to be natural, but it seems to be the way I order my mind. I look at buildings and see lines of force and stress. And even with my shift into fiction and games, I still see that structure within words and paragraphs. It is a clockwork as beautiful as a biplane's fabric wings. So yeah, Miyazaki unites both the soft nature of creativity and the hard universe of numbers. Jiro's winged dreams match up with Miyazaki's own celulloid achievements. It is autobiography by transposition.

But I disagree with the hand-wave given to the results of Jiro's work. Caproni, his spirit guide, writes off the military nature of his creations as a thing that gives him the ability to create beautiful planes. And Jiro is of similar mind, even though Miyazaki has to admit the darkness at the heart of Jiro's beautiful creations. The darkness remains at the perimeter, haunting always.

Should this be Miyazaki's last work, it seems to pack the feel of autobiography. I don't know the director's backstory, but it feels like pointing out the unification of imagination and technology matches up well in the area of movie making, another dimension of flight and dreams. It is a long film, alien in many ways to Western sensibilities (indeed, the fascination with steam engines as an analogy of development of Japan approaches the fetishistic, and is probably will be the source of many college papers). The rhythms of the movie are not those of Western film, with its quiet bits, the way it draws attention, and subtlety of the players all mixing into a core experience. If you get the chance to see it on the big screen, do it.

More later,

Fever Dreams

Personal media and social software such as facebooks, blogs, myspaces, twitters and whatnot rely on user-generated content. They also are positive pressure systems - they count on more stuff coming in over time. There is nothing pulling that content into the system other than the users' own desire to participate.

One of the results of this, though, is that someone you normally feel connected to, through their webpages or livejournals or tweets can suddenly drop off the face of the earth for a few days or even weeks, and only by more traditional forms of communication (or by the return of the prodigal)does it become clear what happened. Friend X had a family tragedy. Blogger Y was in the hospital with the swine flu. Facebooker Z is dealing with a breakup.

This stuff won't get into the system unless the poster so chooses it. In fact, unless you're paying attention to that particular individual and know their habits well, you might not even notice they were gone.

So in my case. I've been radio silent not because I've been out of town (a usual reason), but because I have been recovering from one of the nastiest cases of food poisoning/stomach flu it has been my misfortune to get.

Thursday lunch I has a "almost reuben" from a local sandwich shop, sent into the office. the coleslaw tasted a little iffy, but I did not think much of it at the time. That was about 1 PM. By 2 PM I started feeling queasy, and by 3 PM I started getting cold shakes. I went home at 4 which proved wise because by the time the Lovely Brid got home at 6, I was totally incapacitated with at temp of 100.4.

Now, as you can guess, I got better (well, getting better - still a bit woozy and break out in a sweat when I have to lift anything heavier than a mug of tea) but I completely lost Friday, and missed most of the weekend (a Bookfair, Steamcon, and my Sister In Law was up for a visit - she didn't see me until Sunday and was convinced that "Jeff has a stomach bug" was a cunning plan the LB had dreamed up to cover the fact she had killed me with a trowel and buried me under the tomato beds).

But man, the dreams from Friday - color, three dimensional primitive atari art dreams (mind you, I don't think I actually dreamed in color, but I remember dreaming in color, as my fever-infused mind tried to deal with with overheated surroundings). Here's what I ended up with:

Our universe is bounded by other universe (nothing new there), connected by tubes in which the nature of other universe pour into our universes (an upsurge of magic from a more magical universe, an upswing of evil from a more evil universe, an increase of fresh water from a fresh water universe)and vice versa (nothing surprising there).

But the competition is not between opposed universe (evil vs good, salt vs fresh), but rather by factions within each of the universes - those who favor incremental changes versus those who prefer sudden, major jumps in the influences levels. Think of the first as damage over time, and the second a damage from a single hit of a weapon. Gradualists versus Catastrophists.

And agents of each side are convinced that their method of maintaining the tubeways is the correct one - the gradualists feels that the sudden shocks of the catastrophists weakens the structure of the multiverse, while the catastrophists feel the gradualists are slowing the nature sudden ebb and flow of the multiple cosmos. Both sides think of themselves as the good (well, right) guys, and that the others are sworn, wrong enemies.

And it came through is such incredible interwoven clarity that such dreams of capable of, that the curtain has been pulled back and now I get a view of the workings of the cosmos itself.

Basis for a fantasy campaign? Maybe. Foundation for a religion? Heck yeah. And anyone who picks this up remember that I get a piece of the take (no martyrdoms, please)

More later,

A Simpson's Dream

I've stated before that I believe our dreams to be messy emotional states, and that what we call dreams to be an attempt to impose order onto that messy state. And yet the other night I dreamed an entire episode of the Simpsons. In the traditional three-act arc. No opening couch gag, though.

Here's the story: Bart and the other kids are playing space ships (The Simpsons universe is oddly retro – there are hoboes and references to the Rat Pack in it). There have been stories of UFOs around Springfield. Bart takes a tumble. Martin, the class nerd, shows up with a working space ship, inspiring the others to come up with their own working versions as well. Ralph has one that works on the principle of two pie plates banging together. The cool thing is, they all work, and they go looking for UFOs. They are attacked by aliens. We don’t see the aliens, but Bart is captured and put into suspended animation by the Alien’s Minions – Ned and Skinner.

Bart wakes up and all the other kids have grown into their parents or adult analogs. Ralph is a cop, Nelson is Snake, the creepy twins have become Marge's sisters. Lisa is an adult with Marge-style hair. Maggie is a sullen rebel. The world is surviving but post-apocalypse, in the fashion of an old Twilight Zone episode with the old man in the mountain. Lisa says that the aliens did this, but since she was the most adult, she weathered it better. Maggie sends Bart to the mountain, where the old man giving out all the wisdom is … Homer.

Bart leads Homer back down into the city, and Lisa is angry – she’s been using Homer as a false god to keep everyone in check under the aliens. The former kids rebel but Martin (now Professor Frinke) finds a way to send Bart back in time to prevent the aliens from succeeding – don’t call attention to yourselves with the flying ships. As he heads back, Maggie whispers something in Bart's ear.

Bart returns from after he takes his tumble. He belittles playing spaceships, and everyone goes and does something else. The exception is Martin and Ralph, who fly off in Ralph’s pie-plate craft. We see them head off, and they are followed by a space ship. Bart remembers what Maggie whispered to him - "There are no aliens - we become adults eventually regardless."

Over the closing credits, Kang and Kodos appears, to gloat that they finally appear in continuity on the show. Kang points out that the future may have changed, and besides, they only are seen in the closing tag, which gets cut in syndication. Kodos screams “nnooooo!”.

And I woke up, the plot fully-formed in my head, but as I tried to remember it, I was aware I was making linkages and explanations and filling plot holes. Now the only question is: How do I make a pitch?

More later,

The Java Jive

I've mentioned dreams before on this page, but for the first time in a long time, I had a dream of such vividness and emotion that it woke me up.

I've woken up with fright before (attackers made entirely of worms) and with happiness (balloon trips) and even with anger (someone hurting our cats) , but this was the first time I awoke with an overwhelming degree of sadness. The dream itself was unremarkable - I had in my hands a collection of coffee beans, and was frustrated by the challenge of turning them into coffee. I didn't know how, and I awoke feeling very sad and melancholy that I had failed.

I don't drink coffee (I prefer tea and cola), but I lay there, working over in my mind all the ways to prepare coffee. I remember the big red coffee-grinders at the A&P stores and my parent's old percolator with its steel basket and the drip machine we keep in the house for guests and the existence of freeze-dried coffee crystals and espresso machines. But the sadness remained, a melancholia that kept me awake for about a half hour before I finally surrendered to Morpheus and burrowed into sleep again.

Strange. More later,

Dream a Little Dream

"Do you dream in color?" asked my mom.

"Yes," I replied. But now I'm not sure. And thinking about it has occupied way too much of my bloggable time this week.

I mean, I remember dreaming in color. The pink of a plastic tray, the blue of a gingham dress, the green of a tightly-mowed lawn. But am I dreaming "in color" or am I just remembering them as color, because the emotional push-buttons in the dream remind me of those experiences in waking life. I get a certain feeling or memory attached to a pink tray, and when that combinations of feelings comes together in my unconsciousness, I ascribe it to "pink".

For such a simple question, it is weirder than most. I mean, color depends on sight, which the only sense that really has an on-off-state for most of us. We still smell and hear and potentially touch and taste while asleep, though opportunities are supposedly less given our inert state. Indeed, they can contribute to dreams, because the ninjas who crashed into my stately-dream-home a few days ago turned out to be just one of the cats pushing a stack of quarters off the bedside bookcase and onto the metal base of a floor lamp.

But sight is generally active/passive, and with it comes color. We don't ask if we "remember" in color, which pulls from the same mental file cabinets.

And then there is another challenge - dreams by their very definition are not horribly distinct. Distinction and definition often comes afterwards, when you are trying to sort them shape, when you are remembering a dream. I kept a dream journal many years ago, and discovered that parts of it never really happened in the dream, but rather consisted of transitions explaining how I moved from one state to another. I was translating experience to story, and in doing so editing that experience into a more linear form. Does the concept of "color" arrive at that point?

And with that comes the realization that when you tell someone about your dreams, you are engaged in that editing process. You've told a dream to a friend, who then said "Well, that's about money worries". It may NOT have been about money worries, but in telling it, your subconscious fills in the blanks, and why yes, you HAVE had money worries - amazing you never saw it that way before.

So I propose that when you experience flying in a dream, you are experiencing emotions and sensations which you connect with flying, and it only becomes "flying" after the fact, when the conscious mind (even that part that is active in sleep) is paying attention. My dreams of flight do not connect with my personal experience of flight (small plane, commercial jet, and balloon), but I still feel that in my dreams, I flew.

So this is what I've been thinking about, when I would otherwise be blogging. Dreams remain a murky region of the psyche, and I'm pretty jake with that. I define way too much as it is, and its nice to have a comfortable corner of chaos.

So yes. I do dream in color. I think.

More later,

Strange Dreams, Indeed

So you have those dreams sometime. The ones where days, weeks, and even months pass in the dreamstate, and then you wake up and realize that only a half hour has passed since you went to sleep.

And as a result of your time-distorted perception, you become ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED that Federal Agents (alternately, aliens) have broken into your house and replaced everything with reasonable facsimiles of the originals.

You've had that dream, right?

No? Uhhh, me neither. I was, um, just checking. Yeah, that's it - checking.

More later,