Sunday 12 November 2006

Pic of the day: From the anime Kanon 2006.

Dreaming

Ever since NaNoWriMo began, my sleep schedule has been messed up. Or rather, it has been what most people consider reasonably normal, while they consider my normal sleep schedule to be messed up. The reason why they don't know better is that I keep coming to work early in the morning, same as most of them. They don't know that I have been up since 2-3 in the night, after sleeping the whole evening away, then writing on my novel.

Today, however, was an exception. Even though I slept like 8 hours last "night" (or perhaps because of that?) I fell asleep again in the morning and had this wild dream. It was long and colorful, and the end had the most awesome music I can remember having heard, dream or not. The light was also awesome. I woke up wishing that there were dream recorders so I could have played it again later. But of course there are not (yet).

The dream did not really make a lot of sense. Dreams often don't, especially the colorful ones. There are other dreams where you mostly dream about thinking. I don't remember those vividly, but I hear that they gradually grow over your lifetime until they make up the vast majority of your dreams. Then at some point you start mistaking dreams for real life, and claim that you spent your whole night lying awake thinking, while your family members will know that you were snoring like a buzz saw. Of course, my family members will never know that, since my family member is me. But then again my dreams are still very different from those of elderly people. Or even mature people, as you soon will see.

In my dream, I was a boy around 19 years old (same as my male character in my NaNoWriMo novel! What a coincidence!) and an avid player of Dark Age of Camelot (which I used to play for years before City of Heroes came out, as regular readers may remember). This boy even had my name, but strangely enough his family was different from mine, and so was he. He only happened to share my name, it seems, and also the village he lived in seems to share some traits with the one where I grew up until I was 15.

This boy, this dream me, was through a misunderstanding being expelled from his guild in DAoC for homosexuality. (Well, it is set in the Dark Ages after all! Even so, I think we can safely conclude that he played on the American servers.) His only chance was to prove his innocense by getting a signed declaration from a girl that he was indeed straight. (Man, that must be the worst come-on in recorded history!) So most of the dream consisted of him visiting the various neighboring families that had young girls. This took a long time and included a host of events, some of which were decidedly mundane... talking with girls' parents, watching one family move furniture while redecorating their house... while others were quite dramatic, most notably flaming meteors falling from the sky a la Smallville, and a crazed mare severely wounding herself on barbed wire (this may be related to the meteors, as I believe it happened right afterwards).

But eventually I the dream boy found a gamer girl who was willing to take my word for my heterosexuality. I never had to prove it to her, at least not for the duration of the dream. So great was my luck that she turned out to not only be a gamer girl but also a ninja of awesome skill. I remember her moving in a castle-like tower which for some reason was on the farm where she lived. Her speed and grace was truly astounding. It was after this, when we were outdoors, that this music began to play, and it filled the whole landscape with its deep vibrant power. It was hair-raisingly beautiful, and the light was like something you only see a few times in your life, when the clouds break and shafts of golden light fall down like searchlights, suddenly changing the ordinary to a reflection of a higher beauty. And then I woke up.