Sunday 7 November 1999

Pic of the day: "... in a large reclining chair with a flannel sheet wrapped around ..." (Ad hoc reconstruction. The colors don't quite match, they were light blue. And this ain't Florida. Oh well.)

OK, I'm going to describe a dream again. I recommend my pietist friends to skip this one. (The 14-15 year old should probably too, though it may not help them much.) For the rest of you, I apologize for turning your expectation up too high. But there is truly a vast gulf fastened between them and you, and I am falling into it. OK, here goes.

In my dream, we were on the east coast of Florida. (How this came to happen is a long and hazy story in itself.) Suffice to say that I rented half of a large house within sight of the sea. I was with a young female friend of mine, who shall remain unnamed. We were walking slowly on the grass and for some reason she started to make jokes about Koreans. Not very evil and malicious jokes, but still clearly having fun at their expense. What she was not seeing was the Korean lady behind her. She certainly looked Korean, and the forced smile on her face pretty much clinched it and told me that she listened. I discreetly gestured to my friend, but it took a little while before she took the hint, saw the lady, and was quite abashed.

At this point, I picked up my friend and put her over my shoulder and carried her back to the house. She did not resist, rather she seemed to relax all muscles and go limp, as if sleeping. Not that I believed that for a moment. In the house, I laid her down in a large reclining chair with a flannel sheet wrapped around her. I did not want her to notice that I had "suffered the male reaction" as the Americans call it. Not that there was any suffering involved at that point. It soon would, though, as I concentrated on flash-removing that reaction.

(I do this in waking life sometimes too, if by mishap the limbic system runs away with my body; as can too easily happen when you're a healthy man living all alone and not regularly exercising all parts of your body, and then suddenly come in close contact with attractive women. What I do is basically first to reset the brain to a thoroughly meditative state, more or less flushing all other thoughts and feelings. Then by tensing some muscles and relaxing others, I redirect the blood flow. I've arrived at this entirely by experiment; and to tell the truth, it is somewhat painful and probably not too healthy. But it works. In seconds, I revert to my normal inconspicious state. It comes in handy now and then. This is the first time I can remember doing it in a dream, though! Freud would have been so proud of me. He was the guy who invented dream censorship, right? Not that I have seen much of it till now.)

I unwrapped my friend from the flannel and she got up. She was unsatisfied that I had now for the second time in a short while carried her around (I don't really remember the first time) and she felt that I did not treat her like an equal. There's something to that. I therefore made myself available to her to retaliate as needed. She nodded solemnly and made me lie down on the floor, then proceeded to tie my wrists together and then my feet ... with sewing thread. Somehow I got the impression that she was not very whole-hearted in confining me, but I did not struggle against the thread. I noticed that she was wearing trousers that were almost exactly the same color as my own, only a slightly paler shade of yellow. I was now wearing my yellow jogging suit, which you may have seen on some of the pictures but which I won't usually wear outdoors anymore.

My friend did nothing more than tie me up with sewing thread. She went away and hid herself then, and I did not see her again as the dream drew to a close. A flock of Smith's Friends (Christian pietists) came through the house, most of them teenagers. It turned out that the other half of the house was rented by an old pietist friend of mine, who when I knew him was a farmer further west here on the south coast of Norway. I haven't seen him much in later years, and in the dream he looked as young as I remember him. And obviously he had quite a lot of guests. They hardly noticed me at all, rushing through the central corridor of the house. I went searching for my female friend, but did not find her. I thought that she was disappointed; but when I thought that, I found that I was already awake.

In real life, I slept late (hence the dream). Got up, ate a bit of breakfast, read up on the mailing lists, played a bit Master of Magic, took a long walk, made pasta dinner and wrote a bit more on my attempted novel, Thaumaturge.

In today's chapter of Thaumaturge, the Main Female Character breaks up with our hero. I must say I regret this and find it somewhat inconvenient; but there is no way she is going to live in the shadow of a superman. And honestly, the guy is way too blatant about his abilities. He ought to give people more time. And he's not going to improve in the next chapter, I'm afraid.

I wonder how long I'm going to write on this before it peters out by itself? They always do, you know. One peculiar difference is that this novel has no theme music. I almost always have one or a few songs as theme music when I write. They need not have the slightest to do with what I'm writing, though they sometimes have. As an extreme example, I have the plot and some chapters on two books ("Goldwatch" and "Return to Silverworld") which were created mainly by loudly playing Chris de Burgh's "Snows of New York" again and again. To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing in the lyrics that corresponds to a typical fantasy novel at all.

Lately I've been wondering, if we take the antediluvian part of Genesis literally ... or, for the theologically more discreet, set a similar scene in a science fiction story. A genetically superior form of humans with a life expectancy of ca 900 years, placed on a new, unexplored and unexploited planet. What would life be like? How would they act and react, what kind of civilization would arise? How would it feel to have a lifespan like that? And to be surrounded entirely by relatives, genetically closer than the average sibling today? I know Mark Twain wrote som antediluvian fiction, but it was largely a satire over his own time. I think there is a lot of stuff to explore there. Wonder if anyone has written it already? I really don't have the time; writing takes a lot more time than reading.

Oh no, I've written a long entry again! Woe betide... I have an appointment with my dentist tomorrow! I hope I survive it. This would be a spectacularly pathetic way to end a journal, I must admit. Then again, I guess that was its charm all along. :)