alexxkay: (Default)
Outside a Buttery Party at night, probably a New Years, judging by the snow. [personal profile] nineweaving wanders out, rather merry. Seeing a lamp post sparks a memory of a joke, or perhaps a vow, decades gone. She throws her arms around the post, exclaiming, "I never knocked you down! I'm so sorry!"

[This made sense in context, but I didn't manage to retain any more of the context through to waking. But I hope it amuses, nonetheless.]
alexxkay: (Default)
Zombie apocalypse crossed with office comedy. (Intelligent zombies, a la Matheson's I Am Legend,)

One worker suggests that any bites be quickly washed out with Dr. Bronner's soap; maybe the "all one god faith" will stave off infection. Sadly, alarm went off before this could be tested.
alexxkay: (Default)
Had a dream that I waa reading _Finder_ by Carla Speed McNeill. (Well, earlier, I was watching an old Babylon 5 tape, but in the manner of dreams, the experience shifted.) There was a memorable incident where someone was meeting and negotiating with a tribal chief. I don't remember his name, so I'll call him X. X was a very big man, and had his (rather ancient) wife next to him during the meet. After the negotiations were over, and the foreigner had left, X removed the outer layer of his robes to reveal that "he" was actually three slender women!

It seems that, a while back, this tribe had a difficult situation. Tribal law dictates that the chief must be male (mostly due to the neighboring tribes being sexist). The original Chief X, when he died, had three daughters, but no sons. None of the daughters had married (partially due to the fact that any husband might end up Chief, and they didn't see any acceptable candidates in the dating pool). Faced with this conundrum, X's wife managed to convince the tribal Council to accept the legal fiction that X's daughters, collectively, *were* X, and could maintain "his" Chieftan-ship.

That seemed like a nifty enough idea to be worth sharing. I'm not a fiction writer, so if anyone wants to pick it up and run with it, feel free.
alexxkay: (Default)
Yesterday, Kestrell and I watched a bunch of YouTube videos from the British Film Institute, mostly ones connected with their “GOTHIC” film festival from a few years ago. Which may have had something to do with the incredibly odd film I dreamed last night.

I was at a… party? At any rate, there were a lot of friends around, and we were snowed in. I was channel surfing looking for something interesting to watch. I eventually landed on a PBS station from out of state, which seemed to be showing this movie repeatedly and/or in random order. I can’t be quite sure, because the snowstorm was intermittently knocking out the signal, so what bits I did see were in random order at any rate.

The overall antagonist of the piece was Godzilla, but he was attacking Victorian England. In order to combat this threat, Sherlock Holmes had enlisted the help of Dracula, Jack the Ripper, and others (maybe Frankenstein’s Monster?). Near the end of the film, Jack had a speech about how he envied Godzilla for having spent most of its life in a world without humans.

Much earlier in the film (probably the opening scene) a prehistoric tribe of white furred hominids are about to be trampled by rampaging woolly mammoths. We focus in on one of them as he closes his eyes and prepares to die – but he doesn’t die, though blood splatters across him. A ghastly roar is heard above the noise of the trampling mammoths. He opens his eyes and sees (though we do not) the towering form of Godzilla, chomping down on the mammoths, inadvertently saving the ape man’s life. His name is Zaius, and he will become the shaman of his tribe.

Meanwhile, in Victorian England, criminals are taking advantage of the chaos of a Godzilla attack at night to break into a bank vault – but Sherlock Holmes has anticipated this! Sadly, his near-superhuman speed is not sufficient to stop the criminals, who escape in a waiting coach. Several of them were dressed as cowboys (Including Billy the Kid?) but most of them were uniformed Bobbies. Some sort of government conspiracy at work?

I was telling someone else at the party about this incredible film I’d been watching, when I woke up enough to realize I wanted to tell all of YOU about it. And now I have.
alexxkay: (Bar Harbor)
19th century France had video transmission and display technology – but no actual recording tech, just live. Moderately expensive. Mostly used by (mad) science hobbyists to set up the equivalent of WebCams in various places in the city. One of these hobbyists, matter than usual, is linked to vampire urban folklore.

Dream Argh

Apr. 30th, 2016 05:43 am
alexxkay: (Bar Harbor)
Dreampt that I got news from the Judge. Convicted to time on a Chain Gang. Luckily I was lucid enough to force myself awake from that. Woke in significant pain. Decided to write it down in hopes of getting it the fuck out of my head. Back to bed now...
alexxkay: (Bar Harbor)
A few days ago, I had a dream where, for some unknown reason my subconscious decided that Donald Trump was yelling at me. Now it happens that I have been so thoroughly avoiding television news and advertisements that I actually have NO IDEA what Donald Trump SOUNDS like. But my subconscious dream director was like, “There must be yelling here, so we need a voice. Just reuse some appropriate one from deep memory storage.” So now, in my personal head-canon, Donald Trump speaks with the voice of Yosemite Sam.
alexxkay: (Bar Harbor)
"Most experts agree that, while killing oneself once may be therapeutic, making a *habit* of it is distinctly harmful."
alexxkay: (Bar Harbor)
Was participating in something that was sort of like a Hamilton LARP and sort of like a classic Cumberland Company ren faire.
alexxkay: (Bar Harbor)
Cool: Running in to an old friend while both of us were on Babylon 5.
Less Cool: He was working a cash register at a hamburger joint in the food court.

(I was on B5 to attend the big annual interstellar SCA event...)
alexxkay: (Bar Harbor)
I'm in a sweets shop, with Rick and Libby. Rick hands me a chocolate-filled pastry to try. It's sweet, with just a hint of bitter aftertaste. Biting in to it evokes a story: The young ingenue and the old rake; he lusting to corrupt, she eager for experience.
alexxkay: (Bar Harbor)
I had an interesting dream experience a few nights ago. In the dream, I was testing out a game I was working on. It was an immersive VR horror game, with monsters that were approximately “slow zombies”. In this run, the only “weapon” I had managed to acquire was a sharpened pencil; theoretically viable if you can stab a “zombie” in the heart before it gets you. I was trying to sneak past an un-alert zombie, when I accidentally alerted it. I quickly tried to stab it with the pencil I was holding in my left hand, and here’s where the interesting thing happened. Since I knew I was in a VR game, but did NOT know I was in a dream, I actually tried to make a stabbing motion with my real arm! Sleep paralysis prevented my arm from more than twitching, which was so frightening that it woke me up. The zombie wasn't nearly as scary as the sudden loss of control.
alexxkay: (Bar Harbor)
Evening naps clearly make for interesting dreams, though this one isn't nearly as good as the last.

A sitcom set in a world where all religion and mythology is true. Emphasis on ALL – not just that which is accepted by official dogma. Our viewpoint into this world is a set of gossip tabloids, all competing to get the juiciest details of the latest drunk divinities before anyone else. Sort of a triangulation between American Gods, Fables, and Thorne Smith.
alexxkay: (Bar Harbor)
Snatching a few hours sleep at an odd hour, my subconscious served up a surprise: a previously unseen collaboration between Fritz Lang and Peter Lorre, The Deep Underground.

It’s one of those films where the setting (and set designer) is of equal importance to the actors and director. It is set in an old, never-named city, located on the side of a steep mountain. Streets are all switchback and the sidewalks are stairs as often as not. Shadows fall swiftly down the slopes. Night comes early here.

Like all old cities, it has another city beneath itself. Basements, sewers, ancient tunnels of secret and unknown purpose, all interconnecting in a labyrinth. But this labyrinth has a famous difference from many others. Usually, if one is lost in an underground maze, one can escape by always trying to go up; “up” is reliably towards the surface. Not so, here. In the deep underground, you could climb upwards for a mile, always within 100 yards of the outer world, but never actually reaching it. It’s a threat used to keep little children out of the underground, but it’s true for all that.

In this nameless, steep city, Peter Lorre is a denizen of the underworld in two senses: a petty criminal, and someone who has spent much of his life exploring the deep underground. Another criminal recruits him for a job. He has found the existence of a treasure vault, guarded well – on the surface… If Lorre can get them close enough to drill in from beneath, they can share a fortune.

As they travel through the deep underground, sometimes Lang uses shots from street level. You’ll hear just a snatch of clear dialogue echoing up through a sewer grating, accompanied by the merest flicker of torchlight, indirectly reflected below

The exact details of the plot evade me (as is typical in dreams). The treasure is found, there is betrayal in the dark, Lorre survives and emerges with a double handful of jewels. Jewels that are SO valuable, that he cannot immediately convert them to currency…

Later, there is an investigator. He probably would have found nothing on his own, but Lorre is seized by that classic hubris, and offers to guide the investigator through the underground. After all, the underground is HIS domain, and he is proven himself invincible within it. He’s already effectively hidden one body down here, another should prove no difficulty. Down in the dark with a soon-to-be-dead man, Lorre can show off his mastery, and boast of the cleverness of his crimes.

In the inevitable climactic fight, Lorre is blinded by an errant torch. The investigator escapes to the surface, with a solution, if without a prisoner.

Lorre, master of the underground, discovers that though he knows these spaces better than any other man, he does NOT know them blind. Lost, he begins to struggle upwards in montage. Daylight filters in, but he can no longer see it. On the surface, little children sing a nursery rhyme about how when you’re lost in the deep underground, going up will not save you. The rhyme echoes through the underground halls; Lorre hears it, but cannot identify its direction. He struggles frantically upwards… and inwards, away from the light. Fade to black. The End. Credits.
alexxkay: (Bar Harbor)
Vlad Taltos was arguing with Verra. As a result, he decided to go hide out in his highschool bookstore, largely on the theory that at least it should take someone interesting to find him there.

He's not there long before he's sent out front to organize some books ("Out of all the possible orders, you want just 'alphabetical'? Boring, but OK...") He'd only been at it a short time when a group of Men In Black come in, claiming to be some sort of Interdimensional Book Police. But Vlad sees something wrong with their IDs, so he realizes that these are actually here illegally, making them Rogue Interdimensional Book Police...
alexxkay: (Bar Harbor)
In order to raise money for charity, John Scalzi and Jim Hines do a photo shoot where they pretend to make out while each wearing full body costumes that are a sort of transporter-accident mix of Wookiee and Sorayama-style sexy female robot.
alexxkay: (Bar Harbor)
Sometimes, when I wake just slightly from a deeply immersive narrative dream, I can manage to float back down into it. It's easier if the dream is closer to my actual life. When I'm dreaming that I'm an extremely acrobatic, somewhat feral, adolescent French girl... not so much. Damnit.
alexxkay: (Bar Harbor)
Did you know that citizens of Twin Peaks are exempt from being drafted by the U.S. Government until the year 3009? It's true! Or at least, the mayor put up a big stone monument near Laura Palmer's grave claiming that he brokered such a deal.
alexxkay: (Bar Harbor)
I was in a Hogwarts-ian setting, only not so much 'magic' as 'weird'. I wasn't the Potter-equivalent, [livejournal.com profile] siderea was. Now in her third year, the administration had stopped trying to get her to do structured classes, as her self-directed study habits were keeping her well ahead of the curve, despite being frequently interrupted by adventures.

Hanging out in the dining hall with some other students, I and some friends were going through our piles of textbooks for the year. There was a large bee lurking nearby. Kind of scarily large, several inches long, though that wasn't remotely as large and scary as the hyperintelligent giant bees that siderea had defeated in her first year. But while we were distracted in conversation, somehow the bee managed to get a bunch of books into a discarded cardboard box, and start moving it down the hall.

I managed to upend the box, temporarily stopping the bee's theft. and then went and alerted siderea. At first she was annoyed at the seemingly-pointless interruption, but a quick examination of one of the history books the bee was trying to steal showed that the text on the page was changing as we watched. Clearly this was just the first(?) move in the Queen Bee's Time War!
alexxkay: (Bar Harbor)
Had a dream last night that involved a Lego castle.  In the hypnagogic post-dream state, I came up with a design that I would totally do if I still *had* Lego.  A castle bedroom set, with tapestries.  The tapestries would be built of one-width bricks, though using some one-third height flats to make fancier designs.  They would be suspended from the wall, but two bricks out from the actual wall.  They wouldn't quite reach the floor, being short by about 2/3 of a brick, so that if you're paying attention, you can just see the toes of the minifig hiding behind it :-)

Profile

alexxkay: (Default)
Alexx Kay

February 2025

S M T W T F S
      1
23 45678
9101112131415
16171819202122
232425262728 

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags