life is a cabaret

[tsubame]

My dreams have been strange lately; the two that I remember from the past fortnight have been nightmares.



Last week I dreamed that cat_chan and I were making pottery at my house, and then her three cats (she had three cats in the dream) started attacking us. We eventually figured out that they were doing it because they smelled blood, and then realized that the reason they smelled blood was that the clay we used for the pottery was full of the stuff. Backtracking to where we had gotten the clay, we realized that we were on the scene of a mass murder, and somehow my father was our prime suspect. We tried to run away, but somehow ended up in a car with my mother and father, going to investigate (being in the car with a suspected mass murderer is a bit nerveracking, especially when you realize that you and your friend are the only ones who know about the mass murder). We found a videotape that contained some evidence, and we drove to the police station to turn it over. However, when we arrived there the police station was empty and completely dark, as was the parking lot. The door was open, however. My father decided that we should go in and watch the tape, but I knew that was a horrible idea: either we would be alone in a dark, enclosed space with a mass murderer who'd likely kill us, or we would enter the police station to find another murder site and possibly the killer.

I never got to find out which, though, since I decided I didn't want to know and woke up.

Night before last I dreamed that I was on a ship, half steamer and half hulled and rigged pirate ship. The crew was disreputable but close. I was the daughter of the ship's carpenter, and the whole thing was a frantic race to stay alive and not drown. My father, a large and blond-bearded man, died early in the dream, and was burried at sea, slid over the side on a board (I need not describe what this was like; suffice to say that my dreams are always extremely detailed). My mother (a brunette with bobbed hair dressed straight out of a 1930's movie) and I were left on the ship. Later we plowed through a hellish world of crashing seas and sinking ships, and despite the frantic navigation of the captain the ship nearly lost its hull. Watching the wood splinter from inside, I wondered if it would open and I would see my carpenter father's decaying corpse trying to hold the ship together. The hull breached, but somehow no water came in; what was holding everything together was not my father's skeleton but some braided ropes he had knotted and strung with white-and-red beads that thrummed and sang with power. Above decks, we crashed through the sinking wreckage of many boats, a hodgepodge of different types-- cruise ships, junks, schooners, riverboats. There were people, as well, bobbing in lifeboats, clinging to spars, screaming from flooded decks or floundering in the water, all begging us to take them onto our ship, which was miraculously holding together. We could not, though, could not afford to stop lest we be destroyed or mobbed by refugees and sunk. We left behind wailing women in veils who held up their babies imploringly, and sailors who cursed us as they disappeared beneath the waves.

We transitioned to a glassy-calm and flat sea somehow, and here there were strange floating houses, just sitting on top of the water. Upon disembarking we found many people living there, normal people in families and groups, but with something strangely clannish and predatory about them. They seemed to be devoted hedonists, not worried about the huge uncertainty of the future on their floating island-haven, not caring that they might return to the tossing water at any minute and be drowned. The crew took over a house and tried to find supplies and a way to repair our badly-damaged vessel. Without warning the entire place began to sink. The crew scrambled back to the ship, but none of the other inhabitants of the island made it. Some hurried to indulge in some final, momentary pleasure before they went under, stuffing their faces with food or tilting back entire bottles of wine. Others were trapped in their houses, unable to escape as the water rose with astounding speed through the floorboards.

I was in the midst of watching a little girl drown when I finally woke up.



Last night, after I got back from my lesson, I cooked, did dishes, cleaned my bathroom for two hours, took a shower, and then watched the first episode of Firefly. For some reason, I just didn't want to sleep.



Regarding Firefly: definately my kind of show. I made snarky comments at the characters, of course, but I can't tell you how immensely pleased I was when, while the law-guy blustered and threatened his hostage, and the brother-doctor held his gun and dithered, the captain just walked on and shot the law-guy with barely a pause to aim.

. . . combine this with the products of my subconscious, and can you really debate the fact that I'm a bad person?



By the time I fell asleep, perhaps a half-hour after four, I was far too exhausted to remember my dreams.

And now a language joke, because I just found it:

Q: What does it mean if you're multilingual?
A: You speak several languages.
Q: What does it mean if you're bilingual?
A: You speak two languages.
Q: And what does it mean if you're monolingual?
A: You're an American.

Comments

[lazy-as-a-cat.livejournal.com]

You have very vivid dreams. The floating town in the second sounds like something out of Gulliver’s Travels.

I just finished watching firefly for the first time recently. Joss Wedon’s good at that sort of humor; he sets up a tense, dramatic scene, and then has something unexpected completely ruin it (thinking of the ending of “the train job”).

'my fandom really does shoot first'

[daharmaster.livejournal.com]

Firefly kicks ass.

(I love that scene too. Mal rocks.)

You will enjoy the rest of it. Greatly. I know you will.