I Am Completely Serious

I just slept through a power outage and had vivid, complicated, horrific dreams about Homestuck, Star Stealing Prince, 7 Seeds, and my zombie thing. Nepeta named one of the mutant parasitic plants from 7 Seeds after Gamzee, to convince people to hate it and uproot it wherever they go.

What no one but Nepeta knew was that the plant's bulb, if replanted after destroying the plant above it, would re-grow an entirely different and beneficial plant. Nepeta has been gathering up the bulbs people up-root, and when she finds a good place to plant them, she will do so and become a millionaire in post-apocalyptic money, whatever that may be.

The dream spanned epochs - Nepeta was either dead or thousands of years old and a god by the end, which involved my zombie fic ladies stealing ships from alien invaders, among whom numbered a very unhappy Karkat and Kankri. When I woke up, I felt like I'd slept a whole day and into the next night.

Need to decide now whether to try to eat something again. I want Nepeta's Gamzee-plant. It was one of those RPG herbs that cure all ills.

I dreamed I was reading a nonexistent paranormal romance series. In each book, the heroine encountered a brooding, powerful, and troubled man who seemed ideally placed to be her love interest. In every book, he turned out to be as big a douchebag as he looked.

In book one, though she had no magical powers, she was the key to saving Dystopian Noir-ish Sci-Fi City from some sort of magic problem. Maybe the fedoras were going to attain sentience or some shit, it wasn't specified. The sorta-honest chief of police, saddled with a thoroughly corrupt force, quietly hired an outsider to protect her; Hunter S. Thompson. Characterization based on Duke from Doonesbury.

(Look. I am not in charge of the shit my subconscious does. "I" is defined a very specific way when writing posts about dreams, a way that does not include the subconscious. I mean, come on, if I included that thing, then every noun in this post would have to be "I." I am the books and the city and the magic and the police. Clearly linguistically nonviable.)

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I dreamed that Pokemon crossed over with Digimon permanently, and I had to memorize all these Digimon, and their types, and the new battle mechanics that had been added and applied to every single Pokemon. And then I decided to stop liking Pokemon. It was terrible.

But I saw someone mention it online right before I went to bed last night, so I accidentally watched it in my dreams. It's about a Catholic school where the nuns are hooded figures from Night Vale. There was an awards ceremony at the end of the year, but they didn't give out any awards, they just covered everyone with spiders. Then Nazis came.

Then there was a swordfight on the narrow path between two rice fields in Saitama, involving a princess, several ninjas, and a wizard. Because fuck if that movie was prepared to seriously take on the subject of Nazi Germany.

That's pretty much how it goes, right?

Four monsters were conspiring to rebel against the Queen of Monsters, who was obviously Meenah Peixes. One was a talking bear cub, one was my Orcish hunter from Warcraft, I don't remember the third, and the fourth was the Condesce's gentle, easily-distracted personal assistant, whose name was PSBR, pronounced like "Posbur."

PSBR looked a little like Snufkin, but with black skin, a black cape, long black hair, and huge, heavy-lidded purple eyes. Sie wasn't gendered; members of hir particular subspecies of monster were born when two creatures of any sort were touched in a certain way by a large, faceless forest creature with soft yellow fur, who combined their genetic material with hir own to form several offspring.

PSBR's name was, sie told hir co-conspirators, an acronym of the creatures used to create hir: Piranha, Snake, Bear, Rattlesnake.

The orc pointed out that there were four things in that name, not two. PSBR nodded sheepishly. Also, said the orc, two of them were snakes. Was there one rattlesnake, and you put it in there twice to have more letters? PSBR wasn't sure; sie was nearing hir thousandth birthday, and when you get that old, you forget things. And why, asked the orc, was there a piranha near a rattlesnake and a bear, anyway? What sort of forest does this yellow furry thing live in, exactly?

PSBR said, "Okay. So maybe I don't really know what my name means."

The bear cub said happily, "But there was definitely a bear! That means we're cousins!" PSBR agreed, and they excitedly went on a bear family picnic together. The orc and the fourth conspirator grumpily went back to planning sedition.

The nightmares in which Dirk's a space pilot, and he's desperately recording a final message to Roxy as his ship blows up, upset me about as much as the ones in which members of my family are becoming zombies and sitting under the table crying as they lose their minds.

I also have a problem with my subconscious. The problem is that it's terrible.

Something terrible has happened to the Heir of Light, and s/he moves around the world in a fog. S/he dies frequently, unable or unwilling to care for hirself, and each time s/he "inherits" the luck of another person, returning to life in that person's body and wandering away with it alone.

An inheritance is something you get when you die, right? That sounds right to the Heir.

This has been going on for a long time. One day s/he finds hirself looking at a newspaper and astonished by the "2013" date - wasn't it 1952? Or 1977? Something like that. S/he becomes conscious for the first time that s/he does not know when s/he is.

S/he encounters a mirror and is surprised again. Shouldn't s/he be much older than this? S/he knows that this is not hir body, but s/he doesn't remember the right one.

Hir past is clogged with the present; s/he remembers the internet in the sixties. Sometime not too long ago s/he was in India during Emergency, so how did s/he get to the United States? S/he thinks it must be the world that's confused. Hir own memories are so clear.

Last night I learned how to cause problems at airport checkpoints and had to teach an ESL class to a demanding and sullen adult student. Taking a class, teaching a class, and airports! I got the anxiety dreams trifecta.

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I've had several dreams about various Homestuck characters being students at a Crockercorp-run pro-profit university that brainwashes its students. Last night, for a creative writing class, Terezi turned in a rewritten version of a nonexistent Marlowe play about a young woman secretly raising a dragon, with the intent of one day turning it against her enemies.

Her rewritten version was instead about Faust raising Gamzee. This was part of some vague but obviously cunning plan she had to figure out which of the professors were brainwashed and which were collaborators.

(Marlowe wouldn't have written something with a woman driving the action, subconscious, I mean come on.)

A continuing theme in my dreams is the video game power-up that allows you to easily fix the Big Problem. Like, I pick up the magic rock off its magic rock pedestal, and suddenly I've got clairvoyance to tell me where the car keys are, or telekinesis to deflect the asteroid coming at the earth. Or whatever this specific dream requires.

But even though I've now theoretically got the ability to fix everything, somehow my brain isn't amenable to whatever mental change is supposed to accompany the power-up. Like, when you get the power-up you're supposed to feel serene and in control, and know exactly how to find the keys or move the asteroid. But I can't figure out how to exercise that mental muscle. And I'm still freaking out.

So I've just got to try to solve the problem by means of my usual methods - find the duct tape, read the man page, or whatever - and hope that things work out anyway. Usually they do, but sometimes I have to like, go find someone who's got their shit together a little better, and hand the magic rock off to them. Usually this is Mom, Papaw, one of my sisters, or like, Patrick Stewart.

All this is to say that I empathize strongly with Dirk in the last few Homestuck updates. "Yeah this is still just Dirk's sword."