I Am Completely Serious

Lengthy Attack on Titan dream in which I got killed by fucking titans like eight fucking times. I got an exciting plot twist after all that, though: some casual dialog between Armin and Mikasa reveals that people in Titanland don't know where babies come from. They just kind of show up, at the base of the Pale Towers.

The Pale Towers themselves are structures that appear occasionally near human settlements, always just at the border of a forest. They are always either windowless and made of thick slabs of sandstone, carved with strange blurred images, or unfinished-looking frameworks of fresh-cut birchwood. They are always eventually destroyed by titans.

Each year some young unmarried people are rounded up and brought to the towers by singing flying saucers made of sandstone, where they have to... have sex, I guess? This is implied, I guess, because Mikasa thinks whatever it is is upsetting and kind of boring, and Eren is terrified of it. But Armin came away bleeding and with a broken arm the time he did it, so maybe not? Or maybe he's just like, particularly bad at it? I don't know, my subconscious thinks it's Andrew Hussie, it was all coy about this.

The point is that sometimes titans come and destroy the towers and eat the people in them while this is taking place, and that's considered normal. People go along with this because the titans will show up en masse and destroy your city if the kids don't go to the tower and do whatever.

No one seems to be drawing a connection between this shit and the babies showing up because everyone is really stupid. What's going on, Mikasa figures out when she infiltrates an evil lab somewhere or other, is this: the titans are how humans reproduce. They somehow psychically feed on (or physically participate in?) the activity taking place at the towers, and occasionally literally feed on the people doing it, and use whatever genetic stuff they gathered up there to make babies, which they leave for the humans to raise because they don't know what these are. (Or maybe they eat some of them, I don't know, the dream didn't go into this.)

So the titans are Mother Grubs and/or Ooloi. Way to go, brain, you totally figured that one out.

Another section of the dream had velociraptors surrounding my high school, which was fine, and T-rexes which had mastered wizardry, which struck me as deeply unfair. They're already T-rexes, they do not need to be wizards as well.

I'm now improbably tired and concerned that I may have no energy left to do anything else the rest of the day.

I don't remember much of what I've done the past couple days, which implies that I have not done much. Lots of intensive sitting around and looking at the computer screen. But I remember my dreams. There were plagues, wolf gods, animal heads made of mud for a festival and then surrounded with dried cornstalks and burned, a huge empty underground tomb which reanimated its dead, and honeysuckle-scented rain falling on a rusted metal scaffold above a dying forest at the edge of a dried-out marsh.

I think I dream exclusively in Dwarf Fortress format now. Tilesets are optional, digging too deep and too greedily is not.

I didn't used to hate clowns, but now I do, because of Homestuck.

I had a dream about being mind-controlled and beat up by Gamzee last night, and I've been having flashbacks to it all day. Get out of my subconscious, Homestuck, I want the nightmares about zombies back. I got a mecha in those.

I don't know why I always end up in a mecha in zombie dreams. Probably something to do with the classic 90s anime Ten no SINzou.

I don't remember much of last night's dream, but it did confirm that Homestuck and Baccano! share a canon. Andrew Hussie and Ryogo Narita both said so, in my dream.

I guess this means that Isaac and Miria played the Game, given that they’re unkillable and anyway the apocalypse would have made them sad. The immortals would be in an interesting situation; they could theoretically attain god-tier and the skills inherent in that, but they would have to allow someone else possession of all of their memories and skills, possibly losing them themselves in the process.

There are at least three non-immortals who would be able to off themselves on their quest beds without much fuss: Chane, Vino, and Ladd. I can see Nice blowing Jacuzzi up "for his own good."

Jacuzzi is the Hope player, by the way, and Nice is Doom. Rachel is Void because she's associated with liminal spaces and being unseen. Ennis is Light because she's the smart girl who bosses the most protagonist-ish guy around.

Chane is Space because her storyline is about rebirth, and Vino's got to be Blood. Isaac and Miria are jointly the Rogue of Breath. I don't know what Firo is, but Maiza is his sprite.

Ronny was a game construct all along.

I've only watched like the first three episodes of you, I don't need to have long elaborate nightmares about your crap.

Armin was hiding in an abandoned subway that had been turned into a museum thinking he was safe because the titans couldn't fit, but they sent in their hunting-dog, which was a huge happy puppy with spines under its fur. It stuck one of the spines into Armin and messed with his brain chemistry, forcing him to dedicate himself to its survival; it was a brain-parasite puppy. Armin knew intellectually that this was pretty bad, but emotionally he just really loved his titan-puppy.

The worst part was that it was a really cute puppy aside from that. And, of course, the symbiotic fungal growths on its back and sides which, when inflated with its intestinal gases, allowed it to fly.

This dream probably brought to you by roachpatrol. Fuck you, roachpatrol.

I do not say this lightly. I got an upper GI series once, and had to drink an extra half-cup of the radioactive smoothie because I vomited a bunch of it back up. Whatever shamanic tradition it is that uses calea ritually must have developed within a culture which made a practice of eating its pizza before it was cool. It smells like catnip, and tastes like that expansive and indescribable sense of horror which HP Lovecraft spent his literary career attempting to convey.

Anyway, I guess I'll try burning it like powder incense. Probably going to be nauseous for the rest of my life, though.

(Context: Calea tea is something people drink or smoke to give themselves more vivid dreams. My dreams have been either nonexistent or simply not up to my personal oneiric standards for the past year or so, and I'd like to do something about that.)

Last night I dreamed I was in a hammock on the porch and saw a small plesiosaur, about the size of a pony, oozing across the yard like a big slug.

Aren't these things supposed to be extinct? Have we always had plesiosaurs in the yard? Maybe I should go get my camera, or something.

But even in my dreams I'm tired all the time, so I just laid there. It noticed me looking at it, glared at me, and hurried away towards the creek. It was the colors of a fire opal.

More plesiosaurs trundled across the yard, a whole herd or school or pod, each in different jewel colors. I finally hauled myself up to get the camera, but by the time I'd found it, they were all gone.

Me: So last night I dreamed that we all went to [cousin]'s son's bar mitzvah? And it was at a fancy, ridiculously expensive hotel, and was just interminable, like we had to keep moving from one place to another for different ceremonial things.

Mom: Huh.

Me: So during one of these moves I skipped out to use the restroom, and as I was wandering around trying to find everyone again, I realized that the hotel was located on the Death Star.

Mom: Hah! No, the invitation says it will take place at -

Me: The Four Seasons, right? The Four Seasons that's aboard the Death Star.

Mom: - at a synogogue, dear. It will be a small ceremony at the local synogogue, and then there'll also be lunch at the synogogue. Sorry to disppoint you.

Me: And I thought all my dreams were premonitory now!

Mom: Sorry. It sounds like the title of a story, though. Bar Mitzvah... On The Death Star!

Me: It sounds like someone's fanfic.

Mom: Yeah.

Instead of making brackets the sports nerds were making shipping grids.