Long, sad dream.
Mar. 14th, 2014 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snarpThere was a comic book about a young girl named Camille, drawn in a style that was a cross between Jhonen Vasquez and Moyoco Anno. She was very angry and frequently disoriented, because the world did not work the way it was supposed to, somehow. People disappeared and came back different and cruel, and she was the only one who noticed.
Sometimes she drifted off and came back to find familiar things twisted and burned black, days seemingly having passed, and people avoiding her. If she’s doing these things, why has nothing been done about her? She doesn’t know. It makes her mad.
I woke up from this dream into another dream, very disappointed that the comic book did not really exist. I was a small child spending the winter in the gloomy, tumbledown home of a depressed millionaire with many children. Exploring the massive house, I eventually worked out that it had once been several buildings, including a cafe (still in operation; it’s so big that the millionaire, who rarely goes further than the kitchen, hasn’t noticed) and a grade-school.
Some of the children are not the millionaire’s - they’re schoolchildren who were trapped in her house when it began to grow outwards and overtake the buildings nearby. The town is dilapidated and unpopulated for many miles beyond.
Something happens to the millionaire, and myself and the other children, searching for her, find a door that hadn’t been there before. We go in, and fall into another house, in another world where everything is cold and green, full of rivers with black water. To get out of the house to explore it, though, we’ll need to solve puzzles, involving hidden switches, water clocks, and opening and closing doors.
I work out, eventually, that we are in some sort of reality show, which intends that only one of us should survive, but don’t tell the others. They’re excited to be out of the millionaire’s dark house; this one has more light, and things to do other than wander lost through empty rooms. I don’t want them to start fighting each other.
The millionaire’s house was flat and sprawled outward; this one is very tall. The puzzle is, apparently, to find your way to the top. I try to prevent them from solving it, convinced that something bad is waiting there. Eventually, though, the man in charge of the show opened the lock, and they all ran up while I shouted at them to stop. The front door of the house opened, and I ran out just as the house began to collapse under them. The show-runner laughed at me.
Years later, I’ve become a superheroine dedicated to destroying the evil corporation that funded the show. A disease is spreading that only effects human-youkai hybrids, and the man responsible for the death of the other children has contracted it. No one had ever realized that he was not fully human, but now he has left his fortresslike home to find me and kill me, before the disease kills him. I fight him, and he transforms back into his true form, a giant egg with arms and legs.
(Me upon waking up: “…is this a Sonic the Hedgehog thing. Was my archnemesis Dr. Robotnik.”)
He is different as an egg, disoriented and scared, with little memory of the previous decade. He is a shapeshifter, and many years ago, in a panic, he took the form of a human man whom he killed in self-defense. Over time, the man’s personality began to override his own, a sort of haunting. The man I have been trying to kill was dead before I was born.
His true form is fragile and easily-broken, so I find him a safe place to stay until he feels able to choose a new shape. Eventually, I am killed, and he becomes me.
A third dream involved what appeared to be the egg in an earlier incarnation in Edo-era Japan. He had the Subtle Knife from His Dark Materials and worked as an exorcist, with his talking dog (presumably his daemon, though no one else had one) as his medium. They become involved in a war between shape-shifters over possession of an ancient tree and its god, which has fallen asleep. The god changes the color and shape of the leaves as she dreams, and a very old woman interprets these changes to warn the unusually-kind daimyo she serves of droughts and national disasters.
The woman is thousands of years old, the exorcist discovers. He can’t understand why she claims to have known him when she was young. The other shape-shifters kill his dog, and he falls asleep for a very long time; he will wake as another person. The old woman watches the other shape-shifters, whom she knows to have been the exorcist’s family, destroy the tree. The god dies still dreaming.
Sometimes she drifted off and came back to find familiar things twisted and burned black, days seemingly having passed, and people avoiding her. If she’s doing these things, why has nothing been done about her? She doesn’t know. It makes her mad.
I woke up from this dream into another dream, very disappointed that the comic book did not really exist. I was a small child spending the winter in the gloomy, tumbledown home of a depressed millionaire with many children. Exploring the massive house, I eventually worked out that it had once been several buildings, including a cafe (still in operation; it’s so big that the millionaire, who rarely goes further than the kitchen, hasn’t noticed) and a grade-school.
Some of the children are not the millionaire’s - they’re schoolchildren who were trapped in her house when it began to grow outwards and overtake the buildings nearby. The town is dilapidated and unpopulated for many miles beyond.
Something happens to the millionaire, and myself and the other children, searching for her, find a door that hadn’t been there before. We go in, and fall into another house, in another world where everything is cold and green, full of rivers with black water. To get out of the house to explore it, though, we’ll need to solve puzzles, involving hidden switches, water clocks, and opening and closing doors.
I work out, eventually, that we are in some sort of reality show, which intends that only one of us should survive, but don’t tell the others. They’re excited to be out of the millionaire’s dark house; this one has more light, and things to do other than wander lost through empty rooms. I don’t want them to start fighting each other.
The millionaire’s house was flat and sprawled outward; this one is very tall. The puzzle is, apparently, to find your way to the top. I try to prevent them from solving it, convinced that something bad is waiting there. Eventually, though, the man in charge of the show opened the lock, and they all ran up while I shouted at them to stop. The front door of the house opened, and I ran out just as the house began to collapse under them. The show-runner laughed at me.
Years later, I’ve become a superheroine dedicated to destroying the evil corporation that funded the show. A disease is spreading that only effects human-youkai hybrids, and the man responsible for the death of the other children has contracted it. No one had ever realized that he was not fully human, but now he has left his fortresslike home to find me and kill me, before the disease kills him. I fight him, and he transforms back into his true form, a giant egg with arms and legs.
(Me upon waking up: “…is this a Sonic the Hedgehog thing. Was my archnemesis Dr. Robotnik.”)
He is different as an egg, disoriented and scared, with little memory of the previous decade. He is a shapeshifter, and many years ago, in a panic, he took the form of a human man whom he killed in self-defense. Over time, the man’s personality began to override his own, a sort of haunting. The man I have been trying to kill was dead before I was born.
His true form is fragile and easily-broken, so I find him a safe place to stay until he feels able to choose a new shape. Eventually, I am killed, and he becomes me.
A third dream involved what appeared to be the egg in an earlier incarnation in Edo-era Japan. He had the Subtle Knife from His Dark Materials and worked as an exorcist, with his talking dog (presumably his daemon, though no one else had one) as his medium. They become involved in a war between shape-shifters over possession of an ancient tree and its god, which has fallen asleep. The god changes the color and shape of the leaves as she dreams, and a very old woman interprets these changes to warn the unusually-kind daimyo she serves of droughts and national disasters.
The woman is thousands of years old, the exorcist discovers. He can’t understand why she claims to have known him when she was young. The other shape-shifters kill his dog, and he falls asleep for a very long time; he will wake as another person. The old woman watches the other shape-shifters, whom she knows to have been the exorcist’s family, destroy the tree. The god dies still dreaming.
