If you'd wondered, I do excise stuff from my dream posts.

[snarp]

Because in terms of content, a lot of the stuff that happens in my dreams doesn't make sense. Like, last night there was an immortal woman who had a friend who was an independently motile right leg, with a strand of long black hair wrapped around it. The friend was murdered (don't ask me how you murder a leg), so the immortal woman wrapped the hair around her own right leg on the grounds that "it will wear well." I assure you that this made perfect sense when she explained it to me in the dream.

The Pentacle Worm dream was relatively coherent, but there was still a lot of confusing and boring stuff going on that I cut out. For instance, my brain apparently expended a lot of effort inventing a system of street signs that it claimed Paris used to mark Locations Of Interest.

It's sort of a disassembled pie chart; if there's a circle with a red slice in the upper left, it's a church, and a pink slice just below there is a shrine. The worm's church was marked with both slices, suggesting that the church is a church, but its basement is a shrine to the worm, or whatever force the worm represents.

(Apparently I do think that all foreign countries are Japan. France, too, must have some indigenous animistic faith worshipped at places slightly separate from but frequently adjacent to those belonging to its imported, more-hierarchical faith.)

My dream was specific on the issue that, regardless of how many slices a location got, there was always room for the full circle on a sign, even if it wasted space. Like this:



...actually, I kind of think this might be a good idea. If it were, you know, implemented by somebody who didn't just half-assedly generate it in Google Docs. The insistence on leaving all that whitespace makes it uniform in size and shape, it's easy to draw, it'd be usable by colorblind people, and maybe you could even implement it in pop-up or indented form for the blind? It's more the sort of thing you'd want to use to delineate subway lines or something, though. I feel like you could engrave it in a square in the ground, the way they do the Walking and Stopping lines and bumps and Japan, with some sort of groove marking the bottom of the square. You could feel around it with your foot and know if you're facing the right way on the train platform and suchlike.

You know what? Somebody tell Paris that I am now open for negotiations over my awesome idea for their signs. Though I must warn them that I will give preferential treatment to whatever municipality, state, or nation first produces an actual shrine to the Pentacle Worm. I think it's only fair.

Anyway, the day I had the dream I spent a while trying to figure out what the rest of the pie slices would indicate. I mean, my subconscious mind only came up with two, and one was imaginary. I've come to the conclusion that I know shit about France.



You will NOTE that half of it is STILL IMAGINARY.

I think my Japan one's a little more realistic:



I am not very good at being a tourist, by the way.

Comments

[salinea]

When I take over my city, I will consider it.

[sara]

I have laughed very very hard at this. And now kind of want a Pie Chart of Oregon. Although half the wedges would be "trees."

[snarp]

The Kentucky one is like: "Trees," "Knick-knack store that also has decent fudge," "Astonishing natural wonder," "Unreclaimed strip mine sliding down a mountainside like three miles from the astonishing natural wonder," "Reprehensible senator."

[sara]

Well, Kentucky also has a couple of my Very Most Favorite People. They aren't quite sufficient to block out the senators, but they do their bit. ;>

(Oregon: trees, trees, trees, trees, large wooden thing, statue of a salmon, hipsters, bookstore, melodramatically gorgeous scenery, trees, trees, trees, agriculture, A FEW MILLION MORE TREES, trees, trees, libertarians, trees.)

[metaphortunate]

You may not be a very good tourist, but you are an excellent dreamer. And pie chart maker!

[rachelmanija]

You often have my very favorite blog of all time. This is one of those times.

[jinian]

The disembodied leg may have been acquainted with a mysterious disembodied arm in the pre-talk slides displayed at the lecture hattifattener and I went to tonight. We spent quite a while trying to parse the image as a whole (and failed), but were clear on the disembodied arm portion.

The pie slice system is not unlike the standard hazmat label. Far more awesome, though.

[chomiji]

"Significant location in the Lymond Chronicles, lol lol!

You and rachelmanija have such excellent dreams. Mine are stupid dreams about aggravating and only slightly improbable things happening in real life settings with real life people.

[snarp]

Well, a third to half of mine are just anxiety dreams about airports or something, and most of the rest are totally incoherent. They're just not the ones I post here!

[(Anonymous)]

I could be wrong, but I had thought that the European standard depiction of devils were essentially fauns/satyrs because they were demonizing the competition.

Also, shrines to the saints were a lot of times a way to keep the old shrine/god without getting executed by the church. In this legend, the Goddess Diana attempts to firebomb St. Nicholas' church because he cut down her sacred tree: http://books.google.com/books?id=0v4euSc4h1IC&lpg=PA13&ots=HmlFDPy90u&dq=diana%20nicholas%20golden%20legend&pg=PA13#v=onepage&q&f=false

Which is sort of funny since he ended up as the poster child for a Christian saint who was co-opted to continue pre-christian traditions.