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The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
18 October 2009 @ 09:31 pm
I seldom blog my dreams, but this one was worth preserving.

As a note, my dreams often have "point of view characters" who aren't me, per se. Yes, I'm looking through their eyes, and following (or even controlling) their actions, but they're distinct individuals, like the protagonist of a movie or a novel, or, at most, a player character in a particularly vivid RPG.

I note this because, in this case, the first PoV character was the protagonist of the movie I watched before bed: Wanted. My brain had combined the movie (which is about a league of assassins) with what little I knew about the comic (which is about a league of supervillains), and thus, the PoV character was played by James McAvoy. He was posing as a waiter, I believe, and infiltrating a business convention of cartoony, Pixarish supervillains and mad scientists. He was in radio contact with another mad scientist, and had to sneak out to some lab or office to gather some McGuffin or another.

The dream got interesting when the setting shifted slightly. I don't normally dream "in furry", but at some point, the PoV character became an anthropomorphic dolphin named Jan, and the meeting room/convention hall was now underwater -- and had been for a very long time. Kelp was now a significant part of the decor.

Jan was still in contact with the same mad scientist, though, via radio or more esoteric means, and was still on the way to his office/lab/whatever. Now, however, she had to leave the Deeps to go to the surface world -- and the passage had a Guardian.

The guardian was an anthropomorphic white tiger, obviously modeled on the photos of Odin that are well-known online. I do mean obviously; he had Odin's "grr diving" face on. Like most of Jan's segment, the detail on the tiger was incredibly vivid for a dream. I can still see the fur, matted down by the water. He was, oddly, even more an aquatic creature than Jan was; while she had legs, he had a mer-style tail, covered in striped white tiger fur like the rest of him.

The tiger was accompanied by a leopard seal of foul temperament, dark to his light, spots to his stripes, hostile and petulant next to his dignified nobility. I don't remember the details of the conversation between them, but the tiger saw fit to let Jan pass.

She strode up the stairs into a library -- a large building, well-lit, sun streaming through skylights (or perhaps holes in the roof). The stairs emerged into a fountain-pool, one of a series of connected pools at this end of the building.

The library was overgrown -- it was obviously long after our day and age. Wetland plants grew with abandon over the pools, and fins and shrubs filled the rest of the building.

Most remarkable of all, however, was that it was still an active library. People were still using it, browsing through books as Jan wandered past the shelves, leafing through card catalogs, unconcerned by the pleasant, leafy growth that covered the floor and draped over the shelves. I think there was even a table of computer terminals or microfilm readers, though I don't recall if anyone was using them.

It was a place of knowledge and life and peace, in a world that had obviously undergone dramatic, if not catastrophic, change. It was a place of hope.

I recall Jan describing this place to the person on the other end of the radio -- she was mildly surprised to see it in active use, as well, and was every bit as struck by its beauty. I heard her getting directions, in turn, but, alas, the image of that remarkable, verdant place is the last memory of that dream I was permitted to retain.
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I feel: contemplative
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
19 December 2008 @ 07:55 am
I don't remember the details of the dream, but since last night's entertainment included Criminal Minds, CSI: New York, and a novel in which the protagonists are being pursued by a rogue CIA agent who's been after one of them for four decades, the context isn't hard to puzzle out.

At some point, someone in the dream fired off a "warning shot" that hit someone in the ass.

He said it was a "stern warning".

And that's all I remember.

 
 
I feel: not asleep
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
I woke up this morning with "Losing My Religion" running through my head, continually. As [info]quelonzia can attest, I was singing bits of it all morning.

The alarm must have jarred me out of REM sleep.


 
 
I feel: awake
I hear: R.E.M. - Losing My Religion
 
 
The Howitzer of Quiet Reflection
22 December 2007 @ 07:58 am
[info]the_gneech just posted something about the internal struggle his brain has every morning, with particular emphasis on the way his subconscious tries to fool his waking mind into thinking it's already awake.

These are not issues I usually have. I'm normally one of those annoying people who snaps out of bed at the first alarm. In fact, when I'm getting up regularly, I start waking up a minute or so BEFORE the alarm rings.

Being "up" isn't the same thing as being "awake". When I was first in college, fresh out of high school, I would wake up every morning in the shower, hot water cascading over me as I stretched out in the tub. I had gotten out of bed, gotten out of my pajamas, adjusted the water to the perfect temperature, and stretched out to let Brain catch up to Body... while still asleep.

I slept in the top bunk, with no ladder.

A few years later, I was in the Coast Guard, aboard a High Endurance Cutter patrolling Alaskan waters. At one point in the watch rotation, I was due to stand the 0400-0800 watch on the bridge.

As usual, around 0300, the messenger for the midnight watch came down to wake me up. I woke up, put on my uniform, and stood a full rotation -- an hour on the flying bridge, an hour as messenger, an hour at the helm, and another hour on the flying bridge. It was a perfectly normal shift, nothing unusual happened...

...until the messenger showed up again, and said, "Hey! What are you doing? It's time to head up!"

I had dreamed the whole watch.

And even though the "first" watch was a dream... it still felt as though I'd stood on the bridge for eight straight hours.

Ever since then, the conscious mind hasn't fallen for the subconscious's little tricks. I think the subconscious knows that if it pulled that kind of stunt again, the conscious mind would take it out behind the amygdala and beat the living crap out of it.
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I feel: awake