Hypocrisy does not even come close to this. The Star Wars prequel trilogy is a bit hollow and slightly flat, but... dude....
My computer managed to eat my resume, so I'm really pithy.
This summer has been surprisingly hectic. That's one of those things about growing up; summer isn't any different than the other seasons, anymore. The sun shines a bit more, and there isn't school every day, but that's it. It's still life. I still have stuff to do and things to worry about and I am constantly behind on everything.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Saturday, August 9, 2008
The musical nightmare
I had a really weird dream (since I was terrified for parts of it, it was probably more of the a nightmare) last night. I went to bed at ten, and kept falling asleep and then waking up a few hours later; it was during the last interval of sleep that I had the dream. I didn't dream at all, before that; the only way that I knew I had slept was because the clock would suddenly read two hours ahead of what it had a minute before.
The dream was guesome and insane-- part George Orwell, part Ayn Rand, part The Silver Chair... part hundreds of things.
I'm trying to write it all down, now, because its been more than an hour since I woke up, and I'm starting to forget details, but I want to remember this dream. I could almost turn it into a crazy sci-fi/fantasy miniseries, like Neverwhere.
During some of the dream I wasn't there, just observing, but for the most part I was myself. I was part of a group on this big compound in the middle of nowhere (I think that it was going to turn out that we were in the midwest of the USA, but I woke too soon). We all wore off-white jumpsuits and had no idea why we were there, but we had been born there (nearly all of us were clones) and it just seemed normal to us.
At the point in time where the dream began, I think that we prisoners (for lack of a better term) were all about 17 to 19, but that was just my group. Other groups were middle-aged, and later I met a toddler, so I'm guessing that each group was a different generation, which doesn't actually make sense, as we were all being killed when we came of age-- but I'll get to that in a minute.
Each group was named after a state, and each person in the group was assigned a letter in the state's name, despite the fact that it would have been way more logical for each group to have the same number of people. Maybe each group did, as this was a dream, and such things can be not-contradictions while dreaming. In any case, I was the last letter of "Washington State."
Everyone in my group was taken to a big official building, partially made of glass.
The hero, one of the other prisoners told me as we stood in line outside before being let in, had a better education than any of the other prisoners. He was self-taught, and he thought that he was doing the same thing that his father had done before him, but actually the hero was mistaken in this. I think that his father's "real" name was "Two ||" (parallel lines), but I'm not sure; in any case, the hero's late father had insisted to the authorities that he was "Two Cookie."
We were taken into a room and lined up, so I was last in line. The line went up some stairs, and at the top of the stairs was a platform with a woman on it who looked like Umbridge. She directed you to a metal chute and opened its grate, and you slid down it. At some point, we who were in the back of the line (not even on the stairs yet) realized that the contraption we were climbing onto and sliding into was, in fact, an incinerator. We weren't stupid, just naive and uneducated, and this was a dream, so things didn't quite make sense anyway.
Apparently we were in this compound to be raised and then burnt alive. The first people in our group (which was partially made-up of people in the real world whom I've gone to school with) had already died. I confronted Umbridge, who continued to send people down one-by-one as we talked. She had no sympathy, and I couldn't run away because there were guards everywhere. I was filled with more and more dread and terror as she went, because my turn was coming up. I started to say that it was better to go first, like if you were the R in "Rhode Island," and then I was at the top. The girl in front of me went, and then Umbridge sent me down. I said "goodbye," because I wanted that to be my last word, but I slid down really slowly, so then I called up to Umbridge that she should "remember what [she] did," by which I hoped to make her feel guilty when she was old, because I hadn't had time to think of a better plan to avenge and/or save us all.
The metal thing at the bottom of the chute opened, and it was too dark to see, and I fell down... and landed on hard earth. I was in this empty underground chamber. Alone. I walked further in, and came to an area with a few dim lights and metal doors, and some people milling around, almost unconscious. Then one of the doors opened and my friend Annie dragged me in. I was in a small sort of auditorium. It was really cold, which I couldn't actually feel (odd, as I can usually feel such things in my dreams), but I knew that it was cold because we were all covered in a thin frost, and some of the saved prisoners in the room were pulling on sky-blue SOTA sweatshirts.
Denzel Washington was standing on the stage in the room, and I knew instinctively, even though I'd never met him before, that he had been a mechanic who kept the incinerator in shape. As well as not really being Denzel Washington, the nameless man was also in charge, because he had saved us all. Not!Denzel explained that this morning, for no apparent reason, Ms Shepard (a very kind teacher in the real world, but the one who ran the incinerator in my dream) had packed up her incinerator and left. Which explained why I had landed in an empty room. I think that this was supposed to also indicate dissent into he ranks, and that our entire little society was about to revolt on every level, but no one went into this.
Not!Denzel sat us in a circle and answered our questions. I was sitting next to Annie, who found time to tell me about how her class at the local community college had just been reading 1984 and learning about foreshadowing. I asked Not!Denzel "how long this organization had been in operation," and he didn't really answer. Basically, what he said was that when it was founded, the compound hadn't just been about incinerating people. Possibly it was supposed to be a model utopia; I don't know.
Then some time had passed, because a small group of us had left the auditorium room and were trying to find a way out. The hero (a young guy who was nondescriptly handsome, and whom I'd not met yet, and at the same time had a long-standing sort of relationship with) decided that he had to go scout things out for us.
I observed the next part, though I wasn't there. The hero popped out of a manhole in the ground. It was nighttime, and he couldn't really see anything, except for a few ninja-guards, who had a name. It was something like "Nightwings," IIRC. The hero remembered that he had some see-in-the-dark magic goggles, so he put these on. With the goggles, he could see that there were way more Nightwings than he had thought-- a whole field of them. The goggles apparently let you see souls, not people, and the hero was able to see a bunch of buildings like thin back barns. These were the "souls" of the buildings where you were sent to be killed. The hero could also see three guys who were better-illuminated (for no apparent reason except that this was a dream) than anyone else. These were Seahawks-- another form of guard. They were men who slept standing up, with their arms outstretched like wings, so that "they could swoop in on you from above." We knew, even in the dream, that this wasn't possible, but it was still scary.
The hero came back down and our group walked for a while, and then we came to an elevator. There was another group of escaped prisoners on the other side of it, and we started to talk, but guards appeared. They wanted us to get into the elevator, and we tried to run away from them, but they got the other group and a few of us to go in. The elevator went down, and when it came up again and we looked through its glass walls, we could see that everyone inside was sitting at a desk (like a traditional classroom), staring straight ahead. One boy (who was a lot like Martin from The Simpsons) only had escaped being brainwashed, and he ran forward and threw open the doors to beg for our help. We were really freaked-out, though, so we left him and ran on.
Somehow, our group of survivors split up, and my smaller group ended up in these official tunnels. There were more people in them-- other compliant prisoners and some guards with a fake-maternal air, who were dressed like nurses. The "nurses" were guiding the prisoners, and we tried to look as if we were meant to be there, so that they wouldn't notice us. They did, and a nurse came up to our group of a few girls. She grabbed Jessica's arm, and sweetly reminded us that we should be in school. I noticed then that some of the doors leading off the corridor-tunnel that we were in were marked "School." These doors were double doors with windowpanes, and I could see ignorant prisoners beyond.
The nurse had Jessica, but the rest of us (Annie and me) left her and ran on. We were confronted by two more nurses, both holding big sticks of candy with long purple worms twined around them. With the nurses was Chelsea, who had a purple worm on her forehead. I realized that the worm would suck your mind, if it got on you. The nurses were trying to tempt Annie and me to take the candy, but we weren't fooled. One of the nurses grabbed Annie and tried to stick the candy in her face, so I grabbed the other nurse's candy stick and hit the first nurse with it. The second nurse jumped on my back, and we were in this big tussle....
The next thing I remember, a bigger group of us were in a different part of the tunnels, being menaced by former prisoners who had been burned. The were red, with red clothes draped over them and glowing red eyes. They hated us, and we feared them, and they were chasing us until we came to the woman in charge.
This woman was a witch, of course, but no longer Umbridge. Now she was part Mab from Merlin and part Lamia from Stardust (in any case, she looked a bit like Michelle Pfeiffer at this point, though later she looked more like Nicole Kidman).
There is a lot around this part of the dream that I can't remember. The witch had a servant who was a lot like Frick (except in love with Mab instead of Morgan). I think that there must have been a fight. The hero and I realized that we had magic powers: our hands could make water shoot at whoever was trying to hurt us. The incinerated prisoners had become a sort of fire-demon, but the water immobilized them.
The witch's sister (who was an even more evil witch-- things were a bit Narnia here) appeared, but we managed to set her on fire and escape. We had also set the other witch alight, but then drenched her with water.
I think that we prisoners wandered along through the cavernous tunnels for a few years here, like Aeneas, because I observed the witches over time. The second witch had told the first that she was horribly disfigured, and had her lying down, one ankle chained to a far wall. As it happened, though, the second witch had become a creature of fire, at once both burned and burning. The first witch, who was feeling much less evil at this point, was still a beautiful woman, wearing an emerald dress; her feet were continuously licked by cool green fire, and I realized that the second witch wanted the first to be completely burned-- both out of subconscious jealousy and because she had convinced herself that this was true beauty (it was an ethnic-cleansing thing).
The second witch told her sister that she "had found the antidote" to the first witch's ailment. The first witch was weak, but she didn't want to become like her sister, so she resisted. The second witch tried to force the first to drink out of the little bottle of antidote, but Frick pushed the second witch over and helped the first one up, and they began to run. Frick, of course, was in love with the first witch and thought that she was beautiful as she was, and didn't want her to be hurt. In any case, he managed to break the chain that the first witch was on, so that she only had a chain segment about twenty feet long hanging from her ankle. She was trying to run with this, but she kept dropping it (it was really heavy) and it would get stuck in things, like a big metal gate that they had to run through.
The first witch and Frick, and second witch and her fire-demon minions, and our group of suviviors (led by the hero) were all moving toward our goal of getting out of the underground world. When we were by the chutes again, the leader of a group of fire-demons (some of whom had been guards, some prisoners-- nearly everyone had been set on fire and burned half-to-death during our struggles underground) told us that we could have the underground world to ourselves, where we would be safe, but the hero replied that we wanted to live in the fresh air, too; we would take our chances above....
When we got up to the ground, suddenly the dream was a musical.
It was chaos. The fire-creatures were singing "come into the fire" and setting all the trees alight, and people from the compound were panicking and being burnt alive, running between the buildings. I was really pissed off, because I had just coaxed the trees to life (there were no plants, before). I used my powers to quench the burning trees, and I was singing angrily to the fire-demons that this would continue to happen, but that I would win and the trees would continue to grow. (Incidentally, the trees had crimson leaves.) I didn't really believe this, though; the hero and I was far outnumbered and I was starting to suspect that after a while the trees wouldn't want to come back to life, after I put out the fires on them.
Meanwhile, the witches were running around (the second one causing havoc as she went). When I turned around, watching them, I found a little boy (maybe three years old) standing before me. His hands had been chopped off (I don't know why or when) and the poor thing was naturally very bitter. He must also have been blind (from the fire?) and he complained to me (since the hero and I would obviously be the leaders once we established our New World Order) that he couldn't see. I realized that, as he had no hands, he also couldn't feel things or read braille. I couldn't think of anything else comforting, so I told him that he didn't really want to see the world so desolate, anyway. The boy naturally resented this, and he began to sing that "the world is beautiful," and the creatures were still singing "come into the fire"....
And then I woke up.
I know that there was more to the dream, but this is all that I can remember right now.
The dream was guesome and insane-- part George Orwell, part Ayn Rand, part The Silver Chair... part hundreds of things.
I'm trying to write it all down, now, because its been more than an hour since I woke up, and I'm starting to forget details, but I want to remember this dream. I could almost turn it into a crazy sci-fi/fantasy miniseries, like Neverwhere.
During some of the dream I wasn't there, just observing, but for the most part I was myself. I was part of a group on this big compound in the middle of nowhere (I think that it was going to turn out that we were in the midwest of the USA, but I woke too soon). We all wore off-white jumpsuits and had no idea why we were there, but we had been born there (nearly all of us were clones) and it just seemed normal to us.
At the point in time where the dream began, I think that we prisoners (for lack of a better term) were all about 17 to 19, but that was just my group. Other groups were middle-aged, and later I met a toddler, so I'm guessing that each group was a different generation, which doesn't actually make sense, as we were all being killed when we came of age-- but I'll get to that in a minute.
Each group was named after a state, and each person in the group was assigned a letter in the state's name, despite the fact that it would have been way more logical for each group to have the same number of people. Maybe each group did, as this was a dream, and such things can be not-contradictions while dreaming. In any case, I was the last letter of "Washington State."
Everyone in my group was taken to a big official building, partially made of glass.
The hero, one of the other prisoners told me as we stood in line outside before being let in, had a better education than any of the other prisoners. He was self-taught, and he thought that he was doing the same thing that his father had done before him, but actually the hero was mistaken in this. I think that his father's "real" name was "Two ||" (parallel lines), but I'm not sure; in any case, the hero's late father had insisted to the authorities that he was "Two Cookie."
We were taken into a room and lined up, so I was last in line. The line went up some stairs, and at the top of the stairs was a platform with a woman on it who looked like Umbridge. She directed you to a metal chute and opened its grate, and you slid down it. At some point, we who were in the back of the line (not even on the stairs yet) realized that the contraption we were climbing onto and sliding into was, in fact, an incinerator. We weren't stupid, just naive and uneducated, and this was a dream, so things didn't quite make sense anyway.
Apparently we were in this compound to be raised and then burnt alive. The first people in our group (which was partially made-up of people in the real world whom I've gone to school with) had already died. I confronted Umbridge, who continued to send people down one-by-one as we talked. She had no sympathy, and I couldn't run away because there were guards everywhere. I was filled with more and more dread and terror as she went, because my turn was coming up. I started to say that it was better to go first, like if you were the R in "Rhode Island," and then I was at the top. The girl in front of me went, and then Umbridge sent me down. I said "goodbye," because I wanted that to be my last word, but I slid down really slowly, so then I called up to Umbridge that she should "remember what [she] did," by which I hoped to make her feel guilty when she was old, because I hadn't had time to think of a better plan to avenge and/or save us all.
The metal thing at the bottom of the chute opened, and it was too dark to see, and I fell down... and landed on hard earth. I was in this empty underground chamber. Alone. I walked further in, and came to an area with a few dim lights and metal doors, and some people milling around, almost unconscious. Then one of the doors opened and my friend Annie dragged me in. I was in a small sort of auditorium. It was really cold, which I couldn't actually feel (odd, as I can usually feel such things in my dreams), but I knew that it was cold because we were all covered in a thin frost, and some of the saved prisoners in the room were pulling on sky-blue SOTA sweatshirts.
Denzel Washington was standing on the stage in the room, and I knew instinctively, even though I'd never met him before, that he had been a mechanic who kept the incinerator in shape. As well as not really being Denzel Washington, the nameless man was also in charge, because he had saved us all. Not!Denzel explained that this morning, for no apparent reason, Ms Shepard (a very kind teacher in the real world, but the one who ran the incinerator in my dream) had packed up her incinerator and left. Which explained why I had landed in an empty room. I think that this was supposed to also indicate dissent into he ranks, and that our entire little society was about to revolt on every level, but no one went into this.
Not!Denzel sat us in a circle and answered our questions. I was sitting next to Annie, who found time to tell me about how her class at the local community college had just been reading 1984 and learning about foreshadowing. I asked Not!Denzel "how long this organization had been in operation," and he didn't really answer. Basically, what he said was that when it was founded, the compound hadn't just been about incinerating people. Possibly it was supposed to be a model utopia; I don't know.
Then some time had passed, because a small group of us had left the auditorium room and were trying to find a way out. The hero (a young guy who was nondescriptly handsome, and whom I'd not met yet, and at the same time had a long-standing sort of relationship with) decided that he had to go scout things out for us.
I observed the next part, though I wasn't there. The hero popped out of a manhole in the ground. It was nighttime, and he couldn't really see anything, except for a few ninja-guards, who had a name. It was something like "Nightwings," IIRC. The hero remembered that he had some see-in-the-dark magic goggles, so he put these on. With the goggles, he could see that there were way more Nightwings than he had thought-- a whole field of them. The goggles apparently let you see souls, not people, and the hero was able to see a bunch of buildings like thin back barns. These were the "souls" of the buildings where you were sent to be killed. The hero could also see three guys who were better-illuminated (for no apparent reason except that this was a dream) than anyone else. These were Seahawks-- another form of guard. They were men who slept standing up, with their arms outstretched like wings, so that "they could swoop in on you from above." We knew, even in the dream, that this wasn't possible, but it was still scary.
The hero came back down and our group walked for a while, and then we came to an elevator. There was another group of escaped prisoners on the other side of it, and we started to talk, but guards appeared. They wanted us to get into the elevator, and we tried to run away from them, but they got the other group and a few of us to go in. The elevator went down, and when it came up again and we looked through its glass walls, we could see that everyone inside was sitting at a desk (like a traditional classroom), staring straight ahead. One boy (who was a lot like Martin from The Simpsons) only had escaped being brainwashed, and he ran forward and threw open the doors to beg for our help. We were really freaked-out, though, so we left him and ran on.
Somehow, our group of survivors split up, and my smaller group ended up in these official tunnels. There were more people in them-- other compliant prisoners and some guards with a fake-maternal air, who were dressed like nurses. The "nurses" were guiding the prisoners, and we tried to look as if we were meant to be there, so that they wouldn't notice us. They did, and a nurse came up to our group of a few girls. She grabbed Jessica's arm, and sweetly reminded us that we should be in school. I noticed then that some of the doors leading off the corridor-tunnel that we were in were marked "School." These doors were double doors with windowpanes, and I could see ignorant prisoners beyond.
The nurse had Jessica, but the rest of us (Annie and me) left her and ran on. We were confronted by two more nurses, both holding big sticks of candy with long purple worms twined around them. With the nurses was Chelsea, who had a purple worm on her forehead. I realized that the worm would suck your mind, if it got on you. The nurses were trying to tempt Annie and me to take the candy, but we weren't fooled. One of the nurses grabbed Annie and tried to stick the candy in her face, so I grabbed the other nurse's candy stick and hit the first nurse with it. The second nurse jumped on my back, and we were in this big tussle....
The next thing I remember, a bigger group of us were in a different part of the tunnels, being menaced by former prisoners who had been burned. The were red, with red clothes draped over them and glowing red eyes. They hated us, and we feared them, and they were chasing us until we came to the woman in charge.
This woman was a witch, of course, but no longer Umbridge. Now she was part Mab from Merlin and part Lamia from Stardust (in any case, she looked a bit like Michelle Pfeiffer at this point, though later she looked more like Nicole Kidman).
There is a lot around this part of the dream that I can't remember. The witch had a servant who was a lot like Frick (except in love with Mab instead of Morgan). I think that there must have been a fight. The hero and I realized that we had magic powers: our hands could make water shoot at whoever was trying to hurt us. The incinerated prisoners had become a sort of fire-demon, but the water immobilized them.
The witch's sister (who was an even more evil witch-- things were a bit Narnia here) appeared, but we managed to set her on fire and escape. We had also set the other witch alight, but then drenched her with water.
I think that we prisoners wandered along through the cavernous tunnels for a few years here, like Aeneas, because I observed the witches over time. The second witch had told the first that she was horribly disfigured, and had her lying down, one ankle chained to a far wall. As it happened, though, the second witch had become a creature of fire, at once both burned and burning. The first witch, who was feeling much less evil at this point, was still a beautiful woman, wearing an emerald dress; her feet were continuously licked by cool green fire, and I realized that the second witch wanted the first to be completely burned-- both out of subconscious jealousy and because she had convinced herself that this was true beauty (it was an ethnic-cleansing thing).
The second witch told her sister that she "had found the antidote" to the first witch's ailment. The first witch was weak, but she didn't want to become like her sister, so she resisted. The second witch tried to force the first to drink out of the little bottle of antidote, but Frick pushed the second witch over and helped the first one up, and they began to run. Frick, of course, was in love with the first witch and thought that she was beautiful as she was, and didn't want her to be hurt. In any case, he managed to break the chain that the first witch was on, so that she only had a chain segment about twenty feet long hanging from her ankle. She was trying to run with this, but she kept dropping it (it was really heavy) and it would get stuck in things, like a big metal gate that they had to run through.
The first witch and Frick, and second witch and her fire-demon minions, and our group of suviviors (led by the hero) were all moving toward our goal of getting out of the underground world. When we were by the chutes again, the leader of a group of fire-demons (some of whom had been guards, some prisoners-- nearly everyone had been set on fire and burned half-to-death during our struggles underground) told us that we could have the underground world to ourselves, where we would be safe, but the hero replied that we wanted to live in the fresh air, too; we would take our chances above....
When we got up to the ground, suddenly the dream was a musical.
It was chaos. The fire-creatures were singing "come into the fire" and setting all the trees alight, and people from the compound were panicking and being burnt alive, running between the buildings. I was really pissed off, because I had just coaxed the trees to life (there were no plants, before). I used my powers to quench the burning trees, and I was singing angrily to the fire-demons that this would continue to happen, but that I would win and the trees would continue to grow. (Incidentally, the trees had crimson leaves.) I didn't really believe this, though; the hero and I was far outnumbered and I was starting to suspect that after a while the trees wouldn't want to come back to life, after I put out the fires on them.
Meanwhile, the witches were running around (the second one causing havoc as she went). When I turned around, watching them, I found a little boy (maybe three years old) standing before me. His hands had been chopped off (I don't know why or when) and the poor thing was naturally very bitter. He must also have been blind (from the fire?) and he complained to me (since the hero and I would obviously be the leaders once we established our New World Order) that he couldn't see. I realized that, as he had no hands, he also couldn't feel things or read braille. I couldn't think of anything else comforting, so I told him that he didn't really want to see the world so desolate, anyway. The boy naturally resented this, and he began to sing that "the world is beautiful," and the creatures were still singing "come into the fire"....
And then I woke up.
I know that there was more to the dream, but this is all that I can remember right now.
Monday, August 4, 2008
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