Saturday, April 12, 2008

[dream blog] Pleasure dome

Hagia Sophia mosqueI was in some kind of exotic, vaguely Middle Eastern (in a very Arabian Nights kind of way) paradise. Whatever it was, it was definitely artificial. Fake, even. It was a shared hallucination or a computer simulation or a magical construct. Very much Kubla Khan's "stately pleasure-dome".

They place was ruled or run by two superhuman beings, male and female. They might have been genies or gods or computer programs. They looked essentially human--beautiful, even--but were huge, maybe ten or twelve feet tall.

I had two companions with me, but they were vaguely defined and I can't remember much of them. One was a woman. The other might have been a rat. Possibly a raccoon.

The three of us were there to steal a palm-sized gem or shiny bauble from the genies. Apparently, if one had both this gem and something else (a secret word, maybe?), one would gain complete control over this false world. We didn't have the other component yet.

The three of us split up and ran all over the sublime garden, dodging the giant, enraged genies and their human-sized servants, all of us looking for a chance to snatch the gem.

Eventually, the rat got it. And it turned out that, even without the second component, the gem did give its holder some kind of power. The rat was able to stop time, or at least the movements of the artificial world and its inhabitants. The three of us were unaffected, and so were the two genies, but their servants froze immediately. I remember seeing my female companion punch out one of the immobile creatures, some kind of hapless-looking humanoid badger dressed in golden armor.

The rat took the gem out of the garden area, running into a wall through some drainage pipe or similar. It caused the gem to shrink down to pea size, and hid it underneath a stone in a tunnel behind the wall. Hopefully, it would be safe there, and we could come back later to pick it up when we had the second component. If we had both items, after all, there's no way the genies could stop us.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

In the only dream I've had in the last three years my fiancee was a bearded Australian man.

Clearly I'm being ripped off somehow.

Matt Sheridan said...

Ha. That is definitely unfortunate.

The only reason I actually remember so many dreams, though, is that I've been sleeping way too damned much. I come home from work and take a nap with Charlie, and then on weekends we basically just laze around uselessly for days. Anyway, it seems like all this excess sleep has a really high R.E.M. content, because almost every time I wake up from a nap, I realize I'd been dreaming just moments before. So nap dreams are really easy to remember.

Anonymous said...

One of the first steps to learn how to lucid dream is to sleep in a lot becuase you're more likely to dream/remember your dreams in the morning.
But since I'm usually carping the diem after six hours I'm out of the loop.