Subconscious Theater Presents:

[featherynscale]

Post-con dreaming doom. First one is from Monday, second is from last night.

Monday:
I'm at a vast gathering of people in a swanky hotel. It is the approximate size of DragonCon, but is a very different sort of event. Everyone I know and love is there, along with 25,000 other people. Everyone is in business suits and whatever business is being transacted is very serious. I get a call on my cellphone summoning me to a meeting. I go to the roof of the hotel and hop a helicopter. I meet with some mafia bigwig types about an upcoming "project", which I know enough detail about already that they don't need to fill me in on much of it, just who I am to meet and where. Then, I get back in the helicopter and go back to the hotel.

When I get there, the place has been laid waste. I rush around looking for survivors, but there is nobody alive anywhere. (I don't know how people died, except that it wasn't a thing that someone did to the hotel, it was a plague or a meteor strike, or some Act of God sort of thing.) I'm rushing to the highest point I can find when suddenly I am joined by a handful of (for lack of a better word) angels.

The angels offer me a chance to save everyone. I follow them to a penthouse, where there are more angels lounging about. They lead me to a boardroom sort of space, with a huge conference table and some bad futuristic art. (On further reflection, it seems to have been in Zorg's offices from The Fifth Element, so that's the color and look we're talking about.) On the table there are vast piles of paper. They tell me that this is the way I can save people: one pile is 25,000+ photographs. The other pile is an equal number of ScanTron sheets that contain data about a person: what they liked, what they didn't like, what they did in life, what they didn't do, what they wanted to do, what colors they favored, all this sort of thing. If I successfully matched a photo to a ScanTron sheet, that person would be brought back.

I was taken aback. There were so many people, and I didn't know most of them. There was no way I could accurately match everyone. I started to go through the pictures, looking for people I knew. The images on top were photographs of people, and I was heartened; at least it would be easy to pick out my loved ones. But a little farther in the pile, the images chanegd. Some were photos of people, some were cartoon drawings of people, some were fields of color, or pictures of objects. I pulled a picture of a Warcraft orc out of the middle of the pile, and I started to cry.

About this time, the angels told me there was a time limit to the exercise. I pitched into the piles, matching as much at random as with purpose. Occasionally, I found a picture I recognized, and took more time with it to make sure I got it right. The angels lounged about and made snide remarks.


Wednesday:
I'm on vacation in California with kittenpants, triadruid, agrnmn, saffronhare, breathofgold, and iron_clad. At some point, Kittenpants, Saffronhare, Agrnmn and Breathofgold are hanging out by the pool, and Triadruid, Iron_clad and I wander away looking for more excitement. We hear music, and we walk around looking for it.

We find the source of the sound; it's a weirdly shaped gold building. It looks a bit like a loosely-woven coil basket slumped over on its side, and is made of gold rather than being, say, painted gold. We walk inside, following the sound. We walk further and further into the building, until we come to a door. We open the door and are in a jungle. At this point, a map pops up on the 'screen' of my consciousness, and shows me that we are in Mexico. (Awake map research shows that the blip I saw was where the city of Manzanillo is; essentially, start at Mexico City and go west, and you'll be where we were. I know there's no jungle there, but hey. It's one of those dream things.)

We have just emerged from the building, when we are taken captive by a band of tribespeople that look a little like Aztecs. They were commanded by a woman who I thought of for some reason as the Captain. She marched us in quick order through the jungle, but was telling us about what it took to live in the tribe, and what we would have to do in order to join, as if we were recruits rather than prisoners.

We walked along a path for a while, when a child's inflatable bouncy-ball rolled past us from up ahead. Triadruid saw the ball and said, "Hey! That was mine when I was a kid!". Iron_clad and I looked at him funny. As we walked, Triadruid got weirder and more nostalgic, until, finally, we came around a bend in the path, and there was this neighborhood there. It was a cluster of apartment-houses, and Triadruid, to our dread, identified it as his neighborhood when he was a kid. Iron_clad and I were starting to get really nervous. Triadruid broke into a run, and found "his old house", in which we found "all his old stuff". At this point, the Aztecs backed off, and let us poke around.

Triadruid showed us a mountain of things ("These were my toy soldiers! This was my first porno magazine!"), and then, he pulled up a cassette tape and put it in a player. A rap song came over the speakers. He looked at me and said, "Oh my god! Don't you remember this? This is the mix tape you made for me when I was 12! When you asked me out! We used to kiss behind the science building..." At this point, Iron_clad and I were trying to tell him that this wasn't right, that I didn't know him when he was 12. He wouldn't listen. From this point, his "memories" began to get more and more unlikely to be true.

We were unable to really react to this, though, because at this point, people who lived in the neighborhood began to filter in. After an interminable amount of exposition, we got the idea that they had pulled down the neighborhood brick by brick, piece by piece and rebuilt it here, in the Mexican jungle, on the orders of Triadruid's mom. Triadruid remembered that his mom was dead, and said so. They told us that this wasn't true; she wasn't really dead, she just couldn't live in Florida anymore, so they built this place for her so she could live here and be okay. He is delighted by this; we're not.

We try to convince him to run away, but he doesn't. He continues to talk happily about memories that didn't happen, when Iron_clad grabs him, throws him over a shoulder, and runs off. I run behind them, but we have no real hope of escape. The Aztecs catch us easily.

The next thing that happens is that we are in the Aztec camp. Triadruid and Iron_clad are in chains, but I am allowed to walk around free. The Captain tells me that if they're going to run, she has no choice but to cut off their feet. Then, they will really be part of the tribe. I argue against this. She assures me that they will be fitted with special boots, and they will still be able to walk, but not to run, and everyone will know that they belong to this tribe. I protest again. She eventually capitulates, saying that they can be bound into the tribe another way. She orders that they be put into the harem (I have no idea where they kept the harem, but hey). They'll be used as breeding stock for the tribe. I am aware that (in the dream) both of these men are fixed, so it seems unlikely they'll make good breeding stock, but it will take a while before the Aztecs realize that, so we'll have much better chances of escape. I try not to let my face give away that I know this won't exactly work, but I can see myself, and I know that I'm making a very stupid expression.

At this point, I wake up going WTF.

Comments

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Often, my dreams are crazy and full of detail. When I am writing, they are less crazy, and more usual sorts of things, with no more detail than is strictly necessary. So I'm thinking that these are the stories that don't make it, that sort of get reabsorbed into consciousness incompletely. There's a metaphor here that I don't like, but that doesn't make it any less likely to be accurate.

[karinablack.livejournal.com]

I suck at metaphors :)
I'm too literal. Sorry *blushes*