Trollpocalypse Dreampost

I was trying to walk from one place to another and somehow ended up on a highway with my boyfriend and his mother. This happens in my dreams sometimes, where I’m just trying to go somewhere and get stuck on a messed up path that is obviously not where I’m supposed to be.

There were other pedestrians stuck in the same path with us. Old timey race cars started coming at us from the opposite direction and I was all personally offended that somebody planned a race on a road that people use for walking.

We barely got out to some safer stretch of road, but when we did, we realized that we had left my boyfriend’s mother behind. I went back for her but I couldn’t find her. Instead, I was stuck going deeper and deeper into a labyrinthine maze of subterranean highway, chain link fences, and colorful pipes.

At the bottom of it all I found that I was now Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys mode, and the family that I was trying to get back to was a fictional wife and child. There were other human beings trapped there with me, and we were under the fascist rule of multicolored cartoony characters – something like those in the Trolls movies, with maybe 5% Killer Klowns from Outer Space vibes.

They were trying to keep us underground for ostensibly benevolent reasons. I don’t know how they communicated that because they spoke in gibberish.

My fellow humans were more easily cowed than I was, given that I was willing to do ultra violence to our captors. I would pretend to go along with them until I could get into a safe spot to attack, then just beat them to death or cut their throats with a shank.

At some point, one of the trolls was going to check my papers, but I remembered I had the IDs of two people I assassinated in my wallet. I managed to sneak the IDs out of my wallet onto the floor slightly out of sight, but one of my fellow humans betrayed me by flicking them into view of the trolls.

After a bunch of violence and misdirection, I somehow reached the outside world. I did this by always keeping an eye on whatever stretch of blue sky was visible through the cracks in the environment far above. If I was going in a direction with less sky visible, I would do whatever I could to climb up over the barriers and keep moving towards the sky.

So I got outside, and the trees were red and the world was very underpopulated. There were just a few random menacing figures, lurking about their business.

My wife and child were there, but their skin was pitch black. Their eyes were blood red and they looked subtly inhuman in some other way. They pretended to be happy to see me, but I knew they would probably kill me when I went to sleep. I was still happy to be there and went along with it until I woke up.

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Chicken Patties

Had a dream there was this serial killer dude people had given way too much deference to, assuming he was some other class of less deadly weirdo.  He had a little theater where chicken patties were tacked to the seats, like he was pretending they were other people in the audience for whatever show he was screening, and he’d take dates in there.  Later on it was like, the chicken patties are people maybe.  One of his dates found out he’d bailed on her during the show and left a large chicken patty in his place to fool her.  Because that works, right?

I’m so tired.
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Conservatives are Boring and Predictable

That bitch dobnal trunk is saying if u don’t vote for him democracy goes bye-bye, when any emeff with eyes has known for years now that if creeps like him or desampnis win, democracy does indeed go bye-bye.  Just another predictable predictable predictable case of right wing projection.  I’d ask if these fucklords could get a new script but they’d probably start communicating in monkey torture videos and christian music.

I tried to post a fun cheesy music video from the ’90s today and in googling “paul stanley chest hair” i had to find out about “paul stanley regurgitates christofascist-filtered terf talking points.”  If you’re gonna be a gender non-conforming transphobe, Paul, why doncha come up with something more original?  Like, “trans people are gonna take over the world with dubstep and use the cis for slave labor on the rings of saturn.”  Oh, I know why you didn’t do that.  Because you’re a boring and predictable conservative doing the most obvious shit humanly possible.

Fucking off now.
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Juneteenth Dreamposting

Didn’t have to work today so I went back to sleep after the alarm went off and had a much more elaborate dream than usual, that I could remember some significant amount of detail from.  That sometimes makes me think, oh, should I make a story out of this?  Especially when it’s a more substantial plot than getting lost in an airport.  But no, I don’t think I will.  The scenario was a very well-trod one for sci-fi these days, and the core theme was too macho – look at his guy, what doesn’t kill him makes him stronger, he’s so cool.  Anyway,

The earlier part is harder to recall specifics but there was a giant hole in the ground kind of structure.  There was architecture to it, like a real building courtyard, but no windows save the distant skyhole, suggesting it might be subterranean.  Like that prison in the third Bale Batman, but it was less prison-y.  The architecture was large, light-colored sunny bricks; there were decorative shrubs in ledges and cracks.  I don’t recall any cells, I think people just slept in the corners in the open area.  There was some element of compulsory combat.  People got up every day to fight for some dubious reward.

A fancy lady had some importance, and addressed the masses from a suspended platform in the middle of the hole.  She was of the people who had cast everybody down into the hole but not necessarily hated because of it.  The invisible gaolers of this scenario started shooting star-shaped projectiles at her from the high walls.  She was injured but not killed.  The prisoners decided at that point that they liked her, and they’d avenge the outrage.

This led to a series of riots wherein everybody would just beat down every nook and cranny of the structure until they found hidden stairwells they could use to escape.  In the process, all died, or were defeated and put back in the prison – along with new replacements to shore up the numbers to a similar level.  By this time in the dream, that was the point.  Prisoners were stoked into disastrous revolt and watched for entertainment by unseen masters.  The survivors that were returned had their memories erased, the new blood were taken by unknown means for unknown reasons from somewhere more like our modern world.  This aspect may have been inspired by the TV series Wayward Pines.

During one of the planned riots, a guy got far enough he reached the “overworld.”  This was the reward, and his memories were restored.  Or were they?  He was some kind of semi-rich asshole who, along with several other similar types, were regular competitors in the game.  Maybe his wealth came in part from reward money.  He had fancy dinners in a clean, bright city with his fellows in victory.  But something was amiss.

There were very few people in the city – much less than one would expect for the number of businesses and streets.  All I ever saw were the victors.  One was a lady who clued our protagonist into other details that were off.  Buildings had been lazily painted, books all had blank pages, and so on.  He determined that he was in yet another simulated environment with no apparent means of escape.

As the dream went on, I forgot the new location had ever been posh, and it became quite slummy.  The people there were much like the prisoners in the first part of the dream, but they had some kind of light industrial jobs to do.  The hero again tried to escape and was dropped back in with his memory erased over and over again.  He would look for an exit, muscle his way through, and fight whatever guards lurked out there.

Among those guards was some kind of human/insect hybrid with a bad attitude.  I think it was the same individual and he regenerated between fights.  During one of the escape attempts, the hero was fighting this bug and they exchanged words.  The bug said he only existed for math – as long as he killed three escapees before he died, he was serving his purpose, and didn’t care about anything else.

The main dude remembered bits more on each cycle.  Not a full memory, but just an instinctive knowledge of what he needed to do.  Part of that was making improvised body armor out of tape, cardboard, aluminum foil, whatever, but he began to run out of raw materials.  He kept fighting, turning into an archetypal he-man, but as part of that instinctive knowledge, came to realize he’d never fully escape.  He was trapped.

When he got to a certain point in the daily combat routine, he had defeated enough enemies to not be under constant threat, but instead of pressing on, he turned back.  He went to the home of a lady prisoner who may have been the fancy lady from the hole scenario, in a new life.  She and her (friends? family?) did not have his wisdom, did not know about the imprisonment.  There was a storm outside, water damage creeping through her apartment, and our hero could feel the presence of the secret stairs and the menacing guards outside her thin walls.

She didn’t finish her ravioli and it was getting dry on the table, so he tossed it in the garbage for her.  She was feeling ill and he wanted to just stay in and comfort her, but first he went to one of those apartment walls, parted the secret door, and told the guards to fuck off.  Nobody was going to cause trouble that night.
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Delusion Collapse

So that sense of reality overtook the optimism I was feeling fresh out of surgery, before the two ambulance rides to the emergency room and my subsequent back problems.  Realistically, I’m not going to be able to accomplish shit with this time off from work.

That’s always depressing when reality gets in the way of inspiration.  I’m not feeling so hot.  I can barely wipe my ass in the state I’m in.  How is your week going?

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The Don’t-Be-Fired Button and the Human Floppy Disk

In my youth, I once briefly worked a job where there was a button you had to press between every transaction.  If you didn’t hit that button, the previous transaction would be added to the current, which could result in you paying out a lot more money than you were supposed to.  I could not consistently remember to push that button, and cost the company more money than I was owed in wages.

At roughly 5 AM today, I awoke with a profound feeling that I had to become nothing more than a data storage device.  That I was a glowing white folder in a computer’s graphic user interface, and that I was containing files requiring some kind of work.  I could not, for the life of me, figure out what kind of work was needed.

In my job I sometimes handle electronic messages in a proprietary interface that is a little more awkward than modern email.  You have to label messages according to priority, make sure they’re headed to the right component code, set the request and “tickle” date, and other annoying little shit.  I figured that I needed to do this kind of work to the files within me, but I didn’t know how.

My current employer has a potentially adversarial relationship with people applying for certain benefits, and it was also unclear to me if some of these files represented me as an applicant or as a claim processor.  These files were just words in a void, important but unprocessable.  Stifling.

This persisted for at least a half hour.  During this time I have also been trying to work up the will to risk injury by changing the position of my body or getting up to go to the bathroom.  At about 5:45, Hecubus placed a single paw on my belly and bore down within a few inches of the site of my surgery, stirring me from my uncomfortable reverie.

This feels worth remembering, although again, I’m not sure why.

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Should mostly conscious hypnagogic states be tagged as Dreamposting?

Edit:  I never connected the first paragraph with the rest of the post.  Now I can’t remember what the connection was, not precisely.  I’m unwell, my fellows.

A Chain of Beauties 01

As discussed here and here, I’m going to try to write a novel real quickly on the blog.  Be ready for foolery.  I’m “showing my work” so SPOILER ALERT!  The entire plot outline is below the fold on this post.  Will also add some carriage returns so people coming directly to this article can skip it if they feel the need.
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Use Your Delusion

Call this the sequel to my post here, as well as a GnR reference.  When last I left you, I was contemplating an exercise in high-speed novelling, to be posted here over the course of this time I took off work to recover from surgery.  The way holidays fell, I don’t have to go back to work until the 20th.  The idea thus far – High fantasy, something to do with court intrigue, a romantic young royal in peril, most of the cast as bisexual.  Read the previous post and comments for what few additional details there are.

As I circle the table furiously trying to come up with a plot outline, I have fewer ideas for plots than I have for characters.  But any ideas are good ideas.  There are going to be a group of immortal nymphs, sleeping at the start of the story and posed elaborately by royals that keep them as a sort of living sculpture.  One or more nymphs will be awakened, some may die, haven’t decided.  There will be an elven “royal grandmother” who contributed to the royal line and has some prestige as an immortal noble, but lacks actual title because no human blood.  Does she favor her current royal descendant or work against them? Undecided.  The other day I was thinking about the bisexual music of Queen as a possible source of inspiration, including the epic cheesiness of the Highlander soundtrack.  Not sure.

I will continue “thinking out loud” about this in the comments as the evening winds on.
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*”circling the table”:  when you have all your inspirations in a heap and you walk around it looking from multiple angles, hoping for understanding.

a lil outpatient procedure, nice and easy

…and I went back to the ER for a truly hellish experience shortly after midnight, not getting home until now at 5:00 a.m.

if u happen to have a CT scan after abdominal surgery and nobody tells you anything about the results, you might want to ask them if they saw blood in there. if they did, do not try to lay flat on your back for a few days at least.

it seems some loose blood from the surgery lapped gently against my diaphragm, triggering spasms that felt much like what you would imagine of a heart attack, only more violent.

kinda like my chest tried to rip itself apart, followed by spasms in a heart-sized area and seeming to follow a heartbeat, during which pain was truly extreme and breathing was not possible.

over the next fifteen minutes the spasms grew further apart and more faint until they stopped, but yeah, somehow I missed a few very important memos about possible side effects of this surgery.

i try to sleep now.

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Drugged Delusions

Back from surgery, the pain meds haven’t quite worn off, and I’m feeling more ambitious than sensible.  I took the week off work without pay (starting now, running thru next week), which is what I raised those funds for.  During this time, unless I get my sense of reality back, I might try to compose a short novel.  And I’ll share it with you right here on the blog.

I’m going to use the setting from this RPG I’d like to make someday in my pipe dreams.  It’s a stock fantasy setting in a Final Fantasy way.  Think high magic, lots of “character classes” and “races.”  The difference is that LGBTQIA people are heavily centered.  In my pipingest pipe dreams, book one will be about gay boys, book two the gaydies, book three the bi, book four the trans, and book five the ace.  In the world, different types of LGBTetc people would be associated with different walks of life.  Like, everyone would think of adventurers as gay dudes, which would become a self-reinforcing concept like gay dudes in performing arts IRL.

Book one of the (possibly never to exist) RPG is a stock adventurer-focused game which assumes all adventurers are gay dudes.  That was the first idea I had, which was a way to show people the absurdity of presuming cishetness by presuming all players to be gay dudes – the most classically reviled type of queer people ever, still the focus of homophobic propaganda from Uganda to Utah.  To have the other rainbow RPGs be set in the same world, I’d need to come up with other subcultures for the characters to be associated with.  So in that world, lesbians would be associated with the defense of settled places, from farms to cities.  Bi / pan /etc people would move in aristocratic circles, have adventures of court intrigue.  Trans / gender variant people would be associated with the arts (in a high fantasy / adventurous way of course), and ace / adj-ace-nt people would be scholarly esoterical wizardy types.

All this could be taken as problematic, like the voice of this universe making big assumptions about inherent qualities of different rainbow people, but it’s just a setting thing, not my beliefs, right?  Plus I don’t care too much about upsetting the most aggressive LGBTQIA partisans because I ain’t gonna read my reviews, heh.  But all this explanation of my RPG setting is just background to explaining where my novel that i’m totally going to write in a week is coming from.

So I’m gonna do the Bi RPG novel tie-in, working title: “Tales from The Amphisbæna: A Chain of Beauties.”  I need a plot about court intrigue, and will ponder that on this post.  Seeing as how I’m doing this work publicly, if you want to make suggestions on the novel, you can.  But I’ll be moving pretty quickly if I do this, and belated suggestions will be less likely to be implemented.  Gotta get those ideas in quick.

I haven’t read much history of the feudal / monarchist era upon which fantasy is typically based, but I’ve been struck in what I have read by certain recurring motifs.  Nobles and royalty were often at odds, with the greatest domestic threat to any monarch typically coming from noble schemes to replace the current dynasty with one of their own blood or one that will treat them more favorably.  As the nobility were the most direct oppressors of the peasants, those serfs would sometimes have a more favorable view of a monarch than a local lord – especially if that monarch took a strong or adversarial stance with the nobles.  IIRC, this was true of both Ivan the Terrible and Vlad the Impaler.

So I’m thinking the story takes place in castle of the monarch, where schemes abound.  Maybe there’s assassination attempts and nobody knows who’s behind the plot.  Maybe the monarch is the big bad and noble schemers are in the right.  The best way for I, as the author, to show proper solidarity to my class is to have all the rich be scumbags that must drown in their excess and be eliminated by peasant revolt.  But, you know, I’m liking the romance of a monarch today, if only in the context of pure fiction.  Charles Windsor can have his head turned into a hood ornament.

I don’t have any firm ideas yet, but I’ll need them quickly.  Holler at ya comrade.  What I need is the bones of the plot.  A monarch who is romantically delicious is in conflict with some kind of enemies.  Takes place with mostly bisexual characters in courtly settings.  What kinda twist could make this interesting?
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