Phew, just had a complex and vivid dream…it sort of alternated between really awesome and really awful. There was a sort of movie-like quality to it. Sometimes I was actually in a theatre, and sometimes I was actually there.
It started out watching these mermaid swim through the stairs of a flooded hospital. They were Betty Page-style classic pin-up kinda chicks, with shiny tails marked with blobs of pink and orange. They were swimming upwards, and also doing a deeply cheesy kind of synchonized swimming thing ala fifties, or seventies, or whenever coreographed swim routines was in.
They were aiming for a pair of dentist’s chairs (we got to switch cameras a few times.) The dentist chairs picked themselves up and started dancing, doing a Fred Astaire tap dance kinda thing, arms swinging, flipping various hardware around like top hats and canes, dancing across the floor of this flooded hospital, and the mermaids were going up to meet them, also dancing, and the music was bright and brassy and cheesy, and at the climax, the mermaids sort of waltzed in and were picked up by the chairs, who did a few rounds around the room, music thundering, spinning and dipping the mermaids, and then rolled them into the seats and filleted ’em like giant salmon.
It was a trifle unsettling.
Then I wound up at a military hospital, helping somebody escape through the vents. Running from the military hospital later took me across a red desert, crossed by black roads, with big alien kudu wandering around, and I was so amazed by the beautiful reds and the harsh black lines, and the kudu-things, that I wanted to paint it desperately. Then a spaceship went by, followed by a laser obviously trying to hit the spaceship. James appeared and informed me that our idiot president had decided to blow up Mars. I wound up sneaking into a presidential press conference (which was wildly disorganized, since not only was I there, my mother, and a number of former classmates, but Sigourney Weaver and my old math teacher.) Bush informed us that this was no longer a war against one idealogy, this was a war against–whereupon a bunch of stuff exploded. Bush was thrilled. That’s good television. My math teacher had to be intubated and taken out on a stretcher. Things got a little confused after that, but they had put up giant screens, and were showing a movie, about dancing mermaids. “Oh, god,” I said, “I know how this ends already!” So after some discussion of Jungian archetypes, they put in a new flick called “Amaryllis.”
“Have you seen this movie?” I asked James. “Sure! It’s brilliant!” “It’s creepy and doesn’t make any sense!” “Yeah, but it’s still brilliant.” And then I was stuck in the movie, which was indeed creepy and nonsensical, and involved a lot of people shooting at me, and finally a surly guy addicted to painkillers, who could walk on water (he showed me how, it wasn’t hard. It involved something about surface tension. He could actually step out of the water and up onto it, which was a neat trick.) took me off in his airship dragged by a giant (and equally surly) armored flying fish. He informed me that I had to go into this house, and get some plant called baby’s….(something? breath? tears? Dunno?) which did not look like any of the plants I would associate with those names, but like giant white tulips. They’d been growing less lately. You needed them to communicate with Jack. Who was Jack? I’d find out. Now I needed to go into this house…which turned out to be a flooded hospital…whereupon I thought “Oh god, I know how this ends already!” and woke myself up.
Even for me, that thing with the mermaids was creepy.
