I took a nap and had a dream, which my waking brain insists was full of fragmented marvels, but now I can barely remember them.

There was something about a culture who painted their hands and forearms with these painted strings. Children were only allowed black and white, you got a color when you proved you could support yourself, if you married, if you had children, if you joined the priesthood, etc, etc, so old people had these elaborately colored arms.

There was a city under seige. I don’t remember much about that at all–sometimes I think I was inside, and sometimes I was one of the besiegers. But it was a really cool city! (Too much Might & Magic, probably…)

There was some kind of scrying where you could see the invisible and the hidden, but only by their reflections in water. (Of limited usefulness, I suppose.)

There was a room. I knew it wasn’t a real room, and yet I had an intense sense that I had been there multiple times before, in other dreams. (A real sense, or built-in deja vu? Probably the latter.) It was at the top of this winding, junky series of corridors that kept changing direction, and sometimes they were stucco walls and sometimes there were these rusted crates covered in elaborate labels. There were wrought iron doors to be pulled open. The whole thing had a sort of broken-down-Spanish-mission-style feel. Sometimes the corridors were open at the top, with terracotta tiles, and sometimest they were enclosed.

The room at the top was mine. It was very very small, but it was my room. I felt as if, if I changed anything, it would stay changed the next time I dreamed about it. It was a narrow galley kind of room, and everywhere were these things like old cheap movie posters, in a kind of weird collage, like some kids used to do on their walls in middle-school of their favorite bands. I don’t know if bands were involved here, but if I was the designer, I’m a serious freak. It looked like something GWAR would create, or one of those posters included with Dead Kennedy albums back in the day. I don’t remember if I changed anything or not.

Then it segued into one of those “I’m looking at birds near my house,” dreams, where I was wandering around the courtyard of this (still mission style) housing complex, and there were all of these animals. Big ochre-furred monkeys with black hands and faces were leaping out of the trees after herons. There was a gigantic male orangutan, pure white, carrying a broadsword over his back. (The odd thing was, I didn’t go into a “Hey, it’s an anthro orangutan, hey it’s a heroic orangutan,” thing, I went “Who the hell gave that ape a sword? This will end badly!”) There were tiny little tamarins with yellow half-moons on their chests, and a huge array of birds.

It was when I saw tri-colored squirrels that the dream broke–my brain went “Pffah! Tri-colored squirrels are Southeast Asian! No way are they HERE!” And then, disappointed, I realized that all the cool birds–solid blue pigeon-like birds, with elaborate crests and brilliant red spots on the breast, golden herons, etc–weren’t real either. Of course, that also meant that I didn’t have to worry too much about the pygmy hippopotamus stuck in the revolving door, which was a good thing.

I feel like there was a lot more to it that I can’t grab hold of. Of course, as always, I’m not sure if there really was, or if I just dreamed the generic sensation of seeing marvels, without bothering to provide the marvels in the first place.

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