Dream Theatre

Man, I just woke up from a helluva dream. There’s a thunderstorm going on, but it’s not raining, so the air is very hot and heavy and oppressive, which doesn’t help.

I dreamed I was living in this weird house, with tiny doors, full of Asian furniture, and for most of the dream, things were pretty normal–handymen would stop by to ask if I needed to buy a truck, or to get drainage ditches done. And one of the handymen started reciting poetry at me, this long, dramatic poem, which would probably be completely nonsensical, but which ended with the line from Shakespeare, “to give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.”

Fine and good, fair enough.

Then stuff started to get really weird. The other people in the neighborhood were watching me, and little things were going wrong with the house. This strange little creature, like a fat black chibi cat thingy, was out to get me–it was mostly just a minor badness, but it kept leading these blue wind creatures with angular faces to find me, and they were definitely bad. I was getting more and more freaked out, and then somebody knocks on the door.

It’s all these women from the neighborhood, who I discovered I was really scared of, and they start asking me if I haven’t figured it out yet. “Figured what out yet?” (Obviously I hadn’t.) So they all come in, and they explain to me that I’m not real, I’m the shadow of this dead woman who lived in the house before me.

“What?! But–we bought this house! My husband and I did! And look, I’ve got a shadow!” I held up my hands, but the shadow I was casting looked like a child’s toy rubber monster, all silly teeth and long thin legs with claws. This was upsetting.

“Didn’t you wonder where all this furniture came from?” one of them asked. I realized I had no idea where the furniture came from. “It belonged to the Farudos (or Farutos, or something.) You’re her shadow. We made you into a person to keep the house from being sold. They’re both dead.”

“Here,” one of them says, “trace your hand.” So I go to grab a sheet of paper–the penciles were levitating off the table, but that was the least of my worries–and I go to trace the outline of my hand, and even though I could SEE my hand, it wasn’t where I saw it. The hand I wound up tracing had two really long claw-like fingers and a couple of little weirdo digits down the sides. This was not comforting.

At that point, I did the only logical thing possible, and freaked out completely.

When I had finally calmed down, it turned out I could see other people’s shadows, like their ghosts after they died. I wound up talking to a woman who’d just been in a car wreck. She kept asking if I was Death, and I was trying to explain that I didn’t think I was. It was like she was trying to deliver a package, and I kept saying “No, no, that’s not me.” And then finally Somebody says “I’ll take that.” You’d think, being a Pratchett fan, I would be getting heavy all-caps for Death, but actually I could see the script in my head as a kind of large, swirly cursive.

Death was…not imposing. He looked like one of those monsters they get on South Park, where they start out with a Bigfoot, and then he’s got a radish for an arm and Bryant Gumble for a leg or something. He looked sort of like an explosion in a toy chest–really tall, not particularly humanoid, made up of bits shoved together. Death explained that since people kept projecting things on to him, his image had gotten really piecemeal for the years. I said it was hard to deal with, so he tried to shrink down, and wound up looking like a warty, lumpy Superman with a suitcase for a head.

Fortunately, before Death could impart the wisdom of the ages to me, a particularly loud crack of thunder woke me up. I sat up, and went “Duuuuude.”

Some interesting ideas in there, but brrrr.

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