I had a really odd dream last night. It’s stuck with me for most of the day, just because the visuals were so surreal. I remember waking up and thinking “Lord, that was like a Miyazaki film…”

There was a complicated, blurry bit at the beginning, which involved being a shapechanger, but only being able to change into a bull moose. The practical applications of this skill were limited.

When the dream proper started, I was walking beside a stream with my father (who, in the way of dreams, wasn’t quite my father as he exists in the real world) He did something to the stream, and it lifted up, as if the surface of the water were a blanket, and we peeled it back to look at what was underneath.

The stream was full of fish, most notably a huge bone-white pike, which was standing on end, and a giant turtle, bigger than a man. He started harassing the turtle, and I was yelling at him to stop, be careful, for god’s sake, that thing’s beak could crush your head like a melon, and then he reached out and plucked out the turtle’s left eye.*

At some point, we ate the eye. I can’t recall doing it, but I know we did. Things got rather blurry–I recall yelling at my family, including an aunt I don’t actually have, but really didn’t like, and telling my mother for god’s sake, get out and go to Rio and experience Carnivale or something before living with her sister killed her. (The person playing my mother in this dream was nothing like my mother in real life, and I haven’t a clue who the aunt was. Eh, go figure.)

Fast forward–I was living on the street of a bizarre mechanical Venice, and I was being pursued by a very strange villain, who wanted to haul me in for experiments because I had eaten the turtle’s eye. He had a round, balloon like body, with a fur muff and a Russian black fur hat, and he wore black gloves and thick round glasses. His henchman was a craggy metal golem that was chasing me through the markets of this questionable Venetian city.

It was one of those dreams where you can fly, but only if you breathe in a certain way. I acquired two rather strange friends–a boy about my age (I think I was fairly young in this dream) and a tall, lanky person who looked mostly human, but who was also an artificial construction like a golem. The boy could also fly, but fairly sporadically (same as me, since the breathing was pretty tricky. God only knows what I was really doing–snorfling and wheezing into the pillow or something.)

The round balloon man was chasing me–he could also fly, although not well–and he’d taken off his gloves. I knew that if he could touch me with his bare hands, I’d stop being able to fly, and I’d fall to the ground, where his golem would have no trouble catching me.

It was in the middle of a kind of bizarre slow-motion, madly huffing mid-air dogfight that I woke up and went “….whooooaah.”

Really, it was just like a Miyazaki film. Young heroine who can fly, young hero, wise-cracking flesh golem, cartoonish villain, magic with weird and arbitrary rules…generally dreams don’t stick with me for the whole day, but this one was really solid.

Funky.

*My father loves animals dearly and I cannot imagine he would so molest an innocent chelonian, but y’know, dreams…