Dream Theatre

Unexpected stress led to a night of raging nightmares. We hit all the usual themes–the Thing That Won’t Die, no matter how many times you stab it/shoot it/tie it to the railroad tracks*, followed by the late-for-a-class-I-haven’t-taken-all-semester, (that one worked out well, as I explained that I’d been sick and apologized, whereupon the professor hired me to work on his paleontology dig in the playground, where he was disinterring a T-rex.) Unfortunatey the T-rex fell by the wayside as we were attacked by shape-changing cthulhoids that threw fireballs. I didn’t bother to try to fight that one out, I just ran. Even my subconscious knows you don’t mess with Cthulhu.

Oddly enough I got away, skipping the classic being-chased theme of nightmares. That was something, anyway.

By this point it was 4 AM and I woke up in a cold sweat, staggered into the bathroom, (turning all the lights on as I went) staggered back to bed, fell immediately back into anxious dreams, and found myself in an underground set of tunnels, in a large room with a stone pool, fed by an iron grate.

There was a god there. I’m not sure who it was, but he was definitely a god.** He handed me a metal tray and said “Now you must do Tefnut’s job.” ***

“Whuh?” I said, with my usual brilliance.

Brightly colored–things–like beads or jewels or something, but alive–started coming in waves out of the grate. I jumped in the pool and started washing them onto the tray, then dumping them over the lip of the pool onto dry ground. It was important that I get them all out of the water–they were like children or souls or anyway something Symbolically Significant (although probably the fact that I was playing Bejeweled before bed was rather MORE significant.). I remember that I wasn’t panicking, though–just had to get ’em all out of the water, no need to freak out, work quickly and calmly and it’ll all get done.

When it was over, he embraced me, and said a few things that I wish I could bloody well remember–something about strength, and names, and then something about rose and soapwort and grooves, (which probably proves that one should not take this sort of thing particularly seriously, or else that the spirit of the divine is exceedingly concerned with my bathing products) and then I woke up to find both cats on me, doing the you-gonna-feed-us? dance.

Huh. I am being very flippant because it’s easier, but it felt like something, anyway. Haven’t had one like that for awhile.

Weird.

*I hate this one. I know a fair number of people, often women, who cannot fight back against foes in their dreams. I don’t know if it’s a sign of a robust psyche or not that I can fight back just fine, it just doesn’t seem to slow ’em down much. Mind you, all I had was a pair of manicure scissors, which aren’t much in the way of armament…

**And had been hitting the gym quite a lot, too. Human head, though. My brain defaulted to Apollo, but that was probably ‘cos of the abs. Which I suppose would be Horus if we’re sticking to one pantheon instead of mixing and matching. My subconscious mind has no respect for cultural continuity.

***I knew Tefnut was Egyptian, but there memory failed. According to wikipedia, she’s the goddess of water and fertility. (She better not get any ideas on that latter front…)

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