authoring destruction

Disconcerting dream about the Black House last night. I mean, they all are, really. The Black House is somewhat terrifying and increasingly feels like home. Real Home.

Anyway. This time, it was a huge sprawling castle. There was some kind of amorphous threat beyond the walls per usual and plenty of danger inside the building. I was hunting down archetypes of some kind, character in dichotomies (courtesan and priestess, I remember, though there were others). I sought them out, hidden away in secret chambers in the castle where they had sometimes been for ages I think, and had to get advice or secrets about the castle, but I don't remember the specific information. There was also the ghost of a soldier who was sometimes a friend and sometimes an enemy. I think that's reflective of head hopping throughout the dream rather than changes in his character.

The world beyond the castle was apocalyptic. This might be another common theme in the Black House dreams but I so rarely feel allowed to leave the grounds of the House that I don't often see it directly. But maybe that's why the outside world is so threatening.

At the end I was back in the castle, laying clothed in bed with another person, listening to an insistent knocking at the door and hoping desperately that one of the other entities in the castle would answer it and make them go. That if we managed to pretend we were sleeping we'd be safe. I told myself that there was nothing to be anxious about, just someone knocking at the door. But I couldn't make myself believe.

I wake up to phantom knocking a lot.

The downstairs neighbor (or rather, her belligerent douchebag boyfriend) was at it again last night, cranking the music up with as far as I can tell the specific intent of pissing her and the rest of the house off. They've gotten at least one disorderly house fine, several visits from the police on noise complaints, and a sternly worded letter from the landlady and on more than one occasion we've heard him turning the noise up and her turning it back down and them fighting about it. He knows he's getting her evicted.

Upshot being I didn't sleep much, not nearly enough to recover fully from yesterday and go in to work at 515. Work was... pretty god damn busy, and I've been feeling dimly nauseous and fairly foggy most of the day. So I came home and washed my tattoo and laid on the couch in my piejams and watched stupid television for the afternoon and now Delia is making supper.

My feet didn't hurt much at/after work. I've worked slightly fewer hours this week but not a lot, and have gone comparably pain free. This seems to be a marked improvement. And despite feeling sort of tired and crapped out physically in other ways (I think feeling a little bit drained after the ink experience is reasonable, especially given that I didn't have a good opportunity to sleep it off), my mood isn't suffering a lot. I mean, I didn't want to be at work, but I don't normally want to be at work at the end of the week when I've only slept a few hours. So all in all, not miserable, not dipping into too much anxiety (Kris the tattoo lady said she's been taking B vits as of recently as well and they're helping her anxiety a lot), and feeling like I'll be able to get things done and enjoy myself throughout my next couple of lighter days (and Sunday off - off of everything, even choir).

Also, I had violently apocalyptic dreams last night. Not nightmares... definitely frightening but fear wasn't the central part of the dream and I didn't wake up upset. Only had fragments when I came out, but committed what I could to memory. It was all very bright... very sunny (outside), very clay colored. Terra cotta and dust. People were dying of... something. I don't know if it was plague, or what, but they were rotting away, like some combination of sepsis and gangrene. Not in a zombie way, though... everyone was still aware. Spitting up green, blotched and soft, bloating like corpses. I was in a house full of survivors (some of us were survivors longer than others). Boarded up, chaos on the outside, don't really know what was going on. When I left... I was alone. But I don't think I was the last person alive in the house, maybe we just all split up at that point. I don't feel like I knew much about any of those people. Anyway, I found my way toward people who had lived through at least that wave of whatever was happening. There was some kind of semi-organized gathering place, a cafeteria or meeting hall or something, and I was befriended by two Indian people (a man and a woman; siblings or good friends). We decided to stick together... I have a dim sense of there being some kind of authority, sort of. A presence trying, if sternly, to keep us safe, and a threat from the outside but I don't know if it was the sickness or something more sentiently malicious or what. I kept trying to convince them to go back to my house so I could get some of my things (cell phones still seemed to be working, and I wanted mine, and my ipod, and a couple of other things). I'm unclear now whether my house was where I'd been with all the dying people or not. I also feel like I had some other reason for wanting to go back that I was hesitant to tell them, but I don't remember what it was.

I have so missed the long, late driving.

In that space, there's a deep anonymity to the open land. The darkness, and the fact that at any given moment no one knows particularly where I am, spare my immediate company (tonight, auto_destruct), and the moving, always moving, I think create enough of an analog to the deep-beating sea that it calms away a lot of things. There have been an abundance of bad dreams, lately, and me without clarity enough to remember them for any kind of analysis. I need to start writing all of this down again; I really should make time first thing in the morning but the fact is, I don't want to.

I don't want to sleep at all. I may go try to close my eyes a little while.

Three nights now. I'm still exhausted, but I haven't been having bad dreams. In short form:

1: Dating my voice teacher ('Clinton'), who looked like Nathan Fillion.

2: Flight delayed because my airport of departure was shut down because the President (at the time in my dream, but it was Bush) breached some super secret security by posting where he'd just touched down on Twitter (same place I was in).

3: Something a little more personal (with someone a little more personal).

Let's see if this holds. I'm still ruminating over Saturday, the last night of bad ones. The horse, and a woman killed by something inside her body which left a hazy mark on her ankle/calf: vertical type of TABULA RASI (I was curious about the I in the dream, too). She died on our hands, me and A and maybe some other people. I was afraid of what the mark would mean to anyone else who saw the body (I don't think I knew myself). Excusing that it could have been a tattoo, maybe they would just mistake it for a tattoo. Very strange.

And nothing below us to break the fall...

( Read more... )

Not sure what to make of all that business.

Two more nights, and still nothing, or little.

( Dreams )

Committing to yWriter, I think. (http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter.html). The fact that it presents me immediately with 'viewpoint' as an important piece of information scene by scene makes me feel like it was designed just for me ("Marie, why is the first half of the novel primarily told in first person, from two perspectives while the second half of the novel is in third, and from about FOUR?" "I don't know, Logi-Brain, that's an excellent question and one I'll surely have to address eventually...").

Also, the dude seems to be pretty awesome; a novelist himself and committed to free software, etc.

Also, getting back into the swing of groceries and cooking. Making myself balanced, good, regular meals. Trying to get to bed early; still sleeping poorly. Interesting dreams. Last night's was very bizarre and a little scary.


Aaand... I had some stuff written about the dream but, then LJ crapped out on me and I think I'd rather wander off instead of type here. Although, no coffee yet and I had to shower cold, and I don't feel groggy or headachey. Not caffeine addicted after all?

Wicked nightmare last night; I'm going to try to write it out at some point (I just don't feel like I have energy to, which vexes me) and post it to my journal on Vox (the plan for that is that it will be the dream journal, cause for some reason I kinda want to keep them separate). But man, they were bad. Really bad.

Also, this strangely appropriate haiku:

( haiku YOU! )

Have any of you got experience keeping a regular dream journal? Either public or private, computerized or written longhand...

If so, how do you keep it? Do you write down all the dreams you have, or just ones that seem particularly vivid or interesting? Does it help you remember dreams better when you wake up, with practice? Does it help you have more control over your dreamscape?

I figure, everything - every stimulus, pleasant or otherwise - is some kind of resource. I might as well start trying to make use of more of them.

Last night, I dreamed of snow.

It was one of these deep, seamless dreams that left me not quite aware of where I was when I woke, trying to sort out one sensation from the next. I'm not sure where I was... somewhere where it did not snow, but nowhere that I've properly seen in this town. Some bizarre, composite fantasy of many lives that I've lead up until this point. A little of the old, a little of the new.

The rest of the dream - the other facets, the where and why and what was happening - weren't very important. I don't really remember them now, waking, but I do remember the snow. It was very accurate, Alaskan snow that began in a peaceable flurry and progressed, over a very short period of time, to near-whiteout conditions of big, wandering flakes that billowed and billowed from the sky.