Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Last night I dreamed I was escaping a zombie apocalypse by sailing down the Thames from Sonning (small and so-English-it-hurts country village) in a rowing boat with an old gameskeeper, a grandmother from Oxford, and Captain America. It was very awesome and actually kind of atmospheric with the fear of zombies being far more common than actual zombies (I think I only saw them twice, once when we were running for the boat, and again when Oxford grandmother's best friend started to transform).

That? That was bloody awesome. From growing wings to escape Moriarty to the whole flying through London thing right through to being captured and taken to the moon base (yeah, moon base. A la Jules Verne, with cavorite. I love my brain). I would really loved to have remained asleep and found out if Watson and Mycroft were going to stage a rescue, but oh well.

This is what I get from reading so many Sherlock Holmes fics. AND IT WAS AWESOME.

My brain needs to do better than that to scare me! I dreamed I was back in my mother's house (a nightmare in itself, lol), sharing a room with an old friend of mine. I went out for a walk (which was difficult as I was always forgetting my shoes) which for some reason took me around my local area (nnote, my area + mum's area, two different ends of London. I was about to go out again for a second walk, and in retrorespect I think it's then I started to realise it was a dream, because there's a reoccuring place in my dream, a sort of short alley and park, and road with a beautiful building on it, that doesn't exist in real life but I see a lot when I dream of my mother's part of town.

Anyway, I headed off, and saw what I thought at first was the smoke from a fire, then a tornado, it was a columb of cloud that split the sky in half. There was something weird where it met the clouds but I couldn't see it properly, I've always wanted to see a tornado but my delight at finally seeing one was mitigated by the 'it's heading right for us!' It seemed quite far away, but tornadoes are fast and I wasn't goign to hang around. I was grateful that no one I knew was in that area, and decided I'd call my father (whose house would be the nearest to it) the moment I was out of range.

Then it became obvious it wasn't a tornado, because more began springing up from the ground, and I realise they were missiles or something. They were going up and exploding when they reached cloud layer, like colpourless fireworks. By this time the noise had brought out a lot of people into the street, and we were all looking up as more and more rockets filled the sky and turned the whole air grey. Everyone was starting to panic and there were more and more explosions, and I wondered if there'd been a horrible accident, at a military base or power station or something. Then the whole skyline went up in one huge pillar of smoke.

We were all watching and asking each other what had happened, and I made the mistake of saying it looked like an atomic bomb cloud. They everyone really started panicking. I quickly added 'Or just a cauliflower'. It still didn't feel quite right to me. Maybe it was that the skyline was still in black and white, or that we hadn't been obliterated by the flashwave. Anyway, I decided to call Paramour, if only to check he was okay. My phone was almost out of power and when I tried to call him it just went to a voicemail of a Russian woman speaking English very badly. The grey ash was still coming down and I wondered if we should go inside and take anti-nuclear precations, wash it off then fill a bath with water while the pipes still worked, etc.

Anyway, that's when a Russian guy turned up and told us the KGB had nuclear bombed London, and I'd had enough. I just looked around and said 'this is a dream, isn't it?' Everyone looked very insulted. In turned to the Russian guy and continued 'If you'd said there was anm explosion at a nuclear power plant, I'd have believed you, our own personal Chenobyl. But nuclear war? now? With Russia? They would be blown up as well! no one is that stupid. No one is that stupid'. (Famous last words, I know, but I couldn't believe what my brain was trying to pass off as a plausable dream. Anbyway, i left the street and went up to my mother's place. No one else in the neighbourhood seemed to have noticed the attack, and when I got to my room my roomate seemed completely unaware of it, and when i told here, and that I thought I was dreaming, she (in what I think was my brain giving up making this realistic) went 'oh, cool', and went to have a shower.

I sat down on the bed and waited to wake up. Which I did when my mother (irl) rang me to sing me happy birthday in french down the line. It took me until the third line to unsderstand waht was going on. Weirdest nuclear warning siren ever!

So yeah, subconscious? You'll have to try better than that to scare me!

Sometimes, in dreams, reoccuring motifs occur. I've had a few, the park with the Heart of London skyline, the Last Chance Bookshop, and now the broken islands that show up on a map to the West of America. Apprently they're made up of broken up bits of the British isles and called Quebec.

And they're basically undiscovered, and very weird, and kinda like Newfoundland. And probably nothing to do with the real Quebec, for all that in the dream I went 'Ah, so that's where it is.'

And it was awesome. This is what I get for buying Beksinski prints.

I was in a flea market, I think it was the Stables Market in Camden Lock, and I was browsing through old photographs when I came across a rather odd one. It was pretty big, square, just under A-4 size. It was make of what felt like really thick card, and it showed a bunch of people, I think about three, in a labratory testing something - the photo was blurred and I couldn't make much out, I thought it might have been some sort of weapon, like a gun- on a fourth person.

I thought, well, this is cool. I wondered if I was from something like the Manhatten Project, it looked about that old, so I turned the photo over to find a date, and saw, instead, another photograph. This time I knew exactly what it was and I felt rather pleased with myself for recognising it so fast. It was one of the Auschwitz gas chambers, the one known as the 'little red house'. I was also slightly weirded out because I wasn't aware there were any photos of this gas chamber, it got blown up before the Russians arrived and not many people were taking photos in Auschwitz anyway.

Whatever, I'm not an expert (yet), I must have missed this one. Anyway, I was all set to buy this photograph when I turned it over a third time and things were from creepy to creepypasta.

The first photo had changed.

This time, the laboratory was gone, and I was looking at an SS guard standing in front of a fence in what looked like Birkenau, he was holding something, I wasn't sure what, it looked something like an acordion, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't. He was smiling.

I hadn't done anything to the photo, just turned it over. I stared at it, just thinking this isn't possible, then I turned it over again, and that one had changed too. This time I was looking at three people in gas masks standing in front of one of the crematoria.

At this point I just went this really can't be happening and turned to a group of girls who were standing next to me at the stall, also going through the old junk. I just said, "Please look at this, then turn it over, then turn it over again."

They looked at me, clearly thinking who is this weird freak? But they took the photo, sort of winced at it, turned it over, grimaced again, then turned it over again. Then they freaked out as well. It had changed.

And then I woke up. I'm not sure where the dream could have gone from there but if I can come up with an ending to this story better than avenging surivivors trapping the souls of SS in a photographs, I will totally write this properly and submit it to creepypasta or something. This is one of the most epic dreams I've ever had.

Last night I dreamed I was a slake moth (or I was riding it, dream was vague), flying above New Crobuzon. Then I fucked right off because no way was I staying in that shithole for another five minutes. Being a flying dream it was  beyond great because I have very realistic dreams about flying where I have to actually beat my wings and take into account things like wind resistance and updrafts (I flew a lot better in this dream than in others, maybe because I've had so many I'm getting better at it, or because I took into account I had, y'know, wings, rather than just flapping my arms like I usually do). I think I started off going up the river as a pirate (the Black Pearl was involved), and then probably I realised I was dreaming and was like 'save the slake-moths'! So I did.

I mean, there's no denying it was a good book, if only because it's engraved itself into my subconsciousness (nearly wrote sunconsciousness, which is just awesome) as thoroughly as Mass Effect has, so its clearly powerful. Unfortunately it's powerful like Man with the Iron Heart, in which I start really hating the author because he has created something which revolts me to the pit of my stomach.

In my version, the story ends with a huge pack of slake moths decending on New Crobuzon and eating everyone, then inhabiting the ruins in an awesome post-apocalypse beauty-fest of crumbing buildings and nests and insanely gorgeous wings which blot out the sun, and the reader is left with a satisfying feeling that nothing of value was lost, the good guys won and the world is a better place as a whole.

That or Mass Effect Mirek turns up with the Normandy and ships the slake moths off to the Rachni home world where they eat Rachni song forever and live happily every after. And then a Reaper turns up and eats New Crobuzon. Which turns out to be like the Batarian home world. And Mirek feels kinda bad but not really. And the Batarians really hate him now. And no one cares because the Batarians are enslaving arseholes of the galaxy and everyone is better off as a whole. And the Rachni are happy because they thought the moths had died out. And no one gives a shit about the main characters because Mirek shot them in chapter 1 for attacking a critically endangered species.

I dreamt I was flying one of those old two-person biplanes. I was in front, with the machine gun (but for some reason it was an AK-47 because the dream was REALLY anachronistic), and I can't remember what the pilot's name was, only that he was cool and awesome and we flew around England through to Russia for some Cold War reason (told you it was anachronistic).
Anyway, it was cool, I want to fly a plane now.

I dreamt I was Josef Mengele and we (me and other nazi cohorts) were gassing people on barges for some reason. But we were spectacularly incompetant and gassed ourselves instead so I grew claws and ate my way out of the steel-reinforced boat. I drowned and everyone died and we call came back as undead!nazis sowing terrror and horror everywhere we went, single-handedly turning back the soviet advance in a snowy mountain pass somewhere in the Ukraine.

Seriously brain, what the hell?

... which could possibly best be described as a cross between Sherlock Holmes, Lanark and Alice in Wonderland In which Charlse Dodgeson made elaborately carved coffins, caught dragon and died (dragon is an illness in Lanark), Sherlock Holmes died the same way and someone made an enourmous mecano structure on one side of Mars to hold all the porn and crap and /b of the internet.
And it was Holmes/Watson slash. Sort of.

...What the fuckity fuck fuck do I have in my head?