08-30-2010 Early Morning Dream

Drempt I was Cleopatria (I was in Liz Taylor's body). The Romans were invading Egypt, and Egypt was repelling them using a device from a story I've yet to sell. The dream started before actual fighting. For some reason, the Romans were building a dike out of very large rectangular stone slabs - the dream wasn't very clear on where, so I'm not sure if it was in the Nile or in the bay of Alexandria. They gave a flimsy excuse about building the dike, but everyone knew it would be a staging area for their navy.

So Egypt built one, too, only more with more decorative stone slabs. As the construction of the dikes continued, neither side believed that they weren't going to be used for a big battle.

There was a scene change, and I switched to omniscient viewer. I'm not entirely sure who they were at first, but they turned into Cleopatria and Antony (although I have a vague notion the man was based on Rex Harrison). The woman runs into a twenty foot by twenty foot library / conservatory. One of the stone walls has a window in it leading to a kind of niche or interior room with tomes on the shelves (I am having problems describing the wall's window because of dream-logic architecture). The woman giggles and hides beneath the window (she must have crawled through it).

The man enters the room. He's pretty sure she's in the room as there's no other door. He traces the perimeter of the room, one eye on the door, one eye looking at the shelves and the art on the walls. As he passes the window (which looks like a kind of painting), cartoonish, stylized wiggles appear in the air (it's as if the dream wanted to turn into a cartoon, and the wiggles show the viewer there's a smell coming from the window). He keeps sliding along the wall, but now the scent of her perfume diminishes, and he slides back to the window, certain he can sniff her out.

Of course he finds her and a (ahem) romantic scene follows.

Insert naval battle here.

Hanging over all of the dream was the knowledge that asps in a tomb were the final outcome.



Then I started some other dream with a science fiction space opera theme.

Let's see...

• imperious, omnipotent, the-penalty-is-a-horrifically-painful-death, disembodied-booming-voice alien bent on carving up the Earth. Check. (In waking life, think The Borg meets Ming the Merciless.)
• Final band of multi-cultural human freedom fighters holed up in a kind of Mayan Temple (with a stone arch the underside of which is painted as a rainbow). Check.
• Last chance, super-techy, super fast, super small, spaceship in the shape of a silver sphere. Check.
• Crazy, suicidal plan to delay omnipotent aliens with a, "you can't find us and our secret on the Moon" red herring (complete with high-power energy beams and plumes of lava from the moon raining down onto the Pacific). Check.
  

The battle scenes did have an annoying feature in that the two spaceships involved repeated targets and intentions to themselves (almost like part of me was narrating the story and another part was rendering the story in images, but needed to be reminded).