Dreams and Stories

Tuesday morning the cats were up to no good, and I ended up rising and writing.   Currently I'm working on a 2000 word short story.  I'm thinking that after I get that polished up, I'll look at the corpus of material from last spring and see what I can do with it.

I dreamed an Arcosanti dream, probably because one of my friends posted some pictures from her visit.  It was refreshing, because it wasn't one of those stuck at Arcosanti trying to get to the airport dreams.

Tuesday evening I printed out the rough draft of the story and edited it with a red pen, crossing out words and drawing arrows where paragraphs should be moved, and, in some cases, writing things out long hand.  There's something to be said for the physicality of editing actual text.  Also, my mobile is too small for the Scrivener screen to do involved editing.

Wednesday, I had a a very odd dream with involved the Shopping in an Alternate Corvallis scene.  Usually, I'm walking through downtown Corvallis, and there's some sort of funky boutique.  Back in the 80's, I used to shop at a store called "The Golden Crane," which sold vaguely Asian apparel, mostly for the 20-to-30-something female crowd (clue number seven about my orientation).   The Shopping in Alternative Corvallis dreams usually involve wandering around upscale shops or a series of shops similar to The Golden Crane, that sell things velvet cushions, brass terrariums, pillar candles, and poofy clothing.  Then I try to get home or to another store, or some other vague destination which involves walking a lot of blocks.

At one point I was trying to fly home while carrying The Child.  It didn't work so well because a wind forced us back, and I had to levitate us back to the ground.

Then the dream took on a weird twist.  My recollection is bad, but it involved a woman who was growing clones of her female friend out of her ground-apartment/beauty boutique.  They had sort of an Edwina and Patsy, Ab-Fab relationship, which got more disturbing as the dream went on.  I don't recall why, but the clonee wanted a copy of herself, and loaned the cloner a finger (or something) to make a full copy from.  I have an image of a wig-manikin -- just a head and shoulders on top of some sort of retro-50's clothe-washing machine/wringer -- of the clonee talking to the cloner while new clones grew. 

The number of clones grew, because each new clone wanted a clone of herself, and I'm a little confused trying to recall the dream... at one point the cloner had to hide a previous clone from a current clone, because the current clone thought she was the original, and the cloner and the previous clonee had a "OMG, do you think she knows? / Darling, no one wants to tell her that she's falling apart" French and Saunders dialog. 

Eventually, the original clonee was reduced to a pile of five shoulder and back bones, and the cloner was resignedly picking up a scapula and wondering how she was going to get a full clone out of it.

In a dream shift, a wheel of cloud rolled over Corvallis.  It was dark, and narrow, and the cloud was rolled up over itself as it whizzed over the city.  Someone was onto the cloner, and she was going to be punished.  Then the wheel of cloud rolled back over Corvallis, lower this time, and it slammed into the brick apartment building where the cloner lived.  The wheel of cloud broke up, and apart and the pieces fell to the ground in the form of a great, cloudy dog, which was inky and vaporous, and at the same time solid and alarmingly large.

It slunk into the cloner's apartment, and just before I woke up, I had taken her point-of-view and was staring at an open hallway door, querulously calling, "Hello?" and knowing there was a Very Big Dog, which might be around the corner, or which might be a mist creeping closer, but that at any moment shadowy jaws were going to close on my throat.