Dreams of Late

Last night my dreams took a turn for the better, but lately I have been having a series of unpleasant dreams.  

The theme of one dream last week was "The Return of the Old Gods" meets "You Don't Know Who is in the Secret Kabal (Oh, and, everyone who could be on your side hates you)."   Part of the dream must have been inspired by "The Devil-Hound of the Baskervilles," because there was a dog who was conditioned by an evil alien demon.  

At one point Dr. Who was involved.  I really need to understand what the Doctor means in my dreams, because dreams with him in them usually have a feeling of smothering associated with them.  They sometimes have elements of the Labyrinth dreams--where I am usually stuck in a confining, very narrow tangle of passage ways and tunnels.

Then there was the animals dream--where what I thought was a weasel turned out to be a kind of narrow-nosed golden retriever.  It really looked like a weasel, though.  It snuck into our house, and I wasn't pleased in a "Oh great, a wild animal is in our house" kind of way.  Then the dream house--I want to say it was made up of mostly screen doors, but I might be splicing dreams together--turned into a kind of swimming pool and snakes were wriggling out of the faucets, and I wasn't pleased in a "Oh great, water snakes in the pool I'm in."  I was sure they were poisonous.   Luckily, the weasel was a snake-eating weasel.  I'm sure this dream is about my libido, but I just don't know how.

Finally, there are the Child in Peril dreams, which are straight-forward The Child is in Peril.  These usually involve New York City windows and ledges, but the latest one involved balancing along the stair railing in my parents' house.

Last night's dream was relaxing by comparison--for much of the night I was going over my current manuscript and tweaking the text.  In waking life, someone pointed out a way I could tweak the ending, which I like, and I think I was rehearsing adding that part in.  Also, Eric WItchey spoke to the Wordos last night, and I was probably rehashing what he said.

At the end, the editing turned into registering for a convention... and the last scene involved Wonder Woman, Dracula, and a youngish Dick VanDyke as a detective chasing an evil tatoo artist.

Dracula was most likely from the post-Wordos discussion, but in the dream he was a metaphor for writing.

Writing and Dracula

It was a dark and stormy night.

I came across a children's science book that was badly edited. I'm not sure what was up with that. The tone was conversational, and I think that must have turned off the editor's editing abilities. I'm still shocked that they mixed up the word "subsumed" and "sublimated" to describe what dry ice does.

In different news, I have a manuscript pending with the Wordos. It's an idea and milieu story, so it feels a little slow to me. Or maybe it feels like a game campaign log. I like the setting, and I like my main character, but I'm not sure if I've made them shine enough to make the story work. I expect the manuscript will be torn to shreds, so that should make it easier to spot the weak spots.

I'm currently working on a manuscript that I'd run out of steam with. At the time of abandonment, I thought it was a horrible mess, but going back to it, it is not as confused and horrific as I thought it was. It's a vampire story in the same vein (heh) as Stoker; no sparkly vampires here. What had made me put it down for a while was making the vampire character seem real. The trick is to keep the Stoker aspects clear but not worn out. The challenge for me is to understand how Dracula's existence would have been a horrific inversion of the Christian Eucharist to Stoker's victorian readers, and translate that into something a modern reader can identify with while still keeping a fantasy victorian feel.

Maybe I can make my Dracula a poor editor of children's science books.