Dreams of wackitude
Mar. 26th, 2010 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elabyMy god, it's been like fandom roulette in my head lately. And naturally none of the fandoms I dream about are ones I'm particularly obsessed with at the moment - some more well-loved than others, but nothing I'm thinking about very much during the day. Oh well, it makes for interesting re-telling!
First, I had a dream the a few weeks ago about the Amberites (thank you for that, Mr. Zelazny) that was weirdly Saiyuki-ish and an all-around AU while still making some sort of sense with the first five Amber books.
I think I was Corwin in the dream, or at least I was seeing everything from his perspective (like you do) and we were trying to figure out who stabbed/killed Brand (...like you do). I think Brand was actually dead, not just stabbed. Anyway, the whole blooming family of us was out on this dirt road, and Benedict got disgusted with our squabbling and walked off. Random called after him, and then ran after him, suddenly revealing to the rest of us that he had realized Benedict was behind it the entire time (!!!). As an aside, this is kind of hilarious, because of all of the suspects for Brand's stabbination in the real story, Benedict was probably the farthest down on the list, considering that he wouldn't need to resort to subterfuge to take anything he wanted. I also can't think of anything scarier than Benedict being behind a plot.
But anyway, in my dream, Random confronted Benedict with the evidence that Random had been driving back to college (on the shadow Earth, I assume) when he saw Benedict and Brand in another car. That was sort of "when it all began," with Brand's disappearance, and Random had put the pieces together from all of these different incidents to realize that Benedict was the one to kidnap and kill Brand. Apparently not remembering that Brand is a frigging maniac, Random was very upset and yelly and all shattered innocence (Random? Innocence? What?).
This is when it went Saiyuki. In order to keep Benedict from escaping, Random went after him, and I (Corwin) cut off this leather collar he was wearing in order to unleash his youkai super-powers. For those of you unfamiliar with Saiyuki, two of the main characters have "limiters" they wear that keep them looking human whereas they are, for all intents and purposes, youkai (sort of like demons/monsters, but with a culture and society like that of humans - it's complicated). When they take off these limiters, they look more like youkai (pointed ears and teeth, etc) and can kick major ass, but they tend to go a little bit crazy and have to have people bash them in the head to stop them when the ass-kicking is over. So, Random had a leather collar that worked as a limiter, and I cut it off and he somehow subdued Benedict. He was all growling and snarling and rar and we managed to stop him before he killed Benedict, but when he came back to himself the snarling flowed into Stop me, for god's sake. He fell on his knees and looked utterly horrified by himself, which he must've been, because he let Corwin-me help him up with an arm around his shoulders.
Geez, even in my DREAMS I'm a dorky physical-contact-comfort fangirl e_e
Then, a couple of nights ago, I had a short slashy dream right out of the Pairing List that Ate Fandom.
Let me just start out by saying that this was an Assistant Director Skinner/Greg Saunders dream. I know, right? WTF. Anyway, they were up camping or something at this cabin in the woods with a bunch of other people, and Skinner and Greg volunteered to go pick up pizza. They went outside to get into their car, and Skinner grabbed Greg and kissed him up against the car, and Greg was all "OMG someone will see us!" That was it. And that was enough, thanks XD
And last night, the fandom was even more obscure: did any of you watch Shark, the lawyer show with James Woods, for the couple seasons it was on a few years ago? We watched the first season and then sort of stopped following it, but we did catch a marathon the other weekend. In this dream, it was Sebastian Stark takes on Jack the Ripper, which is entirely the fault of the new Holmes novel I just finished reading, Dust and Shadow (utterly marvelous, by the way - consistently and mind-blowingly squee-inducing).
Quick rundown for those of you unfamiliar with Shark: Sebastian Stark (played by James Woods, called "the shark") is a former cutthroat defense lawyer who did all manner of unscrupulous things to get his most-likely-guilty clients off. He switches sides to the prosecution after one of the defendants he gets released turns around and kills more people, and he acts a mentor to a group of little bitty new lawyers. I thought the show was entertaining but not ground-breaking; the ensemble cast entirely made it, because the stories weren't so great sometimes. And Stark is just the kind of character guaranteed to make me love him. He's snarky and ruthless and just a little bit evil, with an ends-justify-the-means attitude and a strong adherence to his own definition of justice. He also goes way out of his way to make sure nobody figures out that he cares. Oh, no, I don't love characters like that at all.I'm looking at you, Saitou.
Stark has a teenage daughter, Julie, who lives with him, and is totally his emotional weak spot. Her actress is phenomenal, and the show would've been much poorer without her. In my dream, Julie was older, probably in her early twenties, and was working with Stark and his gang of lawyers. They were, as I mentioned, running down Jack the Ripper (this was inexplicably modern-day, but whatever). In the first part of the dream, a woman came out of a public restroom and was attacked by this guy with a butter knife. She managed to get away from him, mostly because butter knives don't do a lot of quick damage, but then he pulled out a sharp knife and cut her with it. She got the better of him, though, and flipped him over a balcony down a stairwell (they were on the upper level of a mall, and she threw him down to the ground level). It killed him, and although we as viewers knew that he wasn't really the Ripper, the public celebrated as if he had been.
Stark and his team had this plan to draw out the real Ripper by throwing a huge public party for the lady and hoping he would show up out of arrogance. The party was at the mall, and there were all these tables covered with food. Stark's little lawyers were playing their parts very well, congratulating everyone and being all happy and festive, but Stark stayed behind one of the tables, leaning on it with his elbows and glowering from behind his sunglasses. He was clearly terrified about his daughter being there where they were essentially playing bait to catch this killer who particularly liked going after women.
There was a guy there who was not, if I remember correctly, part of Stark's team, but was an old friend of his in some other sort of civil service position. He wasn't from the show, just in my dream. All I remember about him was that he was much taller than Stark and the "filming" in the dream kept doing this weird thing where the perspective would be from his height looking down. Anyway, he noticed that Stark was all grumpy and out of sorts and he asked Julie if she wanted him to "go take care of him." She said "Yes, please!" in a very "for god's sake get him to stop being such a worrywart, I'm not a child anymore!" sort of way.
When this friend went over and was like "Dude, you need to chill out," Stark exploded at him about how he'd put his only daughter in the path of a psychopathic killer and how could they expect him to act like he was enjoying himself, etc. etc. He was, as we say in the Victorian fandoms, somewhat overwrought, and near tears in fear and frustration. The friend did that--that one-armed head-hug thing, keeping their backs to everyone else, and kissed his head in a very siblingish RDJ!Holmes and movie!Irene sort of way.
I think these kind of gooshy comforting sentimentality dreams embarrass me more in the telling than sex dreams would, if I ever had them ^^;;
And, for posterity, two "spectacle" dreams I've had recently:
In this dream, I was driving with my parents through a range of hills that were high, narrow, and smooth, like ones you'd see in the background of Mario games or in those pictures of China with the green spires all shrouded in mist. The road wound through them, and at the end, the ground sloped down into a huge valley where there were many similar hills, all very narrow and tall and rounded and uniform. On the top of these hills in the valley were round or hexagonal wooden houses.
We walked down into the valley, which was a tourist destination of sorts, and the hills were all covered with moss instead of grass so they looked very soft and smooth. There were little winding dirt paths that went up the front of each hill to the structure on top, very steep, curvy switch-back paths, and we went up one to the top. The house had a porch around the outside, and only one round room inside (it looked like a blockhouse, with a central pillar). There were some kids inside the house but nobody else, and when we went back outside, all of the other people had turned kind of black and grey and red and crackly, like they'd been burnt or were growing mold. They didn't seem to mind, though, and it didn't really alarm me, for some reason.
Sadly, this one was very disjointed and not terribly coherent. It started out on a wet grassy hillside beside a low stone wall, which was, in the dream, the wall around London. I was riding on some kind of platform that took me all over the landscape, like you do in a video game. It was actually very video game CGI-esque, but it was Middle Earth. Or a huge movie set of Middle Earth. Or something.
What I remember is riding the platform above a waterfall where the land spread out in front, all grey and blue and green and beautiful. There was clear water in the pool above the waterfall (where Rivendell was, I think) and a lot of rocky, brush-covered land beyond it. The top where I started was Hobbiton-like in its green grassiness, even though it was London. There were really no other recognizable LotR landmarks that I can remember.
First, I had a dream the a few weeks ago about the Amberites (thank you for that, Mr. Zelazny) that was weirdly Saiyuki-ish and an all-around AU while still making some sort of sense with the first five Amber books.
I think I was Corwin in the dream, or at least I was seeing everything from his perspective (like you do) and we were trying to figure out who stabbed/killed Brand (...like you do). I think Brand was actually dead, not just stabbed. Anyway, the whole blooming family of us was out on this dirt road, and Benedict got disgusted with our squabbling and walked off. Random called after him, and then ran after him, suddenly revealing to the rest of us that he had realized Benedict was behind it the entire time (!!!). As an aside, this is kind of hilarious, because of all of the suspects for Brand's stabbination in the real story, Benedict was probably the farthest down on the list, considering that he wouldn't need to resort to subterfuge to take anything he wanted. I also can't think of anything scarier than Benedict being behind a plot.
But anyway, in my dream, Random confronted Benedict with the evidence that Random had been driving back to college (on the shadow Earth, I assume) when he saw Benedict and Brand in another car. That was sort of "when it all began," with Brand's disappearance, and Random had put the pieces together from all of these different incidents to realize that Benedict was the one to kidnap and kill Brand. Apparently not remembering that Brand is a frigging maniac, Random was very upset and yelly and all shattered innocence (Random? Innocence? What?).
This is when it went Saiyuki. In order to keep Benedict from escaping, Random went after him, and I (Corwin) cut off this leather collar he was wearing in order to unleash his youkai super-powers. For those of you unfamiliar with Saiyuki, two of the main characters have "limiters" they wear that keep them looking human whereas they are, for all intents and purposes, youkai (sort of like demons/monsters, but with a culture and society like that of humans - it's complicated). When they take off these limiters, they look more like youkai (pointed ears and teeth, etc) and can kick major ass, but they tend to go a little bit crazy and have to have people bash them in the head to stop them when the ass-kicking is over. So, Random had a leather collar that worked as a limiter, and I cut it off and he somehow subdued Benedict. He was all growling and snarling and rar and we managed to stop him before he killed Benedict, but when he came back to himself the snarling flowed into Stop me, for god's sake. He fell on his knees and looked utterly horrified by himself, which he must've been, because he let Corwin-me help him up with an arm around his shoulders.
Geez, even in my DREAMS I'm a dorky physical-contact-comfort fangirl e_e
Then, a couple of nights ago, I had a short slashy dream right out of the Pairing List that Ate Fandom.
Let me just start out by saying that this was an Assistant Director Skinner/Greg Saunders dream. I know, right? WTF. Anyway, they were up camping or something at this cabin in the woods with a bunch of other people, and Skinner and Greg volunteered to go pick up pizza. They went outside to get into their car, and Skinner grabbed Greg and kissed him up against the car, and Greg was all "OMG someone will see us!" That was it. And that was enough, thanks XD
And last night, the fandom was even more obscure: did any of you watch Shark, the lawyer show with James Woods, for the couple seasons it was on a few years ago? We watched the first season and then sort of stopped following it, but we did catch a marathon the other weekend. In this dream, it was Sebastian Stark takes on Jack the Ripper, which is entirely the fault of the new Holmes novel I just finished reading, Dust and Shadow (utterly marvelous, by the way - consistently and mind-blowingly squee-inducing).
Quick rundown for those of you unfamiliar with Shark: Sebastian Stark (played by James Woods, called "the shark") is a former cutthroat defense lawyer who did all manner of unscrupulous things to get his most-likely-guilty clients off. He switches sides to the prosecution after one of the defendants he gets released turns around and kills more people, and he acts a mentor to a group of little bitty new lawyers. I thought the show was entertaining but not ground-breaking; the ensemble cast entirely made it, because the stories weren't so great sometimes. And Stark is just the kind of character guaranteed to make me love him. He's snarky and ruthless and just a little bit evil, with an ends-justify-the-means attitude and a strong adherence to his own definition of justice. He also goes way out of his way to make sure nobody figures out that he cares. Oh, no, I don't love characters like that at all.
Stark has a teenage daughter, Julie, who lives with him, and is totally his emotional weak spot. Her actress is phenomenal, and the show would've been much poorer without her. In my dream, Julie was older, probably in her early twenties, and was working with Stark and his gang of lawyers. They were, as I mentioned, running down Jack the Ripper (this was inexplicably modern-day, but whatever). In the first part of the dream, a woman came out of a public restroom and was attacked by this guy with a butter knife. She managed to get away from him, mostly because butter knives don't do a lot of quick damage, but then he pulled out a sharp knife and cut her with it. She got the better of him, though, and flipped him over a balcony down a stairwell (they were on the upper level of a mall, and she threw him down to the ground level). It killed him, and although we as viewers knew that he wasn't really the Ripper, the public celebrated as if he had been.
Stark and his team had this plan to draw out the real Ripper by throwing a huge public party for the lady and hoping he would show up out of arrogance. The party was at the mall, and there were all these tables covered with food. Stark's little lawyers were playing their parts very well, congratulating everyone and being all happy and festive, but Stark stayed behind one of the tables, leaning on it with his elbows and glowering from behind his sunglasses. He was clearly terrified about his daughter being there where they were essentially playing bait to catch this killer who particularly liked going after women.
There was a guy there who was not, if I remember correctly, part of Stark's team, but was an old friend of his in some other sort of civil service position. He wasn't from the show, just in my dream. All I remember about him was that he was much taller than Stark and the "filming" in the dream kept doing this weird thing where the perspective would be from his height looking down. Anyway, he noticed that Stark was all grumpy and out of sorts and he asked Julie if she wanted him to "go take care of him." She said "Yes, please!" in a very "for god's sake get him to stop being such a worrywart, I'm not a child anymore!" sort of way.
When this friend went over and was like "Dude, you need to chill out," Stark exploded at him about how he'd put his only daughter in the path of a psychopathic killer and how could they expect him to act like he was enjoying himself, etc. etc. He was, as we say in the Victorian fandoms, somewhat overwrought, and near tears in fear and frustration. The friend did that--that one-armed head-hug thing, keeping their backs to everyone else, and kissed his head in a very siblingish RDJ!Holmes and movie!Irene sort of way.
I think these kind of gooshy comforting sentimentality dreams embarrass me more in the telling than sex dreams would, if I ever had them ^^;;
And, for posterity, two "spectacle" dreams I've had recently:
In this dream, I was driving with my parents through a range of hills that were high, narrow, and smooth, like ones you'd see in the background of Mario games or in those pictures of China with the green spires all shrouded in mist. The road wound through them, and at the end, the ground sloped down into a huge valley where there were many similar hills, all very narrow and tall and rounded and uniform. On the top of these hills in the valley were round or hexagonal wooden houses.
We walked down into the valley, which was a tourist destination of sorts, and the hills were all covered with moss instead of grass so they looked very soft and smooth. There were little winding dirt paths that went up the front of each hill to the structure on top, very steep, curvy switch-back paths, and we went up one to the top. The house had a porch around the outside, and only one round room inside (it looked like a blockhouse, with a central pillar). There were some kids inside the house but nobody else, and when we went back outside, all of the other people had turned kind of black and grey and red and crackly, like they'd been burnt or were growing mold. They didn't seem to mind, though, and it didn't really alarm me, for some reason.
Sadly, this one was very disjointed and not terribly coherent. It started out on a wet grassy hillside beside a low stone wall, which was, in the dream, the wall around London. I was riding on some kind of platform that took me all over the landscape, like you do in a video game. It was actually very video game CGI-esque, but it was Middle Earth. Or a huge movie set of Middle Earth. Or something.
What I remember is riding the platform above a waterfall where the land spread out in front, all grey and blue and green and beautiful. There was clear water in the pool above the waterfall (where Rivendell was, I think) and a lot of rocky, brush-covered land beyond it. The top where I started was Hobbiton-like in its green grassiness, even though it was London. There were really no other recognizable LotR landmarks that I can remember.
