Today, I Curse My Imagination

Last night I had two extremely vivid dreams, two extremely vivid nightmares. I say nightmares, but the sun was just about up when the first one started, so day-mares? The cats normally wake me at around 4:30 - 4:45 am just 'cause. This morning, I suppose, they figured I could use the extra half hour and woke me up at 5:15am instead.

As I drifted off to sleep, the first dream started.

I was in a castle, on the walls beside someone showing them the view... or something. That someone was roughly my age, perhaps a family member, perhaps a fiancée (yes, in this dream, I was a guy), it's unclear. I do know that I was very fond of them.

Then the alarm sounds. It's a dragon alarm - a siren to warn of an approaching dragon. We all descend the stairs to a courtyard that has a roof and wide rectangular (lengthwise) windows. The shadow of the dragon passes overhead and someone screams. A woman, about to cross to an uncovered part of the courtyard to get into the castle proper turns back to us. I think she's a caretaker of some sort. She looks suspiciously like the woman who plays Lady Stark in HBO's A Game of Thrones.

Yep. Exactly like that.

She beckons to us and tells us to hurry before scurrying forward. We follow. The shadow passes again and then a massive pair of jaws drops down and poor Lady Stark (who isn't actually Lady Stark in this dream, that's just the face she wore, but whatever) is snatched up before she gets to the door. I grab the girl I'm with (I remember she wore a dress of crimson velvet), and pull her back to hide flat against the wall of the covered courtyard. The red jaws come through the opening from the covered courtyard, sniffing.

I find a crevice in that wall and drag the girl in. It's a tight squeeze, but the crevice turns out to be a tiny corridor with three sharp left turns. At the end, there's nothing but dirt and stone walls. We wait there a while.

We can hear sounds of battle. Knights have shown up to battle the dragon, and are losing badly. There are screams, and the sickening crunch and snap of bone and breastplate as the knights are devoured or burnt alive.

By chance, a knock to the dragon's head tilts it up over our little hiding spot, and the dragon sees us. We're the new target and the dragon scrambles to dismantle the tall stone walls so it can get at us. We are trapped and terrified.

More knights arrive, distracting the dragon, and myself and the woman in crimson make a dash for it. We run away from the fighting, back out of the crevice and across the covered courtyard to another little crevice. This one is little more than a rain trap with a grill covering the drop into the storm drain, which will eventually lead into the sewer and thence out of the city.

I grab the gill and lift. The dragon sees and turned back to us, snapping at us, straining against the walls of the courtyard to reach us.

I lower the girl in first, and follow and even pulled the grill back over our heads.

The storm drains are huge. I, tall for my age (though I couldn't tell you what age that is), can stand entirely upright. We follow the tunnels to the sewers, and follow the sewers to the outer wall of the city encircling the castle. I jump into the filthy water to see if there is a place to get through the bars that cover the sewage exit. There is a smallish hole where the bars had rusted through, but we both would be able to fit.

I come up to relay the news to the girl, who helps haul me out of the very deep sewer. Just then, the light is obscured briefly as the dragon flies overhead. Then it wheels around. I see it approaching, and so pull the girl backwards into another hole (it's another storm drain, I think, though intended for water storage during flooding. That is to say, there is a shallow round hole cut that only extends back enough so we can press ourselves against the back wall and just be out of sight from the exit. Into that back wall is cut a rectangular hole which opens out into a very short ledge followed by a fairly long drop into what is essentially a stone drum.

I can hear splashing further up the pipe and assume that others from the city had the same idea as I did, and are trying to escape the dragon, which has since claimed the castle. We can only watch as the group reaches the grill, dives under to escape to the other side to be promptly snapped up by the dragon.

The screams are terrible.

The light is obscured once more and I hear an intake of breath. Without really thinking, I grab the girl and push her through the afore mentioned opening, with me behind. We both make it out onto the ledge, upon which we have only precarious footing and move to either side of the opening just in time to avoid the extremely hot exhalation of flame.

The dragon torched the sewers not once, but twice before the light flooded back into the tunnels. The girl made to crawl back out, but I stop her. With a shake of my head, I indicate that we should wait until dark, when the dragon is sleeping. I suspect he's still just outside the sewer, awaiting any others who are foolish enough to think him gone.

That is where that dream ended. I woke in a cold sweat, shaking and with a pulse that couldn't be controlled, even though all throughout the dream I was almost outside it watching on fully aware that it was just a dream. I'm not sure if that makes sense.

I also have to note that this is the first time a dragon has been the villain in my dreams. They're most usually allies/heroes.

I did my best to control my breathing. I looked at the clock. 6:40am. I had an hour to try and rest until I had to get up and get ready for work. I closed my eyes and somewhere between trying to stop shaking and trying to calm my pulse, I fell asleep again.

This time, the dream featured people I know, and I'm very much me, not some random castle-owing bloke. The stand out was Kung Fu brother K.C. I'm not sure why he was in the dream. I'm assuming it's because we just finished training not too long ago. He looked and sounded, incidentally, EXACTLY like he does in real life.

You know how sometimes you have dreams with people you know in them, but the people you know look completely different, but you still know it's them? Not this time around. He was the exact same, right down to style of dress.

The other characters in the dream were people that I know, I think, but I couldn't tell you who they were. They were simply people I know or, at least, people I knew in the dream world.

In this dream, K.C. and I and three other people were kidnapped, and taken to a big-brother style house. There is no way out of this house. Everyone starts panicking, except K.C. and I. We decide to go on a food hunt to try and find out how long we can survive without having to resort to eating one another.

Then K.C.'s mobile rings and he answers and this gravelly voice says, "There's no way out. Only the survivor escapes. Fight."

I look at K.C. after the call. He just looks at me, shakes his head and we continue to search for food. We find a large, fast-food style kitchen with quite a bit of food. K.C. finds a door that opens out into a garden beyond which is a gate. It's twilight out.

I ask K.C. if he's going for help. He nods and ducks down the path to the gate and vanishes.

World's. Easiest. Escape. Ever.

Anyway, immediately after K.C. leaves (and I have absolute faith that he did, in fact, go for help and not just buggered off thankful he's no longer in the house), this kid shows up saying very boldly that he's K.C.'s replacement, as there must always be the same number of people in the house or the kidnapper, whomever he is, will get suspicious. Never mind that the kid is, like, 10-years-old and as blonde as can be, and K.C. is in his 20's and couldn't look more Asian.

The weird thing is, it seemed perfectly logical in the dream world. So this kid and I return to the other, still-panicking house mates in the living room and then everyone's mobile phone rings (even, strangely enough, K.C.'s who is no longer in the house. I know this because my brain cut to him in his car looking at his ringing mobile... don't ask me how he got his car).

Everyone puts their mobiles on speaker phone.

It's my sister, Z.C. She greets me with false merriment and a very strong Australian accent: "Hey Sonia, it's your sister Z! How are ya?"

When she asks how I am, I burst into tears and can't respond.

There the dream ends. My eyes open, and I see the clock and it's precisely ten minutes after I should have gotten up. I swear and roll out of bed.

I am exhausted! I am so tired. I feel like I've run a marathon, only without the fun endorphins that come with actually running a marathon. I just want to sleep today!

So today, I curse the imagination I usually bless.

I'm going to leave it here, after another really long post (sorry!). Here's today's Forgotten English:

Behindhand

In arrears as to the discharge of one's liabilities; probably [formed] on the analogy of beforehand.

- Sir James Murray's New English Dictionary, 1888