Go North for Freedom, part 2

I fall in love with a man. He's not glamourous or perfect in any way, just a nerdy looking guy with a blue collar job. We decide to move up to the Yukon and set up housekeeping, so we load into an old Cutlass Supreme and point it north. it's already winter when we leave and there's snow on the road.

For a Canadian road trip it's a romantic experience; the truck stops are charmingly gritty and the parkas are toasty warm on the inside. We make out in parking lots a fair amount. By the time we pull in to our destination, a fair-sized northern town, the car is loaded with supplies and we have had a big adventure we will always remember.

Then we settle down to sensible Northern living in a modular house made out of two old shipping containers. My husband and I both work for the local transit company, him as a vehicle mechanic and me as a dispatcher. Sometimes my job involves knocking truly gigantic icicles off the doorways of the building I work in. My husband has a hobby that involves multiple vats of boiling liquids kept in a part of the garage, metallurgy maybe? It's delightfully geeky.

We still make out in the chilly garage sometimes, because we just can't help it.

Go North for Freedom

Unlike in real life, I had a whole lot of fun in my dream last night. I dreamed I was the type of girl who goes to parties every night. Some friends and I were getting drunk and dancing on tables in a run-down old house, well on our way to trashing the place. Once it was trashed, we moved on to another house, the one I lived in when I was 10. We started up the party again, an ounce of pot was spilled out on a table, and I was exploring the old rooms with a bottle in my hand. I came to what was formerly my parents' bedroom, intending to claim it as my own, but things felt different. The room had a creepy, hair-raising vibe it didn't used to have. After a few minutes in there, I started to hear voices coming from the ceiling, and once I heard a baby crying. My instincts said to get out of there, but I hung around a bit longer, trying to make sense of the voices from the ceiling, but they were just muttering disjointed phrases, like the hybrid in Battlestar Galactica. As I listened, the voices resolved themselves into a woman. She walked out of the shadows in a corner of the room, took hold of my hand and squeezed it. She said, "Go north for freedom," and a pilgrimage began.

"End of line."

My party friends and I set out on an epic trek towards the north. The whole world had been turned into a neverending series of malls and hotels; we never go outside. But this new world is populated with large spiderlike robots that lie dormant under staircases and in darkened rooms, waking up whenever they sense movement. They attack my friends and I. Our pilgrimage to the north becomes similar to a first person shooter game, where we scout ahead for robots and fight them whenever we can't avoid them.

Eventually, my entourage and I find new digs in an ultra-modern building, all glass and stainless steel, where all the cool features in the apartment are controlled with buttons on a sleek silver console. There's one in every room. I stand on the bed and play with the buttons that are supposed to move the window blinds into myriad stylish arrangements. Instead, they fall on my friends' heads. They are not amused, and they start listing all the ways in which the automation in the apartment will not work. They say the track lighting will leak and the windows will turn dark. Somehow, one of the cushions from a charcoal Danish modern sofa goes flying out an open window, and I can't go out to retrieve it because my keys have gone missing. To punish me for the falling curtains thing, a friend makes me drink gin from his cupped hands.

We do eventually head outside to look for the flying cushion. We walk all around the building and its in-house fine-dining restaurant in a quaint, old fashioned annex. Clear on the other side of the building, we find several people gathered on a patio overlooking a garden. Piles of detritus line the concrete walls of the garden, including my wayward couch cushion.

I took a brief break from reading scifi novels this summer and got into horror movies instead. Guess what I dreamed about (once I finally got to sleep, that is)? I dreamed longingly of a long and dangerous journey through conflict and adversity to visit my friends the aliens and space travelers. So I guess it's time I resumed my trek through CJ Cherryh's Foreigner novels that I started earlier this summer.

Still, the Lovecraftian horror story I read last night had me waking up with yet more heavy metal in my head, and since this blog is called "The Song In My Head When I Woke Up This Morning", here is some Tool.

And now, back to the nerdfest.

I have not actually been sleeping these past few days. It's a pattern: when the hottest nights of the year arrive, sleep goes away, and I walk around for days in an altered state, feeling giddy, thinking in symbols, not language, and feeling like I'm on the brink of big changes.

All you folks who reliably sleep through the night have no idea how much time there is in a week. To pass the time, I have been plowing through a compulsively readable science fiction series (CJ Cherryh's Foreigner books - so far, 3 books in as many weeks). Now I'm walking around in two universes at the same time. When I leave my apartment, I have to remind myself of where and when I am. I confuse the names of real places with fictional ones. I feel sad to be all alone with my monumental nerdiness.

Maybe I'll try being a writer again ...

I dreamed I was driving in Ireland on a hedge-bordered road at night, when a strange light in the sky caused me to stop the car and get out, and start wandering through fields, up and down hills in the dark. I keep exploring til I reach the crest of a hill and push my way through a hedge fence. There is a stone circle on top of the next hill, and people are dancing around it. A sudden flash of blinding white light comes from the stone circle. It expands til it fills my vision. The next thing I remember is being back at the car.

As I'm standing on the road in the headlights, looking around at the hills, I begin to hear the sound of footsteps coming slowly towards me in the dark ... slowly ... getting closer ... until finally an old man shuffles into the area of light in front of the car. He has a friendly face. He walks straight up to me and hands me a piece of paper. There is something written on it, but I don't know what it was.

Bridge Crossings

... in which I explore two divergent ways to cross a bridge.

One: Two supervillains an a hovercar speed away from the scene of the crime, laughing evilly. Ahead, a huge bridge is just beginning to open to let boats through, but the villains gun the engine and sail right over. Just as one of them notices that battery power is getting low on the hovercar, the other suddenly remembers something they left behind, so they turn around and head back towards the bridge. It's fully open, a pillar of iron towering to a great height, but our supervillains are too important to wait. They speed up, fly vertically up the bridge deck, hover over the chasm in the middle, and, engine sputtering, make a rough landing on the other side.

Two: A rickety wooden bridge in a forest is cared for by two elderly people. The bridge has been in disrepair for many years and no-one has been able to cross it, but now, some younger people are there to help fix it. They start by fencing off the edges for safety. They acknowledge that the repairs will take some time, but that they will do it safely and with joy in their work.

A Song That Doesn't Exist

Last night I dreamed that I was at a karaoke party with The Police, except that they had a different lead singer, a woman who was wearing Lululemon yoga pants for some reason. Anyhow, they did a song in campy karaoke style, but it was no Police song I had ever heard before. Sounded good, though...

A few nights ago I dreamed that I was a pregnant teenager. I've never been pregnant! Always wanted to know what it felt like though ... not because I want kids or anything. I'm just curious. I was a bit disappointed when I woke up.

And speaking of disappointment, last night I dreamed that I was looking over some of my own short stories written over the past few years and coming to the realization that they were pretty good and I should think about publishing! My dream self-esteem rose considerably! Then I woke up and realized I hadn't actually written the stories, just thought about them. Oh man that was depressing.

Feeling a Wee Bit of Anxiety Perhaps

On this day, I missed a friend's funeral so I could attend a meeting and be spoken to rudely by several people. I could have done that any day. My friend will only die once.

This morning I dreamed that I was on a river cruise from Central Africa to Scandinavia. My sisters and I swam in the river and watched the water change as we went north - crocodiles and water snakes giving way to trout and kingfishers. I remember trying to recall the names of the countries we passed through on the map, but couldn't; can anyone remember that kind of symbolic detail while dreaming?



Today a twofer. Driving past the PNE yesterday I suddenly remembered a dream I'd had a few days ago, where in they had built a fancy new big ol metal roller coaster at the park. Not only was this roller coaster big and awesome, it had an amazing feature: the train was designed to detach itself from the track for part of the route like a caterpillar spinning a cocoon - connected to the track at the front only, and the rest of the length whipping around in the air as it sped along.

Dontcha hate that, when you dream of something cool, and only become aware later that it doesn't exist in the real world? Happens to me all the time.

Another Nuclear Apocalypse

My family and I are preparing for a farm-country fall fair or something, collecting bushel baskets in the pickup and carrying around armloads of pies. The fair is a big outdoor event, with a number of tents and trucks parked all over a field. Hundreds of people are socializing happily and eating well.

Then news comes over the radio that nuclear war has broken out. The news spreads fast through the crowd and the mood becomes sombre. People stand around their vehicles listening to the reports. After a short time has passed, the voice on the radio starts listing places that have been targeted and we hear with horror that a bomb will explode very near us in only a few minutes. People scramble to collect their children and find shelter, but we are in the middle of a giant field with only tents and trucks around us, and so all anyone can do is huddle on the grass and wait. A man near me asks me to look after his son if he dies.

Presently the bomb explodes. It's very hot and bright and skin burns. Everyone knows to wait for the big wind; it comes after a few seconds, and all the tents and some of the trucks fly away, spinning along the ground.

The man beside me has died. The boy and I get up and go looking for other survivors among flapping bits of tent and overturned vehicles. After walking only a few metres, we see three strange grey machines in a row, each with two green lights for eyes. They are apparently military machines - they see anything moving as the enemy. They fire on us three times. The boy is hit and dies; I crawl back and lie there among all the dead and wounded. My sister finds me there; she is unhurt and is walking through the crowd trying to help where she can. She brings me all the dying children to hold until they die. After a few hours I am surrounded by forlorn little bodies. I get up and limp around looking for more survivors.

There are other machines arriving which also kill everything that moves, this time big truckosaurus-like things that chase people down and chew them up. I have to hide behind concrete barricades and even crawl under heaps of detritus to escape from them.

Relief doesn't come. People go into the forest and start acting all feral. At one point some others and I have to stay up a tree for days to escape cannibals, who eventually kill each other. Some people band together and decide to build a stockaded town. The interior is all broken up into apartments.

Finally, somehow, I get back to Grandma's house in the city. I hide in the basement crawlspace behind the water heater until others from the family arrive - Grandma, Mom, my sister and my cousin. Some semblance of normalcy has returned to society. We take turns keeping watch out the back door, and the front is barricaded. For a while it's winter, with huge drifts of snow in the backyard, but eventually spring comes. I spend some time telling Mom about the horrible things that happened after the bomb. In my mind I keep hearing happy songs about flowers and sunshine, trying to cheer myself up.

I go out walking behind the house and see sculpted cherry trees in blossom. Some of the branches have been packed into a sort of transparent plastic rectangle, making a sign that looks like it's been carved out of blossoms. Petals are falling out the bottom of the sign. There is a drift of petals under the tree, and I am so in need of comfort that I roll in the pile of petals like a dog in garbage.

While stuffing my hair with petals, I hear an ambulance siren very nearby. It sounds like it's going to pass the house but stops before I can see it. The siren changes to music,and I smile because it's one of the happy songs I cheered myself up with during the terrible times. Then that song ends and another of my happy songs comes on. It's too much of a coincidence, and I sprint around the house, trailing petals, to see the source of the music.

There's a van parked beside Grandma's house. It's not an ambulance but has a siren and loudspeakers attached to it. There's a man standing beside the van. It takes me a while to recognize him, but then I see he is one of the bomb survivors/forest people. He was severely traumatised by the, er, trauma, and I had thought he was insane, but he has recovered and now lives in the van. He is very different than he was before the bomb, very nervous, but he is a whole person. I am very happy to see him, and can't stop patting him on the arm and complementing his cool van.