kimurho

Started out at work. One of my young associates was dismantling an old woven ... blanket? tapestry? and preparing the threads - braiding them into different sized ribbons. Another associate was sewing the ribbons onto a backing. They were creating ... recreating ... King Arthur's banner or family shield sort of thing.

Then I was a teenager (not me), high school age, on a field trip with a bunch of others to a college university. We were participating in projects in different fields of study offered by the colleges. My boyfriend had a hobby of exploring abandoned buildings so I wasn't too worried when he didn't show up the first night. Second evening, though, I did begin to worry. By the penultimate day of the visit with no sign of him, I was frantic. Some study had identified the most likely object of his explorations but college authorities refused to do a search ... not because of danger to human life but because human contact/breath/hair/&c might damage the objects stored within - books. I decided to go in and look for him myself - and a bunch of my friends decided to join me with others covering our absence.

At that point my husband woke me up because I had overslept.

There had been a revolution - the AI computer in the school had attained awareness and had taken control.

A rebel alliance was trying to overthrow the revolution - to turn off the computer leader. There were several teams of two or three. One of them contained R2D2 and C3P0 ... one of the freedom fighters, a young tech-savvy woman, kept calling them something like "education providing modules".

The Doctor was sealed in his TARDIS. All of his incarnations present at the same time, arguing with one another and trying to break free. They needed someone on the outside, but they couldn't get through.

We teleported into the school, each team to a separate location. I was with my husband, who had been in charge of the computer before it went rogue.

The halls were in ruins, the walls tumbling down. Some sentries approached, we hid. To our great surprise, the mobile unit of the Master Computer was with the sentries. He *knew* my husband was coming, wanted to capture him personally. He looked right at him in our hiding place and didn't see either of us.

We managed to get to the gathering spot, only to discover that all of our teams had been captured and were wearing the slave collars that controlled their thoughts. The tech-savvy female injected both droids with strings of random numbers to disrupt their ability to reason. The Master Computer was sitting down on his throne ... assuming his more powerful sessile construction - it looked like a transformer with several faces indicating the many functions it was controlling. The last face on the row, the smallest one, was that of my husband.

The one gleam of hope was the Doctor, and he was managing to contact a young girl thinking that it was me but she had no idea what was going on. The Master Computer had blocked all memory of the Doctor on those wearing the slave collars, so there was no one to tell the children who he was.

=============

I suspect that the dream was triggered by the recent infestation of AI art into one of the facebook groups I subscribe to combined with some thoughts I've been having about the meaning of an old Gaelic story about a woman who calls on her Good Neighbours for help and ends up being overwhelmed by them.

In my dream this morning, I was doing data entry for a high-tech company. It was a clean, modern campus; cafeteria in a separate building; exercise room. Lots of space and light. The particular project I was working on was finishing up.

I got an email reminding me to clock out by 5 ... at 5:30. I quickly finished up and left my cubicle ... and in the way of dreams found no cognitive dissonance to step out into a forest. But I had forgotten to actually clock out. So I immediately turned around to do so and the office I'd just left was gone.

Worried now because I was remembering things from earlier in the dream, I managed to get home (my bike was missing - no surprise because the entire building/campus was an untouched forest), and contacted the boss.

The dream cut to the boss talking to someone about it and he mentioned the causality geese, which ...once the project was done and the data saved, it would return things to what they had been before and "edit" the memories of those involved. Because I hadn't clocked out, the effect of the causality geese hadn't affected me.

Had one of those hidden rooms dreams.

I was working at a daycare - new hire - and there was a hallway with a couple of rooms that was blocked from access. The doors to the hallway were standard school issue; the kind with thin, tall windows with wire on half of the upper half of the door. The more obvious door had the window covered, so you couldn't look in.

I was told that there was some issue with the rooms on that hallway, some sort of dangerous contamination, but we were very crowded so I was curious. Then some official showed up to inspect the hall and rooms. I escorted him to the office to talk to the director. On my way out, I happened to pass by a second door into the hall. To my surprise and dismay, I saw someone ... several someones ... at the door, slamming on it in desperation to get out. I tried to open it, but it was locked and one of my co-workers pulled me away. I cried out that there was someone inside, that they had to get out. I was told that there was no one there, I was imagining it. And, in truth, while I had seen them banging on the door, I hadn't heard anything. Plus, they had looked ... pale and insubstantial. Spectral, with open sores and staring eyes.

Kind of dead, in fact.

But they were dressed like young education professionals, the way we were instructed to dress at the facility.

I was creeped out.

Second try, first one the program crashed as I was saving.

I have dreamt of a team of ghost-hunters for years, probably triggered by the BBC show, Sea of Souls. Or else by a Canadian show that's even older (Beyond Reality 1991).

The format is always the same, the leader is an older male academic - late 50s, early 60s. There are a couple or three junior academics, some students - graduate and undergraduate, and civilian consultants/ talents. I am usually a student and a talent. Rarely am I a civilian consultant/ talent. But always a talent.

This time I was a strong medium.

( the story )

And I woke up.

The ship's name was Helena. She was a smart ship, intelligent and sapient, with a complex neural net. Unfortunately, she was insane.

We didn't know it when we boarded. Not immediately, at least. One of the physicists recognized the name once we were on board and balked. I remember his response. "The Helena? The one with the malfunctioning neural net? We can't ... " But by then it was too late. The University was under attack; we had to evacuate and ... she was already underway. With a cargo of academic types; scientists, mathematicians, some liberal arts types - doctors, researchers, professors, a few assistants. And Boots the cat.

The first incidents were minor. Could have been accidents or mistakes. A door that wasn't there one day but was the next. Or that led somewhere else. Somewhere dangerous. A release of gas that caused euphoria or put us all to sleep.

One of the assistants got into the habit of using a chute to get between levels. For speed. He liked to sleep late and cut it fine. Oh I wish I hadn't written it like that. The last time he jumped into the chute, it took him down into waste disposal. It took us a while to find out what had happened.

That could still have been an accident but what she did to Boots the cat ... was not an accident. She owned up to it proudly. Boots the cat was a mouser and the Helena was infested with rodents of all sorts. Boots the cat proudly brought his kills to his owner who made much of him.

She tortured him over several hours and left him for the rats to finish off then presented her "kill" with a flourish.

The worst of it was, she wouldn't let us go. She sealed us in whenever she made planetfall so we couldn't escape. Her rationale was that we had been given to her to protect and she was going to protect us whether we wanted her to or not, from everything and anything. Except herself.

I'm at my high school graduation and my boyfriend and best friend tell me that they are now a couple. I'm furious and walk away, looking for somewhere else to sit for the ceremony because I don't want to be around them. One guy offers me a seat next to him but it's already "taken" and the next seats are wet for some reason. I'm about to sit on the driest of them when I spot a large Arabic-looking swirl in golden flame over a side hall. I go down it and find an Middle-eastern looking man sweeping up in a large empty space. I ask him what the letter meant, but he insists that there was no letter. He's obviously trying to get rid of me, so I turn to go back to the graduation ceremony. As I do, he gets an odd, considering expression on his face (my "overmind" knows that the glowing letter was put there by a djinn and that the man knows it as well) ... and the dream shifts suddenly to me opening my eyes to bright natural light.

There's a young European-American male looking down at me with an expression of concern - dirty-blonde well-cut hair, tee-shirt filled out very nicely, jeans ("Andy" from the show WKRP in Cincinnati). I am in an old gas station converted to a day care and he's the care-taker. The kids are all ages from very young to barely teen. One little boy almost breaks my heart. He's about four or so, Downs syndrome, and he's fascinated by the toy jewelry. He picks up a bracelet and puts it on. Looks at it, then with tears in his eyes, he takes it off again saying "No no no". He does the same with other pieces of jewelry.

I'm not too upset about the change in circumstances because (1) I'm still upset about my boyfriend jilting me for my best friend and (2) the guy is way cute and seems interested in me. I start helping and bonding with the kids.

At one point, I go out of the building and look around. There's an old trailer home off to one side, covered with kudzu, sealed up with some plastic - with a warning sign "Warning: Sheriff Black", it's either on the trailer or as an open captioning for the show because at this point "I" am being played by Amy Schumer. I pull the plastic off the door ... and fall into a ditch as a result. While I am in the ditch, the door opens and a figure shaped like Jackie Gleason as Sheriff Buford T. Justice exits the trailer home. Shaped like because his face and parts of his body are obscured with black tar-like substance. "Sheriff Black"

At this point, I am definitely watching a show because one of the children from the day care is sitting beside me and he's a little scared of Sheriff Black. I hug him and point to Amy Schumer, struggling to get out of the ditch.

"If this were really down in the South," I say, "She'd been covered with poison ivy." He giggles and I'm back in the middle of the action, being told what the crops were around the converted gas station.

I hear a news report about my absence and find out that my family is very upset over my disappearance, so I call them then hike out to meet up with my mother and aunt coming to pick me up. I am afraid that if I'm found at the day care, they would suffer because ... there's some sort of secrecy about it all, that the kids would suffer if the authorities find them.

But I feel like I'm abandoning them. And then there's that really cute guy.

I meet up with my relatives, they're going to take me home, but I have to say goodbye so I call the gas station. I talk to the cute guy, explaining and he convinces me to stay where I am and he'll come get me. It's a split screen at this point, with Amy Schumer on one side and the cute guy on the other. At one point during the conversation, however, he peeks over the dividing line and gives me a wink.

I crashed after work today and dreamt of just after moving into an old house. I kept seeing a couple of young cats ... adolescents, not kittens ... playing in the autumn leaves of the yard. My husband never saw them. They were the colours of the leaves - brown and cream and a touch of orange, with furry pantaloons and fluffy cheeks. Great big surprised eyes.

Sometimes I saw a girl and an older, mother, cat with the two.

Then in the dream, I saw one ... named Pennypacker ... on the stoop outside the back door. I quickly opened the door, keeping my eye on the cat, but when the door was open, the cat was gone. Disappeared into thin air.

I was a woman and a mother - not sure how old my kids, young but not too young ... independent but not teenagers. A woman asked me to watch over her three boys - Tyler, Ben and ... I can't remember the name of the youngest; he was terrified of me and was mostly hiding. Tyler was the eldest - about 5 or 6, also the most active and actively naughty - always getting into what he shouldn't. Ben was a middle-child, quiet, thoughtful, caring... obviously wondering why his mother left them with me. He was the one distracting and watching out for the youngest.

The youngest was terrified of me because I had threatened Tyler extravagantly in an attempt to get him to behave.

I tried to put them into a wrought-iron pram (one big enough for all three to fit in easily) but Tyler worked out how to collapse the thing so they could get out. So I invited a lot of neighbours with children to join us for a party in a garden-house - typical dream/Faerie construction combining indoor and outdoor features. Grassy floors, trees, open roof but also rooms with doors and furniture. Tyler was running around, leading a pack of age-mates; Ben was in the middle of the younger children with his youngest brother - mostly.

During the party, I took my mother - a blacksmith - to look at the collapsed wrought-iron stroller, which was in one of the inside rooms of the garden-house. She said that she knew I was strong as a swordswoman but solid iron prams were not at all practical and no one was strong enough for one. She said I should use it as a decorative planter. When I persisted, she said she'd do what she could to fix it. At that point, someone came running to tell me that there was a storm blowing in.

It was not a natural storm. I bundled the party up - taking care to collect the three boys with me - and took them across the street to my more normal house. Some of the neighbours went home. Once I got them settled, I went down into the kitchen and found a Death Spectre in one corner. I banished it, then went around to all the corners and walls of the house, bottom to top, renewing the seals and wards. When I got to the front foyer, I found that my younger sister had the front door wide open, looking to buy prisms for a street saleswoman. I ran the saleswoman out - she claimed she had the perfect one for me but when she showed it to me, I saw that the centre had been hollowed out and something added ... making it useless as a prism and somehow dangerous. I refused.

At that point, the front doors of the garden-house across the street blew open. I glared at them, raised my voice and loudly proclaimed "You'll shut those doors and lock them if you know what's good for you." The doors slammed shut again; the saleswoman stared at me with open-mouth shock. I raised my voice again. "And lock them!" I emphasized. There was a loud click and the saleswoman scuttled away to her van and gunned it.

Then I woke up.

====
Analysis

Thinking about this dream without the matter-of-fact acceptance of dream-logic and the "everyone knows" knowledge of dream characters.

Iron is protection from fae. The fact that I tried to put the three boys into an open iron-work wheeled conveyance implies that I was protecting them from some Otherworldly threat - especially since I was apparently a swordswoman of some repute.

The pram in question was based on the memory of a wicker-work pram that my mother got from her oldest sister when I was ten or so. It was large enough for three of us to sit in. We would decorate it as a parade float and the older kids would push it around ... until it fell apart.

When I banished the death-spectre from the house, I understood that I had some power over spirits of that kind, that Death had touched me to guard the interface between Death and Life. Those were the seals and wards that I was checking on and renewing. The flawed prism the saleswoman tried to charm me into buying would have weakened the protections on the house.

I suspect that the youngest was terrified of me because he could clearly see the spirits and spectres that existed in the Borderland of the dream - but I don't think he was the specific target of the threat. I think that the spectres were after Ben. Ben remained in the middle of crowds throughout the dream - Tyler was running about getting into trouble and the youngest kept hiding in out of way places when he wasn't with Ben. Both of them would have been easily taken at any point.

My dream mother was a cross between Meg Langslow (a blacksmith) and her mother (a society hostess).

Catholic elementary school

Two girls on the playground at recess see the new girl in a corner crying and go over to her. They invite her to play with them. When the bell rings at the end of recess they are some distance away, over the salt pond and won't get back in time. The leader of the three takes the hands of the other two, tells them to close their eyes and imagine that they are very fast.

The new girl exclaims "I'm imagining that I have a jetpack on my back."
The other girl echoes this idea.
The three girls take off flying, zoom over the salt pond, across the playground, up the stairs, into the school and down the hall where a nun stops them and gives them detention for flying the in the hallways.

It was very different from flying in previous dreams. In those, I could feel the wind beneath my arms, feel it lifting me. I couldn't go very fast and I had to go where the wind blew.

This was propelled flight, with a push from the back and in control of direction and speed.