And here I sit, dreamsick and hoping that writing down a small part of one of the dreams might help me get moving, help me stop thinking about it, and so make the waking world seem a little more solid and worthy of my attention. But even this one small part is shattered, and I do not entirely trust my ability to reconstruct it. But...this is what I can recall. Spooky and I at a séance in a Victorian drawing room, sitting at a round table, holding hands with other people. Edwardian costume. The smell of oranges and candle wax. The room was dark, and my eyes were not closed. Above the center of the table, maybe a foot or so above the top of the table, drifted the perfect likeness of a spiral galaxy. I couldn't stop looking at it, entranced at the beauty and perfection of the thing. I wanted to know how it was being done, how the medium was creating an image like this when it would be many decades before astronomers would capture such clear images. No one seemed to mind that I was talking. A man directly across the table from me, sitting behind the image of the spiral galaxy, replied that it was all fakery and that he'd almost figured out how it was being done. I realized the man was Harry Houdini, or, rather, it was Tony Curtis playing Harry Houdini. Which, of course, made perfect sense. I also realized about this time that the tabletop was covered with Tarot cards, all lying face-up. But the only card I can remember recognizing was the Wheel of Fortune. Then all the cards fluttered, in a very insectile sort of way, like wings, and the spiral galaxy vanished.
And then I was at a window. I think I was still in the same room and the séance had ended, but I'm not sure about this. Behind me, in the darkened room, people were arguing. Outside, there was a forest, and I was looking down on it (so I must have been in a building higher than the treetops). The forest seemed to run on for quite a way. I could see no end to it, and for some reason it frightened me. On the window ledge was a large stag beetle, and it kept flipping over on its back, legs kicking in the air, so that I kept having to flip it over right again. I could hear a mockingbird. And then there was a low rumbling, and a wind came up, wind that smelled like the ocean, and far away, beyond the farthest trees, there was an enormous shadow, rising high into the sky, blotting out the stars. "That's the wave," Spooky said, and I hadn't noticed she was standing behind me. Maybe she hadn't been. Not before that moment. I pushed the beetle off the windowsill, and it flew away. It sounded like a helicopter, and I watched it vanish into the branches of one of the trees, but I could still hear the helicopter. "This isn't my dream," I told Spooky, and she told me I was being silly. So I explained that this was a dream Bram Stoker had when he was a very small child in Ireland. I told her how he dreamed of a giant moving across the land, but she insisted this wasn't a giant, it was a wave. And then someone was calling us to dinner, and we walked down a very long wooden staircase, past glass-fronted cabinets filled with taxidermied birds. And that's all I can recall of this portion. No doubt, Deacon Silvey would call it "brain garbage."
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Yesterday was a bit of a disaster. I'd intended to read through "Metamorphosis A" and "The Lovesong of Lady Ratteanrufer" with Spooky, then make any corrections that needed making. We read through both. I made the corrections to "Metamorphosis A," but then, partway through the corrections to "The Lovesong of Lady Ratteanrufer," everything just sort of sputtered out on me. I could no longer be sure if I was fixing things because they needed fixing or only changing things, and the things I was genuinely certain needed fixing, I couldn't seem to trust my corrections. Spooky came in and tried to help, but I became increasingly agitated, and when I found the phrase "For a moment" repeated on three successive ms. pages (18, 19, and 20), I kind of lost it. I think that was about 5:30 p.m. (CaST).
One thing I need to do today is a photograph that will be appearing as an illustration for "The Lovesong of Lady Ratteanrufer" (Sirenia Digest 12).
Last night, I read from Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. I played a couple more hours of Final Fantasy XII. I tried to get to sleep early, and I took Kava and Spooky read me Robert McCluskey's One Morning In Maine, but it was still after 3 a.m. (CaST) before I got to sleep.
Oh. I almost forgot. I spilled a full glass of Crystal Light pink lemonade on my office floor last night. It was very spectacular, actually. My office floor is always a maze of books and files and papers. Yet, luckily, very little damage was done. A fat manila Sirenia Digest folder got the worst of it. The books were somehow spared. John Lindow's Norse Mythology (Oxford University Press, 2001) just barely missed getting soaked, as did my old copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology (Little, Brown, and Co., 1942). Everything's dry now, but there are still open files lying all over the place.
And that was yesterday. And last night.
Sadly, Peter Jackson has announced that he will not be directing either the The Hobbit or an adaptation of The Silmarillion, as the ongoing dispute with New Line over the amount he was underpaid for The Fellowship of the Ring has led the studio to seek a new director/s for these projects. I think this may have ruined my whole damn day. Maybe the rest of the week (though Thanksgiving would have done that, anyway). I shudder to think what will become of the projects. Oh, and while I'm on about the news, here's a wonderful little bit of outrage, xenophobia, and paranoia: Six imams ejected from US flight. They were ordered to disembark after a passenger reported their evening prayers as "suspicious activity."
And now I have to do something about "For a moment" x 3.