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1. Well, this bit isn't a dream: new bookcase! Good big wooden bookcase. We have so been needing one. I suppose there'll come a time when shelf space will actually have to influence book acquisition rate, but it hasn't been so far, so we'd just been piling them higher on top of the ones we already had. Now there are no piles, and a shelf is even still going spare.
2. Sometimes my dreams go multimedia. Last night, (all set in America, possibly because of blog-reading before bed) they began as a pleasant characterful computer game where you wander around a cafe picking up bits of pizza, segued somehow toward a woman transforming herself into a forest fire for reasons of righteous vengeance, and ended up as the final Avengers movie.
The Avengers are gathered in a grand wooden hall of government, trying to solve an apparently insoluble problem. Along one wall, peripheral to this problem, some scientists are looking at cages of small lizard-eel creatures and becoming increasingly aware that they're out of their depth. These creatures (and apparently my subconscious thinks this is decent shorthand for 'too deadly to be dealt with by humanity') can take a piranha to pieces in two seconds flat. They're learning, too -- rapidly. As we watch, one of them not only figures out how to open the door of its cage, but before the scientists can get there, it teaches its neighbours the same trick. (And it also remembers what it just did, which is apparently a major leap in lizard-eel cognition). Soon indestructible lizard-eels have dispersed invisibly into every nook and cranny of the room's panelling.
The Avengers notice what's going on. Someone -- Steven Strange? I'd like it to be Natasha Romanoff, in on this secret subplot since the beginning -- shoots a glance at short-haired time-traveller Thor, here from the past. Thor gives a slight complacent nod: yes, this is still the timeline where we survive.
"Let's do it again," Natasha/Steven says. "How it should have been done."
"Will it work?"
"It ought to. We've got four magi* in the room, after all."
"Four?"
"Yes. Including the queen of the eels."
All the Avengers link hands in a circle. Something of technology and magic mingled, and the placement of the lizard-eels in the room amplifies the magic-
Cut to gliding over water through a forest. Someone, perhaps Tony Stark, is talking to the queen of the eels, who looks just like one of the regular lizard-eels, palm-length. He explains an idea they've had: she and her species can move into the area of Asgardian jungle which for decades has been sliding in and out of phase with this part of America. There, they can fit into a biosphere that's equal to them, and perhaps in time grow as powerful in that context as they would have been on Earth.
"This is the most important decision you've ever made," he says. "We don't want you to look back and think you were sold anything. So take an hour. Talk with your people about it."
The queen is now in the sea. She summons her people, and they gather around her in a great spinning ring, which is at first solid black and then, as it rotates, begins to glitter with other colours...
At this point, in the cinema, I have my arms spread to the sides like (I thought, in the dream) someone in an ecstatic congregation, and I'm not the only one. I don't know when I last got an emotion that strong out of a dream.
Later, back in the hall, the eels have made their choice and gone. But have they all gone? A young boy screams. Something on his head!
A bit of old packing tape. He's joking around, playing with the 'just when you thought you were safe' trope. He keeps it up, he's clearly enjoying it. Now the packing-tape is on his chest, and now he's pretending something is on one of his shoulders...
The camera pulls back, decentering him, to take in the room, which gradually fills with hints of ambiguous movement. Nothing that's still there when you turn your head to look.
...
I don't know whether that was the end of the film, or what problem the Avengers were solving to begin with, because the film doesn't survive. It was the last great work of a director whose films were treated all too casually when he was alive, before cancer got him in the eighties. He was casual about the films himself. They were work, it was something to live on. You never got all that happy, he said while walking up a hill. Because when you found new happiness (visualisation of little stones piled to greater and greater height) you took it apart and shared it with people -- that was what directors did.
*this was a weird, specific magical title, but I don't remember what it was.
2. Sometimes my dreams go multimedia. Last night, (all set in America, possibly because of blog-reading before bed) they began as a pleasant characterful computer game where you wander around a cafe picking up bits of pizza, segued somehow toward a woman transforming herself into a forest fire for reasons of righteous vengeance, and ended up as the final Avengers movie.
The Avengers are gathered in a grand wooden hall of government, trying to solve an apparently insoluble problem. Along one wall, peripheral to this problem, some scientists are looking at cages of small lizard-eel creatures and becoming increasingly aware that they're out of their depth. These creatures (and apparently my subconscious thinks this is decent shorthand for 'too deadly to be dealt with by humanity') can take a piranha to pieces in two seconds flat. They're learning, too -- rapidly. As we watch, one of them not only figures out how to open the door of its cage, but before the scientists can get there, it teaches its neighbours the same trick. (And it also remembers what it just did, which is apparently a major leap in lizard-eel cognition). Soon indestructible lizard-eels have dispersed invisibly into every nook and cranny of the room's panelling.
The Avengers notice what's going on. Someone -- Steven Strange? I'd like it to be Natasha Romanoff, in on this secret subplot since the beginning -- shoots a glance at short-haired time-traveller Thor, here from the past. Thor gives a slight complacent nod: yes, this is still the timeline where we survive.
"Let's do it again," Natasha/Steven says. "How it should have been done."
"Will it work?"
"It ought to. We've got four magi* in the room, after all."
"Four?"
"Yes. Including the queen of the eels."
All the Avengers link hands in a circle. Something of technology and magic mingled, and the placement of the lizard-eels in the room amplifies the magic-
Cut to gliding over water through a forest. Someone, perhaps Tony Stark, is talking to the queen of the eels, who looks just like one of the regular lizard-eels, palm-length. He explains an idea they've had: she and her species can move into the area of Asgardian jungle which for decades has been sliding in and out of phase with this part of America. There, they can fit into a biosphere that's equal to them, and perhaps in time grow as powerful in that context as they would have been on Earth.
"This is the most important decision you've ever made," he says. "We don't want you to look back and think you were sold anything. So take an hour. Talk with your people about it."
The queen is now in the sea. She summons her people, and they gather around her in a great spinning ring, which is at first solid black and then, as it rotates, begins to glitter with other colours...
At this point, in the cinema, I have my arms spread to the sides like (I thought, in the dream) someone in an ecstatic congregation, and I'm not the only one. I don't know when I last got an emotion that strong out of a dream.
Later, back in the hall, the eels have made their choice and gone. But have they all gone? A young boy screams. Something on his head!
A bit of old packing tape. He's joking around, playing with the 'just when you thought you were safe' trope. He keeps it up, he's clearly enjoying it. Now the packing-tape is on his chest, and now he's pretending something is on one of his shoulders...
The camera pulls back, decentering him, to take in the room, which gradually fills with hints of ambiguous movement. Nothing that's still there when you turn your head to look.
...
I don't know whether that was the end of the film, or what problem the Avengers were solving to begin with, because the film doesn't survive. It was the last great work of a director whose films were treated all too casually when he was alive, before cancer got him in the eighties. He was casual about the films himself. They were work, it was something to live on. You never got all that happy, he said while walking up a hill. Because when you found new happiness (visualisation of little stones piled to greater and greater height) you took it apart and shared it with people -- that was what directors did.
*this was a weird, specific magical title, but I don't remember what it was.
