Wednesday, October 06, 2004
I think, mostly, I'm amused that a poll to determine whether or not I'll post nude photos of myself got more votes in seven hours than a poll asking which of my novels is the best got in seventy-two hours. Sex, whether you're pro or con, is the Great Motivator.
Right now, the total stands at 67 for, 8 against. Interesting. Will it go to 100 "yes" votes? Will the anti-Nude Caitlín camp rally and carry the day? I think I'll watch this thing a little longer. I am indecisive, as usual.
Spooky thinks I'm an idiot.
Again, as usual.
This morning, I had what seems a momentous dream event. Momentous because it was no doubt one of the geekiest goddamn dreams I've ever dreamt, but also because I achieved "lucid" dreaming for only the second time in my life (the first time was about two months ago). And also because it's my first Nebari dream (hence the geeky part). I was a Nebari woman, possibly Nar'eth (I find it curious that I'm not sure on this point), and, along with a number of other Nebari, women and men, was fleeing through a high mountain pass, driven on through the snow and ice by an unseen threat. There were two sleds, drawn by shaggy, red-haired oxish creatures, and I was driving one of them. They were heaped with furs and plastic crates and such, and a couple of Nebari children were riding on them, as well. I know the furs were from wolf-like animals called kragats. The wind was freezing, blowing the snow so furiously it was impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. Above us, there was thunder and a sound like falling rocks. All of this was so vivid, but that isn't unusual. My dreams are almost always very vivid, often unpleasantly so. I kept looking back over my shoulder, sure that whatever we were running from was about to catch up. This part seemed to go on a long, long time. Hours and hours. I was freezing and breathless and my legs ached. Eventually, we came down from the mountains and out of the storm. We were now in a small, narrow valley, the mountains rising up steeply on either side, the rocks showing through black wherever the snow wasn't covering them. Down there, the wind wasn't so bad. We stopped to let the animals rest. One of the children was crying. I kept saying that we should hurry, that there wasn't time to stop. One of the men told me the animals drawing the sleds would soon drop dead if we didn't let them rest. And then I looked over my shoulder again, back up at the clouds hanging about the peaks, the storm clouds we'd passed through, and a couple of aircraft that looked a lot like Vietnam-era helicopters emerged through the mist. They hovered a moment, then tilted forward and rushed down the slopes towards us, skimming only a few meters above the rocks and snow. Someone began to scream, and someone else was shouting, "Run! Run! Run!" I turned and looked across the valley, and there was what looked like the entrance to a cave on the other side.
And then we were racing across the snow, and the helicopter things were sweeping in right behind us. They began shooting, not lasers or plasma weapons or any such sf weaponry, just bullets that whizzed through the air and buried themselves in the snow crust with a dull thwup noise. And then one of the animals pulling my sled slipped or collapsed or was hit by one of the gunners. It went down, and the sled and everything on the sled and the other animals drawing the sled went down on top of it. I was thrown forward. I seemed to lie in the snow a long time, face down, shivering, listening to the bullets and hurting animals and screams, afraid to look. When I finally did look, the two helicopter things were circling us. A couple of the others were huddled behind rocks, shooting back. I remembered the child who'd been on my sled and frantically began looking for her (I think it was a her) and panicked when she was nowhere to be found. We were still a good hundred yards from the entrance of the cavern. There were other people there, also shooting at the helicopters, shouting for us to hurry. I was terrified and angry, pushing aside piles of kragat hides to find the missing child, and I realized that I was muttering "Run, run, run," over and over and over again. And then I realised that I was me. That is, I realised that I was the waking me. I looked up from the mess from the wrecked sled, and Spooky was standing in the snow a few feet away from me. Her lips were moving, but I couldn't hear her. She looked up at the heilcopter things, and then she became the waking me. And there I was, a dream me looking at the waking me, and at first I was startled at this strange pink person. Then, in another moment of realisation, I became aware that there was no distinction between that person and my dream self. "Pull me out," I said to myself. All around, the chaos continued, gunfire and people screaming and there was blood all over the snow, blue Nebari blood, and though it felt very wrong to leave them behind, I reached out for myself and woke up.
Spooky was awake. I'd been talking in my sleep (she heard me say "hurry" and "pull me out"). She'd been trying to wake me and had finally clapped her hands very loudly, which is what apparently woke me. But, as I said, this is only the second time in my life, that I am aware of, where I've realised that I was dreaming. Both times, it's left me feeling very strange, as though waking reality might shift at any moment, revealing itself merely another layer of dream. It's sort of the mental equivalent of that funny feeling you get after an elevator ride, as though you're still falling. And I expect I'll spend much of the next day or so playing this dream over in my mind. It seems particularly meaningful in light of some of the material I've been reading on chaos magick, pop-culture magick, and shamanism.
Which brings us to yesterday, when I did not write. I did work on other things that needed doing. I spent two hours on the signature sheets for The Dry Salvages, finished with them at about 2:30 p.m., then took them to the post office. While I signed (and got a paper cut), I listened to Concrete Blonde and P. J. Harvey (Walking in London, Mexican Moon, and To Bring You My Love). I forget sometimes how important Concrete Blonde once was to me and what an amazing voice Johnette Napolitano has. I exchanged e-mail with Nancy Kilpatrick regarding The Gothic Bible and Outsiders: An Anthology of Misfits. The latter is a book to which I contributed an sf short story, "Faces in Revolving Souls," and it also includes stories by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Steve Rasnic Tem, Léa Silhol, Tanith Lee, David J. Schow, Freda Warrington, Elizabeth Massie, Melanie Tem, Kathe Koja, Brett Alexander Savory, Katherine Ramsland, Yvonne Navarro, Thomas S. Roche, Michael Marano, Bentley Little, John Shirley, Poppy Z. Brite, Brian Hodge, Elizabeth Engstrom, and Joe R. Lansdale. Outsiders is scheduled for an October 5th release. Does that mean it's out now? I don't know. Anyway, that's the sort of stuff I did yesterday instead of write.
Later, I read a couple of papers in the latest Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology — "A Late Cretaceous gaviloid crocodylian from eastern North America and the phylogenetic relationships of thoracosaurs" and "Description of the skull of Ctenochasma (Pterosauria) from the latest Jurassic of eastern France, with a taxonomic revision of European Tithonian Pterodactyloidea." Spooky and I played a really long game of Scrabble (it's becoming a habit), and watched astronomy shows on the Science Channel. Later still, I played the last few levels of Armed and Dangerous. This was such a fun game to play, I just wish it had been better written. If you're going to bother to do a weird Douglas Adams-Monty Python-Terry Gilliam sort of high fantasy with guns riff on Stars Wars, you should really find writers with wit to match the inspirational matter. Neil could have done a marvelous job on this, as could have Terry Pratchett.
Oh, and I coughed a lot.
And that, kiddos, brings us to Now. Tiddley pom. I'll keep watching the poll (Blogger people who wish to see it, follow this link and scroll down). You people are a bunch of damn perverts...
1:42 PM
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