(At some point in the distant past, my cousin Eric persuaded me to start keeping a dream diary in an effort to develop lucid dreaming. This has not happened. They are, however, absolutely insane, and quite entertaining. I’ve decided to share these with all of you here on the blog. These won’t be in any particular order; I’ll simply post them as desired. Warning: my dreams are not always politically correct, or safe for ordinary human minds.
Enjoy.)
Night of February 26, 2018:
The earliest part of this dream I can remember is a wide-angle shot, from above, of my mental image of Storm’s End. It’s a big dumb tower, of course. The outer walls are not presently visible, the reason for which will shortly become apparent. There’s a party on, because apparently some part of my brain thinks that Stannis would allow anyone, anywhere in any of his holdings (all two that he has at a given time), to throw a party. Eventually people start slipping off to their rooms, but some remain in the lower halls to revel and such.
We are now informed (this dream has a prose narrative built in) that the castle is flooding. No one is concerned, it’s happened before. Those of you who read A Song of Ice and Fire or watch Game of Thrones may be aware that
A. Winter is coming.
B. Storm’s End is on the fucking ocean.
Id est, in spite of falling temperatures, the ocean has risen hundreds of feet and this is fine with everyone. Welcome to dreamland, kiddies. It’s dumber here. Eventually, however, the floodwaters rise so high that they start consuming parts of the castle. Apparently the Drowned God is taking the most roundabout way possible of foiling Euron, namely by sinking the entire continent he’s trying to conquer. We watch from within a room that has a very similar layout to my parent’s bedroom, waiting for the rising waters.
Now we are hiding in a weird overgrown red-brick mansion (still in the same room), and are aware there’s some sort of nebulous beast or malevolent entity in the house with us. Wow, thanks for the seamless transition, brain. We’ve gone from surrealist drowning horror to much more typical horror. I am myself for this segment, which is rarer than you might expect in my dreams. Some versions of DreamCul are peerless, superhuman warriors who would immediately seek out this supernatural home-invader and dice it to pieces with awesome sword combos.
This is not such a version; this version runs downstairs, exists the manor through its back doors, snags an AK-74SU (my dreams are very careful to use either real weapons or meticulously designed custom pieces, because of course they are) from some fellow the monster already took down outside, and blazes away ineffectually at it through the glass paneling on one of the back doors. The creature appears to be a hunched, vaguely humanoid thing that spends too much time at the gym and constantly fumes the air around itself with SHADOW GAS. If I didn’t know better, I’d say my dreams are ripping off Shadow of the Colossus a little bit. It absorbs the bullets with no visible effect, but appears unable to grasp the idea of charging DreamCul. Before it can finish this tactical calculus, someone throws an incendiary grenade on it. This at least annoys it enough for DreamCul to escape.
I beat down a Spetsnaz man in a ghillie suit (note to Spetsnaz operatives: I don’t believe for a fucking second I could take you guys, but look at this trainwreck, nothing here makes sense) and steal his… laser rifle. Okay, fine, whatever. Most of the dream’s remainder is a tense stealth sequence; I am now some kind of bald, gaunt ex-con. Sudden changes of identity happen often in my dreams, and are not a matter of concern. Two groups of four Spetsnaz each advance on the manor from a copse of trees on one side, and straight up a hill on the other. Despite the verdant, open meadows laid out behind them and the fact that multiple waves will attack the creature before the dream’s end, we cannot see any further Spetsnaz incoming. Perhaps they have cloaking devices.
Convict ex-con man takes cover behind a low, moss-covered piece of metal in some dense pale grasses, neither of which were present in the dream a few seconds ago. Unfortunately, I woke up before we could figure out what the hell any of this meant.
Ashenvein Gate: Stories & Dreams 