Dreams

I have weird dreams.That's just a statement of fact.

Many people say, "oh, I have weird dreams too. This one time..." I don't doubt that there are many, many people who have dreams as strange, or stranger than I do. But I haven't yet met any of them. Today, for example, my roommate said "I had a really funny dream. Wanna hear about it?" And she proceeded to explain her "funny" dream.

Apparently this girl she was best friends with when they were little was with her and they were at a dance party. Then the song changed to "choose the right" for some weird reason. And they started to jam out to choose the right.

That's all.

I say this not to disparage. Not to mock or judge. Simply to illustrate. This is not a weird dream. Maybe a little random. Not actually funny. Sort of an insight into what things her brain thinks about when it's unconscious. But not weird. Or at least, not weird in the same sense that I mean.

In these situations weird refers to Lewis Carroll-esque. Especially Lewis Carroll crossed with Tim Burton, which we recently experienced. (And which, frankly, could have been a lot better than it was, but was still pretty cool).

Unfortunately I don't ever remember my dreams unless I tell someone about it or write it down within seconds of waking up. I'm just left with a few scattered images and the distinct impression of "uh... that was just weird."

**Side note: The word weird is weird.It's one of the few exceptions to the I before E rule. I've only found like 3 so far (not counting names) and one of them is only an exception in certain accents, and not in others: Deity. And I can't even remember what the third one was.

Sometimes my dreams are creepy. Sometimes they actually make me wake up freaked out. This usually happens if extra-planar demons are involved. And sometimes they're just odd, and not quite weird. Like the ones where I lose my teeth. (That happens a lot. I think I have a paranoia about losing my permanent teeth.) Sometimes they're happy. Sometimes they're epic adventures.

Most of the time they're just random assortments of stuff that disjointedly happen and eventually form a story with a plot, but one that would only be understood by Lewis Carroll enthusiasts. (Sorry about mentioning him so frequently, but he's really the only example there is of the sort of thing I'm talking about.)

Imagine Han Solo (as a bad guy), a pirate ship house, a frozen ice room prison, my old cross country assistant coach, coke, a murder mystery, an explosion, dancing, and cow pajamas all as main elements in the same dream.

Yes, that actually happened.

But that was actually just the prologue. Sorry, but the point of the post has yet to be mentioned. Oh, and sorry there are no pictures. I can't really think of any that would effectively illustrate this anyway. "This" being a dream that I had, which was epically awesome.

Sadly, it won't seem as awesome as it really was. Language muddles things horribly. Not to mention that Inception was right about a couple of things. A) You never remember the very beginning of a dream. You just sort of end up somewhere. And B) Sometimes there are loads of details and stuff in a dream that make sense then, but when you wake up, are either too weird to understand or too fuzzy to remember.

For these reasons, my narrative will not be so interesting as I wish it could be. And sorry it took so long to get around to starting it.

Jenny and I were ambassadors to this land that I'm sure was heavily influenced by a sort of demo game of Lords of Magic that I played. (Which, by the way, would be really interesting except that it's so old, that my computer scrolls the maps at hyperspeed, and I can't ever see anything, so therefore I can't play.)

Jenny's roommie/our friend from home, Bekah, was in the dream as well. And thus it begins.

In this land were several leaders. Sort of chieftains. Not quite kings. They were powerful mages, and each one ruled a different element. The nicer ones, which were more friendly to our ambassador's mission of uniting the land, were air and earth. The more independent, and much fiercer, ones were fire and ice. Water existed, but somehow never came into play.

We split up to accomplish our missions. The earth, water, and air kingdoms were on the plains, and the fire and ice people lived on the top of this enormous cliff. By enormous I mean like taller than mount everest, and wide enough to fit oceans and house two separate kingdoms.

I met the ice people first, by wandering through their store. It was like a department store crossed with a shopko. There were lots of snow suits there. Obviously, there had to be. It was very cold. The people were like giant vikings. At least ten feet tall, with huge muscles, heavy beards, and all wearing waterproof overalls. (The snow suits).

I don't remember why the things that happened next actually happened. I think it may have been a sort of, "if you pass our test, we'll listen to you" kind of thing. I got grown really super big and looked down on the ocean where all their ships were sailing. They were making some kind of formations with their tiny wooden boats. The rest is all a bit fuzzy, but I remember some kind of disaster, boats crashing, maybe even a tidal wave.

Whatever it was, it ended up catapulting me back to my original size and over to the half of the giant cliff that the fire elemental mage lived on. For some reason the fire guys lived in the cold as well. *shrug* Just like the ice guys' main thing was sailing, and the earth people's (see later paragraphs) was that candy stuff, the fire people's main thing was dragons. And that is much less surprising than a race of fire worshipers living in an icy wasteland.

The dragons didn't take kindly to having me violently thrown into their midst, and they started going crazy, like wild horses stomping a snake. One by one they all took off, and the last one, I somehow knew, I had to tie some ropes on to or I was done for. It looked a little bit like toothless, except for much spikier and fiercer.

Somehow I managed to tie a rope around each shoulder joint of the wings, and I hung on tight. What happened next was a little like sky-diving on steroids mixed with bull riding. The dragon ran for the edge of the cliff and dove off. Not flying. But actually diving, like into a pool, face down and wings closed. All that held me on to it were two separate ropes tied with shoddy knots. If my hands slipped down the rope, I was done for.

Picture an Olympic high diver. Now picture a pool at about sea level. And picture the diving board at well over thirty thousand feet. In case you need to know, that's approximately a six mile drop. And I definitely had not brought my parachute with me.

Only seconds before we were going to hit the ground, the dragon pulled up, flared its wings, and started flying parallel to the ground, like the death dive we had just completed was no big deal. Now it was even harder to hold on to the ropes because the dragon was flying forward under its own power, and I wasn't. We started careening around through a city that looked remarkably like a super busy airport terminal. I'm pretty sure there were even moving sidewalks with hand rails and escalators and everything.

We were going so fast that I could see the different winds, and they all had labels on them. I remember thinking, "oh cool. Now I know what the different winds are called." But they weren't things like "north wind" or "head wind" or any of that. They were things like "king kong wind", which was the bulkiest, and most obviously labelled. But there were others with names like that and they were all different sizes. Tall and thin, short and long, square, and lots of them were sort of cylinder-y. I also kind of guessed that we were flying through the air country.

We had to duck and roll and swerve to not hit any of the winds or they'd be mad at us. After a mad dash to not get attacked by angry winds, I was suddenly back at the earth compound, where I had left Jenny to do some negotiating.

Bekah was the Earth Mage. She controlled things like growing plants and using different (chemical) elements to meet the needs of her people. One of the advances she had made was the creation of magnetic candy. Yes, magnetic candy. They were shaped and colored like sweet tarts. The kind that come in the smartees type wrappers, and not the flat ones or the giant tubes.

These magnetic candies could be used as buttons or buckles, or even for wearing earrings, but they were also edible. It was the pride and joy of the earth kingdom, and Jenny was really excited about them when I showed up. I was impressed and interested, but had a hard time showing it because of my devastatingly death defying ride. So I was avoiding painful splattering, charbroiling, freezing, drowning, and being tornadoed to death, while Jenny was being wined and dined safe and comfy in the Earth Mage compound.

Also, Bekah mage had a sword just like Sting, which she had let me borrow for the trip up the cliff to the fire and ice mages. It didn't really help, but I was sad to give it back. It was cool, and sort of had a green aura. Which made sense, since it belonged to Earth mage.

Then we all looked at some maps and ate food, and that's when I woke up.

So yeah, it was pretty epic. I wish I could show you a picture of it all. It would make things make a lot more sense, and have them be much more intriguing. Sadly, even if I could draw well enough, it's one of those things where a lot of the magic gets lost in translation. It would look cool, but you'd never know the feeling and the aura of all of it.

**UPDATE:

I changed my mind about pictures. I decided that even if you couldn't see the coolness, at least you could know where it was, so I made you some maps for your enlightenment.

** UPDATE 2: Sorry about the smallness. Blog used to let you click on the pictures and make them bigger in another window. It doesn't anymore. But I'm sure you get the idea.