A Most Extraordinary Dream!
Last night.
It was in the ’40s, in Vancouver.
There was a large Chinese community hall where gambling was going on but a young woman was going to be married there so the family cleared out all the gamblers and the gambling tables.
Now, in Dreamland, in the ’40s, in Vancouver, a young Chinese girl might be allowed to have three or four boyfriends at a time but once she’s engaged, she has to dump all of them but her intended.
So the young girl in question, who was never named in the dream, called her four boyfriends together in the hall after the gamblers were kicked out and told them she had to stop seeing them and why. They understood.
But a fifth one turns up and doesn’t want to let go - and neither does she. But the wedding’s today, there are obligations to her fiance’s family and things must be as they must be.
There’s a heartbreaking scene as they both decide she must do what’s best for the families and he leaves.
The bride’s mother comes in and starts putting up the Chinese Baroque decorations for the wedding. For some reason, she’s wearing her classical formal wedding get-up now.
I finally enter the scene as a character, rather than merely the observer.
I am a middle-aged Chinese woman, a priestess or wizardess of some sort, in full regalia, and as the bride’s mother finishes each of the decorations, I am wandering around with a small bowl of holy-water, splashing a bit on each object around the room by raising my hand just so with a practiced twist and a jerk to let just the right amount of water splash out.
Suddenly I move around a wide pillar up through which a dumb-waiter runs, to find that the side of it is a floor to ceiling mirror - I realize that this large room is also used for a Chinese dance school.
I shout out “Nobody told me there would be mirrors! I have to start all over again!”
The bride says “I have a mirror in my trunk.”
I say harshly “Everybody has a fucking mirror in their trunk!”
Everybody, the bride, her mother, the Chinese ladies helping her, all look at me in shock at my language. The observer part of me realizes that the priestess just shouldn’t be swearing, but she has reason to be upset at not knowing about the mirrors.
It turns out that there are other pillars with mirrors on them and even some on the walls behind wedding hangings and banners.
I tell the mother to send out kids and bridesmaids to check the whole building, the bathrooms, the offices, even the drug store and let me know where all the mirrors are.
I’m not happy at having to start all over again.
Now I usually have great dreams, usually science-fiction or fantasy epics, sometimes involving flying (at which point I almost always think ‘Thank god, I thought I could only do this when I was dreaming…’) but this is one of the most vivid and internally consistent I have had for a long time.
I had one a few months ago that was quite startling too.
There was an extraordinary ancient city in the mountainous deserts of Cental Asia, with domes of both the Muslim and Russian style, with high walls and broad streets.
I knew that the walls were made of porcelain and the domes were made of paper, because long ago, God had granted the city the blessing that it would never be conquered, why I never learned.
The ruler was called the Soltano, and he was looking for something called the Soltano’s Lyrica, about which he asked all travellers and merchants, including me, but about which I knew nothing, including what it was.
That’s all I remembered, but I loved the imagery.
I’m going to do something writing-wise with both dreams but I don’t know what yet…
February 5th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
A puzzle: Why does a possible atheist dream about contracts with the universe (which is what most fantasy genre stuff is to me), contracts with god (blessings), or social contracts such as the engagement rule, the rough-language rule, but the lack of a contract for a wedding in a hall, the only thing business-oriented in the dream, that god or the universe would have no part in, but that people alone would contract for, and would be the most likely “contract” to be satisfied “in the real world”? I hope you don’t find that in any way embarassing or insulting.
I usually just dream about books or modern Japan. Usually when I dream about books, I say to myself, “Aha! you’re dreaming, I can prove it.” “Open a book, and read a page. What do you see, what does it say?” and as I concentrate, what is written becomes less and less nebulous and just as the text becomes visible and ready to be read, I wake up…
Now as for Lyrica, it’s a pain-killer by Pfizer. Immediately I think of the Pfizer building in Tokyo. Voila, 1 order of separation to my own mind/dreams. Heh.
As for “soltano”, Sultan in Italian is “Sultano”, so we can assume Italy conquered this unconquerable city of yours at some point. :)
February 6th, 2006 at 9:23 am
Yes! Some of those same things in that first paragraph go through my head too, in more than one way…
I love my dreams and while I think about them, I try not to overanalyze them, no matter how interesting that might be.
You hear stories about ideas during the day triggering dreams at night, or that any impressions of continuity or consistency are just a post-sleep attempt to make sense of jumbled images, but I prefer to hold on to the story line view.
The day I had the Chinese wedding dream I had been considering re-reading Sean Stewart’s excellent Galveston, which takes place many years after magic reappears in the world and causes the total collapse of civilization, except in isolated pockets with people who know or learn how to deal with it. Another story in the same universe has part of its action in Vancouver’s Chinatown, where knowledge of old Chinese magic has helped a small part of the city to survive. Maybe a trigger for that aspect of the dream?
Now, I don’t think I knew about Pfizer’s product but perhaps the Soltano needed his Weltschmerz assuaged…
Thanks, Jeff.
February 7th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
I fancy myself a philospher. Now I think most philosophers are crazy, however I am an strong adherent of “naturalism”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_%28philosophy%29 This philosphy states that although magic & the supernatural may exist, they can nonetheless be studied in the same way as non-magic. Now the only problem with naturalism, is that quantum indeterminism has no natural explanation. So poof! naturalism disappears, just like magic.
I also fancy myself a logician. Ask me about it some time.
February 8th, 2006 at 10:12 am
Since there are recent, rational explanations for most ’supernatural’ phenomena, and the explanations for the still unexplained are, based on past performance, likely just down the line, I don’t even bother allowing for them as possible at all.
Such beliefs are really just an sloshing overflow from the Stone Age and the Dark Ages, and we’ve been mopping all that up in fits and starts beginning back with Aristotle, and then later, with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and since 2001, the Future.
I deconstruct rainbows, bad moods and folktales, constantly moved and inspired by what we have done as accidentally sapient animals in a muddy, confusing world (as opposed to aberrant angels expelled from Paradise), as clever and mean and mad as we are, as lonely in the universe as we are.
I ‘m not going to want to die, but God, what a wonderful life it is on the way there.
February 9th, 2006 at 8:31 am
Hm, you did notice that naturalism says that if you can study magic naturalistically, then it ceases to be magic?
Anyway, the reason I brought it up is that in many fantasy stories, if there’s something that’s wanted and there’s no method of translating it from a vague want to a hard physical reality, I’m not interested in the story.
The only thing in the real world that works like that is sales, which is backwards, you start with a hard physical reality and work backwards to convince someone that’s what they wanted in the first place.
February 9th, 2006 at 9:24 am
Your last paragraph is great (LOLing & ROFLMAOing), but I’m not sure I understand your middle paragraph exactly. Elucidate further, if you please.
February 10th, 2006 at 8:11 am
Well I didn’t want to insult any religions, since there are plenty of deserving politicians in the queue ahead of them, but paragraph 2 was for things like “The boss said ‘Let there be light.’”. I mean, he didn’t say, “Well I wanted this thing that was y’know like a little like a wave a bit like a particle, and don’t tell anyone radio waves are just the same thing only at a different frequency, oh and by the way I also want some redshift for my Quasars and that sort of thing.”
Then the boss spells out his 15 [crack], “Oy!” 10 commandments, and then the engineers making the light are almost done and all of sudden the boss says, “Oh, ya, wouldn’t it be cool if light could only go at 300,000km/sec?” and the engineers go and trash their photon designs and start over.
That’s what’s wrong with most fantasy stories. There is a hidden element of ancient thinking in them, or they are incomplete in some major way.
Can you tell I like hard-SF and satire?
February 10th, 2006 at 10:15 am
Ah, much clearer and very interesting points. I must agree with most of it.
I like the fantasists who seem like they’re living in the very universe they’ve created, like they know it, inhabiting it like God, and making me suspend my disbelief, which increases my enjoyment and satisfaction no end.
Granted that type of author is rare, but wonderful to find.
Any suggestions, Jeff, or anybody?
February 10th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
Early James P. Hogan SF did that for me in the 80’s. I’ve grown to like symbolic works more recently (SF: PKD, Vonnegut, Pynchon, lit: Sallinger). Lord of the Rings is a tightly constructed work.
Please note however, that of the thousands of books I’ve read, probably only a few hundred were fiction and I never finished LOTR for the primary reason that I was not able to construct a method to remember what’s in it. I’m bad with names, but good with symbols and images. For example it took me a while to get used to the name “Frodo”, however in PKD’s Valis, “Horselover Fat” is described as derived from PKD so I just think “PKD” and I’m done. I could also probably draw the story-boards for “Matrix Revolutions” from memory.