Category: Dream Journal

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Dream Journal

Vision of Magic while Trying to Sleep

So I just had one of the more powerful, scary magic experiences of my life.

I was hanging out with my dad in my living room talking about god-knows-what. We were kind of talking about magic. He was trying to talk me down from considering it. Then a funny thing happened — we both saw something that should be impossible. A magazine with which I’m very familiar — the issue of Cabinet with the article on Boethius and his wheel of fortune, the one thing that most helped me get centered while I was in jail — was seen to be levitating several feet off the floor. I didn’t mean to point it out, I didn’t want it to be real, but I did anyways. My dad and I lost volition. Fell to the floor. Stared and stared. Our vision left us. I started talking, trying to talk my way out of believing, and my voice kept going but I heard no sound. I began trying to signal that we needed to cut it out, using the throat-slash hand gesture. My dad held tighter on to me, believing I was saying something more sinister. So then I couldn’t gesture.

All of this really happened — in a dream I just woke up from. It’s the first dream I can remember since the last dream I can remember, which I had near the beginning of February. It was one of the scarier experiences I’ve had in a dream in awhile, because it’s comforting in a strange way.

It means that magic can’t really hurt you as long as it’s only a dream…

…

Got that?

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Dream Journal

Portcullis Dream

(Let me tell you about my dream this morning…)

We were walking up the stairs to your apartment. I was behind you. You opened your front door, turned around, and suddenly noticed me. With a gasp, you hit an emergency switch which slammed down a portcullis — a genuine medieval portcullis — over the entry. Immediately you recovered, apologized… a bit embarrassed perhaps… and began trying to retract the damned thing. It was stuck. There was a solid mechanism, but it was finicky, antiquated. This went on for a long while. It got awkward. I felt silly helping you from outside. I don’t know how we got it open. Or who. But the portcullis ended up on the floor. I don’t know if we just broke it down, or what, but by the end of the dream we were making out on top of it… metal spikes and all.

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Dream Journal

An Inferior God

Story interpreted from a dream in three parts. Recovered/copied from where I originally wrote it, a wiki maintained for my own creative writing.

Suppose a technologically advanced alien civilization does somehow accidentally interferes in the development of another culture. They are forced by circumstance to rescue it from annihilation — a rogue individual sets himself up as a world dictator, or some such disaster, a disaster which could in fact be their fault. The damage is done and the worst happens: the aliens (or their agents) begin to be worshipped as gods. The culture’s development shifts focus to them instead of keeping any semblance of forward momentum. The mentality of a cargo cult sets in.

Then the only moral thing for those aliens to do would be breaking the culture of its dependency; the only way to do that is to further interfere. Very methodically they must instill the idea that god has limited resources, that [a] god isn’t omnipotent. To do so such that seems it’s been this way all along. Offerings to the gods might come in the form of donated energy. CCTV cameras are the way to watch over worshippers and guard holy places. The central idea is for the “contaminated” culture to indulge its obsession and work through it, to raise its collective self-esteem by doing as much for the gods as the gods have shown they can do for themselves. Outwardly it may appear as an oppressive and subjugated society, but the ultimate goal internally is to subvert the entire artificial structure.

The deals with a few things: how oppressive societies contain the seeds of their own destruction, but also how [human] nature inherently desires order, explanation, even its own subjugation. It also deals with the pace of enlightenment, in that the artificial boundaries are only crossed when an individual chooses to cross them. It contains the hope that, even with senseless repression, some good may come of it.