Dickensian - Russian - supermarket - dinner. I sat down yesterday to write those four words down, then gave it up. The dream was so long and complex that it would take too much effort to recall all the scenes, and anyway I'd find them vanishing even as I tried, as so often the case. But just now the four words came to me again, and I checked that none of the scenes were lost, though of course most of the detail will be a lot weaker more than a day later. But it goes to show, a bit of writing down can fix dreams.

I or she or he was a... perhaps an orphan?, a character with a history, someone someone wanted to know about, or to stop someone know about. I was in the house (I'll assume it was "I" though it also had an odd feeling of me watching a story of someone else), and then someone came. They were the one who wanted to find out or repress the family history. I bundled myself into a neighbouring room, an attic or an arras, or a space under the floorboards, somewhere where I could hide from them but overhear.

He had a fruity voice, perhaps cruel, drawing out. He wore old fashioned clothing, I think a waistcoat and a hat, and primped himself like a pompous character from Dickens. This is why I call this episode Dickensian. There was, I think, a genealogy, a family tree, either recited or shown.

Scene two was in Russia, a snowy region full of distrust and dissent. Marina -- someone called Marina, or actually my friend Marina -- was a kind of agent, or superhero, or leading figure in an underground network. I saw how dangerous what she actually did was, and my respect for her increased. There might have been railway lines, or tunnels to go through, perhaps a border to break for.

Next the supermarket, an endless vista as these often are in dreams, and I'm not very clear any more about what I was doing in there. I faintly recall an abundance, a sort of Goblin Market stacked up on the shelves, and I was walking around stocking up on good things. Perhaps rich cakes and chocolate; perhaps rich wet fruits; or things for holidays. There might have been a shoplifting incident. It might even have been me doing it.

Over in one part of the supermarket were long communal tables where feasts and dinners were spread out, and among them was my company's, probably the boring Christmas dinner I didn't ever want to go to. I wasn't one of the popular people who'd be up with the interesting talkers in the middle, but I'd be stuck as usual with ugly L. or boring S. or, oddly, whatsisname from another job long ago, temporary and with kids.

The most persistent fascination of this is that I dreamt of Marina like that, so real, so vivid, and only a week or so after dreaming of Judy.

I was outside my old elementary school with some people, doing really unimportant stuff. The moon rose, and my mother wanted a picture of it, but the image of it on the surface of the sky was generally too dark. I was tall enough to see the projector of the moon in the west, which was much brighter, so I took the camera to get a picture of it.

Before I could get set, we spotted a large, brown, somewhat banded planet in the distance. It was banded more like metamorphic rock than Jupiter; that is, the bands had tapered ends rather than being a continuous ring. I wondered if it was gaseous, although it didn't feel all that big, as if it were something about the size of Earth itself. I also wondered if this marked the end of the world.

Still before I had a decent picture of the moon-projector, my parents and I began floating up into the sky. I managed to pull off two shots in flight, from high enough that the Earth and atmosphere were a blue curve across the bottom of the field of view. We landed in some sort of space station. In a major digression from my usual dream physics, normal considerations of spaceflight and matter such as inertia, atmospheric pressure, and the walls of the station itself hadn't been a problem.

The station was made up of three rooms: a bathroom, a properly sci-fi looking control room, and a catch-all kitchen/living/dining room. We got oriented and discovered we were on course for the mysterious planet, when an impact shook the station. The computer started speaking in an annoying synthesized voice, repeating "The boom. Is unstabilized. The boom. Is unstabilized..."

There were very few repetitions of that, however. There was another, more serious problem the computer needed to inform us of. "The power reserve. Is. AAllmmoosstt... em......ty......" I suggested turning off all the electric things, and though one appliance was turned off, they left the refrigerator running and lamp on while they tried to light a kerosene lantern. Matches do not burn well in space.


I find myself back in Buffalo, in a warehouse-like building. Everything's gray, either paint or concrete, harshly lit by four mercury vapor bulbs in the ceiling. This is some sort of strange physics lab, set on UB's North Campus, although the building itself doesn't exist there in reality. In the first part of the dream, it was a little more spacious, and I was there doing physics homework out of a very strange book. It was paperback, around A4/U.S. Letter size, bound by hobbit snot, with approximately 6-point type. Despite the tiny print, readability was not affected.

Somehow, the Moon had settled into a geosynchronous orbit over UB, so they had built a tower up to a Moon base, painted the color of green of oxidized copper in the middle of this building. I went up there to visit someone. The base itself turned out to be laid out much like a hospital. There was a big guy who looked a lot like George Foreman there who was roughly in charge of guarding the patients from escaping back to Earth. I don't remember finding whoever I was looking for, so I returned to Earth.

The physics lab was gone now; the room was like a glorified garage with a ledge-and-table combo around the top, where we (myself, my girlfriend, and some enemies from my childhood) were busy noding. One of the guys was trying to do things like kick me under the table, but I had miraculous powers of dodging, and he only ended up bothering the guy next to me.

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