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Dream Journal, April . . . 18? 19? 2021

I actually had a dream with a semblance of some kind of throughline last night, but I cannot for the life of me remember what it was.

So instead, I’m going to share some snippets of the previous nights’ dreams.

I can remember trying to tell someone something about Shirley MacLaine, but couldn’t remember her name. I described her as an older actress with red hair and that she used to be a dancer. Her name didn’t occur to me until I was awake, and if “Shirley MacLaine” wasn’t the first thought I had when I woke up, it was pretty darned close.

Another one was something about taking a boat from Los Angeles to New York City. In this dream, Los Angeles was roughly where Miami is in real life, but it was definitely Los Angeles. I knew where things were, like I do in Los Angeles, but don’t know about Miami.

Anyway, the boat wasn’t transportation, it was just a sightseeing thing that in real life would take 20 days, but in my dream it was going to take an afternoon.

I got lost getting to the port and I think I ended up at the airport. I also think I may have stood in line for a long time at the airport before realizing I was in the wrong place, but maybe not.

The boat was really small — just a small seating area and like a kitchen/snack bar kind of place. There were other people there besides myself but I really only saw one person clearly. He was a good-looking younger man. Maybe he looked like a young John Travolta, maybe.

Anyhow, we never went out into the open sea (thank God) and somehow the authorities ended up sinking the boat because they thought we were harboring some kind of fugitive or something.

The young man and I were the last people on the boat, and so we had time to wrap our phones in plastic slide-closure bags to protect them from the water and . . . .

Well, I assume that I ended up in the water, but I don’t know for sure.

Gratuitous Amazon Link: Today’s book, Catherine House, by Elisabeth Thomas, is a good one, and also a really creepy one. Catherine House is, well, it takes the place of college/university, but the director insists that it is neither a college nor a university. Room and board for Catherine House is free, but the students who attend the school give up three years of their lives. They cannot bring things from home, and will have no contact with the world outside of Catherine House until graduation. Our protagonist, Ines Murillo, has never really fit in anywhere, and she feels that Catherine House may be her chance to become something. It wouldn’t be a creepy book if everything went smoothly, though, and it doesn’t go smoothly. And it is awesome. And creepy. And Ines “majors” in art history and I immediately thought “why didn’t anyone tell me that art history was an option when I was picking my major?”

Series I’ve Read: Philip Jose Farmer’s The Dungeon

Oh. Wow. While going through my memory for books that I’ve read, I just remembered The Dungeon.

The Dungeon is about a group of adventurers traveling through, well a dungeon that’s somewhere undefined. It may have been underground or in a pocket universe or wherever.

Our original point-of-view character is Clive Folliot, who is looking for his missing brother, Neville. Along the way he teams up with a giant spider, a cyborg, and his own granddaughter (great-granddaughter? great-great granddaughter?) They have adventures with public domain fictional characters, figures from mythology, and so forth.

Here’s the kicker, though. The Dungeon is a six-part series where the first and last books were written by one writer, and the middle four were written by three different writers.

And for the most part, the three writers play well together and the story holds together really well. Until the last book, that is, when apparently the original writer didn’t like where the middle four books had gone and wrenched it in another direction entirely without any rationale for it at all.

Obviously, Richard Lupoff, the writer of the first and sixth books, has never done a round robin story. Unless you set out where you want to go ahead of time, you’ll never go where you want to.

I have one particularly, well, I don’t know if “fond” is the word. “Schadenfreude-full,” maybe, of me saying at the beginning of a round robin story that we should plan it out ahead of time and one writer in particular vetoing it because it’s “more fun” if it’s full of surprises for the writers. So, when it came my turn, I gave that writer a surprise. I could see where they were heading and when my turn came, I interpreted what they had said in a completely different way and headed the story off in a different direction.

They threw a fit about how they were heading for resolution X and I just said, “You wanted surprises. I gave you a surprise.”

So, let’s hear it for our three middle writers — Bruce Coville, Charles de Lint, and Robin Wayne Bailey, for doing a great job on those middle books. I’ve never read anything else by any of those authors, I don’t think. I’ll have to look into it.

Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is the March 2020 Fantastic Strangelings Book Club pick — We Ride Upon Sticks, by Quan Barry. This was my favorite book club pick until July’s Mexican Gothic, which we’ll do later. We Ride Upon Sticks is set in Danvers, Massachusetts, which is where the original accusations of the Salem Witch Trials took place. The 1989 Danvers Falcons girls’ field hockey team is the worst in their district (in the book, in real life they actually were an excellent team). Then they sell their souls to Emilio Estevez and suddenly things start to improve for their team. Is it teamwork and friendship, or is it witchcraft?

Dream Journal 4/16/21

I’m journaling my dreams (a) for content and (b) because I want to get back into writing fiction some day and maybe writing about my dreams will spark a short story, novella, or even maybe a novel.

Short stories. That really never occurred to me. I bet that the little plot bunnies I’ve been toying with and that never seem to pan out could be reworked into short stories. I’d maybe also get experience submitting them to fiction sites and working with editors to see if I could do that professionally at all.

I have a lot of performance anxiety regarding my writing. I think it’s to do with how what self-esteem I have is based on my ability to do things well, rather than my value as a human being. I write and write and when I hit a roadblock I tend to throw my hands up in frustration and quit.

If I restructured the part that I’m working on as a standalone though . . . . I think I might be on to something here.

I don’t know if there was a real throughline in last night’s dream, but let’s see.

It started out on a beach with a bunch of people who had dogs. I took a liking to one of their dogs and asked if I could pick her up. She was cute, but kind of strange looking, with a long body, like a dachsund or something, and also longer legs than you’d expect.

The dog’s owner just up and disappeared, leaving me with a dog I didn’t expect to have to take care of. I went home and my home was a smaller place with this tiny spiral staircase in the corner. It looked more like a set of shelves than a staircase, but there was a door at the top.

At some point, while still trying to figure out where the dog’s owner went, I squeezed myself up those stairs and discovered that the upstairs was way roomier than the downstairs and had a laundry room and things. Alex was up there and I had thought he’d said that he didn’t go up there, but he’d been hanging around up there for a while (this is probably about him moving out six months ago).

At some point, I met a rock and roll singer who was in some kind of mobility scooter thing and we went to a church with a group of people (I’m not sure where they came from). The church was having communion and the bread looked like it had sprinkles baked into it, like a confetti cake.

We didn’t go into the sanctuary but hung out in the narthex (the area just outside the sanctuary doors). Some kind of shipping container arrived and it turned out that the rest of the singer’s band was in the container. They gave a concert then, and I accidentally groped the other lead performer in the band while trying to reach the volume control to turn it up.

The crowd for the impromptu concert was really large so I guess the people inside the sanctuary joined us.

I never did find the dog’s owner, though.

Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is by one of my favorite YA/kidlit authors (I suspect I’ve said this before, because I really do love her books!), Ally Carter: Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Valor, the first book in the, well, Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Valor series. I had to redo that post, because I totally forgot to actually copy the Amazon Associates link and instead pasted my last post there. Augh! Anyway, Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Valor is about April, who has been bounced around from foster home to foster home. Miraculously, she has a note from her mom promising to return and a key. Events conspire to her living in the house that the key comes from and that begins her search for the mysteries of the Winterborn family. The second book has been out for a while and I really have to read that one. As soon as I finish the other dozen books on my TBR list.

Dream Journal

Last night’s dream was a doozy. As a bit of background, my dad’s family was never really close. We saw family members maybe once a year, once every two years, things like that.

My uncle died in December. The first we heard of that was when a . . . what’s the probate version of an ambulance chaser? Basically, it’s a company that will get money from the probate court for you, but will take 33% of whatever you inherit.

My dad thought it was a scam of some sort, but eventually he was able to ascertain that my uncle had, in fact, died. Now my dad is trying to figure out how much my uncle left. My uncle was childless and died intestate. By our calculations, my dad stands to inherit 1/3 of it, then my aunt’s kids will get 1/6, and my other uncle’s kids will each get 1/9. That may be nothing or it may be quite a bit of money for each of his surviving relatives.

So. Dream.

I dreamed that I had two friends over for dinner and was making steaks. I don’t really “speak” steak, so my brain was, like, “steak?” and threw in something that looks like halibut steaks made from beef. I mean, they’re . . . steaks, right?

Sometime before I started dinner, my dad, who had been out of town, came home and brought my recently-deceased uncle with him. Now, my uncle didn’t look like my uncle looked in real life, and I even acknowledged that in my dream. He looked like my dad looked 15, 20 years ago.

I’m putting dinner on and I realized that I only had four steaks and that I’d need a steak for my uncle. I head to the store.

When I get there, one of my coworkers walks through the door right behind me. I get stopped by the manager, who tells me that my shoes aren’t acceptable for their store. I may have been wearing open-toed sandals, I may have been barefoot. I think it changed back and forth.

I told him that I just wanted to buy one steak and I’d be out of there and he said that he would turn a blind eye to the state of my feet as long as I would buy a pair of shoes in the store and so I went to the shoe department, which had all of the shoes hanging from a kind of a rack, I think, and grabbed a pair of ankle-high slippers. Not wanting to take any more time than necessary, I took the tags off and put them in my pocket, so that I could pay for the slippers with the steak.

I never made it to the butcher’s department, though, because then the head of store security stopped me to tell me that my footwear still wasn’t appropriate and then she demanded to see my back under my shirt. I turned around and lifted my shirt so she could see it and she did something. Touched it? Rubbed something on it? And said that she thought I was okay, but that I couldn’t come back into the store until I got a clean bill of health from my doctor, and then they escorted me from the store.

I texted my coworker to see if she was still in the store, but didn’t get an answer, and finally decided that we’d just order a pizza.

Oh, and as I walked back to my car, I put my hand in my pocket and felt the tags in there. I knew that I’d have to get a clean bill of health, because, even though I hadn’t been given much choice, I felt guilty about “stealing” the slippers.

Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is Children of Blood and Bone, by Tomi Adeyemi. There’s a lot to like here, though it wasn’t perfect (like, how come no matter how fast they traveled, they couldn’t get any kind of lead on Inan?). I’m still working on the next book in the Legacy of Orïsha series, Children of Virtue and Vengeance, which, for some reason, is nearly not as interesting to me.

Harry Potter, Part 1

I need words for Camp NaNoWriMo and so I guess I’ll free-associate for a while about Harry Potter.

I loved that series. I mean, loved it. Until Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. That’s about when I started to come out from under Rowling’s spell. Actually, that’s not really true.

I found Half-Blood Prince to be underwhelming but I still loved the series. A group of us got together to “spork” it. I’m not sure where the term “spork” in this context came from. The original “spork” is actually pretty much a runcible spoon, which is a spoon with pointy bits on the end of the bowl of the spoon. The biggest difference, apparently, is that a runcible spoon is fork, spoon, and knife. The original runcible spoons had a sharp edge for cutting.

Anyway, somehow the term “spork” came to mean. Never mind, I found a possible explanation on Fanlore.com: The term comes from the expression “It was so bad it made me want to gouge my eyes out with a spork.”

I really thought that HBP would be the low point in the series, but then Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out and, ope. Somehow, the last two books threw the weaknesses of the series as a whole into sharper relief.

I’m going to hopefully dig up a couple of thousand words on what made me love the series in the first place and probably eventually go into why HBP and DH were such a letdown for me.

Wow. Why *did* I love Harry Potter so much?

I found Harry to be a very sympathetic character in the first few books. An orphan living with abusive relatives certainly had a British kids’ book feel to it, and I felt very sorry for Harry.

He also made an excellent point-of-view character for the audience. We also knew nothing about the wizarding world and seeing it all through the eyes of an abused child was emotionally gratifying.

I could see why Harry took an instant dislike to Draco. I am an adult, though, and I have missed out on what would have been good friendships because they rubbed me the wrong way the first time I met them.

I used to write Harry Potter fanfiction and I’ve used this meeting a couple of times. Full disclosure: I also used to write Harry/Draco relationship fic. Nothing sexy though — just hand-holding and first kisses and things. They’re kids and I’m ace. I had one story where our Harry switched timelines with a Harry who accepted Draco’s offer of friendship and things were very different.

But I digress.

Well, not really a digression, come to think of it. I had a lot of friends in the Harry Potter fandom and that probably made me more devoted to it. My Harry Potter friends were also my real friends. I knew that they had my backs and I hope they knew that I had theirs.

We’d talk about our Harry Potter Houses like it was a real thing. I’m a Hufflepuff, thank you very much. And even though I don’t love the series as much as I did 20 years ago, I still have a lot of fondness for it, and wear a Hufflepuff necklace that Alex got me in 2019 to work nearly every day.

The first few books were full of wonder and magic and had just enough disappointing things or confusing things or plot holes to hang fanfiction on. When I’m happy with canon, I have a harder time coming up with what we referred to as “plot bunnies.”

There were engaging characters starting with Ron and Hermione and going on to include Luna, Neville, Fred and George, and so on.

One of the other things that made Harry Potter appealing to me is the translations. Harry Potter is such a phenomenon that there are something like 100 translations of it, official and unofficial. As a wannabe polyglot, that is very appealing. I’ve read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in Mandarin, and understood quite a bit of it. I also have it in Italian in hard copy and in German as an audiobook. My original plan was to get all of the books in all of the languages. This plan ended, being replaced by all of Rick Riordan’s mythology books in all of the languages.

This is not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it is quite a few words, so I’m going to set this up to post later and will come back and start a new Harry Potter post later. Maybe tomorrow, maybe after I’ve reread a couple of books so I can try to pinpoint exactly what the magic was.

Augh! I Need to Go Somewhere!

I have a three-day weekend coming up, and Deimos has a vet appointment on Friday afternoon, but that still gives me two days to go . . . somewhere.

Maybe I’ll go state parking again. Choke Canyon State Park supposedly has 9,999 reservation slots. I highly doubt that, but I’m very curious. Maybe I’ll go out there. It’s not like they’ll run out of reservation slots.

Or maybe I’ll just do what I’ve done most weekends and hide in my house.

In Gratuitous Amazon Link news, we’ve finally hit 2020. I know this because today’s link is the first book in Jenny Lawson’s Fantastic Strangelings book club, Follow Me to Ground, by Sue Rainsford. This was a creepy one, but obviously one I’d recommend, based on the fact that I’m including it as a Gratuitous Amazon Link. Neither Ada nor her father are human. They were constructed from twigs and branches and placed in the Ground, a patch of dirt with healing properties. Ada’s father is training her to use the Ground to heal, plans that suffer a major setback (to say the least) when Ada falls in love with one of the local humans, whom she and her father refer to as “Cures,” because almost all of their contact with them is when the humans come to them to be cured of an illness or injury. Apparently this book is magical realism, but I saw it more as something post-apocalyptic. To each their own, you know?

Guadalupe River State Park

I probably have written about Guadalupe River State Park, but just figured that since that was my outing today, it can’t hurt to write again.

Back in the misty dawn of history, I used to go to Guadalupe River State Park up US Route 281 to State Route 46. This, combined with its mailing address in Spring Branch, made it feel like it was way out in the boonies (is boonies racist? I’ll leave it here for now).

So, when we wanted to go to a nearby state park, Thomas, Alex, and I used to go to Government Canyon State Park, which has a mailing address of San Antonio.

Then, at some point, it may have been due to my next-door-neighbors, I realized that if I go up Blanco Road to State Route 46, it’s not nearly such an arduous trek.

I just checked Google Maps, and Government Canyon is ever-so-slightly closer, but that route is way more inconvenient. As a result, I’ve been using Guadalupe River as my “local” state park.

There are a few places to walk there, but the biggest draw is the Guadalupe River, just like it says in the name. Today, Evelyn and I took the dogs up there to start to expose them to swimming. We got each of them to swim a bit, but none of them seemed really enthusiastic.

Mila swimming in the Guadalupe River. Will she ever like it? Dunno. But if I ever take her on, I don’t know, a boat or a dock and she falls in, at least she’s able to keep afloat. I played around with the levels on this photo, but ended up just leaving it as-is.

We then walked around in the park for a while to lessen the possibility of wet-dog smell in the car, and once the dogs, and my sandals, were dry, we headed home.

We definitely intend to take the dogs back to the river. We’ll being chairs and snacks this time (Evelyn has a canopy/pavilion thing we can sit under, too) and be prepared to hang out for a while. Maybe a few trips like that will have them more eager to spend time in the water.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time. Today we have Holes by Louis Sachar. I’d always heard great things about Holes, but couldn’t get focused enough to read it until I saw it in Half Price Books on my annual trip to buy myself a Christmas present. Unlike some of my annual Half Price Books books, this was definitely worth it.

Dream Journal

Since I’ve decided that my dreams might be a good source for possible fiction stories, I may decide to actually do a dream journal here.

My dad insists that all dreams mean something and usually I take that with a grain of salt and think that they’re mostly about my desire to be able to write fiction again or to have the money to travel the way I want to. This one, however, seems to be packed with at least three meanings.

I was visiting some kind of factory with Thomas. We did the factory tour and it was all very interesting. We left (the parking garage was my usual dream parking garage, in that it looked like M.C. Escher was the architect).

I decided for some reason to go back to the factory and this time the floor was quaking. I found out that the material the factor had been using was being quarried out from under the building itself and had destabilized the building.

Now, there is the obvious end-of-my-marriage interpretation, with everything being okay with Thomas and falling apart without him.

But another interpretation is something that’s been on my mind yet. And that’s. . . .

Okay, we’ll start in the last couple of weeks. In one of my Reddit communities, a poster said that they were struggling with learning to love themselves. They’d achieved all they wanted to, and they still felt unfulfilled.

My immediate reaction was that they were getting their self-esteem from their own achievements rather than from a feeling of intrinsic worth as a human being. And I realized that was a big part of my own problem. I feel like I can achieve my way to feeling better about myself.

And I haven’t achieved anything like my potential. I worry that I should push myself harder and achieve more, but there’s a part of me that recognizes that I should love myself despite not achieving what I had hoped to.

And I think that I might be putting the proverbial cart before the horse. I craved love and acceptance from my mother, and she gave me her attempt to make me an Überkind instead. If I can base my feelings of worth from who I am and that I am a human being who deserves love, maybe, just maybe, that will lead me to a place where I can achieve what I feel is my potential.

And that’s what I see in that dream. Building the factory on top of the source of its raw materials destabilized the factory. If the factory stood on its own, with the mine somewhere else, then it wouldn’t be threatening to fall into the hole that is now where the mine used to be.

Also, I shouldn’t hire M.C. Escher to design a parking garage.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time. Today we have the first book in Margaret Petersen Haddix’s Greystone Secrets series: The Strangers. Chess, Emma, and Finn Greystone find out that three children also named Chess, Emma, and Finn, and having the same birthdates have been kidnapped. Soon afterward, their own mother goes on a business trip and the three Greystone siblings begin to search for their mother and to find out what, exactly, is going on.

I have bought the second book in the Greystone Secrets series, and downloaded it to read by cellphone light during the snowstorm, but haven’t quite gotten to it yet. And, since I read The Strangers in October of 2019, even if I were to read it tonight, the Gratuitous Amazon Link is way far away. Also, it feels very weird having a two-paragraph Gratuitous Amazon Link. I don’t think I’ve ever done this before.

Yay!

I finally finished my taxes last night (April 10, 2021). I’m getting a slightly larger refund than I did last year, so that’s nice.

I usually get right on my taxes, but this year I sold a bunch of stock to pay for critical care vet bills for my poor Phobos who died of hyperparathyroidism, possibly secondary to cancer. I opted not to have him necropsied because I wanted to know that I’d done everything I could for him and if something that I could’ve fixed would turn up in the necropsy, it’d haunt me. So definitely hyperparathyroidism (the fix for which is surgery that he couldn’t’ve had because he was very low on platelets).

Anyway, as I said before, I sold a bunch of stock and I remembered from the last time I (well, we, technically) sold a bunch of stock Thomas needed to take a crash course in tax accounting to figure out if we sold it at a profit or a loss and by how much.

I usually use TurboTax, largely because I have so many bank and investment accounts that it’s nice that TurboTax makes sure I don’t miss anything. I have three investment accounts, and CDs in three different banks.

I’d hoped that TurboTax would be able to do the math for me and it swears to me that it did, so I went ahead and filed. I also buy the Audit Defense package because I’m always scared that I missed something. I don’t think I’ve ever made a “you’ll go to jail for this” mistake, but still, it’s nice to hope that the Audit Defense thing will work for me.

I filed it last night and then today got notified that the IRS accepted my return, so everything should go smoothly from here. I hope.

For today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link, we’re back to one of my favorite YA/kidlit authors, Ally Carter. I don’t know if I have a read date for the first book in this series, and I haven’t read the third book yet (dang life getting in the way!). So, today we have the middle book in the Embassy Row trilogy, Take the Key and Lock Her Up. The premise of the series is that Grace Blakely has moved in with her maternal grandfather, the ambassador to the small Mediterranean nation of Adria. She makes new friends and discovers long-held family secrets along the way.

Let’s See If I Can Make this Quick Post Quick

Ha! That’ll never happen. I have to be up in nine hours, so I don’t want to spend all of it writing; I’d like to get *some* sleep.

Let’s think. I guess that last night’s dream will take up some words towards my 35,000 word goal.

I was at the movies? Watching a movie on television? Something like that. And the movie that was playing was one of the Harry Potter movies. I don’t know if they were the original Daniel Radcliffe ones or newer ones. But as the movie progressed, I found myself actually *in* the movie.

And the longer I was in the movie, the less Harry Potterish the movie seemed. I met a man with a small child and the man told me that he had a new wife, not the mother of the child, who, when he said her name, I recognized it as the name of a woman who had figured in a video that had gone viral in which she had been behaving badly. I don’t know what she was doing; I think she may have been mouthing off to a cashier or a waiter or something.

The group I was with ended up inside Malfoy Manor somehow, and while we were snooping around, it occurred to me, like a memory that I already had, not like something that I’d been told, that the guy I was with had a twin brother who’d died somehow.

We ended up inside Narcissa Malfoy’s wardrobe and I remembered a scene where Hermione was wandering around in there and that the very back of the wardrobe is where the most beautiful of all of Narcissa’s beautiful clothing was located.

I seem to recall having an ongoing theme of beautiful dresses in my dreams. I swear I had a dream where my mom had a hidden wardrobe of gowns in the back of her closet (or was it in our basement? dreams are weird).

This, in turn, may have been influenced by having seen a wedding gown dressing room at my local Sears when I was a kid. I didn’t know what I was looking at. I only saw a room with mirrors all over and a platform in the middle. In fact, I never saw another one until I was getting ready for my own wedding.

Anyway, Narcissa’s wardrobe was a room full of shoes and purses, laid out more like a shoe store than anything else, and then a small closet at the back. You open the small closet and there’s another type of clothing in there, like, pants and skirts, maybe and an even smaller closet. Then you open the even smaller closet and there’s another type of clothing, like tops, and a smaller closet. And then eventually you come to a very tiny closet about the size of the knee hole in a desk and that’s where the gowns were.

Something happened there and we ended up in some kind of danger and someone rescued us. It was a person of indeterminate gender dressed up in a way similar to a sandperson from Star Wars. They were wrapped in brown fabric and had some kind of mask on their face. I got the impression that the person who rescued us was the twin of the guy in our group.

When we got safely out of Malfoy Manor, we bumped into a woman who was a kind of mother figure for our group and we ran to her and I hugged her.

When I first woke up, I realized that the place we were was less like Hogwarts and more like New Rome from Rick Riordan’s mythology books. There were entire families living there, not just students.

And now that I’m thinking about it again, I realized that the entire dream took place in some kind of shelter, like maybe a cave or something.

One day fiction will come back to me and I’ll be able to parlay at least one of these dreams into a book and maybe, just maybe, be able to make enough money to survive on my own. Maybe.

I know that my Gratuitous Amazon Link should be a less gratuitous Harry Potter or Rick Riordan book, but I think I’m going to continue to go through my Goodreads list like I have been doing. So, today we have The Hidden Power of F*cking Up, by the Try Guys. In The Hidden Power of F*cking Up, each of the Guys takes an area that they feel insecure about and sets a goal for improving that area. We watch their journeys and get to enjoy the humor that the Try Guys are famous for along the way.