Dreamlog: The Ruins
There were several segments to my dreams this morning but I remember only one clearly.
I was a tourist (again) but this time in a very hazardous city... a war zone, more stylised Eastern European than Middle Eastern. I was hugely unprepared: had my backpack, wallet and passport and that was about that. Didn't speak the local language. I walked around a half-ruined building and courtyard, which apparently was some kind of informal station on an underground backpacker trail. Drab browns and greys, stone brick and tile. Floor and roof collapsed in places; there had been a war, it was still ongoing, the economy was wrecked, travel was dangerous and difficult. Rats scurried on the dirty slate floor. There was a sense in these outer ruins of people passing through, hidden, but not here; a sense of being watched. Why was I there? I didn't know; I had come on impulse. It seemed a lot of people had come for the same reason, but not everyone was a friend. Terror seized me as I remembered I had left my backpack back in the shared dormitory. Someone could have stolen my money and papers. I pushed my way back upstairs in the central hostel, past the rats; dozens of fellow travellers crouched in the single dingy room. But my pack was still there. My brother was there, too, a huge relief; we had made the rendezvous at last. We talked about the situation in the country, prospects for the future, his project.
Woke with a sense of muted apprehension and pale hope still clinging to me.
Dreamlog: Port City
Another dream fragment, from two nights ago. And yes, I have been low on sleep for a week, hence conscious dreaming.
I am in Lyttelton for the weekend. Or at least what passes for Dream-Lyttelton, which is nothing like it. But at least it is a port city. It crosses my mind, later, that I have been here before, in an earlier dream, but it was Dream-Wellington then, and of course buildings were different, but the feel was the same. It is a port city.
It feels like Dream-Lyttelton rather than Dream-Wellington tonight because I am there for a weekend and because I sense that I am only across the hill from my home; no plane flight involved. Less tension. More freedom. It is a visit to people near to me rather than far.
There are hills around the port, and there is a prominent building (either a restaurant, or a hotel, or a port authority, or all of the above) which is a land-locked ship. (In Dream-Wellington this is not so much a ship as a shiny multistoried hotel/office building; but it seems to serve the same function if not be the same place). There is the comfortably entwined social circle that comes from being a self-contained small town. People tend to know each other. There is water and bush and enough urban settlement to be civilised.
I am in town visiting a woman friend (who I don't recognise as I awake). I meet at her flat. We talk. Another friend (who also is a stranger to my waking mind) arrives, and I find myself interrupting the conversation to meet her in the doorway. For some reason I close the door and talk outside; the two don't know each other. It is only as she turns to leave that I realise in fact I am working with both friends on the same project. Why did I not ask her to come in? Perhaps it is because it is not my house and I do not feel I have the authority to invite a stranger in?
I am woken at this point by my alarm clock. I turn it off. I have a few moments of lucidity as the dream dissolves. Lucidity is always a pain as it means I am overwriting a natural dream with my own intentional changes and it always feels somehow tacky and false -- essentially it is breaking the 'fourth wall' and usually stops a dream cold -- but I decide to use it in this case by apologising to Friend #2 and giving her my contact details. Because it feels like the right thing to do. I create a pen and notepad and give her my in-dream phone number, and also get her to add her details into my in-dream Palm Pilot. I know I can't carry any of this through to my waking self but maybe it will stay in the dreamworld.
The last thing that dumps to my waking mind from the dream is that one project one or both of us have been working on is some kind of 3D Interactive Fiction shell called Eagle. Something like Falcon's Eye for Nethack only for Inform-type systems.
Why Lyttelton/Wellington? I have no idea. I haven't especially been thinking about either place for a while. Perhaps being a 'port city' is symbolic? Is it an interface or boundary? Does the ship/hotel go somewhere? (It reminds me a bit of the Stoneship Age from Myst; I was reading an Uru 'Scars' transcript the night before, so that's a couple of links removed. Possibly Eagle is a reference to Uru also. It's probably more likely a reference to Inform 7, which I have been tinkering with in the last week now that a Linux version is out. Or maybe a combination of both of them. There were no other obvious Uru/Myst content references that I could tell.)
The talking-in-doorway scene resonates with a standing-in-doorway conversation I had today with a (male) friend while at a cafe. Perhaps it's also symbolic of my sense of being at the intersection of various groups of people who should be working together, but for some reason seem not to be.
