THAT MORNING

I work on the World Dream Bank. Add Silky's Woodcuts and my friend Patagia's dream-poem Signals.

THAT DAY

Out for Lao food at Champa Garden with my housemate Alder. Sort of a consolation Thanksgiving dinner, since our house party had to be canceled--our housemate Chrissie is sick, though at least it's not Covid. Bring back a care package of lemongrass salmon & sticky rice.

THAT EVENING

News: a woman in Texas with a methane-detecting camera shoots oil wells, pipes and plants. Clouds belch out, invisible to naked eye; but through her viewfinder, obscene. Miniscule to zero fines. She's found it hard even to find out who owns this stuff--shell companies let owners evade cleanup liability. 30% of global warming is from methane not CO2; and a large fraction of that is from Texas alone.

A new law overrides nondisclosure agreements in sexual harassment cases. But not other crimes? I thought where criminal acts are concerned, no contract is legally enforceable; so if you speak up about crimes committed by your employer, how can an NDA ever apply?

Whose Line Is It Anyway? Improv comedy. Guests tonight: sexy twin sisters who are pro wrestlers. I'm not expecting much--athletes, actors and musicians are used to being on stage, but many can't improvise. But these two are naturals--uninhibited physical clowns. From fighting? Well, their sport isn't fighting; it isn't even a sport. It's clowning.

Next, an ad for a psoriasis drug. A tween in a blue-sequined leotard dances on stage, then in her dressing room looking glumly at the rash on her arm. For a moment I feel perverted for finding her sexy, then stop--her character wants to be sexy; that's the ad's whole point, that the rash makes her feel undesirable. The real perversion here is how the ad downplays the long list of drug hazards and side effects. "We'll help you fit in! Or die. See fine print."

There seems to be a pattern in the news tonight. Gender, sex, sickness and... side effects. Not just of drugs. Of capitalist sleaze.

THAT NIGHT...

-- 1 --

An alternate world. One in trouble. An upper class with magical powers wants to be worshiped as gods. Many are nonhuman. These rulers viciously suppress any spills of secrets--their superiority hinges on monopolizing knowledge and power. But a rebellion's brewing...

It's all straight out of Zelazny's classic sf novel Lord Of Light. Except... instead of a setting resembling ancient India, it's Olde England--well, Edwardian England, just a century ago. Steam trains, big country houses full of servants, London townhouses, soirees and balls, posh accents... and vicious backstabbing. Usually social, occasionally magical, but (when enemies are lower-class) literal.

At first I just observe the rebel leader conspiring to overthrow these glib assassins. But increasingly, I become him.

-- 2 --

I'm in a crowd including both Magicals and Muggles. But which are which? I loudly mention a string of names all starting with T, just to see who'll bristle and wince. I'm being indiscreet--the list hints at a state secret. I'm taking this risk deliberately--to learn just who my enemies are.

-- 3 --

I'm on the street. Worry some younger kids will get hit by a car. An odd fear, since the crowd's so dense it'd be hard for a car to reach us. Still, I teach them to advance warily together, in a sort of chorus line, with a four-beat, forward three, back one. They seem to like the dance, and they're sure more visible as a group.

I don't quite know what to do next, but I can feel the dance isn't just for safety; there's music building, demanding a full-on song & dance number.

-- 4 --

I visit one of the aristocracy--the Witchmare, a unicorn who supports a big beautiful estate by charging high fees as a sorceress. I hoped she might support the rebellion.

Her maid leads me in right away. Witchmare knows very well I lead the revolutionaries!

She closes those immense grass-green eyes and is silent a while, then adds:

"Have you spoken with the robots? I suspect they too may support change."

-- 5 --

I take Witchmare's advice. I walk through the valley of junk towers near the mouth of the robot-factory caves, where they're assembled and trained. This garbage-heap valley is the robot newbies' first view of the outside world.

Here I meet a robot who's bitter about the ugly piles of scrap. They growl "These towers teach us that beauty doesn't matter." Esthetic pollution!

Witchmare sure guessed right--the robots will support our revolt. I just didn't think it'd be on artistic grounds...

-- 6 --

I wake and outline those scenes in bed. (If I leap up to type a dream I usually lose all but the first scene I write; and if I handwrite them fully, my hands & wrists hurt. So I use a personal shorthand and scrawl just a few words per scene.)

I reach the scene at the mouth of the robot caves. For mouth I just put a square, the Chinese for mouth. But I pause, recalling this was a sign in the dreamworld's syllabic writing system--I think a square meant 'mo', unlike Chinese 'kou' or Japanese 'ro'. But Hebrew and Korean have square letters too, both pronounced 'm', fitting 'mouth' nicely. What language do I think I'm writing? Habits from five scripts in two worlds clash in my head!

-- 7 --

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• English estates, nasty ruling class: from A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske, where the rich are secret sorcerers. But the dream blends it with Roger Zelazny's sf classic Lord of Light, where the rich set themselves up as the Hindu gods of wealth, lightning, love, death... Ugh. At least plutocracy can't happen here!
• Secrecy brutally enforced: nondisclosure agreements used to punish whistleblowers. OK, the new law voids NDAs for sexual harassment and rape. But what about corporate coverups of other crimes?
• Loudly, tastelessly speak secrets: I think this is the World Dream Bank itself! Telling unacceptable truths is risky, but you learn who your friends & enemies are.
• Witchmare, the unicorn sorceress with a fancy estate: from a dream last year, Witchmare Seduces Twilight. She was intimidating but turned out to be a positive figure meaning both sex and intuition.
• Kids dance: the kids dancing in that drug ad.
• Crowd, worry we'll get run over: the dangers of sexualizing kids who just wanna dance? Or it could just be all the murders in the news. A case today reminded me of the protesters run over in Charlottesville in 2016; a bunch were crippled and one, Heather Heyer, was killed.
• Robots built in caves, then emerge: echoes Shore Leave, a Star Trek show written by Theodore Sturgeon. Kirk, Spock and McCoy land on a parklike world too good to be true. Turns out it's a therapeutic amusement park that materializes your thoughts, so you can act out fantasies. But what Federation explorers expect is danger! And the park serenely obliges... just as capitalism cranks out whatever we feel strongest about--even if it's fear or hate. Regardless of truth. Sorry about those side effects.
• High-tech junkyard: probably from A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers. A child on a techno-fascist planet escapes slavery, but nearly starves in a junkyard like this--until a junked lifeboat befriends her.
• Robots, esthetics: I do see the world like the dream robots--I oppose capitalism largely because it's so ugly--trashy in both the esthetic and the literal sense. Mountains of trash!
• Outline in shorthand: This is what works for me--typing usually makes me lose all but the first scene I tackle, and full handwriting in bed hurts (always has) and I still lose a lot of scenes.
• Clash of writing habits: Dreams of alternate worlds can leave you feeling a clash between waking & dream memories; but this dream went further. How I see a square is a matter of ground-in habit. In the writing systems I know, it reads as 'kou' or 'ro' or 'm'; but it takes long practice to make reading automatic. Yet here, an epic dream created not just the impression of a whole history in a single hour--it managed to establish a linguistic habit--deep learning that usually takes months, even years. When awake.

  Change can happen faster than the conscious thinks! "All is changed, changed utterly; a terrible beauty is born."

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