elemtilas wrote: ↑17 Nov 2020 01:09
More specific. I was reading your article over on the Damtaverse,
Among Denê, it's not a matter of technology or herbcraft, but rather of that gentle caress of the inner recesses of the mind that the powerful enchantress is able to execute. Here I mean, on the one wing, the literal "singing in" of a kind of spell, but not a work of ordinary magic. After all, there are words within the enchantment, especially towards the beginning, and these words are heard and processed by the physical ears; but it's the music and the higher words that convey her stories directly to the very experience, the spirit & soul of the individual who is subject to the enchantment.
It's similar to CR, in that, in fact, participants do in fact share in the adventure or experience whatever tableau the shinanntannenima is weaving. Some folks are, in fact, able to interact in a paraconscious way with her weaving, but, really, most people are just kind of stunned out of the waking world only to find themselves experiential observers: they feel the joys and experience the hurts; they live and love and die; and, indeed, they bear the marks & scars on descending again into their physical bodies.
It is, for them, similar to true dreaming, which is something akin to a dream vision, or dream journey. The sort of dream where you just knów that you were there and are positive that it was real. It's just that true dreaming offers a much more tenuous connexion than being properly enchanted.
Think of it, perhaps, as a kind of subliminal ad that a) actually works and b) doesn't stop. This is one reason why Denê would not willingly allow any lesser peoples like Werres or Serren to participate. It would literally phoque with their minds and fry their brains, and they would forever wander the length and breadth of Yeola in search of a Faerie they can never find the entry way to. It would drive them totally mad. They may have come to hate Werre folk, but you know, there's just some things you don't do, and this kind of torture is one of them!
This sounds a bit like guided imagery.
(And a good deal like cerebral reality too! And the Lehola Galaxy also has a synthetic drug called (in LIE) oneirin, which gives people waking dreams called D-dreams.)
A few weeks before the 2020 election, I had another weird dream. I was walking into a restaurant that looked an awful lot like Hubcaps with my mother.
Ah, looks like a kind of chain greasy spoon. Is the food any good? Me I like actual diners, because each one has that little something special that sets it apart from all other diners, and certainly apart from even good chain restaurants.
I ate their Hickory Burger, their Cajun sausage sandwich, and their onion rings, and enjoyed all three. It has a fifties theme to it, with fifties music like Grease and the Everly Brothers, as well as a tribute to the car culture of the fifties (hence the name).
Hillary Clinton was running against Donald Trump in the 2020 election, and my mother told me there was a 97% chance that a third candidate, a man running for the Libertarian Party (and yes, it was a man) would win. I pointed out that only once before in history had a third-party candidate won, so the chances couldn't be as high as 97%.
If only...
I was quite impressed that this year the Libertarians put up a woman as the presidential nominee and a Jewish man as her running mate. Among the many reasons I am not a libertarian/Libertarian is that the ideology seems to be a club for SWMANs (Straight White Male Atheist Nerds), as many recesses of the Internet are fabled to be. As someone who is not a SWMAN, I'd feel left out.
Then I entered the restaurant. I thought I was walking into Carl's, Jr., and therefore I couldn't eat the food there, nor look at the wrappers for the food they were serving. Then I saw the wrappers. They didn't have the star with its eyes closed upside-down that Carl's, Jr. used. Instead, it was more like the boar's-head design on the Boar's Head hero sandwiches I sometimes buy from Safeway. I drank some water from their glass, before waking up.
Interesting how your dream went from food, to politics, back to the much more interesting topic of food. I've heard of Carl's, but not Hubcaps. Any idea why they played such central roles in this dream? . . . I have to admit, I don't think I've ever had a dream that's taken place in a, mm, name-specific location like this. Have certainly dreamed inside various kind of shops and libraries and so forth, but maybe not restaurants, but they aren't brand specific
Carl's, Jr. and Frosty Freeze (please, no one post an image of the latter!) appear in my dreams sometimes because their signs/logos make me purge. The former is drawn with its eyes closed upside-down (as is very common in anime) and the latter combines ice xxxxx cones with anthropomorphic food -- two things I hate -- for a lethal synergy. They're bad for my peculiar form of OCD.
I think this is my first Hubcaps dream, though.
More recent dreams:
I was at an elevated store with my father. The rest of my family was waiting outside for my father and me in a van. The folks at the store showed me "cannabis candy" and I wanted to try it. This candy was a red rectangle/cuboid with diagonal stripe-indentations on the front and back. I tried one, and it tasted like a cross between fruit snacks and red vines! I liked it! My father bought a bag of them for me, and I told him about having smoked weed in high school and college.
We climbed out of this high store and down the ladder that led to it. I walked on some dusty, dirty (but not muddy) ground that had a few plants growing out of it and by an array of shabby-looking buildings, with the cannabis shop now to my left. I walked into the van with my mother, but now realized I couldn't find my shoes! I wouldn't need them for the duration of the van trip, though. I tried to find out if anyone knew where my shoes were. My family handed me a tote bag that was mine. I woke up.
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I was at a museum where various online conworld stuff was hosted as art. Among the art was the works of celebrated conworlder Elemtilas (!) The various sapient races in Yeola appeared in pictures. Many appeared to be cyclopic. Someone pointed out that Yeola had many peoples, and that there were as many peoples as could possibly exist in one country (it was pointed out that the U.K. had the English, the Cornish, the Welsh, Scots, Scots-Irish, the Irish, Manx, Jerriais, Guernsey people, and Travelers, although some of these are really Crown Dependency groups instead of U.K. proper). I was told that if I spoke to one of the pictures, the people in the pictures would be animated and speak back to me. I looked at the picture labeled "Daine", and spoke to it, then it started saying something to me about imagination and spirituality and higher realms. Then I thought, "Hey, why doesn't the Daine guy have wings?"
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I was in the audience, watching a live talk show from a tower high up in a building in front of me. One of the topics the talk show hit on was elementary reading education. This mom related the story of how there was a grading error in her child's reading class' test-grading software, and so when the class took tests, only one student's score came out perfect. We saw a copy of what that one "perfect" child had written, and the mom demonstrated that the letters that the kids had learned to write in that unit -- letters like K, N, O, U, and W -- had the part joining the left and right of the letter slanting in the wrong direction on that kid's paper. It should have been glaringly obvious to the other students or at least to the teacher, but the teacher didn't notice because the test-scoring software said that that kid's letter-writing test was perfect.
Now, I had a question I wanted to ask, so I raised my hand and said, "I have a question". A woman introduced as Monica told me she would take me into the tower where I could face the talk show hosts and guests with my question. I was lofted up in one of those carts like the kind that you sit in on a roller-coaster or Ferris wheel, and entered the tower from the back.
To my delight, I was soon in there with the host(esse)s and guests. They all appeared to be women. I spied a list of things that would be gone over at that episode of the talk show, including the reading class topic. I politely waited my turn to speak (albeit keeping my hand raised) as they went over some inane dalliances, then I spoke up. I said, "I have a question about the reading class topic".
One of the hostesses, however, told me that the topic of conversation had moved on: "You're a little late for that".
"But I've wanted to discuss that for all this time!", I objected.
"Why didn't you tell Monica that?", a hostess asked.
I was both furious and flustered with that question. It made no sense. How was I to know that I would get up there as soon as possible, but, thanks to no fault of Monica's own,
still be too late? Exasperatedly, I answered in as loud a voice as I could (although my voice was barely audible): "How was I supposed to know that all of you would be yammering and not give me a turn? I'm not Nostradamus! Monica got me up there as fast as she could! I waited my turn -- VERY POLITELY -- because it would be rude to interrupt, and you tell me I'm still too late?" Then I tried to speak even louder, so I wouldn't be silenced -- but my words barely came out as a rumble: "This is my question: Didn't some other kid *point out* that the K's and N's and W's on that student's paper were all wrong if the teacher didn't notice it?"
They chastised me for hijacking their program by asking an after-the-train-has-left-the-station question, and then I planned to tell Monica about what the hostesses had done to me, and perhaps even complain to the producers of the talk show. Then I woke up.
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I was having a conversation with my parents about the election predictions, and Biden was almost certain to trounce Trump. They said that there were 269 electoral votes that were in the bag for Biden, and he only needed a single up-for-grabs electoral vote to reach 270. My mother commented that the law-and-order segment of the population liked Biden. She said German-Americans were polled to vote overwhelmingly for Biden. So were Christians, and this was the first time in living memory that the majority of Christian Americans would vote Democrat.
I looked at a groundbreaking poll that broke down the vote by state, religion, each of the ethnic ancestry groups (German, Italian, Mexican, African-American, Jamaican, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Hawaiian, Cajun, etc.) on the U.S. census, gender, ideology, generation, and more. I was now in a library, and this poll appeared in front of me. I used a computer-style search option to find "German", and found that most German-Americans who took the poll (it gave absolute numbers, not just percentages) supported Biden. Then I did a search for "Jewish". There were something like 9 Trump-voting Jews to 1,007 Biden-voting Jews sampled in the poll. I then checked out Christians. Then I wanted to search for "Jewish" again, but the highlighting feature of the document viewer highlighted the word "Jewish" in many other papers and books, now going into the juvenile section of the library.
I heard the word "yxm" twice. As the search went through, I started getting uncomfortable waiting to go into the restroom to purge off the word "yxm", and tried to find a place in the juvenile section where no one would see me purge.
Everywhere I went, I saw at least one person. I tried to purge when I saw no one looking at me, but my hands felt so paralyzed. Eventually I woke up.
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I was back in the library. This time, my sister Liz and I were trying to program a miniature-sized android boy (like Don Juan Diego in the movie Jingle Jangle). We called him Ma-chûte (pronounced as in French), because that word had some meaning in the language in which we were programming him. We taught him language, introducing new words in one sentence at a time. We went through a book about teaching vocabulary. The book seemed to be from the thirties, forties, or fifties, though, and I wasn't too pleased how it had lots of dated words and some literary words like "debonair" that weren't core enough. I wanted to teach Ma-chûte with the Landau Core Vocabulary instead!
As we went through the book and saw the pictures the computer program was creating, I saw a fractal-esque image of a Ma-chûte with a smaller Ma-chûte on his right shoulder, and that Ma-chûte had an even smaller Ma-chûte on his right shoulder, and the third Ma-chûte had a smaller-yet fourth Ma-chûte on HIS right shoulder! Clearly, there was a recursion error. We got some Wite-out to try to fix it.
Unfortunately, however, one of us closed the book by accident (we weren't using a bookmark!) and we lost our place. I used a search/highlight option, like the one in the previous dream, to search for the word "out", which I remembered was on that page. We watched as this amazing search option flipped through the book like a deck of cards, until it landed on the same page, about halfway through the book!
As Liz was fixing it, I thought to myself:
But Ma-chûte isn't all that attractive a name. What are we supposed to do: Call him Mash? Will addressing him as "Hey, Mash!" once make it work? And "Mash" isn't very appealing -- I can't stand mashed potatoes. How about we choose a name like Danny? What will Liz think of calling Ma-chûte Danny?
As I was pondering names, I woke up.