Don't Mess With Ogres

[smokingboot]

I'm not bad at dreaming. If someone asked me to describe it, I would say that on one level - only one level, there are others - dreaming is your brain's final check before throwing stuff away, it's you looking through the antique shop/warehouse in your head, making sure you don't accidently lose whatever it is that's precious in some mass clear-out. Don't leave the grail on the pavement, that sort of thing. I don't know why it matters, it's not as though anyone can nick it, but there you go.

I think that when dreaming, your brain, or your backbrain, or some aspect of mind too nebulous to pinpoint wants you to turn your attention upon one thing or another, like the centre of Sueno's stone where a huge battle is being depicted, but no language is used and therefore you must read the pictures. One is squared like a cartoon panel, lined around and emphasised; it's a head. In the context it reads as we killed him. He mattered and we got him! Dreams can be a lot clearer than Sueno's stone, but they can also be much more obtuse. How does one know when to pay attention? For me, however bizarre/incongruous, important ones are sharp and clear, often repeating motifs, boxed round like that head. Scratch out the booze/digestion/drug touched ones, they're muddy and full of scraps, and beware of dreams that come when one is ill; often all they reflect is low mood and physical distress.

Still, all my dreams are going to be 'drug touched' for a long time now, so without expecting any sense out of the process, I will continue to record them.

Last night's was an odd one, of old friend CD setting out on a journey; he had a backpack though it didn't seem particularly full. I couldn't work out where he was going or why. He showed me a space between two trees and asked me if I thought it was too far to swim. I looked at it and him incredulously, because there was only earth there, how could one swim it? And why? It was very easy to walk. Then he lay down and closed his eyes, seeming to sleep. I looked at him for a while, and placed a wolf cub on his chest. He woke, delighted with his new friend.

Then I was somewhere else, in some kind of weird game where you chose a little wilderness via a board, and had to go hide there because an ogre would come searching for its property, currently held by one of us. I was that person; the property was some kind of long strip of leather, a leash or harness. So I chose one of the wilderness squares close to the ogre's starting point, because I figured if I got caught, a great lie to start with would be 'if I had your stuff, why would I stay nearby? Wouldn't I just run away asap?' You know the kind of reasoning that works with ogres... And it all made sense until I learned that it was a real ogre and it might really kill you. Then I tried to change my spot, but couldn't work out how to do it.