Dream (no slayers)

[truepenny]

Disturbing, lingering, haunting.


Waive, if you will, the complete unlikelihood of Mirrorthaw and me going camping. We don't and we wouldn't. But nonetheless, there we were out in the woods, at night. With, as it happens, a bunch of other people, and I have no idea who the fuck THEY were.

I had to leave our underground campsite (and I did once go camping in a cave when I was a Girl Scout--and that part ISN'T a dream--so the inherent implausibility quotient has not actually gone up) to find a portajohn (and thank you so very much, subconscious, for rendering THAT as realistically as possible). On the way back, I see these ... things, darting on and off the path. They're ugly, deformed; they have the heads of animals. Also? Not friendly.

I don't know (either in the dream or now, awake and thinking about the dream) why they don't attack me. They mob the campground owner and pull him down. I get away, hide. The owner sees something out of my line of vision and starts screaming. Really screaming. I'm afraid for Mirrorthaw, and I bail. I get back to our underground campsite, and Mirrorthaw and the other campers are gone. Signs of struggle, yada yada. I escape into the woods. These animal-head creatures aren't very bright. They seem to know it and be frustrated by it. They're scary and repulsive, but also intensely sad.

In the morning, I set out to rescue Mirrorthaw. The first person I find to help me is a folklorist, who tells me that these creatures are "The Skin of the Seasons." Southern folklore is full of them, according to what he tells me; they are ... not ghosts, but avatars, embodied nightmares, of animals which humans hunt seasonally (which so far as I know is everything except fish). Also, their leaders--the ones with the ability to plan--are creatures with the heads of wasps. I figure that's what the campground owner saw.

At that point I was starting to lose the dream, so my lucid dreaming instinct took over. I rescued Mirrorthaw and woke up.

I'm not sure if I'm conveying how UNSETTLING this dream was. It wasn't scary--I was never in any real danger, and I knew in the dream that I'd rescue Mirrorthaw all right--but these hunched, squat creatures in the dark, with their misshapen, unnatural heads. They were abhorrent and sad, sort of equally. They hated us (humans), but they took no pleasure in what they were doing. It was what they had to do, because it was what they were created to do. It was upsetting to them, and frustrating. That's really what I think is staying with me, the sense that these creatures were acting out of frustration, bottled-up anger, centuries of helplessness and suffering and not understanding why they were dying. Killing humans wasn't satisfying to them, but they didn't know of anything else they could do.


If this looks to you like it's about Baghdad, you're probably not wrong.

Comments

[renenet.livejournal.com]

animals which humans hunt seasonally (which so far as I know is everything except fish)

There are fishing seasons, actually. Dates vary from year to year and are different for different bodies of water and types of fish. For example, though, if you wanted to spear sturgeon in Lake Winnebago, you'd be SOL until next year, because the season this year was from February 8th to the 23rd (or until the pre-set harvest cap was reached -- I don't have that information). Not to quibble with your dream logic. Just to inform.

[renenet.livejournal.com]

Update: it seems that the sturgeon season on Lake Winnebago is frequently just a few days long in practice before the harvest caps are reached.

Of course, now I'm thinking, "great, now sturgeon avatars can chase Truepenny and Mirrorthaw and kill campground owners in her dreams." Umm...sorry?

Very sad, disturbing dream. Seems like it could be the basis for a very affecting short story.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I'd be disinclined to make a short story of it, actually, as Clive Barker did something quite similar in "Skins of the Fathers" which is in one of the Books of Blood.

[rliz.livejournal.com]

> The first person I find to help me is a folklorist, who tells me that these creatures are "The Skin of the Seasons." Southern folklore is full of them, according to what he tells me; they are ... not ghosts, but avatars, embodied nightmares, of animals which humans hunt seasonally (which so far as I know is everything except fish). Also, their leaders--the ones with the ability to plan--are creatures with the heads of wasps. I figure that's what the campground owner saw.

This is a really beautiful, sad, scary little bit. I love it. (In the, you know, really-glad-it-wasn't-my-dream kind of way.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That's the bit that made me realize I had to write this one down, because I was wandering around with that phrase, "the skin of the seasons," jangling through my head. Writing as cheap, do-it-yourself mental exorcism.

I'm glad it conveyed to you something of what I was feeling.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That wouldn't necessarily stop me. The trouble is that, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, "there's no there there." It could be a poem, if I could write poetry that was not utterly for crap, but it isn't a story.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and I don't actually think of fishing as involving "types of fish." They're just, you know, FISH.

And I know this is wrong, because I know perfectly well there's a difference between salmon, catfish, and cod, but my brain's filing system does not always care to condescend to facts.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I agree about the thereness, and I wouldn't do it as a story and a focus, but the skin of the seasons might well fit into the background of something else at some point.

I doubt you'd be likely to forget them anyway.