slayer dreams #12
May. 14th, 2003 07:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyActual nightmare here. Also a bit of a spoiler for S7 (identity of the season's Big Bad) and X2, but only tangentially to the dream. Oh, and It by Stephen King and a couple M. R. James stories, if anybody cares.
The dream was also a movie, written and directed by Joss Whedon, heavily influenced by King and James. The villainous force started out as a kind of combination of Pennywise from It and the First Evil (shapeshifting, ubiquity, that kind of thing), but gradually it turned into a different, more Jamesian story about a eighteenth century gentleman who murdered his father by means of a mirror and a set of bed-linens (the bed-linens very definitely borrowed--by me if not by J. Whedon--from James's "Two Doctors). This of course caused the room to be haunted, and I'm not sure if it was by the gentleman, his father, or both. They were very similar looking, and then there was the whole being-dead thing which tended to obscure individual features. Several other people had died in that room. The bed-linens trapped them--this bit very clearly from "'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad'"--and then the revenant (or revenants--like I said, I'm really not sure) appeared out of the mirror, intent on re-enacting conflict and murder, and although I can't describe what happened next properly, believe me when I say it was unspeakably awful. It called up all sorts of echoes, not only of "'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad,'" but also of "The Diary of Mr. Poynter." *shudders*
Other people had escaped, and one thread of the dream was trying to figure out what they had in common. They seemed to be all reformed wastrels and rakes (or whatever the feminine of rake is): people who had been prodigal and dissolute, but had realized the error of their ways and become philanthropists and jurists and things like that. The murderous gentleman had been a wastrel who (clearly) did NOT reform, and somehow that concatenation of circumstances explained the escape of these particular people.
There was also the benevolent ghost of an eighteenth-century butler, played I believe by Ian Holm.
Buffy, Xander, and Willow are of course trying to stop the evil. The thing that was the First turns out to be one of the early victims, a little girl (and here there may also be a trace of X2), who is both trying to destroy them and trying to tell them what they need to know to defeat the revenant.
And what they need to know is apparently their real names. Not "Buffy," "Xander," and "Willow," but their REAL names. Identities started getting extremely weird. Buffy's fighting the revenant, but breaking the mirror is what destroys it. Or, at least, what got me out of that phase of the dream.
I'm noticing a defense mechanism pattern with bad dreams. They back up on themselves and become meta. That's what happened this time, as the dream itself morphed into a screening of the dream/movie, at which I was extremely anxious because I knew this movie was going to give me nightmares, and then Joss Whedon showed up and was interested in my theory about M. R. James's influence and there was some generally fan-girly intellectual wish-fulfillment. The dream ended, or turned into something else, with us--Joss Whedon, movie crew, some of the cast, people who had attended the screening (including, I think, HL as well as me)--leaving the enormous house that was both the setting of the movie and the location of the screening, and walking along a gravel driveway in the slush and the mud to get to where the cars had been parked. And the symbolism of leaving the dream behind is obvious enough that even I can see it.
The dream was also a movie, written and directed by Joss Whedon, heavily influenced by King and James. The villainous force started out as a kind of combination of Pennywise from It and the First Evil (shapeshifting, ubiquity, that kind of thing), but gradually it turned into a different, more Jamesian story about a eighteenth century gentleman who murdered his father by means of a mirror and a set of bed-linens (the bed-linens very definitely borrowed--by me if not by J. Whedon--from James's "Two Doctors). This of course caused the room to be haunted, and I'm not sure if it was by the gentleman, his father, or both. They were very similar looking, and then there was the whole being-dead thing which tended to obscure individual features. Several other people had died in that room. The bed-linens trapped them--this bit very clearly from "'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad'"--and then the revenant (or revenants--like I said, I'm really not sure) appeared out of the mirror, intent on re-enacting conflict and murder, and although I can't describe what happened next properly, believe me when I say it was unspeakably awful. It called up all sorts of echoes, not only of "'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad,'" but also of "The Diary of Mr. Poynter." *shudders*
Other people had escaped, and one thread of the dream was trying to figure out what they had in common. They seemed to be all reformed wastrels and rakes (or whatever the feminine of rake is): people who had been prodigal and dissolute, but had realized the error of their ways and become philanthropists and jurists and things like that. The murderous gentleman had been a wastrel who (clearly) did NOT reform, and somehow that concatenation of circumstances explained the escape of these particular people.
There was also the benevolent ghost of an eighteenth-century butler, played I believe by Ian Holm.
Buffy, Xander, and Willow are of course trying to stop the evil. The thing that was the First turns out to be one of the early victims, a little girl (and here there may also be a trace of X2), who is both trying to destroy them and trying to tell them what they need to know to defeat the revenant.
And what they need to know is apparently their real names. Not "Buffy," "Xander," and "Willow," but their REAL names. Identities started getting extremely weird. Buffy's fighting the revenant, but breaking the mirror is what destroys it. Or, at least, what got me out of that phase of the dream.
I'm noticing a defense mechanism pattern with bad dreams. They back up on themselves and become meta. That's what happened this time, as the dream itself morphed into a screening of the dream/movie, at which I was extremely anxious because I knew this movie was going to give me nightmares, and then Joss Whedon showed up and was interested in my theory about M. R. James's influence and there was some generally fan-girly intellectual wish-fulfillment. The dream ended, or turned into something else, with us--Joss Whedon, movie crew, some of the cast, people who had attended the screening (including, I think, HL as well as me)--leaving the enormous house that was both the setting of the movie and the location of the screening, and walking along a gravel driveway in the slush and the mud to get to where the cars had been parked. And the symbolism of leaving the dream behind is obvious enough that even I can see it.
