Wolf Dream
17/10/04 20:26![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eredienI am sorry I did not call anyone this weekend, but I had a hellish work week last week and spent the time catching up on sleep, doing housework, and having some very needed alone time to relax. A twelve hour day=bad.
Is anyone else familiar with the concept I like to call "Lost Title?" It's when you're so close to encapsulating the entire meaning of a work, or the most important part(s), in a single phrase or word, but it just...won't..come.
You have a world on the tip of your tongue. It's maddening.
But sometimes it works itself out in interesting ways. I was standing at the counter the other day, feeding the cat, and said the word "Autumn" out loud just because I felt like it.
When I said it, it was like I'd never heard the word before correctly, and thought, "that definitely has something to do with the title of the dragon book."
This is last night's dream. It is part of an email I wrote to Sei because she doesn't read lj, slightly edited for readability and content--if you would like the missing content, please email, but it adds nothing to the heart of the dream. I very much liked it and plan on illustrating it as soon as I figure out how to do watercolors decently enough and finish with the set of other dream pictures I've been working on.
I was one of Queen Elizabeth I's wolves. (I don't know if you've ever been to England, or Hampton Court (Henry VIII's palace in the countryside), but on the off chance: it's beautiful, and this dream started in its kitchen in high summer.)
She had a pack of wolves--we weren't trained for her like the falcons, but voluntarily entered into her service as a kind of special footsoldier corps, because we were sentient. (Throughout, this dream reminded me of Wolf's Rain, but never stole directly from it).
Some of us had always been wolves. Some were people who changed periodically into wolf form as traditional werewolves, and some were magical shifters who just could when they felt like it, or shift into other things entirely. I, in this dream, was somehow voluntarily in a wolf's body while keeping full consciousness of my draconity and knowing that when I was "normal" I was usually in a human body. Here, the knowledge of that was there, but the consciousness of being human had dropped off, so I was just wolf with a dragon soul. I don't know why. It was rather nice. I got to run on all fours! :D
Anyway, so we were sent off--asked, really--to catch this criminal. I was one of two groups. We were split up for better efficiency and sent off over...well, I can't describe it. It definitely wasn't entirely a non-physical area, because I could feel the snow on my paws, and see the ice coating the trees in the distance, and hear the particular squeak of snow as it settles underfoot, and feel the mist of the breath of the other wolves around me. But it also wasn't all "there" all the time, because the space seemed to stretch on forever, and and time seemed to collapse entirely (so whenever you thought about something, it seemed as if you were also partially there watching it happen in "real time"). Sometimes, you would look up and the horizon would have dissolved into stars that became snow under our feet as we got "closer," or, really, as the world turned under us.
We ran for a good long while, and that felt really wonderful. We were all out there doing something we loved and really enjoying it. No one said anything and it smelled really cold.
I kept thinking that I'd seen the lead wolf of our group before. She was the alpha female of the entire pack of "wolves" in England, if not the world, but I kept thinking if I thought hard enough I'd figure it out. And then suddenly I did:
"You're the wolf who the Inuit say drank from the well at before the beginning of the world," I said, and simulntaneously saw the starry horizon expand and grow to encompass absolutely everything, and saw the lead wolf dip her muzzle into it and lap it up; the drop of water that fell off her whiskers fell into the starstuff and rippled it so the universe-well wavered.
She turned around and looked at me as we were running through the snow and said, "Yes, Dragon," with some hint of, "hey, you got it!" and some hint of "we're almost at the scent now--it's not so important, why did you bring that up now?" and some hint of "tell me more about those stories in a little while, won't you? I've never heard all of them."
I don't remember clearly if we caught the evil person or not--I hope we did, because of what he was doing [edit]. But I think we might have.
It's driving me crazy though because I don't know if the Inuit say that or not!
Ancalemon, thank you. I just finished "The Longest Journey" a few days ago, and will try to get all my friends who like computer games to play it. It's gorgeous. I felt the epilouge was too predictable, but the way the last chapter managed to pull the plot-rug out from under your feet and leave you not feeling cheated in any way was amazing storytelling. How cool is Cortez? I wish we'd been able to see more of him. And the Alatien! I can't describe to you how neat it was, personally, for me to play that section of the game. Thank you so much!
Is anyone else familiar with the concept I like to call "Lost Title?" It's when you're so close to encapsulating the entire meaning of a work, or the most important part(s), in a single phrase or word, but it just...won't..come.
You have a world on the tip of your tongue. It's maddening.
But sometimes it works itself out in interesting ways. I was standing at the counter the other day, feeding the cat, and said the word "Autumn" out loud just because I felt like it.
When I said it, it was like I'd never heard the word before correctly, and thought, "that definitely has something to do with the title of the dragon book."
This is last night's dream. It is part of an email I wrote to Sei because she doesn't read lj, slightly edited for readability and content--if you would like the missing content, please email, but it adds nothing to the heart of the dream. I very much liked it and plan on illustrating it as soon as I figure out how to do watercolors decently enough and finish with the set of other dream pictures I've been working on.
I was one of Queen Elizabeth I's wolves. (I don't know if you've ever been to England, or Hampton Court (Henry VIII's palace in the countryside), but on the off chance: it's beautiful, and this dream started in its kitchen in high summer.)
She had a pack of wolves--we weren't trained for her like the falcons, but voluntarily entered into her service as a kind of special footsoldier corps, because we were sentient. (Throughout, this dream reminded me of Wolf's Rain, but never stole directly from it).
Some of us had always been wolves. Some were people who changed periodically into wolf form as traditional werewolves, and some were magical shifters who just could when they felt like it, or shift into other things entirely. I, in this dream, was somehow voluntarily in a wolf's body while keeping full consciousness of my draconity and knowing that when I was "normal" I was usually in a human body. Here, the knowledge of that was there, but the consciousness of being human had dropped off, so I was just wolf with a dragon soul. I don't know why. It was rather nice. I got to run on all fours! :D
Anyway, so we were sent off--asked, really--to catch this criminal. I was one of two groups. We were split up for better efficiency and sent off over...well, I can't describe it. It definitely wasn't entirely a non-physical area, because I could feel the snow on my paws, and see the ice coating the trees in the distance, and hear the particular squeak of snow as it settles underfoot, and feel the mist of the breath of the other wolves around me. But it also wasn't all "there" all the time, because the space seemed to stretch on forever, and and time seemed to collapse entirely (so whenever you thought about something, it seemed as if you were also partially there watching it happen in "real time"). Sometimes, you would look up and the horizon would have dissolved into stars that became snow under our feet as we got "closer," or, really, as the world turned under us.
We ran for a good long while, and that felt really wonderful. We were all out there doing something we loved and really enjoying it. No one said anything and it smelled really cold.
I kept thinking that I'd seen the lead wolf of our group before. She was the alpha female of the entire pack of "wolves" in England, if not the world, but I kept thinking if I thought hard enough I'd figure it out. And then suddenly I did:
"You're the wolf who the Inuit say drank from the well at before the beginning of the world," I said, and simulntaneously saw the starry horizon expand and grow to encompass absolutely everything, and saw the lead wolf dip her muzzle into it and lap it up; the drop of water that fell off her whiskers fell into the starstuff and rippled it so the universe-well wavered.
She turned around and looked at me as we were running through the snow and said, "Yes, Dragon," with some hint of, "hey, you got it!" and some hint of "we're almost at the scent now--it's not so important, why did you bring that up now?" and some hint of "tell me more about those stories in a little while, won't you? I've never heard all of them."
I don't remember clearly if we caught the evil person or not--I hope we did, because of what he was doing [edit]. But I think we might have.
It's driving me crazy though because I don't know if the Inuit say that or not!
Ancalemon, thank you. I just finished "The Longest Journey" a few days ago, and will try to get all my friends who like computer games to play it. It's gorgeous. I felt the epilouge was too predictable, but the way the last chapter managed to pull the plot-rug out from under your feet and leave you not feeling cheated in any way was amazing storytelling. How cool is Cortez? I wish we'd been able to see more of him. And the Alatien! I can't describe to you how neat it was, personally, for me to play that section of the game. Thank you so much!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
17/10/04 21:32 (UTC)(no subject)
18/10/04 13:40 (UTC)I was watching The Simpsons. In the particular episode I saw, Lisa was offered a bribe to take a fall in a Spelling Bee. The bribe was a full scholarship to the Seven Sisters college of her choice. While wrestling with that dilemma, she has a dream, in which she is approached by representatives of the colleges (who resemble Greek goddesses). They each offer her a reason to come to their respective schools, and each of them is stereotypical. ("Come to Radcliffe and meet Harvard men. Come to Wellsley and marry them.") The Smith college woman says "Come play Lacrosse with me" (or something to that effect- she was very muscular and had a lacrosse stick in her hands) and then the Bryn Mawr woman says "Come expiriment with me" and the Smith woman puts her arm around her. It made me laugh, and, as all things Bryn Mawr related do, made me think of you. That's all. I'd call right now, but you're at work and I'm at work.