Toad dream
Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 12:04 pmI’ve been taking melatonin before bed for five nights now. I’ve noticed that I’m sleeping better, am less tired during the day, and am more productive and in a better mood thanks to the improved sleep. I’ve also had somewhat improved recall of my dreams, though they were quite boring until last night. This is one I had after getting up for a drink of water at about quarter to four.
The setting was a fairly close facsimile of our apartment. There was an enormous jar sitting on Stu’s desk with a large beetle flapping around inside. There was also a toad. I can’t remember exactly what order things happened in next, but every time I looked at the jar there was something else in it, or something had escaped - a giant green frog, one of Patrick Woodroffe’s elephant snails, an even bigger toad, etc. I left the apartment for some reason and came back to find two foot-long cocoons in the room next door. When I looked again these had hatched into two little people, male and female, apparently made of stockings stuffed with white filling material. The male wore a toga and glasses and looked older than his partner. He explained that the life cycle and marriage customs of their kind, with the male being much older than the female, served to aid the preservation of written knowledge - or something to that effect. I don’t think we were talking verbally; we were writing our conversation down somehow. Meanwhile the elephant snail had taken its shell off and was waving it around with an air of triumph. The female stocking person didn’t say anything, just smiled a lot. I went out and came back again to find several strangers exercising in the living room - a man with a rowing machine, a woman on a treadmill, and a couple of others. The man started advising me on how to stay in shape. I found this annoying. Then I woke up.
The snail reminded me of my vampire snail period, which I went through somwhere around year 8 or 9. Leering snails with enormous fangs and top hats. A large, winged species of vampire snail was used as a mount by a clan of gothic warriors.
March 29th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
…Your… Vampire snail period. Snails?
Okay, so vampire snails are admittedly less weird than that dream, but still.
March 29th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
That was full of awesome. I had a dream earlier where the four cardinal directions were .. represented, named, tied to Cain, Abel, Thoth, and Bast. (I had to concentrate to pull the last two so I’m slightly less sure). Not that there’s any connection. I would like to see art involving Gothic warriors riding giant flying snales. Somehow I’m imaging a large amazonian woman with dark hair and ashen skin, wearing dull plate armor that includes a breast plate that does nothing to cover the breasts, and carrying a large 8 foot long spear with a smooth wooden shaft, grayed and dark like weathered wood, and a 12 inch blade on the end with a small slightly raised guard. The snail would be painted, of course.
March 29th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
I do like that the vampire snails had top hats. … That is a nice touch.
March 29th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
I had a long-running obsession with snails. Woodroffe’s elephant snails sparked it off. I think he painted winged snails, too. I just loved the idea of a snail cat or a snail horse or a snail dragon.
The warriors did have the ashen skin, dark hair and armour, as well as large lance-like weapons. I can’t remember if they painted their snails but now I can imagine the shells painted like the fuselages of warplanes with distracting images of Betty Page.
Cain, Abel, Thoth and Bast - that’s an interesting eclectic melange. I’m seeing it as an intimate little dinner party with Cain and Abel in their Trinity Blood forms.
March 29th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
It didn’t occur to me that I might need to disambiguate “painted” - I was seeing primitive/tribal glyphs rather than “new car blue.” Which is how you seem to have taken it, anyway. Thinking on it, I suppose the likes of Boris Vallejo and Fredrik K.T. Andersson have a certain amount of influence over how I render fantasy images internally… In any case, Betty Page on a B52 is probably part of modern tribalism.
Also, I don’t know which of the four were connected to which direction, but this makes a certain amount of sense:
South is Bast, because Bast is a god that watches over southern Egypt.
North is Thoth, because of his roll in judging the dead, my concept of North doesn’t really start until snow is the largest part of the landscape, and such frozen climbs equal death. As for Cain and Abel, with the biblical versions, Cain would be east and Abel would be west. Because in the US, their are old associations of farmers in the east and ranchers in the west. Cowboy is western, after all.
hmm. Gwynn comes from the North (associations, icy land, death and judgment) travels east (internal association of “east” is middle-east, ie, Egypt- so a desert land).. then travels to the southeast, where associations of fertility (bast) and hot/humid (American Southeast) meets an incarna of bast (mysterious, sensual), does bad things for the one he serves (Cain) hits due south as Beth ascends, swings west (the end was like lawless days of the west) and ends where he started, North- this time with Thoth’s connection to Hermes, existence of/as magic, frozen+death duality.
ah. that was a bit rambling. Err. Quietly thinking out loud. ^^
March 30th, 2007 at 2:16 am
Well, I have to say…. that made perfect sense to me.
Really, I’ve been opened up into a while new world of possibilites.
“Where you throw ducks at ballons and nothing is as it seems!”
- Homer Simpson
=D
March 30th, 2007 at 9:42 am
Wow. Thoth-Hermes as psychopomp would go in the North in my world, it’s true. I know West is more traditionally the direction of death, but for me it’s the cold snowy north (sounds like it’s similar for you). The various directions in the book were always meant to be more about states of mind or being than actual geography.
I love the farmers and ranchers thing with Cain and Abel - I never would have thought of that. Australia’s geography places death in the middle and life around the edges, but my mind is so full of European mythology that the four directions model feels natural.
N.B. I’ve tried to take Gwynn to the real East, the full-on Orient, but it always ends up like an episode of Monkey or a riff off Barry Hughart. I can’t conjure up any mental Far East that isn’t obviously ancient China, about which I have hopeless romantic feelings.
March 30th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
the east and west thing was just purely American associations, but it all felt reasonably right when typing it. ^^