blather: weird question

[arrow00]

A weird question for my flist:

when you were a kid, did you have a recurring nightmare? if so, what was it?

I had one that was the usual monster-somewhere-in-the-house-coming-to-get-me, but whenever I had a fever and was delirious I had another that was very hard to quantify. It came in various forms but the theme was the same. there was some gigantic piece of machinery, ponderously heavy, made of wooden cogs and levers and chains, and if I touched the wheel the machine would creak into motion and I knew I was destined to be chained to it forever keeping it moving. Or a giant pyramid of stone was suspended above me and I was holding it up but knew it would crush me eventually.

Something about responsibility, or adulthood, but there was also a sense of my insignificance in the giant scheme of things.

What about you, oh my flist?

Comments

[julia-here.livejournal.com]

I had a bunch of them, most of them coming down to being chased by animals. The worst, and most common, was being chased through a haystack by a black boar. The weirdest was being chased through a maze of giant kids cartoon style lunch boxes by a giant rat-terrier puppy.

I should note that I lived (still live) on a farm and had been chased and bitten by geese, muscovy ducks, and dogs. Nobody I know even raised black pigs, though, and the one in my dream was like a European Boar.

Julia, I also dreamed about being chased by fighting bulls, a la Pamploma

[arrow00.livejournal.com]

If you had the experience of being chased a lot as a child, I'm not surprised. EEP!

Did you ever read "This Immortal" (...And Call Me Conrad) by Zelazny? There was a gigantic mutant black boar in that one. :)

[julia-here.livejournal.com]

Not for a very long time, if I have; I need to get back into Zelazny, he's much...sharper? blockier? more vicious? (stylistically as well as thematically) than what I've been reading lately.

Julia, I went through a period of reading mostly Zelazny and Samuel l. Delaney, and then I had kids and my mind went squish

[arrow00.livejournal.com]

I can understand why your mind went squish. Kids take up every bit of intelligence you can muster up :)

Zelazny *is* very blocky, that's a great way to put it. This was the story (lots of funny in it) where the caretaker of Earth is a demi-god of sorts with one blue eye and one green eye and a club foot. He's told to give an alien a tour of the best places of Earth before they are all destroyed. No one lives on Earth anymore except for some mutants and the hard-liners who don't want to leave.

None of which does anything to capture the charm of the story. Something about his writing voice is just wonderful in this. I believe it was his first novel. I don't know if it's still in print, but I can lend you my copy if you like.