Where Do You Get Your Ideas, Revisited

So here's the time line:  My white cat (the "whine-o") wakes me up at 8:00 hocking up a hairball, on my bedroom carpet which I have to get up and clean up (it's not my carpet).  I look at the time and decide to take my meds right then (an hour early), turn off the alarm clock that wakes me up every day at 9 to take my meds, and turn on the alarm clock with the CD player on sleep timer, and set it to wake me up at 10, which is when I absolutely have to be in my office booting my work computer up and going to work.Then I crawl back in bed to try to steal another 2 hours' sleep.  And while I'm asleep I have this dream:

I'm moving south at driving speed (although I'm not inside a car) down a street that I know (well) to be the stretch of University between 50th street and the Loop.  (My folks still live two blocks east off this street, and I did too from 7th grade til I left home).  Off to my left, up a side street which I know is the street that's just south of the Heritage Oaks nursing home, I see two men on horseback dressed in "Robin Hood" time period clothes, and I think "Reenactors." They're riding away from me up this street, which doesn't look like a street but looks like open country with trees.   I move a little further past that, and then on the west, I'm beside this apartment building that's shaped like a bracket ( ] ).  It's a whole block long, and I "recognize" it as being apartments that are actually on 34th Street and about Avenue T, (This group of apartments has three buildings, one on each side of 34th street and one right across the alley behind them on 33rd street.  When I was 3-6 years old, we lived in the block that's on 33rd street --#55?  When we lived there, they were called "Plaza Apartments," -- my folks always referred to it as "Plasma Apartments."  They have new owners (again) and they're not called that any more, but that's the name for them in my mind. It is the site of my earliest childhood memories. )  The land between this dream-relocated apartment building and the street is "green space"  (The current owners have put up a brick and wrought iron fence and planted trees and made it nice.  Back when we lived there, it was just a grass lawn open to the street.)  In the dream, this green space is mostly lawn, except it has a couple of big old trees, and there are several "campsites," and a couple of women dressed in dark clothing with long skirts like British peasant women of the 1700's.  There are stacks and stands of reeds/wheat stalks and they've made circles of rocks around their camp fires like you do to contain the fire for cooking, and there are kettles cooking over them.  Again, I think "reenactors" and I think maybe they are having a "reenactor weekend gathering" happening in the area.  So now the dream comes in for a closeup of the yard of these apartments.  The scene changes, I'm inside some small place with plaster walls,  and I see pieces of blank parchment and a container of ink and a quill pen out on a wooden table, and I'm hearing this voice in my mind about how the priestess' gift is to be able to remember and to write down if necessary the contents of some kind of book -- the whole book, word for word -- like if anything happens to the book, the priestess can write out another copy of it from memory, and that this memory of the book has been passed down to her from the one before.  The scene changes again and we're back in the apartment yard.  There's this man who's involved in some way with the priestess, and he feels like one of the major arcana of the Tarot.  He has a task he's trying to perform. Then I see this man dressed in black "Robin Hood" era clothes who takes out a piece of card stock folded in half like for a greeting card (it's the same size as one), only it's yellowed and parchment colored.  He shakes the card  --the same way you shake water off your hands before you dry them -- that downward motion with the sudden stop and reversal of direction that slings the water off -- shake! shake! -- two times, and the Tarot man dissolves/particle-izes into a dark glittery swirl that goes onto the card.  I realize then that the black clad man has some kind of control over the Tarot man, and that whenever he shakes the card, the Tarot man has to go onto it.  Now I think maybe the Tarot man must be The Fool, because that's the only major arcana card his "feel" fits, although he doesn't "feel" stupid or jokerish.  He feels aware, and serious, competent and intelligent, and like he's very aware of everything that's going on around him, its significance and all the implications. Then I realize that the "priestess" woman associated with the quill pen and ink container is one of these Tarot cards too, and that the black clad man controls her card as well.  There is something the black clad man wants her to do that she is unwilling to do, and that carries a sense of "being manipulated into serving someone else's purposes."   The priestess does not want to do what he wants her to do, not because it's "bad" or "evil" or "wrong" but because it is using the knowledge she has for the wrong purposes.  She doesn't want to give him this knowledge because he is not entitled to it, and because she knows he will try to use it for selfish purposes.  I get the sense that you do not control the knowledge and use it to serve your own ends.  That's not the way it works.  The way it works, is that you are controlled by the knowledge and that it uses you to serve it's own ends, and that this is the natural order of things, and the way things are supposed to work.  The Tarot man and the priestess are trying to accomplish a task that should be accomplished because it's part of the natural order of things, only the black clad man doesn't want them to, and keeps trying to interrupt them, and coerce them to do what he wants them to do.  When he shakes the cards, they have to go onto them; but I don't know if they can leave the cards unless he releases them.  I don't think he has puppet like control over them, only the ability to impede them and interrupt what they are doing.  He's not "bad" or "evil," only selfish and self-involved and manipulative and is trying to make events serve his own agenda . . .


And then the alarm goes off and  I wake up still wrapped up in this dream, and I'm so frustrated because I have to get up, boot up my work computer and get ready for work, and I've got to make a pitcher of tea (which I should have done last night but didn't because I was too tired), and make some instant oatmeal for breakfast, and go to my office and start working.  But what I really want to do is go straight to my "play" computer and record this dream while it's still fresh in my mind, and all the time, the dream is fading, fading.  Moving around and doing stuff makes the dream fade faster than it would have if I'd just come in, booted up my computer and sat down to record it.  I'm frustrated because I can feel it fading and I know I'm loosing details. And I'm frustrated because I can't explore and play around with the ideas in the dream because I have to start working and get as much done as I possibly can because it's the last day of the pay period and I need to make every penny I possibly can between now and 2 a.m. so I can pay rent, when what I really want to do is blow it all off and play with this dream imagery.  But I've spent 45 minutes typing this up in one long frantic spasm of typing (which I should have spent working) so at least I won't lose it completely.  Today's the last day of the pay period, so what I do today determines how much I'll make this check (not enough, never enough).  Tomorrow will be a day off.  The alarm will go off at 9, I'll get up and take my meds, and then I can go back to sleep and sleep until my stupid white cat wakes me up because he's such a prima dona -- all he does is whine -- maybe I'll get to sleep as long as 4 whole hours.  Maybe I'll have a TV day tomorrow, when I get caught up on all the TV I missed (recorded on the DVR that came with my cable) because I've spent 12 of the past 15 days in my office working because this is the paycheck my rent comes out of. I'm already $200 in the hole because I didn't make enough last pay period to cover all my bills, and every time I have an overdraft the bank hits me up for $30 bucks -- so $90 of that $200 is overdraft charges -- And it's all so frustrating I could just howl!

The above was written in one long frantic fit of typing -- I did go back and punctuate it a little better and fix the typos and misspellings, but it's essentially the stream of consciousness that came out at that moment.  To which I've added the following footnotes.  

Footnote:  In the "Sandman" graphic novels by Neil Gaiman, in the Sandman's realm is a library of books that authors wanted to write but didn't for some reason -- like the whole Xanadu poem that came to Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a clear, complete single flash of inspiration, all rhymed and everything, and all he had to do was just write it down, which is what he was in the middle of doing when that stupid man from Porlock interrupted him (all we've got is what he could salvage of it later) . . . .I'd probably have half a shelf in the Sandman's library by now -- and I know exactly that wild, enraged, howling frustration Coleridge felt when he was interrupted . . . . 

Footnote:  This is not the first story idea that has come to me in a dream. "The Cat, The Dog and the Cantaloupes" has its roots in a dream about Sam Elliott (Do I envy Katherine Ross completely and totally and like crazy or what!)  And one time, right as I was floating into wakefulness, I dreamed an entire story -- completely from end to end --  the whole thing -- like I was watching it as a movie in my head.  In feel it was like a cross between Star Wars, The Matrix movies, Aeon Flux  and  Underworld and it starts with a voice saying "What is the mission?. . . . ."  I've got about the first 4 pages of it down, and I know where it goes and where it ends up, and how it gets there. It's a great story.  I could sell it if I could get it down on paper, but have I had the time to? AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!