Spiders in the academy

[davidn]

After two very early morning starts in a row and allowing myself to finally sleep in, I had a dream...

I was staying at some hybridized combination of the Furfright hotel and the academy that I went to from 1996-2002. The dream started off in what I thought was my room - this was the alcove off the main corridor that housed the trophy cabinets, except it had a king-size bed in it. There were two other people there of my age milling about with me, and we were vaguely unpacking, when a teacher walked past and leaned in to talk to me.

This teacher - who I didn't recognize, but had glasses with brown hair and a beard - asked me about replacing one of the large baubles on the Christmas tree in the assembly hall. Evidently I had agreed to do this by buying a replacement red bauble and then painting it so that it looked like the missing old one. I had forgotten the arragement, but I reassured him that I would remember to do it, and he stepped back again and said that something in the room smelled wet. We looked around for a while trying to identify it, then I realized that someone had come in to water the pot-plant in the corner yesterday (by which I meant I had seen him just a minute ago) but nobody else had seen it happen.

At this stage, I was staying with kjorteo and I left him getting dressed in an arrangement of wooden screens while I walked outside. On my way I noticed that there was a red alarm light rotating in the corridor, and there was an anime-looking red-haired woman with a sword wandering around - I didn't talk to her but knew that she would become an important character later.

When I went outside, the academy was on the edge of a town built around a bay, where the cruise ship that we had stayed on last month had arrived. They were lowering the tender boats so that they could take people ashore, but this was a far less organized arrangement than in real life - people were on the deck of the ship just flinging masses of little boats and dinghies and inflatable flotation devices down into the water over each other and leaping down to get into them. It was like a blowup recreation of the Dunkirk landings. Stepping back from the chaos, I took a couple of friends up to sit down on a hillside where we could observe the proceedings, and I saw Kjorteo walking up towards us (now in woodrat form but with his pixel Livejournal icon as a head). I declared that I loved this place, where everyone was anthropomorphic for a couple of days a year.

As he got closer, I realized something was amiss, because - though I was unsure whether this was what was happening or had been added later for censorship - he was wearing a large round bush around himself, because his clothes had been stolen. He sneaked past us up to where I had left my car, presumably to find some spares there, but instead got into a white cardboard box and rolled down the other side of the hill back towards the academy, a difficult feat in a square container.

I excused myself and followed him, picking him out of the box, and - because he was incredibly light and curled up - carried him back to the entrance to the library and English department. For the sake of simplicity I will explain this part with American indexing from floor 1 on the ground - the first floor had now been infected with a colony of large mechanical red spiders (who presumably ate clothes), so I avoided going into it and climbed the stairs to the third floor, where the red warning lights were flashing again. The infection in the school was spreading, because the spiders were reaching maturity and turning into glowing white slimy pillars that stretched to the first floor's ceiling, eventually reaching up to the third floor where the pillars stopped at head height with vague faces notched into their rounded tops.

I saw all this from the stairwell, but looking through the window in the door to the main corridor, I saw the woman with the sword from earlier fighting the creatures. Either she called to me, or I just somehow... gained the knowledge that the creatures were growing through a break in reality that encompassed the second floor, leaving it clear.

I went down the stairs one floor again, and saw that there was nothing out of the ordinary on the second floor, so I took a chance and ran for my car sitting there. I drove us away to escape, and the satellite navigation projected arrows on to the street to take us away on a circuitous route that ended with a long straight on a bridge that curved down into the water for a few metres and then back up again. So I zoomed down there, splashed through the water, went up the other side and launched off the other side of the bridge... where after spinning madly, I landed us on the deck of what looked like a pirate ship.

Then I woke up and found that a woman's magazine that I'd never heard of had been delivered to the house, addressed directly to me. That wasn't part of the dream, but it seemed to be worth mentioning.

Comments

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

As far as dreams go, that was actually pretty coherent - and thrilling, at the end!

There's usually a dividing line between "anthropomorphic" and "not anthropomorphic", so I find the idea of a place where everyone is anthropomorphic for a few days a year very charming. Was it a phenomenon that affected everyone at the same time, or would different people have different days? You didn't mention it affecting you - did it? Did people get to choose, or just represent their inner selves like in Zelda 3's Dark World? I hope not too many people turned into sneezing trees.

By the way, I was particularly amused by the imagery of Kjorteo rescuing himself from nakedness with a cardboard box only to promptly - and deliberately - roll down the side of a hill. Injuries notwithstanding, that's certainly one method of getting to the bottom!

The clothing-eating spider infestation was fantastic - no comment about the slimy pillars, though.

[premchaia_pre4]

I still can't help but find that usage particularly odd despite knowing it's how it's likely to be perceived. I'm assuming in his dream that everyone was human-looking the rest of the time? But then, pretty much by definition, humans are the most anthropomorphic things in existence!

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

If anthropomorphic should mean to give something a human-like form, then wouldn't humans be non-anthropomorphic, because, being fully human, there's nothing to make "like" a human, as everything already is? The concept of something being similar to a human, means anything completely human is excluded.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

If you were walking down the street with a friend, looked up, pointed at one of the clouds, and said "that cloud looks like a car!" The would be a "normal" sort of experience, that everyone could accept. If you pointed at a car on the side of the road, and said "that car looks like a car;" suddenly the statement seems improper.

Unless it was some type of art car; like it only looked "like" a car, ironically.

[premchaia_pre4]

Aggravate not my crimson breast.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

I'll try my best~ :3!

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

". . .spiders were reaching maturity and turning into glowing white slimy pillars that stretched to the first floor's ceiling, eventually reaching up to the third floor where the pillars stopped at head height with vague faces notched into their rounded tops."

At least I don't dream about that. . !

[xaq.livejournal.com]

I got to the "satellite navigation projected arrows" and thought, "have you spent too much time editing together those UT3 Stumbling Together videos?"

[davidn]

Oh, you're right, I never thought of that! These were sort of projected across the corners rather than a line of them, but it was the same idea...