My friend’s kid gave me pinkeye and I have been on a particularly fuckt up sleep schedule about it and dreamed an entire Italian Opera on the themes of heaven and hell and the power of love and recognition of the self in other and the tragedy of loving the idea of something rather than the thing itself and the dream ended with the phrase “-And then it was banned EVERYWHERE.”
The plot starts off with a hybrid of Cinderella and the Taming Of The Shrew where a woman with her own daughter marries a Duke who has an older daughter, and then the Duke dies under “Mysterious circumstances”.
But he leaves in his will that his fortune won’t be disbursed until his daughter (the elder one) marries.
The elder daughter (like, 20ish?) is refusing to get married because her step-mother is trying to set her step-sister (age 12) with IDK A Medieval Italian supreme court judge?? (Age 65) , but the marriage can’t go through until the Duke’s fortune disburses and the mother can pay the dowry.
Other thing about the Eldest Daughter: She Always Speaks The Truth. Not only does she refuse to lie, but kind of like a retroactive Cassandra, everything she says is True. As you can imagine, this is not terribly popular In Fantasy Medieval Italian High Society.
The mother, big mad about being stuck with this stubborn, awkward girl, gets a Lawyer and a Bishop and a bunch of other authority figures to modify the will so that “Should the plague take my eldest, we will not be bereft *wink*” AKA if the eldest just dies or disappears without getting married, the mother will get the money anyway.
(They all know she’s going to kill the girl, but they’re getting a cut.)
The Step-Mother then, in true operatic fashion of Going Way Too Hard tortures the Elder daughter, and locks her in the basement to bleed out and die.
There, in the darkness, abandoned by God and the Law and Family etc. the daughter turns to the last thing she has left.
BLACK MAGIC
(Come on, it’s Opera. Everybody knows Black Magic)
He appears to her in the darkness- And is immediately terrified and transfixed because even though it’s totally dark, she’s looking right at, and through him, and Can See Him Exactly As He Is.
Which is Spooky, because he’s been having some serious self-esteem issues lately- Demon has his own problems, you see- He’s a Prince of Hell and thus he’s the victim of Hellish Politics and beset by all his fellow demons. And he’s Terrible at machinations and scheming because he too feels an attachment to The Truth and it’s making him feel Demonically Inadequate, even if he’s got the Wrath and Violence part down pat.
…So He’s been lurking on the material plane to get away from it all and been watching her suffering, because he too feels the kinship of being betrayed and hunted by all that ought love him and telling The Truth no matter how easy it would be to lie.
So now, here he is in the darkness, and his crush is looking RIGHT AT HIM and he’s genuinely frightened because he’s never cared about someone’s opinion of him before.
His aria about this is pretty great, but THEN:
She reaches out to him and says
“There is something wrong with you
There is something wrong with you that is also wrong with me
What is this kinship I feel with you? The affliction grants you Grace and Beauty, and leaves me a Hobbling wretch
Yet I believe we share some kinship- I know the fear in your eyes, for I see it in every mirror”
(I know the first two lines are from a poem in Mirror Traps by Hera Lindsay Bird, but this is what my eye-pain-delerium brain supplied me with)
He goes down on one knee in front of her and promises to do anything she wishes- He’s seen how she suffers and If he cannot have his own recompense, he will have hers- -For what price?
You are wise, and I am weary- I am a Demon and there is but one currency we trade in. Give me your soul, and I will give you everything you desire.
She thinks about it for a bit, and he makes every offer he can- I will torture your stepmother as she tortured you! The Judge lusting after your sister? I’ll make his dick explode! That bishop that has his head up his ass- I’ll make him shove it up there so far he turns inside-out!
-Love me. She says. The suffering of others will do nothing to ease my own, though some bitter part of my would thrill to see it. Love me, Truly love me as neither of us have been but deserved, and my soul will be yours.
…If I were to Truly Love you, then my soul would be yours.
-Would that be such a terrible thing?
…It would not. He says, and promptly spirits her off to his palace in hell, and explains his situation as he tends to her.
{{archivist’s note: the next paragraph is in a larger font size and a fancy cursive font}}
[At this point my brain extensively hallucinated some real smutty hurt/comfort, because I am hurting and need the comfort]
Once they understand each other, they decide to do a strangers on a train-
He goes to Earth where the mother is planning to marry the younger daughter off to the creepy old judge and tricks everyone into betraying everyone else in disguise as a simple manservant, and spirits the younger daughter away back to Hell to play with Hellhound puppies all while making sure he Never Tells A Single Lie, because it’s not a sin for a demon to be honest- it’s a demonstration of his Mastery that he doesn’t NEED to.
Meanwhile, She goes to the royal court of Hell and goes around to all the Demons and tells them The Truth about themselves, which they can’t stand as all their power is based on a sense of self-importance and secret rules that don’t actually have anything to do with reality. After losing most of their power to The Divine Wrath Of Autsim, they scamper off to Earth to get more power from their humans, who are all in a tizzy because there’s some kind of political thing going on, and the Elder Daughter and the Demon play off each other’s work to get everyone ready to fuck up each other’s shit.
(This part of the dream got muddy because Actual Plot is something I have to do while conscious and I’m not doing more than I have to until my eye stops trying to to persuade me to gouge it out with a spoon)
ANYWAY, The Final Act is the Big Wedding where all the Humans are plotting to murder each other and the Demons are all shriveled up little creatures and The Daughter and The Demon Prince turn up and reveal it was them all along and that ALL of you suck and have also ruined each other- the Judge has gotten the lawyer disbarred, the Lawyer had gotten the Bishop caught committing fraud, the Bishop has gotten the judge excommunicated and ALL the mother’s friends and allies are broke and their careers are dead and now that they have no social agency, they can’t hurt anyone anymore.
And then the caterer steps forward and reveals that He’s Actual For Real God, and he is SO PROUD of the daughter and the demon for stopping this corrupt fracas without violence or lying! The shriveled demons are Human Souls that had been cast into hell to atone but weren’t learning the lesson, and the humans are headed that way unless they really get their shit together.
The demon prince remarks that it’s odd that God would be pleased with the work of a demon.
What Demon? Says the Daughter, who always says the truth.
Yeah what Demon? Laughs God. You’re one of my Best Angels, who oversees the rehabilitation of the wicked. You looked like you were getting overwhelmed though, so I found this Paragon of Truth for you. And you Paragon looked like you were in need of help so I found this Angel for you! Now, is someone getting married today or are we just gonna let this cake go to waste?
God marries them, there’s a big party and The All Live Happily Ever After as the King and Queen of Hell, and her sister gets big into Demonic Dog Breeding.
and then I explicitly dreamed the voice of some art historian saying “-And then it got banned EVERYWHERE.”
Tags:
#storytime #dreams #demons #illness tw #murder cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Had a dream this morning that Archive of our Own had a Random button which would simply take you to a random fanfic, like Wikipedia has. (AO3 does not appear to really have this, I checked and couldn’t find one, but I kinda wish they did.) Someone had started a game where whatever fic you got, that was your new fandom, which is very fun! I would love this meme in real life.
The problem came in where so many people used the button that it broke and just started sending everyone to Stealing Harry, and like…I have fond memories of Stealing Harry but it’s not my best work and nobody should be assigned to be a Harry Potter fan in this day and age.
So I decide to go off and find Astolat and demand she fix this but when I finally did (there was a whole quest) she turned to me like the baddie in a horror flick and said, “But that’s the most random story there is” in a dark voice and I was terrified and woke up.
In the cold light of day I know there are more random stories by me on the archive, let alone by others, but I’m not going to try to get back there to argue my case. Pretty sure whatever I spoke to was actually the demon specifically assigned to plague fandom and not Astolat at all.
I’d say “get thee behind me, demon” but I know just how many porny fics on AO3 begin with that premise. (I’ve written some.) Begone foul spirit, and take your Satanic Panic with you!
This made me laugh so hard – of all the things a sleeping mind can offer up as entertainment, poor Copperbadge was visited by a demonic Astolat impersonator.
It’s a generator that produces a link to a random work page on AO3, using a number generator in the link.
Fair warning, it turns up 404 errors pretty often, because many works have been deleted. Keep clicking, you’ll get something eventually.
Also, this is literally any work on AO3, so remember the back button and browse responsibly.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #dreams #AO3 #memes #https://archiveofourown.org/works/2890094 #I have been assigned Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries #I’ve heard vaguely positive things about it
The strangest dream that I ever had was where I was talking to Strax the Sontaran from Doctor Who and he claimed that he had gotten into Christianity in a big way because he thought that it was “admirably cunning of humanity to lure their God down to Earth in a mortal body so that they could DESTROY HIM!”
Tags:
#Doctor Who #dreams #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #he would though #(the person I reblogged this from tagged it) #Almost Nowhere #(took me a bit to get it but it’s a good joke too)
Things that were true in a hypnagogic dream world I experienced last night (for like five seconds, while drifting in and out of sleep):
“Ghosts we” was a popular slang phrase, meaning something like “I approve of ghosting” or “I ghost people,” used as sort of a macho/”alpha” boast (like, “lots of women are interested in me, I don’t owe anything to any of them”)
Grammatically speaking, I don’t know whether it was supposed to be interpreted as “we [are] ghosts” or what, but that’s what it meant
Violent J of Insane Clown Posse had recently changed his stage name to “Go Sui,” which was universally interpreted as a made-up “Asian” name that sounded like “ghosts we”
It’s been three years and I still think about “ghosts we”.
Tags:
#me three #that one post with the thing #dreams #(…that song sounds like nails on a chalkboard) #(but anyway) #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
do you ever form close relationships with people in your dreams and then feel a little sad when you wake up
i had a son in one of my dreams, he was 3 or 4, i loved him so much, i don’t remember his name but i remember loving him so much, and then i woke up and he was gone
Hey um what the FUCk
tldr: boy have i ever
Tags:
#dreams #storytime #death tw #unreality cw? #holy *fuck* that reaction GIF #(if you don’t get why I’m going ”holy fuck” at that reaction GIF‚ watch ”The Sound of Her Voice” and get back to me) #Star Trek #DS9
When I was asleep, I dreamed about a popular tumblr post that went something like this:
I’m incredibly jealous of fishes why? It’s because icebergs are a thing for them
As a human you will never get to witness a gigantic mythical ice creature descending from the heavens It’s so awesome it can only happen in fiction But for antarctic fishes, it’s just like “yep” “that’s wednesdays for ya”
They don’t know how good they have it! If I saw a Leviathan Frost Dragon manifest in the skies I’d pass out from excitement And yet these fuckers are just jaded to such happenings.
This has been your annual repost from the best of Dreamworld Tumblr, enjoy.
Oh, also the research session on the dream internet turned up the fact that dream icebergs are all shrouded in a miniature storm system with spectacular lightning and snow. And also that, off the coast of Brazil, some of these iceberg mini-storms have become self-sustaining even though the iceberg has melted, and they bring immense fertility to the seas below, by churning up the nutrients, so a whole bunch of fish follow them around to feed on the plankton bloom. Sadly, they’re hazardous to visit if you’re a fisherman. This is because the storm is so warm and full of nutrients that it snows mold. The legendary mold-storms of Brazil, responsible for their vast fishing exports.
Tags:
#…Dreamworld Tumblr has a fucking point #icebergs #unsanitary cw? #dreams
one of the best parts of horses and the horse world are the dramatic names, it’s honestly my favorite. i want my professional job to be naming racehorses stupid things. i write fiction about racehorses sometimes, and the best parts aren’t the dramatic crime scenes, they’re the the racehorse names i get to come up with. like:
i have literal lists dedicated to this
I had an extremely vivid dream a few months back that I was trapped in a fire tower (to watch for wildfires) that was surrounded by wildfire and my manager emailed me and told me I had to legally name every single horse owned by the national park service and enter them all in a database as the flames grew closer.
The dream mostly consisted of trying to figure out the Secret Horse Naming Rules of the Offical Horse Database so that I could name all Sixteen Thousand Horses. Rules included “Must contain real, whole words” “No Profanity” and “No repeats at all ever, for any horse that ever lived”.
I kept thinking of new things like “I’m pretty sure I know more swear words than the Horse Database” and “I bet there aren’t horses named just strings of random nouns” and “I bet I can gives horses last names”
Some of the names I remember, as the flames howled around the tiny tower and I was filled with vengeful rage:
Valid-To-Eat-Fingers-O’Malley
Dishwasher
When You Are Engulfed In Flames
dinosaur chicken nugget
The First Third Of The Bee Movie Script Before I Hit The Secret Character Limit
The average person has about one or two hours/night of REM sleep, and is awake for about 16 hours/day. So of all your experience, about 90% is awake, and 10% is in dreams.
But dreams tend to involve much stronger emotions than waking. In a typical waking day, you’ll go to the office, maybe hang out with friends, do a lot of boring stuff you’ve done before. In a typical dream, you’ll find true love, or get attacked by zombies, or discover a new continent. So much more than 10% of your interesting emotions, happiness, and unhappiness happens in dreams. Let’s kind of arbitrarily say it’s 50%.
You spend so much work trying to improve the quality of your waking life, and it’s so hard. But you put almost no work into improving the quality of your dreams. And improving the quality of dreams is much easier! A cooler room, a softer blanket, or a cup of tea before bed could all do it. That’s before you even get to all the complicated herbs and meditation techniques people have invented for the purpose. If, as a utilitarian, your goal is to maximize your positive and minimize your negative experiences – then if you’re concentrating on waking life, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
This suggests probably the most important and neglected effective altruist cause is giving people better dreams. It probably costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Amnesty International to prevent one person from being tortured when awake, but far more people are tortured in nightmares, and those probably can be prevented for a few dollars each. The same is true of positive utilitarianism. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to create new lives. But there are dozens of medications and supplements that can give people much more vivid dreams, and if we give those the the people whose dreams are most likely on net to be pleasant, we’re creating vast amounts of extra pleasurable experience.
If your dreams are generally good, take galantamine and melatonin to get more of them. If your dreams are generally bad, take scopolamine and clonidine to get less of them. This is by far the most effective life improvement advice you will ever get.
I think this is related to the distinction between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self”? Most people remember their dreams pretty weakly (I generally don’t remember mine at all.) We generally seem to treat the “remembering self” as more real than the “experiencing self”. (Consider the use of “conscious sedation” in medicine.)
That just kicks the can down the road to “making dreams more *memorable* is one of the most important things we could possibly do”.
And before anyone is like “but most waking experiences are also not memorable”: maybe your *brain* doesn’t remember, but if you care to arrange it you can get an exoself that *does* [link]. As technology advances (data storage, wearable recorders, automated transcription, etc), this gets more practical every year.
Whereas…okay, I haven’t yet had a chance to post the draft I’m thinking of here, but for now: the scariest part of lucid dreaming is the acute awareness that you’re operating with a malfunctioning memory compiler with *nothing* you can do to compensate for that. Everything around you–every bit of scrap paper, or keyboard, or microphone, or friend–is an illusion even more fragile than your current consciousness.
A sedated me is, if she can *possibly* manage it, wearing a microphone around her neck [link]. A dreaming me gets nothing: maybe an after-the-fact journal entry if she’s *lucky*.
I had a dream that I lived in a town on the edge of reality. There was a map showing the location of the town in spacetime, and it was depicted as teetering on the edge of the event horizon of a funnel-shaped warp in reality. Like light a certain distance away from a black hole, we were unable to escape the influence of the warp, but not drawn in by it completely, either.
Our proximity to Unreality conferred many advantages, and we were able to do things in our town that weren’t actually possible. We could survive fatal accidents and walk away without a scratch. Things that were lost forever were found again, and sometimes, if you didn’t think about it too directly, failures transformed into successes just like that. It was as though thought itself was a physical substance that could bend the shape of the world in our favor. Life was good in the little town of Event Horizon, where things always seemed to work out and Lady Luck lived on our side.
But Event Horizon also experienced “reality-quakes”. Now and then the fabric of spacetime would ripple, and shockwaves would rock our little town violently. Sometimes things would shake loose and get drawn in to the Unreality, and even people could be lost this way. They quakes weren’t common, but they seemed to be occurring with more frequency, leading to fears that we were becoming unmoored in spacetime and might lose the equilibrium that allowed us to survive and take advantage of the flexibility of reality.
Thought could stabilize things, if we projected our minds as physical forces to hold things in place. You could cast your thoughts out as a net and pull against the draw of Unreality. But that only worked if we were prepared and braced ourselves against the quake ahead of time, and people needed to work and eat and sleep and go to school. There was no way that everyone could be on anchoring duty all the time.
That’s why we had a lottery. Every twenty years, one among us would be selected to by the community to be the Achor for the entire town—a full-time psychic resistance against entropy. The Anchor would enter a trance state and project their mind out to touch every structure, every tree, every pebble, every person in Event Horizon, and hold them there. Constantly. For twenty years.
People would come to tend to the Anchor, to feed and bathe them and keep them comfortable, but the Anchor rarely became lucid enough to recognize them. It was a vital, respected, honorable position, but there was no glory in it. If you found out you had been selected to be the next Anchor, your family would grieve for you as though you had died. If you had children, they would be taken care of in a princely fashion as wards of the state, and your family would be honored and want for nothing, because even though your assignment was only twenty years, former Anchors did not tend to live for very long. They’d be made comfortable and lavished with good things, but their life energy would be sapped, and they’d fade away quickly.
My dream was 90% exposition and very little in-the-moment action, but I had just discovered that I would be the new Anchor, and I was not happy about it. The most vivid action scene I remember was standing in my kitchen staring at breakfast cereal boxes on a shelf and touching them with my mind, feeling every grain of cereal within and thinking, “Even this? Even this?”
I was drawing a bunch of pentagrams in my notebook during math class because I was bored and I think I drew 150 pentagrams in total before a devilish-looking guy wearing a red suit broke down the door of the classroom and yelled“wHAT the fUCK do you wANT?!”
this username escapes me every single time
i cant stop thinking about this post
Tags:
#dreams #demons #unreality cw #storytime #art #fanart #tbh I was completely willing to believe that this had happened #like not an *actual* demon #but if you drew like 150 pentagrams that gives a classmate time to notice #and quietly arrange a prank over some wireless communication method with an assistant
Brinens and Things 