Another Dream and a Review at Angie's Desk

Two posts in two days! It's like old blog-time again around here. I definitely wanted to mention a review for Write With Fire over at Angie's Desk. I hope you'll check it out. Thanks Angie! Angie has been a staple of the blogging community for a long time and her lists of open anthology calls are must sees for anyone trying to sell short fiction today. Check out her own work too.

I also had another monster dream last night. Two of those in two days too. In this case I was camping out in a forest known to be inhabited by bigfoot. The whole dream had a kind of Boggy Creek vibe until I actually saw the creature. It was the horned monster with the striped shirt from the book Where the Wild Things Are. That was my son's favorite book as a kid. If I were to try and interpret this one, I'd say it meant that I needed to stop being so afraid of things, that maybe issues that I'm facing are not the monsters they seem to be on the surface.

A Dream Night to Remember

 Dreams 11-11-2016:

Weird how some nights I remember my dreams very well and other nights not so much. Last night was a good one. I had three dreams that I remember.

First dream. I had rescued a black bear that had lost its mother.  He was very sweet and affectionate. He was cuddly and loved to rub noses. At one point, we were out in the field walking and saw another bear, a big adult male, attacking our cattle. Terrified, I grabbed up the little bear and hid behind a fallen tree. The cows were able to defend themselves, though. A group of them struck back against the bear and two held him down while one sat on him. I took off for the house, carrying the little bear, and reported the incident to my mom and dad. End. (In the dream, the cows sitting on the bear didn’t seem odd to me. I imagine this dream was inspired by the book, The Bear, which involved an orphan bear and which I read a couple of weeks ago.)

Second dream. Don’t remember many details about this one. There was a young girl who was possessed. At one point I saw her sitting in a pond with her head down in the water. As I watched, she  lifted her head out of the water and her long hair was matted over her face. She hissed from beneath her hair, which creeped me out. (I’m sure this was inspired by a piece of the sitcom Blackish that I watched last night, where the grandmother believed that one of her young granddaughters was possessed and evil.)

Third dream. I was a security guard at a big company. My partner was Colin Farrell. We were in a car cruising the grounds when we saw a door open into the building. It was a door of metal bars set between two brown stone columns. I called attention to it and we went in. There were a bunch of empty rooms. I pushed open the door to the bathroom and saw a shadowy figure move quickly behind it. He was missing his eyes but there seemed other things wrong with him.

I backed away and called to my partner. He came in and I asked for his gun. I didn’t have one.  While I was doing this, the figure darted out of the bathroom and around the corner into another hallway that I couldn’t see. I started to approach that corridor and a couple of people turned the corner and looked concerned or confused. I knew they’d seen the thing. One particular man I remember was  dressed in a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase. Some other folks came from another direction and were also milling around.

Suddenly, the figure burst out of the hallway he’d gone into and came charging toward us. He was on fire. I yelled something about it being a zombie and shot it. I didn’t shoot it in the head but it went down. People were staring.  I stepped back outside for a moment and saw Colin Farrell pacing back and forth, looking upset. I figured it was because he’d never seen anyone shot before.

I went back in. There was a young kid sitting not far from the dead man. Suddenly he looked up at me and his face changed. His eyes got huge and turned completely full of black. He looked a bit like a Predator from the movie of that name. When I saw the kid change I knew the zombie effect was starting to spread. Then I woke up.

(The kid looked almost exactly like a photo I saw a day or two ago on facebook. It showed a big guy who’d been arrested who had dreadlocks and resembled the Predator in some ways. That was the caption beneath it too.  The zombie on fire was probably from the video game Doom, where you see these kinds of things. I was playing it a bit last week.)

My Days and Nights with Vitamin B

Lots of pain in my legs and back last week. Some of you know that I have neuropathy in my legs and feet, in large part due to spinal damage caused in a motorcycle wreck. As with many things, some days are worse than others. But I’m pretty sure I know what led to last week’s increase. It had to do with sleep and the role of Vitamin B, particularly B-12 and B-1.

For many years my sleep cycles were extremely regular. I went to bed, fell quickly to sleep, slept an hour, woke up at the end of my dream period, and….repeated the process throughout the night. But in the last year or so my cycles have been shortening. I have frequent periods where I sleep 20 to 30 minutes and then wake up from a dream. I suspected Vitamin B might be partially responsible, since it acts in me somewhat like a stimulant.

I began taking high doses of the vitamin a couple of years ago to help counter the effects of my neuropathy. It works, in large part, I imagine, because Vitamin B can act as a neural growth stimulant. It facilitates the ability of nerves to recover from wear and tear. But, since the changes in sleep cycles seem to have correlated to some extent with my increased intake of “B,” I stopped taking it for a few days to see what would happen.

I seemed to sleep deeper without B but the increase in cramps and pain countered any benefit from that. I began waking up from the pain of the cramps in my legs and feet rather than from the end of a dream period. I went back to taking the vitamin and within a day the cramps had subsided.  That was a relief.

I’ve also noticed that I have an upsurge in energy levels when I take Vitamin B, and that is nice during the day but may partially explain the shortening of my deep sleep periods. I have certainly noticed an increase in dream intensity while taking Vitamin B,  although I’ve always had intense and vivid dreams since I was a little kid. Unfortunately, increasing dream sleep generally means decreasing deep sleep, which is where we get most of our “rest.”

Monday night, after having returned for a couple of days to my Vitamin B regimen, I had one of the strangest dreams I’ve ever had, and those of you who have followed my blog over the years know I’ve had some odd ones. Even my weirdest dreams, however, can usually be traced to recent real-life experiences, such as something I’ve read, or written, or seen in a movie. This dream was, to put it mildly, Freudian.  Here it is. Make of it what you will.

I’m in what appears to be a covered canal. The floor looks like cement and there is a trickle of water running down it, but the walls and ceiling are made of rough rock. Though the canal is enclosed and no sunlight can get in, I can still see pretty well. It’s dim but not dark. There’s a clear glow of light coming from some unknown source. 

As I venture deeper into the canal, working my way upstream, I come upon a skeleton lying on the rocks to one side of the central water flow. I feel horribly sad for the person who has been lost here, and I decide to pick it up and carry it out of the canal.  I turn and start downstream toward the exit with the skeleton in my arms. As I walk along, however, the skeleton begins to reflesh itself. Blood vessels, muscles, and skin begin to reappear on the body. I am untroubled by this and continue on my way.

Soon, I can see a brighter light growing ahead of me and know it is the exit from the canal.  As I step out into the light of day, I look down and realize that I’m carrying my fully grown son in my arms. He is sleeping peacefully.  I turn and gaze back at the canal.  Although it looks physically like no more than a rounded opening into a mountain, I “know” in my head that I’m looking at a womb and that I just “delivered” my son by carrying him out through the birth canal.

OK, so there’s some weirdness to start your day.

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War Dream, with Extras

I dreamed I was with an army. We were fighting in Asia, either Mongolia or China it seemed. Mostly we were fighting the Chinese who seemed to be wearing WWII era clothing. Our weapons seemed like that era as well. I had a Tommy Gun. We finished a fight with some soldiers and then advanced into this valley where lay our objective, a village.

Before we saw the village, though, we saw the villagers coming toward us. They were mostly children with a scattering of women and old men. I was just a soldier but we had translators with us and through them the officers ordered the villagers to stop. They didn’t, but came on with these blank faces that seemed totally devoid of will.

Again and again they were ordered to stop but kept coming. Then the order came for us soldiers to open fire. We did. I shot a young boy in the leg to take him down but he seemed hardly to notice it and kept coming. I shot him again, higher, in the shoulder. The bullet seemed only to tug at him. No blood ran from the round black hole and he kept coming.

I was scared now. I opened fire for real. Bullets punched holes across the boy’s chest and even through his face—round, perfect, black holes, without any blood. They didn’t stop him. The other soldiers were having no better luck. I saw some of the bodies of the villagers almost torn to shreds by bullets and through those torn gaps I saw the reason for the villagers advance. From the back of each protruded a tentacle that was pushing them, controlling them.

The villagers, what was left of them, were within feet of us now. Then the tentacles shed their torn camouflage and whipped forward into our line, wrapping around various soldiers. One tentacle caught me up, jerked me up in the air. It dragged me spinning through the air and then released me. I fell, and landed with many other soldiers in a great long trench. We didn’t land on dirt though. We landed on a massive, quivering bulk of slick, pink flesh.

I woke up.

Chtulhu lives! In my dreams!

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A Rare Symbolic Dream

As a psychologist, I often get asked to interpret dreams. My general response is that I have no idea what ‘your’ dream means. For the most part, dreams appear to have no meaning other than an expression of those events and experiences that we are going through at the moment of the dream. In other words, most of what is in our dreams is the same material that is in our waking life, such as the books we read, the TV shows we watch, and the thoughts that worry us.

Most dream material is not demonstrated in any symbolic way but is right there on the surface of the imagery. If there is “symbolic” meaning to your dream, it is generally a symbolism that only you can accurately interpret. It is based on your life and culture as you grew up. The same is true for me. Once in a great while, however, I have a dream that seems clearly to be saying something in symbolic form. Last night’s dream was an example, and it’s pretty easy to interpret, probably for everyone. Here it is:

An astronaut crashes on a desolate planet and walks away from the wreck. The planetary surface looks much like our moon, with no signs of any life. The man is wearing a space suit and is already thinking about what happens when the suit runs out of air. The man is not quite me, and does not look like me, but I feel clearly as if I’m inhabiting him.

Then, the astronaut sees a shadowy figure approaching from the distance. He heads off in that direction but stops as he gets a closer look at the figure. It’s a human and he’s not wearing a suit. He looks almost like the astronaut, but older. This older man approaches the astronaut and stops, but says nothing. His stare is blank.

The astronaut cautiously tests the air and finds it breathable. He strips off his suit, and as he turns back to the older man he is attacked suddenly by that fellow. The older man is slow and weak and the younger man easily throws him down and then backs away. The older man gets up and attacks again. The younger man punches him and knocks him down a second time.

The guy gets up off the ground and stands there. The younger man is ready to defend himself but no attack comes. The young man tries talking to the older man but there is no answer, only the stare. As the younger man relaxes a little bit, the older man attacks again. The astronaut easily knocks the man down again but now dares not relax when the fellow climbs back to his feet.

At this point, the dream began to jump forward in time. I’d see the young man starting to walk away and being attacked, moving to examine his suit and being attacked. Each individual attack was easy to defeat physically, but now the wear and tear of the psychological stress began to tell. The young man could not escape because the old man followed. He could not rest or an attack would come. He dared not sleep for fear that he would be helpless. And now he begins to tire.

In such a way is youth and strength defeated.

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Miscellaneous Adventures

Been pretty busy this week. We had mid-terms due. Here are a few things that happened.

1.  I had an amazingly beautiful dream on Wednesday. Lana and I had gone to a mountainous nature preserve where we saw five snow leopards crossing a creek. As night fell and I looked up at the sky I realized we weren't on earth. The stars were huge and absolutely myriad, and they did not all appear white but were gorgeous in brilliant shades of yellow, red, green and blue. Then, as I scanned the sky, I found a vast planet glowing a sullen red in one portion of the sky. The planet's seas appeared black, and there was a ring around the planet that was clearly an artificial construct. I could see space stations in orbit around the planet and understood that many of them were docks or construction sites for spaceships. I sure wish I could paint these images.

2. Lana and I watched the new Godzilla movie on Thursday night. We both thought it sucked, although I think Lana liked the depiction of Godzilla a fair amount. She certainly cheered when he used his lightning breath.  The movie definitely seemed to hark back to the original Japanese movies. However, all the plot lines involving humans in the movie turned upon them being absolutely stupid. I found myself unable to root for any of the human characters because of this stupidity. For example, why in hell would you arm a nuclear weapon while still in the city if you intend to take it out to sea to detonate it?

3. I found in my last year's reading that I didn't peruse many graphic novels so I've ordered a few from Amazon that should be in soon. I will report on them here.

4. And, delightfully, Randy Johnson has reviewed "The Adventures of an Arkansawyer" over on his "Not the Baseball Pitcher" blog. Thanks to Randy! I hope you will check it out.
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Review of Under the Ember Star by Rachel V. Olivier

Something good to post about. Rachel Olivier has put up a very fine review of Under the Ember Star over at her blog. Thanks to Rachel for the review, and I'm glad she liked it. I was happy too because this is one of the first posted reviews I've had of the book by a woman reader. It took me a long time to try, as a male writer, to create a female protagonist, rather than just female secondary characters. I've only done it a few times so I was pleased to hear that it worked from someone of the other gender.

In other news, interesting lucid dream last night. As soon as I realized it was lucid I opened the door the cabin I was in and took off flying. That's what I usually do whenever I go lucid. Love to fly. Later I had a dream about a wolf puppy gnawing at my boot.

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Star Trek Dream

I dreamt last night that I was on the set for the filming of the final scenes of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. Picard, Troi, Riker and Crusher had beamed down to a planet and been trapped by a group of aliens whose ship had crashed there. These aliens were reptilian, an apparent offshoot of the Gorn. Something in the planet’s atmosphere was causing the Gorns to mutate into near-mindless alligator type creatures. The ones who were still OK insisted that the humans, who were unaffected by the condition, help them solve the problem before they were all lost.

In the scene I witnessed, the Trek crew discovered that the problem had something to do with unequal air pressures inside and outside the bodies of the aliens. These pressures were causing their skulls and bodies to distort. Once the Trek crew figured out the problem, the aliens had a device that was able to equalize the pressures and prevent the mutations from occurring.

It was clear to me that the actors thought the whole concept was very weak and they weren’t really enjoying themselves. As the last scene was filmed and the actors headed for the dressing room area, I was walking along with them and saw lots of head shaking. As Patrick Stewart was unbuttoning the top of his uniform he made the comment: “That was insane.” 

I guess that’s why this episode never aired!

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Dream stories: A Dangerous Walk

I’ve talked about my dreams quite a bit here, and about how I’ve used scenes and imagery from them in a lot of stories.  I’ve said that many of my dreams have coherent story lines that actually work as stories. Probably the most frequent use of dream materials is found in my horror collection, In the Language of Scorpions.

However, not all my dreams are suitable for such use, certainly not without major overhauling. Some are just full of capriciousness and sheer weirdness that make me laugh when I finally wake up. Last night’s dream was an example.

It started with me and a friend heading out for a nature walk. The friend was my friend in the dream, but not someone I know in real life. In most such cases the “friend” appears to be a composite of at least several real folks. We were going into this big open field of grass, with a creek running through it and wooded hills in the background. There were a lot of cattle in the field.

After we cross the barbed wire fence to the field, I look at the cattle again and realize they are really deer.  I excitedly point this out to my friend and we continue on. I realize there is a commotion among the deer and stop to figure out what. My friend keeps walking. I suddenly call for him to stop as I realize the commotion is caused by a very large grizzly bear trying to catch one of the deer. A huge buck deer, with antlers like an Irish Elk, charges in and gores the grizzly, driving him away from the fawn he’d been trying to catch. The grizzly starts in our direction, looking distinctly angry.

My friend sees the grizzly coming and runs back toward me. His cap blows off. As he stops beside me, I look back at the grizzly and realize I’ve been mistaken. The “grizzly” has gotten quite a bit closer and it is clear to me now that it is actually a scowling young girl of eleven or twelve with blonde braids and wearing a green uniform.  Yes, in fact, the grizzly is a Girl Scout.

Only, I realize suddenly that my friend and I are actually young boys of nine or ten, with said friend being quite a bit smaller than me.  So, the Girl Scout still looks rather menacing to us with her face all angry. My friend darts toward her to reclaim his hat and I scream at him not to risk it. The “Scout” is almost upon us. He grabs up his hat but then realizes the girl is too close. She charges toward him and I rush to get in her way. She tries to go around me to get at my friend and I get my hands up to try and keep her away, yelling as loud as I can in hopes of frightening her off.  Maybe that would have worked on a grizzly. Not on the much more dangerous Girl Scout.

I woke up right about then and had to lay there and chuckle a bit. Of all the imagery in this dream, the only piece I understand the origins of is—strangely enough—the Girl Scout. Lana informed me not long before bedtime that I had purchased six boxes of Girl Scout cookies that day. I did not recall doing so but was assured that it happened and will dutifully fork over the appropriate amount of money. And I have seen some Girl Scouts who I’d be scared not to buy cookies from. 

Pleasant dreams!

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Dreams of Talera

Although I have some big projects coming up soon that will prevent me from finishing Gods of Talera, the sequel to Wraith of Talera, I've begun doing some writing on it until I know exactly what those other projects will entail. I've only done the first couple of chapters on "Gods" but last night had a dream about Talera that essentially gave me the ending to the book. A very nice twist that I don't think anyone will see coming. Jotted it down and now I have to write toward it. Thank you unconscious!

In other news, faculty return to school at Xavier tomorrow. I don't know how the Christmas break got over so fast. I got some writing done, and a lot of reading, so it wasn't unproductive. I finally got to see my son, Joshua, yesterday. He'd planned on coming up earlier but got the flu. We went out for Sushi, and Lana accompanied us. Then had peameal bacon and eggs for supper.

With school starting up, I'll be blogging today but probably not tomorrow. We'll see how much work is piled up Thursday and Friday to see whether I have a chance to blog or not.

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Feed Your Head

It’s been a while since I've had a good alien dream but I had an interesting one last night. Earth suffered two alien invasions in succession. The first one involved a very human appearing species who could often pass for us unless you really knew what to look for. They were generally taller and thinner than us, and always had black eyes that held an unusual shine. They initially attacked right at Christmas and were able to cause tremendous disruption by attacking shopping centers and traffic hubs. Lana and I were getting gas in our car when one such attack occurred, and we were able to make a break through the resulting traffic snarl and escape into the countryside. I saw the police respond and shoot some of the aliens, but they had some kind of shielding that stopped the bullets. All you’d see was a kind of shimmer when the bullets struck them, like heat waves.

Although the aliens quickly took over most of earth, a large human underground resistance formed. We found that we could kill them even when they were shielded by using edged weapons that could be pushed slowly through their defense fields. We also discovered that they didn't wear their shielding all the time. At one point, I and another group of guerrillas broke into an alien TV station and were able to shoot up many aliens who were unshielded in what they thought was a safe area.

The resistance forced the aliens into a peace treaty and we found that, in fact, we could co-exist. Before long we were living with one another instead of against one another. In fact, when the second invasion came, I was at a football game with an alien friend of mine and was studying the program booklet, which told us which of the players were alien and which human. The tall, thin aliens seemed to be particularly prominent at the wide-receiver position.

As we were at the game, these small, crab-like aliens suddenly came floating down all over the place. One landed at our feet. It tried to snap my human-like alien friend with its claws and he stomped on it. We knew instantly that they were aliens and it was an invasion, but we laughed at how easily it was going to be for us to repel the new invasion. Then the crab creatures deployed their technology. Each was wearing some kind of machine harness around their bodies, and when they pressed a red button a virtual armored suit formed around them, kind of like what they used to call a Waldo. When they opened fire from these suits we realized we weren't going to defeat them so easily.

I woke up after that so I don’t know whether we won or not. I guess we did since I’m still here blogging this morning. What I did realize when I woke up is that the image/idea materials for the dream had been cobbled together out of stuff I've been reading and watching lately. Since school has been out I've been indulging myself with reading and movies. I've been “feeding my head,” and that’s what my brain was using to construct the dream. I’d watched the movie Arrival, about an alien invasion; I’d watched Avatar again last night. I've been reading some Star Trek and watching reruns. I read a book about terrorists trying to use biological warfare on the US. I noted there was going to be a remake of Red Dawn. I watched The Bourne Legacy, which involved a guy shooting up a research laboratory. I read a horror/western about spider-like (or crab-like) demons. Put all that together and you have many of the elements of my dream.

In other words, if you want to have weird dreams like mine, remember what the door mouse said: Feed your head.

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Hell West

My dream last night began with a college age man sitting in a class for would-be teachers. The students are practice teaching and one young woman first has cake served to the class. Our young man, I’ll call him “hero,” gets a piece of white wedding cake. Class then ends and hero leaves with two female friends, a blonde and a brunette. He is dating the blonde but runs into a female teacher who whispers to him that he should really date the brunette, who is smarter and nicer.

Hero has to go to the bathroom and this is where the weird stuff starts. While in the bathroom, he gets a feeling that something isn’t right. About that time, a dwarf comes in and locks himself in a stall. Then a bag lady he saw outside also wanders in. She starts to flirt and tries to grope him, and he quickly leaves without managing to consummate his bathroom experience.

He goes around the back of the building to urinate but runs into two security guards. He and his two lady friends are then standing next to a railroad car on display behind the building when the sunny sky darkens and a kind of ‘shield’ snaps into place between the three and the outside world. A monstrous shadow starts to rise out of the railroad car, and the two security guards open fire on it. A massive arm with a single huge claw on the end smashes out of the car and crushes the guards. The blonde is also killed and our hero knocked unconscious.

Here it gets really weird, and funny. Our hero wakes up in Hell “West.” Satan has had to abandon the real hell but has set up a little touch of home right on the college campus. He's brought his family with him, 1) a mentally challenged 20 something son who wears a batman mask and cape, 2) a son of about 8 who never says a word, and 3) two twin teenage daughters, one with long and the other with bobbed hair. Hero is being kept because his blood is especially nutritious to the hell-borne. He is told that his brunette friend is alive but being held prisoner to keep him in line.

The long-haired daughter seems the most normal of the family and hero talks a bit to her. She protects him from her short-haired sister who wants to hammer nails into him, and this makes him feel like his best chance of escape is to befriend her. That seems to be working. When the bat masked son wants a snack, the long-haired twin is the one to “bleed” hero into a chalice, but he realizes she's doing it because her sister would hurt him much worse.

Then, Satan offers hero a bet. If he can beat the devil and his family in baseball, they’ll let him go. The young man agrees. The “baseball” is really a hacky-sack, and the bat is a fat red plastic kid’s bat (like my son had). Satan is up first and hero is pitching. Satan gets a hit and his youngest son runs for him. The kid gets on base, but then tries to steal another base and hero tags him out.

The devil fouls the next pitch into the bushes. While hero fetches the ball, the devil brings another player in on his side, a woman who is completely burned black and who stands between our hero and the batter’s box. (Satan refers to the damned as the “Burned ones.”) As our hero pitches, she tries to knock the ball away, and if she succeeds it is called a foul.

Unfortunately, I woke up before the game could finish so I don’t know if our hero escaped. I’m thinking his chances aren’t too good. What do you think?
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Update and a Sorcerer

School is in session again, which explains why I haven’t been posting much or even visiting a lot of blogs. I should be back to normal next week. In the meantime, I did have an interesting dream last night. I was a young man, apparently held in thrall by an evil sorcerer. I was joined in that slavery by a young woman (probably Lana although neither of us looked like we do these days). We were “helping” the evil one hunt down another sorcerer who he had injured in a battle. The young woman and I found the injured sorcerer, who was in dog form, and while my friend called out to the bad guy that she’d found blood, I pulled the wounded guy away and hid him, then marked out the tracks I’d left.

The evil sorcerer came up to us and he was in the form of a giant black wolf, but he bought our statement that we’d only found blood. He led us down a hill to the injured sorcerer’s abode, which was a glass cabin in the woods full of all kinds of plants and strange objects. While there, I spotted a set of keys, and when the evil one ordered us to go and hunt the wounded man again, I took the keys, and then locked the evil sorcerer in the cabin, knowing that the spells on the place would keep him imprisoned for a while. Then the young woman and I fled into the woods to escape.

We later wandered into a village that was abandoned, but it turns out the evil sorcerer was waiting for us. When he faced us, it was clear he meant to torture us slowly before killing us, and so in desperation I challenged him to a duel with swords. He laughed but agreed to my condition that if I merely cut him with the blade we would be free to go. At first as we fought it was clear he was toying with me, but then I began to become faster and faster with the blade. I noticed suddenly that on a hill to one side of the village stood the injured sorcerer we’d helped, and he had friends. I realized they were helping me. The fight became desperate, with the blades moving with incredible speeds until they seemed only flashes of light. And then I cut the wizard across the stomach and stepped back. The wound wasn’t serious but it counted toward our bet, and as the young woman and I strode away in freedom, we heard the good sorcerer comment to the evil one about how his time was up. The End.

I’ve also been remiss in reviewing my friends’ works of late. I finished Discount Noir and reviewed it on Goodreads. Here’s what I had to say:
A really fun collection of short flash fictions all involving "MegaMart," which you can probably guess is meant to represent another "Mart." There's a little bit of everything here, serial killers, vampires, losers, drug addicts, sad sacks and more. I couldn't quite decide on my favorite story in the collection and will call it a tie between "House Names" by James Reasoner, and "Thirty-one Hundred" by Loren Eaton. Loved 'em both. I enjoyed the whole work, though, and particularly the fine stories from Sandra Seamans, Kathleen Ryan, Evan Lewis, Ed Gorman, Bill Crider, Patti Abbott, and more.

Probably based on my “Discount Noir” experience, I also had a dream involving searching for something in a Megamart last night, and finding everything but what I wanted.
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Werewolves of the Ozarks

I had a long convoluted dream last night. A male friend of mine had gotten a divorce and had not fought for custody of his little four-year-old boy even though his wife was a rather well known crazy woman. She was known to be especially cruel to dogs and had been reported tormenting them in public numerous times. I saw some visuals of this in the dream.

My friend wouldn't talk to me about why he didn't fight for custody, but Lana kind of fell in love with the little child and was determined to save him from the awful mother. Lana found out that the woman had grown up in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and she decided to travel up there to find the family and see what she could learn. Naturally, I went along.

We drove deep into the mountains and at one point drove over this small wooden bridge above a deep green pool of water. I saw two different women swimming in the pool, swimming under the water in long graceful strokes. One had blond hair in a braid all the way to her feet. The other was older and was wearing a pink bathing cap.

We continued on our way as it began to rain and the road turned to mud. Dark green woods grew on either side of us, with limbs at times brushing the car. We knew the family we sought lived near the highest point of the mountain. Finally, the road became impassible through a combination of narrowing, mud, and fallen trees and we stopped. It was growing dark and neither of us was very comfortable with spending the night in the woods here.

Then three children showed up. There were two boys and a little girl. All were around the age of 8 or 9. The rain had stopped temporarily and they set out to guide us the rest of the way to the family's house. We reached it and went inside just as the rain came again and a storm wind began to blow. I'd expected a kind of hovel but the house was very nice on the inside and they even had internet service. However, the parents were away. The kids just told us to make ourselves to home and wait.

Lana got on the internet and began researching some stuff. The kids were in and out and the little girl seemed to have taken a fancy to us. She hung around quite a bit. She told us the adults were all in the village getting ready for the ritual, which I assumed was some relgious festival.

The two young boys came in at one point and were whispering with the girl and it was while I was overhearing stuff they said that I put the whole thing together. We had stumbled into a clan of werewolves. I went quickly to Lana and told her that we needed to leave. But we'd come to the house through a convoluted path through the trees and didn't know if we could find our way back. Lana tried to contact 911 through the internet but right about then the electricity failed. I turned at at the sound of whispers and saw dark blotches against the wall that I knew to be the two little boys. Their eyes glowed green, like cat's eyes. Or those of werewolves.

I realized then why my friend had not fought for custody of his child. He must have known the boy would be a werewolf too. And I was kind of wishing he would have told us.

I woke up then, and regretted that. I wanted to see how in the world we were going to get out of this mess, and I wanted to find out more. I guess I'll have to write the story to see how it turns out.
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The Demon Visitor

I've posted more about sleep phenomena over at Novel Spaces. This time I'm talking about a very frightening experience I had. I hope you can stop by.

In other news, G has a review of my short story collection, Bitter Steel up over at his blog. Thanks, man!



Here's a book I'll be buying soon:



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Half a Krapp of Something Abbatt (=3.33)

NOTE: I've been told by a couple of folks now that the original title of this post, which came to me in a dream, is insulting to Jewish people. I had absolutely no intention of insulting anyone, and I have great respect for the strength and courage of the Jews down through history. I would not willingly give offense to them, and so I've changed the title.

The title of my post today came from last night’s dream. I dreamt I was reading a book and found this line. I thought to myself in the dream that it made no sense. But across the day it’s grown on me. I think it’s going to become one of my “sayings.” Aren’t you all happy for me?

I’ve also rediscovered something the last few days that I knew but wasn’t applying. I’ve been writing longer hours but often finding my concentration fading in and out. I’d try to focus, only to find my mind wandering again a moment later. When my concentration waned I’d click over to my email window to see if I’d gotten anything interesting. Then it occurred to me. Half a krapp of something abbatt, what was I doing with my email open while I was trying to write?

The mind doesn’t much like to work and will seek any way it can to get out of it. You can’t give it an easy escape. I shut down all my windows except the word processing one, and, amazingly, the work started to flow much better! Who’d a thunk it?

I shouldn’t have to remind myself of such things, but it’s a habit I pick up while school is in session. My days at work are constantly interrupted, many times by emails that require immediate (or near immediate) attention. That’s a habit I just broke as I move into full summer writing mode.
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Journey to Babel...Con

This weekend (March 19-21) will feature the Babel Con SF/Fantasy/ Horror convention in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It’s being held at the LSU Cook Hotel, and the webpage link is HERE! It’s much, much earlier this year than last, but I think they wanted to have it happen while regular school was in session so as to attract more visitors. You can click on a flyer at the web page.

If you’re in the area, feel welcome to drop in. And bring your kids if you’ve got ‘em. It should be a lot of fun. I won’t be there Friday but will be there all day Saturday for several panels, and will almost certainly be there some on Sunday as well. My panels will be talking about Dreams, where they come from and what they mean, about the “Paranormal, Supernatural, and Science,” and about Parapsychology.

In the meantime, I’m going to eventually do a post on “borrowed” titles, titles that have been used on books or stories that originated elsewhere. These are often very effective because of the resonance they generate. Some examples that hit me off the top of my head are: “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “The Sun Also Rises” from Hemingway, which I believe he borrowed from the Bible. I know there’ve been plenty of titles borrowed from Shakespeare. Can you think of any such “borrowed” titles yourself, from books or music or anything else?

The title of this post is one such borrowing. Extra credit if you know where the first three words of this title come from.
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A Halloween Dream

Had a very strange dream last night. In some dreams I’m one person all the way through. In others, I’m observing from above as an omniscient presence. But in last night’s dream I “head-hopped,” moving from person to person depending on the scene.

The dream began on an oil exploration ship. Our team had brought aboard a slimy substance dredged from the ocean’s bottom and we had it in a glass case that looked a bit like a crystal coffin. I was one of several scientists gathered around the case as another scientist showed us how the slime moved when shocked.

At one point, the scientist sent a surge of electricity through the slime and it suddenly began to grow and started sloshing back and forth in the case much like those old wave machines used to. We all panicked and started backing away when suddenly the slime darkened dramatically and thickened into a throbbing chrysalis. In the next instant the chrysalis burst open to reveal, very anti-climactically, a chimpanzee.

The dream switched ahead in time then and I found myself in a rec room on the ship. I was reading a newspaper while two other men played cards. The chimp was wandering around in the room and I understood that tests had revealed him as nothing more than a normal chimp. For that reason he’d been freed of his case. I heard a sound and looked up to see the chimp suddenly attack the two other men and begin tearing at them. Blood sprayed; the men began screaming; I jumped up and ran for the door.

That’s when I began head-hopping. First I was back in the lab where the slime remaining in the glass case started to bubble and birth black blobs of some tarry substance. These broke open to reveal all kinds of apes. There were chimps, gorillas, and orangutans, but they were distorted, looking more human in the shapes of their skulls but with long arms ending in massive slashing claws. They smashed through the glass and I was swarmed under as I tried to flee.

I switched into another man’s head who was running from some howling apes. He dodged through a door ahead of his pursuers and reached the rail of the ship. There was nowhere else to go so he (I) hurled himself over the rail into a bright blue sea. As soon as I hit the water I switched into the head of a man hiding behind a white counter with two others. Apes burst through the door and began searching the room. One guy tried a peek over the counter and the apes saw him and attacked us.

I fled down a hallway and out a back door and slammed it against the apes. I tore off down a corridor toward what I knew was the bow of the ship. I passed another man running the other way and realized there was no safety in that direction. A large, glass-windowed room was to my left and I pulled open the door there and rushed in, thinking to hide among the machinery in the room. But an orangutan loping down the corridor after the other guy saw me through the windows and came after me.

I saw a metal mesh door that opened into some kind of small control room and ran over to it. The door was opened slightly and it took almost all my strength to get it open and get inside. I started pulling it shut just as the orang burst through the outer door into the room I’d just left.

There was a bolt that locked the metal mesh door and I started to slide it forward with the orang coming toward me. But it was very heavy and I struggled, knowing I had only seconds to work. I almost had it in the lock slot when the orang smashed into the metal mesh from the other side. Hot spittle exploded over my face and chest and I could hear an incredible howling from the creature’s wide open mouth. The bolt was touching the lock when the orang’s fingers came through the mesh and grabbed it. We strained against each other, me trying to close it, he trying to force it back to get in at me. At the instant I knew the beast was going to win I woke up.

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NEW Halloween Horror News and Links:

A bit of cool news. L. A. Mitchell did a flash piece called “Home” for Halloween Horror October and won second place in a contest with that same piece. Check out the post here.

Laughingwolf has another freaky flash up: Chance

Vesper has a story up called Fortune

Will Kinshella has entered the fray with his own Halloween Flash

And Avery Debow adds another flash with The Love of the Job

And another from Laughingwolf, who would get an award for most prolific halloween flash fictioneer if I had thought about making such an award. See rider


OLDER Halloween Horror Links:

Flash Fictions

Hell Plate by Lucas Pederson.

freaky flash IX, night, by Laughingwolf.

lobo, also by Laughingwolf.

Non-fiction

Barbara Martin has been running some posts on her blog about horror films. Today she has a piece on Dracula.

Travis has a great true story on his blog called Ghost. Well worth checking out.

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Technicolor Zombies

Yesterday, I finished reading Bits of the Dead, the zombie anthology I’ve mentioned here. Although it has hits and misses like any anthology, I thought the majority of the stories were pretty good. And I’m not just saying that because I have a piece in it. Since all the stories are short, flash fiction pieces of 1 to 3 pages, it also doesn’t take long to finish one you don’t particularly enjoy and move on to one you do. Especially in these days when concern about Gustav is always in the back of my mind, I appreciated the short pieces. They took me away for moments at a time from my worries, but didn’t require the lengthy concentration a novel would have. I actually wish I had a few more of these flash fiction anthologies around for just this reason.

The stories were salient enough so that last night I dreamed of zombies. I don’t remember all the details, but the gist of it was that people who were pretending to be zombies were attacked by real zombies. The real zombies had your standard gray, monochromatic appearance while the pretend zombies were done up beautifully in Technicolor hues. The fake organs and intestines they’d glued on were brilliant reds and pinks. They had bold slashes of yellow across their faces, and the pure white of fresh bones showing artfully through the fancy rags of their carefully selected costumes. The strangest part was when the pretend zombies were bitten and became real zombies, and how they hunted people now with their faces made up like zombie hookers. Outside, they were works of art; inside, they were gray and empty of all but hunger. I remember one, in particular. He was trying to eat his own fake intestines. He’d shove them in his mouth and bite down, then make a face and spit them out. Only to try a fresh bite moments later.

More Dreams

Steve Malley has another great blog post on writing. Well worth checking out. As for me, I'm putting the finishing touches on my dream presentation for tomorrow, but between that and turning in mid-terms this last week I haven't had much time for my own writing.

Here's another of my weird dreams:

I'm planning to kill someone and creep up to their house to look through their windows. My vision wavers and is discolored, like looking through a flame and seeing objects on the other side. I seem to be hallucinating. I find an open window and slip inside.

My point-of-view shifts and I find myself in bed upstairs in my house. A sound has awakened me and I get up and go out to the landing. I see a man at the bottom of the stairs. He's holding a knife. With a shock of terror I realize that the man is me. But this me looks bestial; body hunched, hands curled, drool sliding from his lips.

My viewpoint switches again, and now I'm looking up the stairs. I see myself at the top of the stairs, without a knife, but again everything is distorted and wavering. I growl and rush up the steps toward my other self.

Viewpoint switch. I'm the me at the top of the stairs. I realize I can't escape. I leap down to meet myself. The bestial side of me slashes with the knife but I close with him, grabbing his wrist to stop the blade. We struggle, and I get a foot behind his leg, tripping him. He pulls me down on top of him and we go thrashing down the stairs. I switch personalities and viewpoints back and forth as we roll down and down, our limbs windmilling.

We hit the pine-wood floor at the bottom of the stairs with a whumpf that shakes the house. One me stands up, chest heaving, breathing wildly. The other lies still, legs and arms akimbo, the blade of the knife standing up from his chest. I look around the house. Although I don't see any visual distortions it occurs to me that I'm not sure which of us survived.

Somewhere in the house there is wild laughter.