Subconscious bizarrity

[ciroccoj]

• So last night, first night back after going camping for the weekend, I had a dream where I biked down to the airport to pick up Chris, and forgot he'd have a suitcase and no bike so we couldn't bike back so I had to bike all the way back home to get the car. This might not mean much except somehow I made the trip, which takes twenty minutes by car, in twenty minutes by bike. Go me. Perhaps has something to do with how much we've all been exercising lately.
  
  Also, we were in an odd part of the airport, in that the announcements were being made in English and Spanish instead of English and French, and I think I discovered that it was the American departures and arrivals wing of the airport. I also wondered if any Quebecois had complained about the lack of French.
  
  Oh! Two of the people at the airport were children who I could only assume had an Asian parent in their background, because they had straight light brown hair and very striking Asian eyes in a beautiful light green colour. I wanted to take a picture of them to send to this person who once betad a fic of mine where I had the son of a white man and a black woman have light hazel eyes. She argued with me endlessly about genetics, and about how a half-black child could not possibly have eyes of any colour other than dark brown. I finally called off the discussion when I found myself about to argue that even though I lived in Ottawa I had really seen more than a few non-white people in my life - possibly more than she had, even though she lived in the Southern States. I went to look up statistics on how large Ottawa's non-white population is (it's around 25%, IIRC) and then thought What the hell am I doing, the kid's eyes are light hazel, enough already. And then about a week later ran across a black baby with light blue eyes.
  
  
• Then I dreamed that I was in a muscle-aches medication commercial, where this guy was talking about how when he was a kid, he could do building work all day with his dad and not feel a thing, but now that he was an adult, he ached something awful at the end of a full day of carrying long pieces of lumber around corners. Showed him doing so with his son, and then it became less of a commercial and more of a situation showing how this guy now had many sons to help him carry lumber - many, many, many sons, like ten or so. And he had a lot of brothers. And they had a lot of sons. So basically it was this huge hive of guys, all carrying lumber around on the family home - big home, BTW. Where were the women in all of this? They painted doors. Dozens of them, daughters and daughters-in-law and sisters-in-law and mothers-in-law, spending their lives in stairwells (?!), painting doors for the family door factory, until one of them said something like, "Why are we painting doors all day long?"
  
  "Because that's what we do. That's what our husbands want us to do."
  
  "But where are our husbands?"
  
  "Carrying lumber."
  
  "But where are our husbands? Have you ever seen your husband? Like, in years, have any of you seen them?"
  
  Blank look from most of the women, and one old woman said, "Of course. I see him every day. At the end of the day. He carries lumber, and I paint doors. And that's the way it's supposed to be."
  
  And there was something about marital sex in there somewhere, but I've totally lost what it was, and then the questioner decided this was really stupid and she had to get out of this Stepford Wive's DoorMaker World, and painted her legs instead of the doors. Why, I don't know. She painted them white, then decided that wasn't the real colour of her legs and painted them pink instead, and left. I can only assume my subconscious came up with that one because my own legs are currently liberally coated with Calamine lotion. Where the doors come into this, I have no idea.
  
  
• Then there was a dream where there was a morose pair of twins who were bumming everybody out and they wanted to get Daniel to behave himself. But Daniel was in fact just sitting around quietly, playing with two other little kids, so I told the twins to lay off and they sulked off somewhere. And then a woman I worked with a long, long time ago appeared, fresh from the Himalayas, and asked me what I'd been doing in the last few years and if I was still teaching inmates. Nope, said I, and she told me a joke that was howlingly funny, but of course I don't remember it any more. I think it had to do with Sprockets. Don't ask me where any of this dream came from.

I woke up at six with a huge sigh of relief, and went to re-apply Calomine on my legs.

I wish I was still camping. Not terribly enthused about cleaning and doing laundry today, and I'm really missing the smell of wood smoke and our canoe.

Comments

[snarkhunter.livejournal.com]

So...was the person who beta'd your fic real, or was that just in the dream? B/c that's kind of a moronic assertion from anyone--I cite Vanessa Williams as an example, and walk away whistling. :D

Also? Your dreams are awesome.

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

So...was the person who beta'd your fic real, or was that just in the dream?
Oh no, she was real. Drove me totally nuts.

B/c that's kind of a moronic assertion from anyone--I cite Vanessa Williams as an example, and walk away whistling. :D
Arg! I totally didn't think of her! And Ice-T, too - doesn't he have green eyes or something?

Actually, she got weirder than that. I wrote it all out somewhere but the general gist of it was, she felt my OCs were too "unusual" to be believable. It was an HP fic, and the OCs were Draco Malfoy's son and the mother of his son. The mom was black, and Irish, but not Black Irish ;) and son looked mostly black, but had greyish-hazel eyes. Beta felt this was way too unusual and I should make mom white, or make her son have dark eyes, or, if I insisted on making her non-white (this point took a loooong time to reach) she should be of Pakistani/East Indian origin, because there just aren't enough black Irish folks to make mom anything but "too unusual."

Which, y'know, as a white-looking Hispanic Canadian, I'm not exactly the best person to convince that a character is "wrong" because they're too racially "unusual."

There was more... a looong discussion on whether God/god should be capitalized or not, which included an assertion that a member of a choir practicing in a church would of course be Christian, and therefore of course referring to the Christian God when he said "From your lips to God's ears," (which, again, as an atheist who had been rehearsing with my choir in a church that very day, I was kinda like, OK, I'll happily capitalize God, but...) and a discussion I mostly blanked out, about sexual orientation, where it seems Kinsey numbers 1-5 just dropped out of sight for her, and... myeah. She was a very thorough beta, and I really appreciate the work she did, and genuinely thanked her in my author notes, but will not be asking her to beta again.

Also? Your dreams are awesome.
LOL thanks - a bit tiring, though. I was very glad it was morning :)

[tudorlady.livejournal.com]

Okay, when you first said 'morose twins', my immediate thought was the two guys on Kids in the Hall doing the "Nobody likes US" skits...

But the Stepford door-painting thing? Man. I don't get stuff like that even when they've been tweaking my SSRIs!