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lethe's bramble
I'm sure you can deduce from this everything I've been up to since my last update. Right?
This was my dream this morning:
To start with, I was Alexander the Great, only in some alternate universe where I was female. This apparently left me much better-adjusted than our Alexander, lacking Philip taking out his repressed homosexual agression on his son and Olympias acting out her Jocasta complex; I had been raised almost entirely by Aristotle and thus had an even greater obsession with Golden Age Athens than the real Alexander. I also lacked a great deal of unneccessary testosterone, and since I didn't have a Hephaistion egging on my pride (He being the sort who wouldn't look twice at a girl and Alex apparently equally uninterested in guys,) a lot less ambition. So even though I had inherited without too much trouble after King Philip was killed by an offended lover, I had been rather low-key about my "conquest" of Asia Minor, doing it mostly through non-martial means, and having finished unifiying Greece, Persia, and Egypt, I was quite ready to retire and take it easy for a while.
Unfortunately the more military-minded young gentlemen of my court were less than happy about this, and a group of my most trusted advisors, with my mother's collusion, and led by Hephaistion, who was apparently still mortally offended by my gender, kidnapped me from my bath and hauled me, blindfolded, halfway across Greece, then left me under guard in a tower prison in a completely different city. (The city was unidentified in the dream, but judging by the architecture and by later events, safe bet it was Mytilene.) I was mostly resentful and bored, not particularly anxious about my throne since I'd gotten a bit sick of it anyway and I figured Mom would do a good enough job ruling from behind whichever puppet she picked in my absence. But I hated just sitting there being eyed up by the guards so I started talking, in a manner I knew was maximally annoying, about my favorite subject, Golden-Age Greece, and how much better it was than this decadent Hellenistic era. To crown it off I pulled a volume of Aristotle's Poetics off the bookshelf and started reading it out loud in the authentic accent and rhetorical style of Periclean Athens. (Where I got off pretending Aristotle was classical in front of those boorish minions I'm not sure, but the bookshelf had very limited selection-- I had been hoping for Sappho-- and I figured my old teacher wouldn't mind. He was, in this timeline, already dead.) Before I got very far, one of the guards, who reminded me a great deal of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
webbapettigrew's Peter, yanked the book out of my hands and gruffly told me to sit still and be quiet like a good little girl. Which did not make me any more happy to be there, you can imagine.
It wasn't too long before I escaped. I don't really remember how, but it must have involved them underestimating a girl, and me at my toilette again, since there was a long sequence of me fleeing desperately through and out of the city with nothing but a square of white cloth smaller than a bath towel to cover myself. This was not as bad as it might seem, since I had always hated the way Greek women were expected to wear diaphanous layers while the men got to go around naked half the time, so I wrapped the towel in the ancient Minoan style (still used occasionally by peasant women, at least in my dream, and later to be adopted by certain Roman empresses) which supported the breasts but left them bare. Only it still wasn't quite wide enough, so I had a slit down the side, and nothing to tie it up with, I had to hold it up one-handed as I ran; I would have just tossed it but I didn't want to be any more conspicuous than I already was.
Anyway, I made it on foot to a very rural fishing village on a river a few miles out of town, but I'd seen a body of guards silhouetted on a rise behind me, and I knew I couldn't get much farther, so I sat under a tree by the road, partly hidden by underbrush, and tried to pretend I belonged there. And they walked past without looking twice at me, except the same Pettigrew-ish guard who'd taken the book from me in the tower. *He* saw me, and recognized me, but instead of calling out to the others, who'd gone on ahead, he froze, then shifted his eyes around, and stealithly pulled from his bag the same volume of the Poetics he'd taken from me in the tower. Apparently he'd been so enchanted by my reading of it, a level of culture he'd never been exposed to before, that he'd decided to desert from the army and devote his life to classical studies. (Don't ask how I knew this just from one gesture.) I was quite supportive of this ambition, especially if it meant he wasn't going to give me away, so I nodded at him, and he smiled beautifully back, then went on down the road to join the other soliders, broke off suddenly and ran across the river. ('Across the river' seemed to lead to some otherworld sanctuary, it comes up again later. That was the safe place I was originally running for, I presume.)
Meanwhile a group of village women and their kids were coming up the road; the guards stopped the women to ask if I'd been seen, but the kids ran ahead. And a very cute, dark-skinned little boy of about four, being lower to the ground, saw me under my tree and got ready to call his mother. I shushed him, but it was too late; the others had noticed me, so I desperately asked him if he would sit on my lap and pretend I belonged here and he was my kid. Meanwhile the other kids had caught up, and miraculously, they all went along with it. Even one of the village women, a tall, sad blonde, backed up my story; but some of the other women were dubious, and the guards even more so. Luckily just then they noticed one of their own was missing and started looking noisily for him. I made no sign I'd seen him run, but they caught sight of him just as he disappeared into the trees across the river, and they all forgot me and ran after the deserter.
By the time they gave up on him and came back I was gone. The blond woman had welcomed me into the women's quarters of her house where no man, even her husband, was allowed. I'd be hidden there even if the soldiers came back; none of the village women would give me away, she promised, now that she'd accepted me. Her name was Foxglove, or Fox, and two of the children had come back with us: the first little boy, Alvie, and an older, even darker-skinned girl. Neither of them looked much like her, and she explained that they weren't hers; to her sorrow, she had never had any children. The boy had belonged to a very close friend of hers-- and I could tell this part of the story was very hard-- friend, and lover, named Hazel. But when Hazel's husband died, Hazel had decided she was fed up with "this damn Greek patriarchy" and wanted to leave her son, her family, and the village, to live with her lover without the bother of husbands (which would have been a great scandal-- everyone knew Greek wives and husbands all had same-sex lovers, but you still gave your first loyalty to your family.) Fox hadn't been willing to leave, and believed Hazel would stay for her. Instead, Hazel had run off with another woman, a woman named Jenny who had recently arrived in the village with her young daughter, and that was the other child she'd adopted. With a shock, I recognized Jenny as a maid of mine who had been fired several months ago by my mother, when she discovered she had a daughter but no husband, and Jenny had disappeared before I could hire her back. Hazel and Jenny had fled across the river and left their children with Fox, and she was happy to take care of them since she had none of her own.
Well, to fast-forward a week or two, I got on very well with Fox and the children, and of course Fox and I became lovers before too very long (although the dream skipped over any x-rated parts.) I was welcomed as Fox's girl by the other women of the village, I loved the quiet pace of life and the simple home work and the children, and I was quite williing to stay there forever, since it seemed the remnants of my old life had forgotten me. Until one evening a group of us women were sitting by the river, mostly paired off, watching the sun set over the water. The children played noisily behind us and Fox was chattering happily about how we'd have to find me a husband so I could run a household of my own and learn the joys of being absolute ruler of my own little kingdom. One of the others pointed out a flash of bright yellow in the forest across the river and wondered what it was-- a bird maybe? We watched it for a while, catching sights of other odd movements too, until a tree fell over and it became very clear what the bright yellow thing was. It was unmistakably a Caterpillar backhoe.
Oh! you're thinking, *finally* the dream stops being in-period and internally consistent! But you don't know the semi-lucid power of my subconscious! "Shit," I-as-Alex thought to myself as the other women exclaimed noisily about the golden chariot, "they've invented a time machine." I really, really wished I'd never been anything more than a simple village woman . . .
I waited until Fox was putting the kids to bed and stood before her mirror to pull a tiny square of white plastic from between two of my back teeth, then shook it out into a 3*5 sheet and went to show Fox the bad news. She was understandably amazed by the plastic, but even more so that it was a photo ID identifying me as Alexander III daughter of Philip II of Macedon, Ruler of the Known World. Underneath it, in a script she didn't even recognize, but I translated for her, it explained that I, by virtue of my temporal power, was, from the date of 333 BC until an unspecified date of death, appointed the primary agent of the Time Guards, charged with reporting, controlling, and concealing any breach of timeline integrity within the stated period. She had difficulty enough believing I really was *that* Alexender, much less understanding about time travels and paradoxes and an agency in the far future which had dedicated itself to preventing them. Heck, I'd hardly believed it when they first approached me. But I did, I think, finally convince her that I had solemnly sworn to them to stop any time travel in my time, and there was a lot more a stake here than just Greece if I didn't. So she let me go, that morning, womanfully hiding most of her tears, and I crossed the river.
It didn't take me long to find what I was looking for. They had built an entire complex, a mishmash of technologies and styles which were beyond me, and gathered together all the outcasts from beyond the river. I wondered with a shiver how much damage had already been done. But my ID, official-looking and obviously anachronistic, got me into the compound and nearly to the inner sanctum before Jenny discovered me. The time machine, of course, was Hazel's. So she dragged me to the inner sanctum where Hazel, splendid in a lab coat, was tinkering with a new miniature version of the machine. They saw my ID and it was enough to scare them into typical supervillain behaviour, shoving me into the original time machine without calibrating it first. It looked like a giant industrial dryer and it apparently could also shift someone into their alternates from other universes; I changed into a dozen different Alexander the Greats, including one who was-- yuck-- a man, before I came back to myself and managed to get them to talk logically. I said I was not their enemy, that what they'd done here was very impressive, and if they'd simply be willing to go to work for the Time Guards, I could probably negotiate a very sweet deal. Yes, they could stay together, openly; keep working on time theory and exploring history; I could probably even get them limited visiting rights with their kids, which perked them up; plus a six-figure salary--
"Six figures?" Hazel asked, eyes wide and greedy.
"well, yes," I said, not bothering to mention I had no idea what currency it would be in. So they agreed, we shook on it, I made them promise not to do *any more* use of the machine until someone from the Guards contacted them, and I headed back across the river. I knew that to make the deal, and clear up the damage they'd already done I'd have to reassume my rulership. I'd have to explain all that to Fox, gather allies to march back into the capital in glory, contact the Guards which was always an ordeal, figure out how the ruler of the known world could be together with a common housewife-- none of that sounded like much fun, so I woke up.
See why I sleep late? What could I possibly do while awake which would be more interesting than *that*? I might even be able to adapt parts of it into an original short story, even though it has no original characters. Hmmm.
This was my dream this morning:
To start with, I was Alexander the Great, only in some alternate universe where I was female. This apparently left me much better-adjusted than our Alexander, lacking Philip taking out his repressed homosexual agression on his son and Olympias acting out her Jocasta complex; I had been raised almost entirely by Aristotle and thus had an even greater obsession with Golden Age Athens than the real Alexander. I also lacked a great deal of unneccessary testosterone, and since I didn't have a Hephaistion egging on my pride (He being the sort who wouldn't look twice at a girl and Alex apparently equally uninterested in guys,) a lot less ambition. So even though I had inherited without too much trouble after King Philip was killed by an offended lover, I had been rather low-key about my "conquest" of Asia Minor, doing it mostly through non-martial means, and having finished unifiying Greece, Persia, and Egypt, I was quite ready to retire and take it easy for a while.
Unfortunately the more military-minded young gentlemen of my court were less than happy about this, and a group of my most trusted advisors, with my mother's collusion, and led by Hephaistion, who was apparently still mortally offended by my gender, kidnapped me from my bath and hauled me, blindfolded, halfway across Greece, then left me under guard in a tower prison in a completely different city. (The city was unidentified in the dream, but judging by the architecture and by later events, safe bet it was Mytilene.) I was mostly resentful and bored, not particularly anxious about my throne since I'd gotten a bit sick of it anyway and I figured Mom would do a good enough job ruling from behind whichever puppet she picked in my absence. But I hated just sitting there being eyed up by the guards so I started talking, in a manner I knew was maximally annoying, about my favorite subject, Golden-Age Greece, and how much better it was than this decadent Hellenistic era. To crown it off I pulled a volume of Aristotle's Poetics off the bookshelf and started reading it out loud in the authentic accent and rhetorical style of Periclean Athens. (Where I got off pretending Aristotle was classical in front of those boorish minions I'm not sure, but the bookshelf had very limited selection-- I had been hoping for Sappho-- and I figured my old teacher wouldn't mind. He was, in this timeline, already dead.) Before I got very far, one of the guards, who reminded me a great deal of
webbapettigrew's Peter, yanked the book out of my hands and gruffly told me to sit still and be quiet like a good little girl. Which did not make me any more happy to be there, you can imagine.It wasn't too long before I escaped. I don't really remember how, but it must have involved them underestimating a girl, and me at my toilette again, since there was a long sequence of me fleeing desperately through and out of the city with nothing but a square of white cloth smaller than a bath towel to cover myself. This was not as bad as it might seem, since I had always hated the way Greek women were expected to wear diaphanous layers while the men got to go around naked half the time, so I wrapped the towel in the ancient Minoan style (still used occasionally by peasant women, at least in my dream, and later to be adopted by certain Roman empresses) which supported the breasts but left them bare. Only it still wasn't quite wide enough, so I had a slit down the side, and nothing to tie it up with, I had to hold it up one-handed as I ran; I would have just tossed it but I didn't want to be any more conspicuous than I already was.
Anyway, I made it on foot to a very rural fishing village on a river a few miles out of town, but I'd seen a body of guards silhouetted on a rise behind me, and I knew I couldn't get much farther, so I sat under a tree by the road, partly hidden by underbrush, and tried to pretend I belonged there. And they walked past without looking twice at me, except the same Pettigrew-ish guard who'd taken the book from me in the tower. *He* saw me, and recognized me, but instead of calling out to the others, who'd gone on ahead, he froze, then shifted his eyes around, and stealithly pulled from his bag the same volume of the Poetics he'd taken from me in the tower. Apparently he'd been so enchanted by my reading of it, a level of culture he'd never been exposed to before, that he'd decided to desert from the army and devote his life to classical studies. (Don't ask how I knew this just from one gesture.) I was quite supportive of this ambition, especially if it meant he wasn't going to give me away, so I nodded at him, and he smiled beautifully back, then went on down the road to join the other soliders, broke off suddenly and ran across the river. ('Across the river' seemed to lead to some otherworld sanctuary, it comes up again later. That was the safe place I was originally running for, I presume.)
Meanwhile a group of village women and their kids were coming up the road; the guards stopped the women to ask if I'd been seen, but the kids ran ahead. And a very cute, dark-skinned little boy of about four, being lower to the ground, saw me under my tree and got ready to call his mother. I shushed him, but it was too late; the others had noticed me, so I desperately asked him if he would sit on my lap and pretend I belonged here and he was my kid. Meanwhile the other kids had caught up, and miraculously, they all went along with it. Even one of the village women, a tall, sad blonde, backed up my story; but some of the other women were dubious, and the guards even more so. Luckily just then they noticed one of their own was missing and started looking noisily for him. I made no sign I'd seen him run, but they caught sight of him just as he disappeared into the trees across the river, and they all forgot me and ran after the deserter.
By the time they gave up on him and came back I was gone. The blond woman had welcomed me into the women's quarters of her house where no man, even her husband, was allowed. I'd be hidden there even if the soldiers came back; none of the village women would give me away, she promised, now that she'd accepted me. Her name was Foxglove, or Fox, and two of the children had come back with us: the first little boy, Alvie, and an older, even darker-skinned girl. Neither of them looked much like her, and she explained that they weren't hers; to her sorrow, she had never had any children. The boy had belonged to a very close friend of hers-- and I could tell this part of the story was very hard-- friend, and lover, named Hazel. But when Hazel's husband died, Hazel had decided she was fed up with "this damn Greek patriarchy" and wanted to leave her son, her family, and the village, to live with her lover without the bother of husbands (which would have been a great scandal-- everyone knew Greek wives and husbands all had same-sex lovers, but you still gave your first loyalty to your family.) Fox hadn't been willing to leave, and believed Hazel would stay for her. Instead, Hazel had run off with another woman, a woman named Jenny who had recently arrived in the village with her young daughter, and that was the other child she'd adopted. With a shock, I recognized Jenny as a maid of mine who had been fired several months ago by my mother, when she discovered she had a daughter but no husband, and Jenny had disappeared before I could hire her back. Hazel and Jenny had fled across the river and left their children with Fox, and she was happy to take care of them since she had none of her own.
Well, to fast-forward a week or two, I got on very well with Fox and the children, and of course Fox and I became lovers before too very long (although the dream skipped over any x-rated parts.) I was welcomed as Fox's girl by the other women of the village, I loved the quiet pace of life and the simple home work and the children, and I was quite williing to stay there forever, since it seemed the remnants of my old life had forgotten me. Until one evening a group of us women were sitting by the river, mostly paired off, watching the sun set over the water. The children played noisily behind us and Fox was chattering happily about how we'd have to find me a husband so I could run a household of my own and learn the joys of being absolute ruler of my own little kingdom. One of the others pointed out a flash of bright yellow in the forest across the river and wondered what it was-- a bird maybe? We watched it for a while, catching sights of other odd movements too, until a tree fell over and it became very clear what the bright yellow thing was. It was unmistakably a Caterpillar backhoe.
Oh! you're thinking, *finally* the dream stops being in-period and internally consistent! But you don't know the semi-lucid power of my subconscious! "Shit," I-as-Alex thought to myself as the other women exclaimed noisily about the golden chariot, "they've invented a time machine." I really, really wished I'd never been anything more than a simple village woman . . .
I waited until Fox was putting the kids to bed and stood before her mirror to pull a tiny square of white plastic from between two of my back teeth, then shook it out into a 3*5 sheet and went to show Fox the bad news. She was understandably amazed by the plastic, but even more so that it was a photo ID identifying me as Alexander III daughter of Philip II of Macedon, Ruler of the Known World. Underneath it, in a script she didn't even recognize, but I translated for her, it explained that I, by virtue of my temporal power, was, from the date of 333 BC until an unspecified date of death, appointed the primary agent of the Time Guards, charged with reporting, controlling, and concealing any breach of timeline integrity within the stated period. She had difficulty enough believing I really was *that* Alexender, much less understanding about time travels and paradoxes and an agency in the far future which had dedicated itself to preventing them. Heck, I'd hardly believed it when they first approached me. But I did, I think, finally convince her that I had solemnly sworn to them to stop any time travel in my time, and there was a lot more a stake here than just Greece if I didn't. So she let me go, that morning, womanfully hiding most of her tears, and I crossed the river.
It didn't take me long to find what I was looking for. They had built an entire complex, a mishmash of technologies and styles which were beyond me, and gathered together all the outcasts from beyond the river. I wondered with a shiver how much damage had already been done. But my ID, official-looking and obviously anachronistic, got me into the compound and nearly to the inner sanctum before Jenny discovered me. The time machine, of course, was Hazel's. So she dragged me to the inner sanctum where Hazel, splendid in a lab coat, was tinkering with a new miniature version of the machine. They saw my ID and it was enough to scare them into typical supervillain behaviour, shoving me into the original time machine without calibrating it first. It looked like a giant industrial dryer and it apparently could also shift someone into their alternates from other universes; I changed into a dozen different Alexander the Greats, including one who was-- yuck-- a man, before I came back to myself and managed to get them to talk logically. I said I was not their enemy, that what they'd done here was very impressive, and if they'd simply be willing to go to work for the Time Guards, I could probably negotiate a very sweet deal. Yes, they could stay together, openly; keep working on time theory and exploring history; I could probably even get them limited visiting rights with their kids, which perked them up; plus a six-figure salary--
"Six figures?" Hazel asked, eyes wide and greedy.
"well, yes," I said, not bothering to mention I had no idea what currency it would be in. So they agreed, we shook on it, I made them promise not to do *any more* use of the machine until someone from the Guards contacted them, and I headed back across the river. I knew that to make the deal, and clear up the damage they'd already done I'd have to reassume my rulership. I'd have to explain all that to Fox, gather allies to march back into the capital in glory, contact the Guards which was always an ordeal, figure out how the ruler of the known world could be together with a common housewife-- none of that sounded like much fun, so I woke up.
See why I sleep late? What could I possibly do while awake which would be more interesting than *that*? I might even be able to adapt parts of it into an original short story, even though it has no original characters. Hmmm.
no subject
no subject
See?
And of course the occurances of lesbians in dreams just goes without saying.
...
The most impressive part, of course, is that you remember all of it. ^_^
Re: ...
I take no responsibility for any psychological harm this causes, be warned that if you have a nightmare it will seem very real and you may wake up paralyzed with fear. That's why I stopped doing this.