I only pick up bad habits from the friends who aren't here.

[thanate]

Along about the start of NaNo (er, when I started writing a bunch, rather than revising & poking at things, though I'm not sure what's actually relevant here) I started having dreams about VP. Normally I don't dream a lot about people who actually exist, but there was about six months at the end of college where I had dreams about fencing or people on the fencing team at least two or three times a week; I think this may prove to be another variant on the same thing. I'm seeing an element of cool people, and element of house stress, and a bunch of tag ends of whatever everyone's been talking about on the internet all rolled in here:

Anyway, Monday/Tuesday I dreamed that aana_t and I were wandering around at something-vaguely-like-VP (doing something I can no longer remember, if indeed I ever knew) and returned to the hotel to discover that in fact the week was all about staging a play: the students were actors, Teresa was directing, and the staff had made costumes for everyone but aana_t and me, as we hadn't been there to remind them of our existence when taking measurements. Teresa was Not Pleased, and there was much wandering around in a huge yellow-lit underground space that was part basement and part partitioned theater storage & workspace. Honestly, the room is the bit I remember most: huge, with pillars and carpets/tapestries hung up to make partial partition walls, and pools of yellow-tinged light in the bits where people were working. Much nicer than the basement at the Island Inn, though admittedly probably less conducive to taking notes.

Last night was a lecture in a suite of two very large stone rooms where I think Patrick and Teresa lived (kind of an ancient school sort of motif); very informal, but Teresa was telling a bunch of us about various historical writing things. She had a notebook with stuff copied out in order by theme and chronology-- there was something my sleep-brain identified as a medieval plainsong in about the middle, written out with the syllables all marked up & things (um, all this was modern english, apparently) and gave us an assignment related to that. Then she went off somewhere & let us poke around the reference books related to the assignment, which were all half-shelved and lying around in that books filed in a cluttered bedroom sort of way. I was about half-way through the notebook (hence why the plainsong in the middle is memorable) of taking notes on things, and looking stuff up in other books, when a couple people who I'm fairly sure don't exist in real life waltzed in, picked up a bunch of stuff including the notebook, and walked off with it. (Apparently this meant they were intending to plagarize their homework... my subconscious symbolism doesn't really stand up to the light of day here, but whatever.) Shortly thereafter, Patrick & Teresa came back, with several other people, and I was just working out how to say, "hey, these people took your notebook" when fwilde started showing us how to play the aforementioned plainsong on... an instrument that didn't actually resemble a piano in any way, and did harmonies all on its own. Also, Teresa was using it as a chair. (And further description would probably go downhill from there.) Suffice it to say, it was kind of cool.

Somewhere around there I woke up to find that the cat who doesn't think it's safe to sit on people was sleeping stretched out along my chest, with his back legs tucked up about at my collar bone. Of course, then I breathed too heavily or something & he went away again, but it was very cool.

Ok, off to eat something, & find out if they actually took the giant hunks of concrete out of the yard before putting down topsoil.

Xposty from dreamwidth, but yes, I'm still here.