the breath of the shape-shifter
Nov. 9th, 2005 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateLook, look! A non nano-related post! (I don’t know if it’s actually any more interesting, but...)
I dreamed this morning about shape-shifters—not the animal sort, but people who could shift between different human forms, and somehow this also encompassed the power to make clones of oneself; I did, during the course of the dream, make a twin-me, who oddly enough started out in one of the proto-stages as a brain-damaged guy. But the main focus of the dream was on another shape-shifter, who was king/warlord of some sort of barbarian hoarde who wanted to wipe out my clan, only he actually came from some highly educated society (which involved lots of stone carvings and temples and stuff) which he’d kind of traded off for the barbarians because of some feud in which he exiled his foster-brother, who was the head of the clan he was trying to destroy. So I was running around in the shape of a red-bearded barbarian (we were all in exciting costumes like the extras from some generic late-european-celtic hoarde) while my duplicate, who being newly made wasn’t a very good shape-shifter yet, drew the attention of everyone who thought she was really the spy. And I (in a rather incongruous way involving sugar syrup and a syringe) drugged the hoarde, until the only one left mobile was their leader, who had sorted out what was going on by then. And then there was this strange thing about stealing breath, which was related to the cloning process, but also how you killed another shape-shifter: by sucking all the air out of their lungs, thus stealing their power. An oddly personal way to kill... anyway, I didn’t quite kill the other guy, I just drained his power and hatred (and consequently most of his mind, but it had to be done) and then was just trying to put him back together again when I woke up.
So this was a really vivid and both well-plotted and well-costumed dream, which probably doesn’t come across at all well in my description. But besides the potential for maybe shaking a real story out of it someday, it’s reminded me of something that I haven’t been thinking about in my novel (ok, maybe not entirely non nano-related...) which is the idea that your life is your breath. There are all kinds of interesting greek linguistic things (that I might remember specifics of if I actually knew greek) about when your breath is taken, you die—as opposed to “inspiration” which is the gods breathing on you—and then there’s the medieval bit about sneezing being bad on account of you might lose your breath, and even the superstition about holding your breath as you pass a graveyard, lest you get possessed by some wandering ghost you happen to breathe in. And I’m not quite sure how this relates to any of what I’m working on (besides the obvious parallel of one of the characters being dead) but it ought to apply somehow.
I dreamed this morning about shape-shifters—not the animal sort, but people who could shift between different human forms, and somehow this also encompassed the power to make clones of oneself; I did, during the course of the dream, make a twin-me, who oddly enough started out in one of the proto-stages as a brain-damaged guy. But the main focus of the dream was on another shape-shifter, who was king/warlord of some sort of barbarian hoarde who wanted to wipe out my clan, only he actually came from some highly educated society (which involved lots of stone carvings and temples and stuff) which he’d kind of traded off for the barbarians because of some feud in which he exiled his foster-brother, who was the head of the clan he was trying to destroy. So I was running around in the shape of a red-bearded barbarian (we were all in exciting costumes like the extras from some generic late-european-celtic hoarde) while my duplicate, who being newly made wasn’t a very good shape-shifter yet, drew the attention of everyone who thought she was really the spy. And I (in a rather incongruous way involving sugar syrup and a syringe) drugged the hoarde, until the only one left mobile was their leader, who had sorted out what was going on by then. And then there was this strange thing about stealing breath, which was related to the cloning process, but also how you killed another shape-shifter: by sucking all the air out of their lungs, thus stealing their power. An oddly personal way to kill... anyway, I didn’t quite kill the other guy, I just drained his power and hatred (and consequently most of his mind, but it had to be done) and then was just trying to put him back together again when I woke up.
So this was a really vivid and both well-plotted and well-costumed dream, which probably doesn’t come across at all well in my description. But besides the potential for maybe shaking a real story out of it someday, it’s reminded me of something that I haven’t been thinking about in my novel (ok, maybe not entirely non nano-related...) which is the idea that your life is your breath. There are all kinds of interesting greek linguistic things (that I might remember specifics of if I actually knew greek) about when your breath is taken, you die—as opposed to “inspiration” which is the gods breathing on you—and then there’s the medieval bit about sneezing being bad on account of you might lose your breath, and even the superstition about holding your breath as you pass a graveyard, lest you get possessed by some wandering ghost you happen to breathe in. And I’m not quite sure how this relates to any of what I’m working on (besides the obvious parallel of one of the characters being dead) but it ought to apply somehow.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-09 08:52 am (UTC)