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    Thursday, July 15, 2010

    Strange dreams of late. I wonder if it's the heat that is making me dream of Dragons?

    Two nights in a row of very lucid dreams with animals in them have me wondering...

    The first night I was surprised to have adventures with my cat involving the outdoors, with lots of butterflies and things to chase. They were much like the dreams I had when my dog Vaugner died, but she's still alive. Vaugner still visits my dreams occasionally, but less and less now that he's been gone so long. I've never had a dream where a living animal showed up.

    But last night was much different. I dreamed I was a young girl in a desert, and that I and my family had lived there for some time. There was a mountain nearby, that shook and smoked, and sometimes made the air taste funny. It was believed that a Dragon lived in the mountain, and the smoke and noise were because he was aware of the time of his death, which was drawing near. 'Near' being still a few centuries away, but when you have a life expectancy that spans milleniums, I guess knowing you'll be dead within a few hundred years is depressing. The village elders said the Dragon had forgotten about everything in the world because his despair consumed him.

    So the whole village knew that their existence 'depended' on the Dragon, somehow. That one day, it would die, and the mountain would explode, and probably wipe out all the little villages nearby. This was no 'monthly virgin sacrifice' type of Dragon - no one had ever seen it, and it had never rained fire down upon us. So basically, just a lonely, sad Dragon, aware of his mortality. But no one knew what to do about it. Various people had tried to find the Dragon, but of course, none ever returned.

    Yes, you know this part of the story, the girl decides to climb the mountain and see if she can cheer up the Dragon. There's the argument with the family, and the sneaking out in the middle of the night and all that. This part seemed kind of rushed to me, but my mind was probably just hurrying my subconscious along to the 'great adventure' part.

    You know, climbing a mountain in the desert is perilous work. You can't possibly carry all the water you'll need. And when the Dragon finds you, passed out at the mouth of his sandy cave, nothing will prepare you for the giant glassy eyes, striated with all the colors of the painted desert, that blinks silently as you gulp the last of your water, sure that this is one powerful hallucination from being waaay too dehydrated.

    At this point, I did wake up, and I think that is why I can remember so much now. It was too hot to sleep, and I kicked off the covers and tried again...

    The Dragon was made of sand and obsidian, crusted with pieces of old wind-sculpted rocks, chunks of dead cedar and sparkling mica. He sighed, and his breath was rotten, like when goat milk stands too long in the pan. And then he inhaled, and I was sure that within seconds I'd be roasted into charcoal, like my parents said would happen.

    "What.... are you?" he said slowly, and it sounded like the wind over the dunes. The black part of his eyes became larger, and I could see myself in them as he drew closer.

    "I...I'm just a girl. From the village. Down there." I pointed towards a smudge on the landscape. My home looked so small I couldn't see the mud brick Temple or the large market tents. But from here, on the Dragon's mountain, I could see many other smudges, and some cookfire smoke curling up into the sky. My stomach growled, realizing that even in times of great peril, one can still be quite hungry...

     

    And damn if I'm not hungry in real life now. I'll have to continue this story later on tonight. As much as I hate to say 'to be continued,' it will have to do...

    Posted via email from anachronista

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