Haunted Nights

[flemmings]

Strange night last night, not just for me evidently. Strange and vivid dreams. The earlier and fuzzier one had petronia sending me a book from which emerged-- that animal which is and is not a penguin or a pigeon or a goose or possibly a goat-- which proceeded to shit copiously about the house and the text; and I had to clean up after it.

Followed by a long, detailed, highly-coloured ghost story involving a haunted Japanese resort in the mountains with elevators I and my friends needed to take to try to get to our rooms. Only various people were also in them, who looked like guests or staff except... wrong. They generally served to impede us from getting to where I or we were going, sometimes by making the elevator doors vanish, sometimes by sending the elevator down when we wanted to go up. (Shades of Utena, I thought on waking.) Sometimes there were saunas and swimming pools with doors that unaccountably became locked, so one had to use the windows to get out of them. Partway through the dream I clearly remember thinking 'I never have dreams like this' but then continued dreaming, until at last someone produced the woman, now middle-aged, whose urami over some adolescent humiliation had caused the various phenomena to appear in the first place.

Comments

[avalonjones.livejournal.com]

The ancient gypsies used to believe that dreaming about shit was very good luck.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

(nod nod) In some Freudian equation of shit with gold. But in the dreambooks I've read it was human shit. And that was long before our modern idioms about deep shit and hits the fan and so on, which must influence our dream word play.

[paleaswater.livejournal.com]

Oh, now you need to write a hundred ghost story. ^_^

[i-am-zan.livejournal.com]

the Malays say that a bird poo-ing on you is good luck. I have no idea why though?

...
and yes I was thinking maybe you were channeling Ima Ichiko somehow. You haven't mentioned 100demons in a long while so maybe it's your subconscious missing it.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

It was and wasn't that, exactly. Half the time I think the 'they' involved were westerners, recalling a hotel I was at in northern-ish Ontario last fall where nothing quite worked right; and then the setting became the Japan Alps and the 'they' became Japanese. The feel really was more Utena than Hyakki Yakou, though it's hard to say in what way.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Oh, specifically a bird? I'll take that as a good omen then.

As I say, it wasn't quite Ima Ichiko, whom I find rather distanced and cerebral about her odd occurrences. This was a combination of menace and frustration.

[paleaswater.livejournal.com]

well, it doesn't have to be Japanese setting. I'm sure an old country hotel can be a perfectly suitable setting.