A Dream Of Typing

A love of reading was an early gift to me from my mother -- well, her, and the idiot alpha males at every school I ever attended whose bullying made my early attempts at socialization a living hell (thanks, guys).  I started early on science fiction (Mom always had something by Ray Bradbury or Arthur C. Clarke or Robert A. Heinlein or A.E. Van Vogt  laying around the house) and have read probably billions of words of the crap since.  Around 9 or 10 I started trying to write my own, and in my life have probably written billions of words, too, much of which is available in various unsavory places throughout the Internet (the latest of which is Facebook).  



And sometimes, because of all this reading and writing, I dream... in text.



I mean, I see what I'm dreaming, and I experience the dream, but as I do, I also visualize it as lines on a page.  Which is, you know, weird.  But you hang around me even a little, you're going to hear that word a lot. Probably use it quite often, too.



Anyway, while right now I am rereading Martha Wells' excellent THE FALL OF ILE-RIEN trilogy.



So this morning I woke up and these are the words I had dreamed:



* Sir Vagmar had already donned his chainmail by the time his squire arrived at his side, but the heavy breastplate yet remained to be put on him.  The travails of the road had tolled on both of them, and Sir Vagmar had lost flesh.  His breath was crisp in the chill winter air as he flexed his fingers and looked doubtfully down at his sadly lessened girth.



"D'you think I can wear the breastplate, Kayle?" he asked, wringing his fingers together, tentatively at first, then flexing and squeezing more strongly, to drive the stiffness from the joints. 



"Aye, sir," the squire said, "if I stuff your shirt with snow."



The knight nodded.  "Do it, then." *



And, newly awake, I thought about this for a minute and then said  to myself...



"Stuff his shirt with SNOW?  What the fuck, dude?"



The universe is permeated with the odor of kerosene.