Raven Lake University

Raven Lake University is a sprawling, unlikely institute of higher learning set atop a plateau well back into some of the most ancient mountains in the world. Chase Grimwald has no idea what he just stepped into: he applied late, accepted late, and arrived too late for the Orientation sessions. The campus itself is a set of ancient stone buildings, his dorm room is hidden away in a back corner of the uppermost floor of his dorm, and some of the other students are sleeping outside in tents. And who anchors their tent to a slope on the edge of a rocky cliff?

Strange things roam the halls at night -- and at least one of them has already tried to kill him. But was that because he hasn't yet learned the elaborate rituals that the other students use to protect themselves? Or does someone genuinely want him dead? And what about the lamprey-things in certain parts of the stream? Where are they coming from? Why do they drop off these weird, fleshy lumps before swimming back into tiny holes in the rock? And what was that bigger one behind them? 

A sensible young man would have opted right back out, but the students are friendly, the food is plentiful, and the education is top-notch... Oh, and the road is gone. The professors may be a little idiosyncratic, but Chase finds that enjoyable. Then a chance encounter with the Fenwick family who run the University leaves him wondering if he might not have some sort of connection to them, and he begins to realize just how far he's in over his head. He'll have to untangle old enmities and alliances, uncover secrets, and possibly negotiate an unexpected marriage if he expects to survive the school year with his grades intact.

Holy Crap, My Dreams Are A Mess

Two part dream, or maybe three: 

Part One featured a very particular co-worker of mine having shown up at my house because I'd taken a mental health/vacation day and apparently we were supposed to be upgrading something and so we both needed to be in the office. Only it wasn't our current house, it was the home where I grew up, so of course my dad was there. The house also badly needed roof repairs and was leaking improbably amounts of water from several unlikely spots. (This had better not prove to be prescient...) Anyway, in addition to the water I was rushing around trying to locate my work shirts, socks, etc. because my Mom had moved things around, and we were already running late.

So the basic scenario for the second half was that we were on a large family trip, and due to head back out in the next day or two, so I was trying to get everything together for that. 

Only there were so many half-constructed Lego sets that I was trying to preserve, and the whole place was hugely crowded, and finally manage to hunt down one of the food cleanup guys. (They have those? Apparently they have those.) He gives me some seal-able gallon bags to put things in, so now it's just a matter of making sure all the little pieces make it into storage, along with the doll house, the little metal cars, the action figures... all of it, presumably, for the younger generation. 

(It didn't feel like mine, if that makes any sense, and I didn't feel like a kid in this dream. Though on the other hand, Beautiful Wife wasn't present neither were our kids; my parents, however, were. So I hypothetically would have been somewhere between eighteen and my early twenties, I guess.)

So having finally gotten all this sealed into bags, sorted into bins,  and piled onto a cart, and stacked on top of a couple of trays that we'd made the big family dinner on, even though we were in some sort of resort hotel, I guess? 

Anyway, after pushing the cart through probably half the hotel, I finally located my Dad. We'd just determined that we had everything here pretty much in order and he asked if I thought I was ready. 

That was when the dream moved into full-on, high-grade nightmare fuel, in the form of body horror. 

'Cause, see, I couldn't leave yet: I suddenly noticed that I had these wide, unwelcome flaps of skin growing out of my upper right arm. They were maybe an inch wide and three inches long, with little white wiggly things coming out of the ends. Which, yes, some kind of carnivorous, parasitic worm. So my Dad figures out how to squeeze them out the end of the tube -- "Thank God I remembered which way to go." -- and onto the stone walkway of the hotel's garden. I have apparently picked them up during the trip somehow. 

And, of course, now that we know what they are (sort of) I can see where they've moved down to my elbow and trying to form another tube there, only they're just under the skin so we have to squeeze them out a lot more carefully. And then there's a line of them down my arm towards my hand, so we have to pull those out, and the opens a gods-awful long slice all the way down my arm, right through the skin, so I'm sitting there looking at it and thinking, I'm going to need to get to a hospital or all this is going to get badly infected.

Fucking subcutaneous worms, man. You can probably even guess which particular book series likely inspired that bit of the dream, at least if you've been reading it too. It happens right at the beginning of book two.  

My Subconscious Is Having Issues

Had a solid night's sleep with really, really weird dreams: 

It started with the return journey on some sort of trip. Usually I spend these sort of dreams trying find things and/or get everyone together, but this time no: there were some challenges, but we all got back. "We", in this case, was "me and the people I was traveling with" so also it wasn't a family trip (as these dreams usually are).

No, the family element picked up once I was back home -- in my childhood home, in considerable and accurate detail -- when I discovered that my parents (both dead now IRL, my mom for a decade and my father just under a year) were going through my stuff -- unpacking my bags, washing and sorting clothes. For some reason, this infuriated me.  I think maybe there were some things in there I didn't want them to find? I don't know. But it was a full-on yelling, breaking-things-in-the-Activity-Room, throwing-furniture-around session. On top of the which there a couple of unfamiliar kids there, playing on our computers, who didn't want to go away. I remember shouting at them to get out.

I really have no idea what set this off. 

Brains are weird. 

New Nightmares

Lot of weird dreams over recent weeks. Notable among them:

1. A thing like a deformed baby roughly the size of a squirrel, but with adult-sized hands on short wrists growing out of its sides. It was trying to pull me into a very small (like, 5") hole in the wall, and if I hadn't pulled harder it would have... absorbed and consumed me. 

2. A completely separate dream. I liked the part where I was camping with my friend. I enjoyed the part where we were LARPing with a bunch of other campers. I was less pleased with the weird rival family throwing rocks at my head. The tarot-ish reading that passed for the post-funeral reading of the will was weird. Having a random toddler get caught between the inner and outer doors of the elevator and fall down the shaft was horrible. 

There was a lot of "trying to find my sword again" in there, which I think is usually a sign of my brain trying to gear up to Get Things Done.  

Most recently, I had a -- slightly broken-up -- sort of Addams Family wedding scenario, except that the various parties involved were actually trying to kill each other. There was a river, which varied in width in various areas, where people would swim -- but there were also eels in there, carnivorous and about fourteen feet long, maybe eight inches across. The one I threw off was only eight feet long, but hit had been cut short. There was a point where I was walking on the pipes just under the water, and then back to the main areas where I needed to be; and then a lot of dastardly dealings, including the intrusion of the Shadow Tooth, which turned out to be a projection controlled by a yoga instructor whose controller I took away. 

It was all very weird, and I loved the strangeness of the settings.  

EPIC Dreams!

I fear I've lost some of the details, but I had this completely awesome dream last night... In retrospect, it's a bit less coherent than it was at the time, but with a bit of spackle and some duct tape it fits together just fine. 

Stage One was venturing out in the wake of some sort of disaster to get people to safety. A bridge had collapsed, or maybe exploded, so being unharmed and on a bicycle let me get people out of immediate danger to where emergency services -- or what was left of them -- could triage them, or just move the relatively intact ones back to the safe area. 

Stage Two was trying to move around in this kind of post-disaster setting, which meant switching over to gathering batteries -- very sci-fi looking batteries -- moving quietly to avoid threats. Somewhere in there I stumbled across a big alien spider-monster just as some bad guys -- raiders? enemy soldiers? alien invaders? -- caught up with me from behind, with the result that I decided that getting out from between them was the priority, and ran away. 

Which promptly turned into a hoverbike chase scene, and somewhere in the middle switched over to Stage Three.

Stage Three was full-on video-game mechanics, where I had to remember how to swap weapons, reload, return fire, etc... all while racing back to the safe area from Stage One. Definite learning curve even in the dream, but it was very cool. I even remember halfway-waking up long enough to think that I'd have play more of this later on, and then being kind of pissed that the game doesn't actually exist in real life. 

All of which was a vast improvement over the dream from a week or so earlier, where "my family" -- not actually my family, just a bunch of random people who were my family in the dream -- had gone to a sort of waterpark/nature preserve... where they (we) murdered somebody for some inheritance. And of course one of the cousins screwed something up, and had to hide a body on the fly instead of disposing of it as planned. 

This led to the nightmare sequence when I'd realized that the body had been found, there were investigators on the scene, and I was trying to grab my stuff and get off the property. Meanwhile my "parents" were insisting that everybody needed to stay calm and act normal and the cops definitely wouldn't figure out what had happened. And then getting out was incredibly difficult, since the park perimeter was blocked off, as were the areas around the rides, and... yeah. All for a murder that I hadn't wanted to be involved with in the first place. 

More Dreams - the hidden beast at the renfaire

Slept hard last weekend, and woke up late. Dreams were... something to do with an eldritch monstrosity showing up at, more or less, a renfaire or at least a small community that existed in a sort of perpetual state of renfaire. I was a kid of about twelve -- not my actual self at that age, just this one kid -- and there was a lot of running into the woods and hiding in the brush or behind the piles of *stuff* that everybody had accumulated for their projects. 

There was also, I should note, a whole-ass renfaire going on at the time, with booths, and people in garb wandering around, and shops, and like several hundred people any one of whom could be the monstrosity.

When the monster finally found me, it was in the form a woman with a sort of fractal array of arms and legs, which was a singularly disturbing image. I woke up shortly after that. 

Fighting Monsters

I wish I'd paid more attention to last night's dreams. There was a lot of Being Attacked By Monsters and also Fighting Them Off, and the monsters themselves were varied and bizarre. Admittedly, it's been a long week -- don't ask, or at least don't expect me to answer -- but still, this was the kind of material I could use. And the sense of fighting back effectively was reassuring. 

The setting was... a lot of uncertain ground -- moving from place to place, climbing and descending, but that's about all I recall of it. There were things that seemed like people, and things that were unmistakably monstrous; most were animal, but some were mostly or partly vegetable. 

Gah. I should have taken notes while it was all still fresh in my head.  

Sleep and Dreams

Had trouble sleeping earlier this week. I woke up a couple of times, which I don't usually do. I think I was having some stomach issues, and also I need to get back in the habit of using the CPAP machine. 

Weird, disconnected dreams, too. I was trying to get to some kind of family for dinner, for a holiday where I hadn't had the day off, only all I had was name of the place -- no directions -- and I kept forgetting the name. I had Secondborn with me, except much younger than she is now, and she kept wandering off. Then I got frustrated and went walking off into the pouring rain. (Not so much leaving Secondborn behind as just... she wasn't there anymore.) There was a Kung Fu fight, or at least a brief tussle in there somewhere, too. 

None of it made much sense, which I suppose isn't all that unusual, but my dreams are frequently pretty coherent -- more coherent that this, anyway. I think I'm just back to having a lot of frustrations in my life right now, and not enough spoons to deal with them.

Dreams: The Empty Archipelago

Slept hard the night after we got back, and had one of those bizarrely lucid dreams that I sometimes do. I'm probably the better for it; these sorts of dreams tend to come along when I'm shaking something off. 

I'd been in an airplane, and we'd made an emergency landing on a stretch of road on an island. No idea where; the dream started after we'd landed, so we didn't get any dramatic speeches from the pilot or anything. I just came into the dream knowing that the plane was down, that it had landed safely but we didn't have any way to get it back up. Most of the passengers decided to stay put and wait for help, but I went exploring instead. 

So: island, tropical, built out but strangely empty. There were roads, sidewalks, buildings, a lighthouse off in the distance. No people, though. There was another island nearby, that looked close enough to swim to; I headed down a wooden walkway that went off in that direction. A few of the other passengers filtered out after me. 

The boardwalk ended in small, avant-guard museum, which was unlocked but uninhabited. I had a flashlight on me, so we made our way through to the back rooms, which had table holding massive vegetables -- like, a squash the size of my chest. Reassured that we wouldn't starve if things like this grew around here, I found the back door, and... 

Came out into a room with people in it. They didn't seem surprised by our appearance, or even very interested in it, but they answered questions. No, they didn't really know how they got here. No, they didn't know any way back. Yes, there was food and water -- I wasn't sure if they grew it, or if it just somehow appeared from time to time. As far as I could tell, they'd established routines and were content where they were. 

I meant to move further in, to see if I could figure out what was going on here, but I woke up before I could get any further. 

 

Colony Planet dreams

Crashed hard and had incredibly weird -- but very narrative -- dreams, probably inspired by the very final scene of Don't Look Up: 

We were on a colony planet. I'm not sure how many people there were, but there were some interesting little details -- the electrical wiring in our rooms hadn't all been hooked up correctly, so if my neighbor switched on his lights, mine went out, for example. (Put in a ticket with Facilities for that one, I guess.) There were snakes that lived in these... basically snail shells... and struck if you set something (a peanut, your toe) in front of the opening. The only good way to kill them was to drop something edible and then behead them when they struck. There were also other, more Earth-normal snakes. 

There were alien ruins and some aliens, who mostly ignored us -- I had the impression that there'd been a hard-negotiated political peace, but I didn't actually dream about that part. Some of the ruins still had active alien tech, too, like the twenty-foot-tall thing that seemed to be half organic and half mechanical. We didn't get too close to that one; it was definitely still moving around. 

There were also monsters: large predators, semi-domesticated by the aliens (or I guess really they were the natives and we were the aliens) in some places, and absolutely feral in others. So there was a very Old West "keep a gun and a knife on you at all times" vibe to the whole thing. Traveling through the semi-forest, even along a trail, was absolutely nerve-racking.  Frankly, so was creeping through the ruins.

All in all I wouldn't say it really went anywhere, but it was a fun bit of unconscious world-building. 

Recovery and Self-Care, 2025

Oh thank the dark and forgotten gods. 

I've been... not feeling well... for the last few days, mainly because I've been pushing way too hard with way too much stress for, I don't know, the last three weeks of May. I spent part of Monday just napping, took most of Tuesday off as an exhaustion/mental health day, and have just generally been feeling like I was right on the edge of making myself really, really sick (and I did have stomach/digestive issues, not to mention a truly horrible headache yesterday that may have been partly dehydration from the digestive issues). I've also been sleeping mostly in five-hour chunks, which isn't ideal. 

So yesterday I worked from home, but... cautiously, with breaks when I felt I needed them -- including napping for a bit of the afternoon and working to make it up in the evening -- and then went to bed with Beautiful Wife (also exhausted) at about 10:30. Didn't even pause to set up the CPAP, just climbed up and burrowed in. 

Finally -- finally -- had all the deeply weird, semi-narrative REM-sleep dreams that I've been missing. Woke up about 5:30, sweaty as anything, and just lay there thinking about random crap, the way I seldom have time to do anymore. Legit feels like I just shook off a fever, though I don't think I've actually been running one. 

The dreams were absolutely wild, too -- a three-part or three-element ceremony involving a circle of monsters (half feline, half canine -- so werewolves and were-panthers, maybe?) who had to move in and out and weave together in particular ways, a human at the center, and... something else that was important, but I can't remember it now. Probably wouldn't do me any good, since I don't seem to know any shapeshifters in real life and couldn't teach them the choreography anyway. Come to that, I don't actually remember what the ritual did, either, but  it was still pretty cool. 

I should put it in a piece of writing, somewhere. 

Next set of dreams started with younger-me and a whole bunch of other people in a fairly large house -- but there were a lot of us, so we were sleeping sort of wherever we could. (My parents showed up in this dream; my brother did not. I don't know if that means anything.) We were pulling together some sort of caravan, and there were a lot of decisions to make about what to bring and what to leave behind. Also, it was raining outside and the house had several significant leaks. 

Then we were actually in the caravan, and we were moving slowly because it was early morning and there were still traces of mist on the ground -- along with a lot of death and destructions -- fires, burned-down or smashed buildings, one truly spectacular corpse that was a badly-burned person(?) on a motorcycly, with the back half sunk into the ground. Looked like a war-zone, or the aftermath of a particularly bloody riot. Apparently the mist came out of the north, and it rises at night and anybody caught out in it dies -- or starts killing each other. 

Then we got to the place we were looking for, which was some kind of... factory? Power generation? Anyway, lots of cool ladders and bridges and big metal equipment. Also a couple of very friendly dogs, which turned out to be unfortunate because the dogs were helping to chase out some monsters that had gotten inside. The monsters were... weird. There was one like a two-legged balloon or egg. It did have a mouth, but it was awkward and not very dangerous, except that when it died it exploded into a small cloud of that death-mist, which did horrible things to the dogs until there was only one dog left. Unlike most of my dreams, I was both young (like, late teens maybe?) and unarmed, so I was avoiding the beasties by climbing ladders, jumping platforms, and like that. There were some other monsters too, at least one that stalked around like some sort of human-sized, featherless hunting bird, but at least those didn't explode into mist when they died. 

Anyway, I woke up before I had a chance to find out why we'd come there or what the workers were doing there, but it was intense and interesting and left me feeling more connected -- to my dreaming or myself, I'm not sure -- and just generally like I'd finally gotten a little bit of my breath back. 

Like I said, thank the dark and forgotten gods for that.  

Slowly Recovering

Woke up from a dream in which I was simultaneously helping Secondborn out with some perfectly ridiculous challenges (gathering treasure off a ledge while hanging by one hand from a metal beam above it, so I could use the other hand to pull a switch and let a small platform swing down for him to stand on) and helping him line up the elements of the video game in which those challenges were taking place. It was a weird contrast; the whole hanging-from-a-beam and leaping-across-ledges sequence was intensely first-person, while the meta- elements were much more abstract -- for example, each possible monster or opponent in the game was represented by a card from a standard deck of playing cards; you assembled a "full deck" by defeating everything the game had to offer. (I guess maybe the Jokers were optional random encounters? I don't know.) 

It struck me as I was sort of reviewing all this in my mind during the process of waking up that a lot of the physical challenges would have been... maybe not easy, but pretty matter-of-fact stuff in my youth. Nowadays, of course, hanging by one hand from a beam while doing something else with the other hand? I could manage it for a moment... maybe... at best. 

And it's not just because I've gotten older. I'm still unpacking a lot of this, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that a lot of it was because my former job just kind of... ground me down. Not obviously, and not even maliciously, but it just wore me down until all I really wanted to do was curl in on myself so I could stop being unhappy. Making some new local friends and being part of one the world's most epic D&D games helped pull me out of that, but changing jobs was what really did it. And frankly, for a long while there changing jobs didn't seem possible, because my job title ("web designer") wasn't actually something I did or could do, and what I could do and was doing was in no way reflected in my job title or official responsibilities (or my pay, but that's its own special three-page rant). 

It's weird not to feel trapped.

I mean, no it isn't, or it shouldn't be, but after nearly a decade of that bullshit it still feels weird. I don't trust it. I feel like I'm doing a much shittier job than my co-workers seem to think I'm doing, and I don't even know what a sensible metric would look like anymore. Being in what was, in retrospect, a pretty shitty job even if I was pretty good at it, well... it messed with my head. It messed with my health. Hell, it messed with my marriage and my parenting. It was a shitty situation and I'm glad to be out of it, and if you're sitting around on a Sunday night filled with a sense of dread about having to go to work in the morning, then I want you to stop telling yourself that your job is "really not that bad" and go find something you actually enjoy showing up for, or at least something that's enough of a change that you can approach it with some kind of equanimity. Because your job? It is that bad. It's bad enough that you dread going back to it.

I hit a point a couple of weeks ago where my whole system basically crashed. Like, I was sleeping fourteen hours a day -- I couldn't help it -- and my immune system just absolutely bottomed out, so every weird little occasionally-recurring health issue that I've acquired over the last decade or more all set in at once, and my ability to focus -- on anything -- was just gone. (That's part of why the last chunk of blog entries have been characters from Saint Vincent's School; not only do I need to have them prepared before I launch into a writing project, but I literally can't launch into the writing project itself yet. The energy and the focus just aren't there.) I'm coming back out of it, slowly, but it honestly felt like all the burnout I've developed over the last twelve years just hit me all at once.

...And then Daylight Savings Time came along again, but I digress. Honestly, my sleep schedule is weird enough right now that I'm not sure if my body will even notice that. 

My New Year's resolution -- which I'm setting for myself, right now, here at the beginning of November, because fuck arbitrary calendar dates for this shit -- is to get back to myself. I used to have a sense of humor; I'm slowly getting it back, but I want to be making more jokes, laughing more, saying stupid shit without being self-conscious about it. I used to be athletic; I'm not ever going to get back to my fifteen- or seventeen-year-old youth and fitness, but I'd like to slim down and at least feel sexy again. I'd like to be able to climb things without getting winded. I'd like to take up some kind of martial arts again, time permitting. One of the great gifts that the World's Most Epic D&D Campaign gave me was that it got me going on my writing again, and I'd like to keep moving forward with that. I don't have any interest in taking up running again, but I'd like for it to at least be an option. 

I'd like to be doing more than just getting through the day again, and I'm starting to believe that might be possible.

Weird Dreams and Life Situations

More weird dreams this week, which is probably a good thing in that it indicates that I'm sleeping deeply and well enough to A) actually dream, and B) remember it afterwards. This is a distinct improvement over the majority of the last few years. (Seriously, if you take a look at the Dreams tag on the blog, you can see it in the way the dates are distributed. I've had several entries since I changed jobs; the last entry before that was back in March of 2023; then it jumps back to December of 2021; and if you keep scrolling down you'll find that I was having -- and blogging -- lots of weird, very narrative dreams right up until about the end of 2016.)

It's nice to have that back, even if the current crop are a bit troubled in tone. 

In the first dream, I (along with some of my friends) was playing D&D in some sort of Dimension 20-ish format, which was naturally complicated by the fact that I've essentially never watched that show. In the dream, we were all comfortably familiar with the D&D elements, but there were some cues and codes for the show format that none of us knew at all. Which... yeah, been feeling that way in real life a lot lately, so it's pretty understandable that my brain would reproduce that mood in a dream. 

The second dream involved being on a farm road sort of... facing off with a couple of truck drivers who were being pugnacious and recalcitrant about sharing the road. At one point they actually sort of drove over us -- not, like, to crush our care but so that the top of our roof was scraping across the underside of their flatbed. I wound up trying to chase them down and get a photo of their license plate so I could report them. But again, the general mood here was just that experience of getting run over like that, not endangered but just hugely stressful and a lot going on. I blame it on the latter half of 2024 just being a lot, and my brain maybe acknowledging some uncertainty about how to navigate it all. 

How about you? What's the weirdest dream that you've had lately?

College Dreams

Dreamt that I was going off to college, and having trouble sorting out everything that I needed to get done (find my room, get unpacked, figure out my schedule...). It wasn't a particularly long or elaborate dream, but it was very definitely a mood -- probably triggered by some combination of Firstborn being away at college himself (parents' weekend is coming up soon) and me settling in on the new job (which I think is coming along fine but there's still a lot I don't know). 

I'm also beginning to think that I might have some unprocessed trauma around going off to college so damned early myself, though I also don't know what we would have done otherwise.

Writing projects are currently at a stand-still; I think I need to give my brain some downtime. 

And sleep. Even with the weird dreams, I need to be getting more sleep. When I get enough sleep, everything else falls into place so much more easily.

Lordy lordy some late nights lately

So, the thing about trying to wrangle applications is that they're frequently, well, recalcitrant. And they frequently need important, unavoidable things like upgrades... that need to be done outside of business hours. This is true even -- hear me out -- even when when what you're upgrading is actually just a test environment, or one set aside for training people where they can't break your business if they make a mistake. 

You might think that those environments should be available for much more casual upgrades, since they don't affect the actual business that goes on in your production environment, and can be refreshed from Production if anything goes wrong. And in an ideal world, you'd be right about that. In actual practice, well, I had a couple of inconveniently late nights last week while trying to get an incredibly recalcitrant training environment to to fully upgrade so that we can start User Acceptance Testing over there before we just upgrade the production environment and commit our fate to the merciless hands of the Computer Gods. 

This would be a great opportunity for overtime, but here at the new job I'm on salary. Which is fine, and maybe even better, because not only am I getting paid more in general, if I have to (hypothetically) put in four hours on a failed upgrade Thursday Night and another four hours on a partially-successful upgrade Friday night, I can bloody well sleep in on Friday morning and again on, say, the following Monday. I need to inform my co-workers so they know what to expect in terms of when I'm actually conscious, but otherwise nobody cares. (And in fact -- kudos to the new job -- they encourage it.) 

I would love to be responsible for a piece of software that was well-documented, well-maintained, and properly tested for quality. This one is... not that, but that's part of the reason it's worth paying me this much to maintain it. 

On a possibly-related note, I woke up Saturday morning after a dream in which Vincent Price -- that bastard -- was in a wheelchair and trying to break open the bathroom door while I was getting into the shower, so that he could feed me to the marsh people. The marsh people had apparently lived here years ago, and been subject to cruel and horrible experiments; the one I was avoiding introduced itself as having been made from six other marsh people, and looked like a cross between a starfish and a stingray. So if I ever see Vincent Price in a wheelchair again, I'm going to murder him on the spot in self-defense. 

BUT THAT ASIDE, life is pretty good. I keep forgetting that Firstborn is no longer living with us, which is weird but otherwise fine; we've put Secondborn into some math tutoring because apparently middle school has taught him that it's both terrible and useless; the dog has very strong opinions about where we should go when we do walkies; and I'm running three different D&D games which I'm enjoying the hell out of in three different ways. 

If I get my sleep schedule back under control, I'll be unstoppable. 

Here's to you, my friends, being -- or becoming -- unstoppable too.

Okay, yes, wow

You know, I don't think it would have been unreasonable to hope that I could change jobs and just focus on settling in to my new role. I mean, yeah, I have a lot of baggage to shake off from the old job -- obviously -- but a couple of dips in the sleep schedule and some weird dreams and I think I could have gotten over that. 

But based on Tuesday night's Weird Fucking Dreams (which woke me up about half an hour early on Wednesday) and this inexplicable sense of overall stress that I'm carrying, apparently that's not enough. I mentioned in earlier posts that of the two couple-friends who have enriched our social life for the last half-decade, one couple is in the process of trying to sell their house so they can move to Colorado, and the other is moving all their stuff up to Boston next fucking week. Plus school starts for Secondborn next week -- we aren't ready -- and we're dropping Firstborn off at college the week after that -- we really aren't ready. Finally, Beautiful Wife's job is being an absolute shit-show right now -- they seem to be trying to sideline her department, if not remove it entirely -- so she's freaking out because she needs to prepare for a double-load of classes¹ in the fall semester, which also starts Really Soon Now.

I'd like to have a nervous breakdown, please. At least, I'd like to drop everything else and get this stuff sorted out. Instead, I have to keep showing up for work, continue actually working so I can keep this job, and figure out some way to squeeze in the other stuff -- like helping Secondborn figure out ways to get himself back and forth from school, and Firstborn get registered for classes -- around the edges. 

Plus I'm watching a lot of the things that I've spent the last several years relying on to keep me sane -- Monday night D&D, Wednesday night horror webcast, Friday Night Writes -- come apart in real time, and apparently my brain has decided to just seize up and start screaming "NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME AGAIN!!!" at me. Which, yes, thank you, I knew that, Brain. 

I'm so tired. 

I would like one year -- just one -- out of the 2020s to just... be a normal year. Just... have a routine, be manageable, don't be buried under an avalanche of external stressors like Covid (Hi, yes, we've hit the summer flare-up and nobody's acting like it because we've been betrayed and abandoned by our public health organizations), the election (which I'm actually finally hopeful about but if anything goes wrong we're now a fully fascist state), and multiple Major Life Changes all happening at once.

Breathe. Move forward. Don't panic. That's my mantra right now. 

I have a meeting this morning and several projects to follow up on. I know what I need to do next. 

But dear gods I would like to crawl into a hole and hide for a while.

1. The idea is that she does her entire year's worth of classes right now, leaving her free in the spring to look for another job, a suitable side-hustle, or a better way to navigate the current bullshit.

Challenge: Strange Dreams

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: The strangest dream that I've had recently.

Okay, so... this one's going to need some background. 

I play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. And I like playing weird, non-standard characters. So when one of my groups offered to run a one-shot adventure for low-level clerics, I jumped in. 

The hook is basically that the priest in this one small town has called for help from nearby temples to deal with a plague of undead, and your character's temple has responded by sending, well, you. Not terribly experienced or powerful, but advanced enough to turn undead and drive them away. They felt it would be safe enough since it would be an interdenominational venture and there would be other clerics around, and this way you could gain some experience out in the world.

So I pulled together a character. Only this character is a kobold -- one of the weakest races in D&D, generally speaking -- whose clerical focus is on Arcana. Moreover, because he's a kobold, he doesn't belong to any of the temples that were asked for aid. So he's just going to show up because some of his people overheard that there was a thing going on, and he wants to make the Big Folk think better of his people and his temple. 

And then I wrote a whole page-long introduction for him, with him being given the job and accepting it, and the clan chief making it clear that his presence hadn't actually been requested by the other temples. 

Meanwhile, in my actual job in real life, I'd been coordinating with our network group to get the website for our local golf course switched over to its new hosting, which holds the updated Wordpress site instead of the antiquated HTML site on our outdated web server. This has been a much bigger project than it ever should have been, because the golf pros care about two things: playing golf, and teaching golf. They want a dynamic, up-to-date website that will bring in new players; they do not want to have to update that website or even have to think about it at all. 

So, y'know, it's been A Process. Mostly, and I am embarrassingly relieved by this, accomplished by a colleague in another department. So all I had to do, really, was make sure that we switched over from the old site to the new one. Which I did. 

And then I went home, wrote out the kobold cleric intro, and went to sleep. 

...And dreamed of changing over to the new golf website and the vital necessity of making sure that the site was accessible for kobolds. Apparently kobolds actually play a lot of golf, and they need to have the accessibility measures in place on the website so they can select their tee-times and schedule their practices or sign up for training. And by the lost god (don't ask, it's a kobold thing) in my dream we got it done. 

Dracula Dreams

So in an attempt to make the changeover to Daylight Savings Time, I went to bed "on time" on Monday and took a Benadryl to make sure I went to sleep -- what with, y'know, my body still thinking it was an hour earlier than it actually was. And, naturally, I slept like a rock. 

So of course I had weird dreams. 

There were a handful of people using projected portals (think Sliders, if you're old enough to remember that one) to get groups of people to different times/timelines, with the eventual goal of destroying Dracula. (I think the groups that were being transported were basically refugees, while the folks with the gate-keys were the resistance.) There was a lot of running and screaming and chaos. 

After they departed, I found my way into the large building that Dracula was using as his castle in this era. (What era? Modern-ish. Couldn't tell you more than that.) I was spying from some sort of duct when he heard me, and let me tell you: 

Grating doesn't even slow him down; he just kind of oozes through it, like a shadowy T-1000. 

He's fast, too. No outrunning Dracula. I made it out of the building, but he caught me at the fountain.

Turns out Dracula doesn't feel pain. That's why he such an asshole: there's no good way to rebuke him when he gets deep into his bullshit. I was starting to ask him about that, and how he felt about losing such a fundamental part of his humanity -- we were definitely veering off into Get Dracula Some Therapy territory -- when the alarm went off and I woke up. 

I have absolutely no idea how the Resistance was planning to try to destroy him, but all things considered it's no surprise that it involved time travel. Something like that, it would probably require time travel.

Weird Dreams: Sean Connery

I woke up this morning from a dream in which I was hunting Sean Connery at a convention in a University -- he'd killed a couple of my friends. The only way to get him was to hit him with a UV light, which caused his limbs to shrink up into little baby-arms and -legs. I'd actually captured him, but then the bastard gave me the slip while we were taking the tram back across to the other side of the University and I was off trying to chase him down again...

...Yeah.I'd just caught up to him in a hallway and was shining the UV light on him again when my alarm went off. (Which was probably for the better, all things considered.)

I think this was a combination of Better Watch Out (which I saw for the first time last night courtesy of the Analog Demon on Twitch), a bit of Blade II (which I was watching before bed) and a Spellslinger Academy book (which I'm currently reading to see what people are doing with School For Magic ideas right now). 

I'm also taking this as something of a good sign, since I generally don't wake up remembering this sort of extended-narrative dream unless I'm sleeping pretty well and getting enough sleep.

Sleep is my friend

So after a week or more of thinking, "I really ought to get to sleep earlier," I finally put myself down right after we finished eating dinner -- well, not right after, but as soon as possible after. That was about seven-thirty, I think. 

I slept straight through to six-forty this morning. 

So, call that about eleven hours. And I feel much better for it. Like, I think I finally got that system reset that my body's been wanting. I'm still yawning, of course -- I haven't been awake that long, after all -- but moving, feeling, doing things? All feel like less of a struggle. 

Writing progress has been minimal this week. I had an idea for one of the D&D stories, but it's too far out on the timeline for me do anything with it right now. I may just pass it back to my DM to play with. And I need to get back to work on Shadow Academy, which is currently still just a bunch of character sketches and an intro scene; I need to get the story going. 

Work is still busy and looks like to get busier for the next several months, but there's not much to do there except ride the wave and learn as much as I can; we're going to need it. 

Oh, yeah: and get sleep. Sleep is my friend.

One interesting side-effect of getting that much sleep: I remember my dreams, and my dreams were weird. Like, I had taken a travel detour to watch a zombie movie, and that movie was also ground zero for a zombie outbreak. A lot of avoiding zombies, blocking their way, and getting out of the theater. So either my brain is deeply recursive, or it's very confused. Possibly it's a reaction to our idiot governor reopening the state before we're full vaccinated. Or the whole thing was a metaphor for this project at work...