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Fermius Firefly

A Dream Log, whenever I remember the dreams I've had.

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Location: San Marcos, United States

Fermius is a pen name drawn from a series of short fiction I wrote when I published the small press magazine Stellanova (on paper.) I play RPG games to escape from my daily grind as a technology wage slave for the state of California. I eat out a lot in order to do my part in supporting our increasingly service level economy. I am butler to 2 feline masters. If you ask them they will tell you I'm not very good at it, late with dinner, don't have enough hands with brushes in them, and sometimes I even lock them out of their office.

Friday, November 30, 2007

I Know Why the Freed Bird Flies

        I had one of those alternate lifeline dreams where I seemed to live through all the highlights of another life, not my own. In this one I was a man who had really well honed robotic construction skills, but really poor luck with choosing significant others. This was a life full of tragedy. His (my) first love as a teen was killed in a post graduation car crash. He created a small statuette of her as a memorial. And so began a lifetime of apparently cursed relationships. Friends and family fell to a plague of some sort, as did his first wife.  He outlived his second and third wives as well, each falling to cancer while still relatively young.

        Again, as a memorial I made small statuettes of each of them. I was happy for many years working on artificial animal robots for an ecology department at a major university. The animalbots were used to follow the migration paths of the declining populations in the world. Climate change had accelerated quite a bit.

        I retired, but used the money from a patent sale to build a flock of 15 ducks. They had advanced sensors that allowed them to dodge shot and to locate viable water and forage from a distance. They were powered by some form of fuel cell that was easily re-fueled by eating any vegetable matter. The birds were released to help the last known migrating flock of wild ducks find usable food and water in an increasingly hostile world.

        I broke out of the point of view character at that point (I think he/I died.) Jumping forward into the future I came across the flock, now only about 30 strong, and one of the mechanical ducks had failed. I took it home and opened it up. Inside was one of the statuettes that the other me had made of lost loved ones over the years. I managed to discover the trouble with the mechanical bird, and after many long days in the basement shop of my home, I managed to rebuild the bird. I recorded the message that was included in the bird, scanned the statuette and then posted it online, without explaining the source. I then released the bird back into the wild, where it winged away, flying at great speed to return to the job of shepherding the last flock of wild ducks in North America.

        I immediately planned to go and add a pond and forage to the property I was living on, so the flock would have one more safe haven along its migratory path. I felt like I was part of something oddly primal, despite the obvious high tech overtones.

Ad astra per technica,

FF

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Portals and Polymorphism

        In my dreams last night I kept changing out my physical form. Sometimes I was myself, sometimes I was a large Centaur (nifty having 6 limbs) and sometimes I was a small housecat. The plot of the dream itself seemed to involve running around a large warehouse district looking for portals that led to different locations and fighting whatever was guarding them, then forcing them closed.

        I know that one of the portals led to a world full of buxom elf women (well, there were men too, but I hardly noticed) I really tried to convince the rest of the group that we should leave that one open, as they werent hurting anyone. The rest of the group didnt buy my arguments so they closed the portal (which was unguarded). I found myself obsessing over the elf portal and wondering if I could figure out how to get the portal open again.

        The logic of the dream demanded that I would need something of that world to be able to tune a portal to it; otherwise Id just be opening portals at random. I think that we sometimes were actually in a portal when shutting down a second portal, that is what was prompting the changes in form.

Ad astra per technica,

FF

Friday, November 23, 2007

Stone Poppas II the Prequell

       I dreamed I was outside under a sky that was mostly blue with scattered wispy high clouds. I was startled to notice a group of large Kelly green clouds beginning to form high in the atmosphere. One green mass touched one of the high white clouds and rapidly the whole thing started to turn green. Soon the green clouds were growing towards the ground, like pools of ink dropped into clear water. A green particle, amoeba-like drifted down in front of me. I raced home to turn on the filters and stuff the cracks under the doors with wet towels. (Not really knowing what to actually do.)
       Later we were told via radio that the spores came from space and had landed all over the globe, coating the surface with a thin living layer of algae that had completely different DNA than life on earth. It was pulling carbon out of the air and increasing the oxygen levels. It was guessed that the process was being undertaken by some sort of alien race in a bid to make our planet hospitable to their life forms. We had no idea where the materials came from, but there was an emergency shuttle mission being undertaken to recover one of the alien deployment satellites.
       The dream fast forwarded several months, we'd all been given armor jackets and lasers based on recovered alien technology. We were all drafted! We were expected to find and fight the aliens wherever they landed. The aliens I ended up shooting didn't act like intelligent beings. Indeed, it seems the aliens were landing their livestock first. I believe that I was in the small group of humans who saw the oxygen producing pollution eating algae as a boon rather than a detriment, and wondered if we really needed to do anything other than round up their cattle and take it to the Sahara and Gobi deserts where it would make for a nice alien reservation. I like many others presumed that when the intelligent part of the aliens arrived, they would turn out to have been in space for generations, having no idea that this world had developed life on its own. Nothing they had dropped on us had any sort of warlike or combat usefulness. I had the feeling that we were in the minority, and in fact the worlds rush to commit what I felt was likely to be genocide was a potential mistake of galactic consequence. (Although who or what would come along to create those consequences, I couldn't predict.)
       In some ways this dream reminded me of the Stone Pappas dream from some time ago, I had that thought in the context of the dream itself, and that is what brought me out of the dream.

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Sunday, November 18, 2007

River Trip, Reenactment, Memories

I dreamed that N and I were traveling along a river in a ruined post apocalyptic looking landscape. We came across a village nestled in the arms of full fruited orchards and well stored shipping containers full of merchandise that never made it to its original destination. They were threadbare and starving, none the less. I discovered, after a short while, that there was some sort of warlord in the region who demanded that they only take food that had fallen on the ground, and items that fell out of the containers to the ground as well. To do otherwise was to face certain death.
I also discovered that the group had not seen this “benefactor” in a very long time. I managed to knock over a rack full of long coats and jeans. N managed to dislodge several apples on each tree that she climbed. The townspeople were glad to have scapegoats in us and rushed in to take clothing and food. Their benefactors never showed up. I showed a bunch of them how to determine if the food they found in any sealed containers was good or not. (Look for the bulge, listen for the vacuum filling in.)
We tried to warn them that winter was coming and they needed to prepare both food and shelter if they were going to survive. In many ways it was if people just didn't remember about there being seasons. We took some of the fruit and dried it before packing up and heading out.

In another dream I was talking with a person who had a 1950's era warplane, and tried to get him hooked up with some 1950's costumers so they could come and fix up his hanger as a sort of living museum.

In yet a third dream I was digging through a bunch of old stuff at my parent's house, trying to find some old models that, as the dream wore on, I realized didn't really exist. There were plenty of interesting things, including about a dozen shirts my mother had cut out all of the pieces of, but had never sewed together, an old balsa airplane model, just needing to be skinned, a collection of wool jackets my father had amassed and I think every package of homework or drawings any of the three of us had ever brought home and put on the refrigerator door.

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Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Bridge Tiger Attack, Cuddles

I dreamed I was running across a bridge like the one over Lake Hodges, Multiple spans, no actual water underneath, but a forest. Some of the spans had sections fallen out of them, and one was crowded with rusted automobiles. I had left the rest of the group about a hundred yards back in case I stirred up any trouble.

Trouble took the form of a small orange and black tiger. It leapt from behind a stack of cars and slammed into my backpack. The backpack probably saved my life as we tumbled to the ground and I rolled out of the shoulder straps, and stood with a steel rod in my hands. The tiger took a bit to de-tangle itself from the ruined pack. We stood, facing one another, sizing up the situation. I could tell that it had some experience with humans and was debating whether to run or ask where its dinner was.
It settled a few yards away from me, allowing me to gather my backpack stuff. When my party arrived I had one of them toss the tiger a rabbit, which it ate.

I stripped the seats out of an old vehicle and made repairs to my pack. It was ugly, but nothing was falling out.

Later I found myself sitting up in bed, not able to breath very well. (Pretty much how I've spent the last couple of weeks, thus no dreams.) One of my favorite women in the whole world came in and started cuddling on me. She wanted me to check out her new brushed silk top. Very smooth, almost as smooth as the skin underneath. Then the smooching started. I hadn't expected that.

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Sunday, November 04, 2007

Magic Hot Rod Rally, Cats on the Hill

I dreamed I was in a game, that, like many of my game dreams, ends up with everyone really in the event. This time, we were souping-up cars, not with mechanical upgrades, although there were some, but with magical upgrades. I didn't dream about the game mechanism enough to make note of how it worked, but the concept was similar to Cthulu 500 and Risus mixed. Not really sure how that would work, exactly. Soon enough my gamers and I were actually riding in our cars, working magic to make them fly, or submerge, or become invisible. I remember there were five forms of invisibility, Sonar, Sight, Laser,Radar, and Magic. There were limitations as to how much you could stack the different invisibilities. I know that I had an instant fuel-up spell that transported gas directly from a station tank to the car's tank. It was of limited use, as I was driving an electric tricycle with a large magically enhanced solar array. (The magic part made the solar collectors about 100 times larger in effect, creating a shadow around the car with one bright spot in the center focused on the collectors.)

This looked like it might actually be fun to play. The race itself had only a couple of rules. You could harm no one, you suffered a penalty if you got a ticket, and you had to pass through the gates at the check-in points in the correct direction and with all your wheels on the ground and crew in the vehicle. Even though you didn't have to spend any other time on the ground if you could magically afford it, you did have to roll through the check-in points and across the start and finish lines as though you were a normal automobile.

I don't believe there were any teams powerful enough to fly their cars the whole way, nor to teleport their vehicle any distance. All spells caused fatigue, just as if you had manually achieved the effect yourself, although those effects could be had in an instant. (This made flying a particularly difficult spell to maintain, so you had to have lots of fatigue reserves to make that happen.)

I had a second dream this morning before waking that involved a large number of cats living in the ivy on our hill. I was trying to impress a date that I was a caring person, so called out to the kitties. About two dozen made their way down off the hill to get pets and rubs. She freaked out and left.

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