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Nov. 21st, 2007 11:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coraaThe boy and I should have been out the door and heading to his father's a while ago, but I can't really regret the delay for two reasons:
1) A few days ago, I bought a lot of watch parts on eBay, and they arrived. They're astonishingly beautiful -- tiny perfect brass and silver gears, frozen-in-time watchfaces, long coiling mainsprings, rounded glass watchfaces. I'll be able to make all kinds of interesting things for my steampunk costume, and probably for other art projects too.
2) I had a highly entertaining (and fairly plotty!) dream. It's beginning to fade, so I will preserve it for posterity.
It was like reading a book -- literally: the dream had a frame-story on either end where I was shopping in the biggest grocery store ever. I mean, like, miles and miles of grocery store, two hundred kinds of mushrooms, a hundred kinds of fresh pasta, and a complete bookstore -- not just three racks of bestsellers. In the dream I wandered over, picked up one of the books, and fell into it, and then I was dreaming the book and I was the protagonist.
It was a fantasy-romance -- it reminded me a little of Tamora Pierce's Alanna series, or The Blue Sword, or things of that vein. I was a young woman living in a country that had been conquered by a neighboring country. The conquest was recent -- within my lifetime -- but not very recent; I could only dimly remember the war. My family were poor farmers without enough food to keep me fed, so they sent me to become a servant in the house of one of the conquering peoples in the city. And of course I gradually fell in love with one of the sons of the house, and he with me.
The next part is where it gets interesting. We married fairly early on in the dream, without much comment; apparently such marriages weren't particularly stigmatized, mostly because it was a society that practiced polygamy, and it was understood that, should he need to make a political marriage to a more appropriate wife, he could do so. But then two things happened: his elder brothers, the heir-and-second, died. The heir had been married with several children, but because he died in a disaster of some kind (I'm not sure what kind), he and his wives and children died as well. My husband was suddenly catapulted from about eighth in line to the head of the house to first. Second, poltics shifted such that my conquered people suddenly gained more power due to complicated religious factors. My husband was suddenly under a lot of pressure to a) find a suitable wife, and fast, since as heir it mattered more, and b) use me politically against my own people.
The story was very small-scale and localized. It mostly entirely took place within the household itself, and the stakes were private: me and my family, him and his, and the delicate network of expectations and rivalries and so on within the household. It was also interesting in that, in the dream, while I missed my family I also loved the amenities of the city. (The city was very beautiful; aesthetically it reminded me a great deal of Southeast Asia. No one in the dream was white; the conquered people and the dominant civilization were both comprised of people who looked Asian, if I remember correctly -- though they weren't actually members of any Earth society, since it was a second-world fantasy. The aesthetics are what stick out in my mind most, remembering the dream.)
1) A few days ago, I bought a lot of watch parts on eBay, and they arrived. They're astonishingly beautiful -- tiny perfect brass and silver gears, frozen-in-time watchfaces, long coiling mainsprings, rounded glass watchfaces. I'll be able to make all kinds of interesting things for my steampunk costume, and probably for other art projects too.
2) I had a highly entertaining (and fairly plotty!) dream. It's beginning to fade, so I will preserve it for posterity.
It was like reading a book -- literally: the dream had a frame-story on either end where I was shopping in the biggest grocery store ever. I mean, like, miles and miles of grocery store, two hundred kinds of mushrooms, a hundred kinds of fresh pasta, and a complete bookstore -- not just three racks of bestsellers. In the dream I wandered over, picked up one of the books, and fell into it, and then I was dreaming the book and I was the protagonist.
It was a fantasy-romance -- it reminded me a little of Tamora Pierce's Alanna series, or The Blue Sword, or things of that vein. I was a young woman living in a country that had been conquered by a neighboring country. The conquest was recent -- within my lifetime -- but not very recent; I could only dimly remember the war. My family were poor farmers without enough food to keep me fed, so they sent me to become a servant in the house of one of the conquering peoples in the city. And of course I gradually fell in love with one of the sons of the house, and he with me.
The next part is where it gets interesting. We married fairly early on in the dream, without much comment; apparently such marriages weren't particularly stigmatized, mostly because it was a society that practiced polygamy, and it was understood that, should he need to make a political marriage to a more appropriate wife, he could do so. But then two things happened: his elder brothers, the heir-and-second, died. The heir had been married with several children, but because he died in a disaster of some kind (I'm not sure what kind), he and his wives and children died as well. My husband was suddenly catapulted from about eighth in line to the head of the house to first. Second, poltics shifted such that my conquered people suddenly gained more power due to complicated religious factors. My husband was suddenly under a lot of pressure to a) find a suitable wife, and fast, since as heir it mattered more, and b) use me politically against my own people.
The story was very small-scale and localized. It mostly entirely took place within the household itself, and the stakes were private: me and my family, him and his, and the delicate network of expectations and rivalries and so on within the household. It was also interesting in that, in the dream, while I missed my family I also loved the amenities of the city. (The city was very beautiful; aesthetically it reminded me a great deal of Southeast Asia. No one in the dream was white; the conquered people and the dominant civilization were both comprised of people who looked Asian, if I remember correctly -- though they weren't actually members of any Earth society, since it was a second-world fantasy. The aesthetics are what stick out in my mind most, remembering the dream.)