Where Swords Rise & Horses Run, Take me There
There hasbeen a great deal of dream before this, which I forget as soon as I wake up. But as it starts, I am apparently trapped in a videogame, according to some of my American friends (Allison, Zach) who are there.
I am told to ‘find the source’ of the video game. If I figure out how to play it, I can get on better in the world. I am directed into one of the cubicles in a public ladies bathroom. On the cubicle wall is a small screen and a games controller. On the screen, the point of the game appears to be to try to make the ‘Mike’ character from Monsters Inc. walk around and do things. It is difficult and frustrating – I give up.
I emerge out of the bathroom and into an old-fashioned shopping centre (Princes Square, Glasgow). Someone shouts that the video game turns people into ‘Vampires’. There are groups of ‘Vampires’, who all have burning red eyes, marching around the shopping centre. Some of them look like normal shoppers, the others look a little like the elves from Lord of the Rings, dressed in dark green cloaks with long archers bows. Someone (Allison?) tries to explain to me that the ones with bows are on our side, and we’re trying to get them to fight the bad vampires. Unconvinced of this, I run away from all of them into a side door of the building.
I run down into what seem to be sewers or flooded basements – they are very dark and wet. I hear footsteps behind me. I run and hide in a ventilation duct that runs through a large chamber. Most of the chamber floor is covered with a still pool of water of unknown depth – at one side is a dry walkway, at the other is the duct that I’m hiding in. I’m not actually sure how I got into the duct, given that I would have had to go through the water to get there.
I lie low in the duct and try to stop myself breathing too much – it’s cold, and my breath is making steam. I hear voices and steps come along the walkway. Someone is shining a bright white torchlight around. I feel it come to rest over my spot in the duct. I think – “no, no, that shouldn’t happen. That only happens in movies. Why would they just happen to rest their spotlight on the place where the hero is hiding, if they don’t actually see her?” But it turns out the spotlight is resting because the man holding it is taking a drink of water – I can see his shadow. I am relieved that the dream has not resorted to cheap movie tropes after all.
I am now with the people who were shining a spotlight on me, a Scottish man and woman (man dressed in a white vest and jeans, woman unclear appearance), who appear to be on some sort of mission. They finish shining the light on the duct and try to creep past the pool of water and escape through a door at the far end. Just as they do, a sea monster leaps out of the water and bites the woman’s leg. The monster is lumpy, white, and deformed, like one of those fish or salamanders that lives in a cave and never sees light. The man however, is able to tickle it under the chin, and it goes back into the water and slinks away. The man and woman wonder at how easy it was to get rid of the monster.
They pass through the door, and enter a long, thin corridor, which has prison cells on one side. All the cells, and the floor of the corridor, are stuffed to the brim with huge toy animals. The animals don’t seem to have any weight – they float slightly (like an old video game with bad physics). They are also somehow scaly – they have hard skins broken into thousands of little flat surfaces (like a 3D model that has been rendered with too large a mesh).
The man exclaims “Everything’s cute!” he and the woman start to make their way along the corridor, pushing past the toy animals. Someone, maybe me, says “I keep expecting some Indiana-Jones booby trap to come up…” A few seconds later, a row of sword blades shoots up from the floor, rising 6ft high and blocking the other end of the corridor, which leads out into the open air.
The man approaches them “But remember the monster,” he said, “are they really…?” He is carrying an old-fashioned Sony hi-fi, on which he turns on some techno music and starts bopping his head to it. He dances sideways up to the edge of the row of swords. The right side of the corridor is now no longer a complete wall, but a low stone wall with a wrought-iron fence on it topped with heavy iron fleur-de-lys. We are clearly at the top of a huge hill – beyond the fence we can see a city far below. He grabs one of the fleur-de-lys and uses it to swing past the sword row, which bends itself sideways to let him past.
We are now on top of a tall, windswept hill. The city below is Glasgow. The man and woman have disappeared. Now there is a group of people on horses. One is dressed as the Duke of Wellington, exactly as in the famous statue of him riding a horse in the centre of Glasgow (minus ubiquitous traffic cone hat). I am now wearing a very frilly light-grey empire-line Victorian dress and a bonnet, with my hair piled up into rolls. I am apparently dressed as another famous statue in Glasgow, though it is not one I’ve ever seen. The object seems to be that we ride into the city dressed as the statues for some sort of show.
The horses start to run down the hill. I chase after them and demand to be put on a horse. I try to get on one, but it falls over. So I jump on one that already has a woman riding it. She is not dressed in period costume, but in jeans, a hoodie and black Converses. She is a professional horse rider. I notice the horse has no saddle or reins and ask how I’m supposed to ride it. Someone shouts “the handlebars!” by which they mean the horses shoulder blades. I grab them, but it’s difficult to get a good grip. The horses start running faster down the hill. We’ve now reached farmland, with fields and fences that the horses have to leap over. The girl in Converses asks me if I know how to ride a horse. “Yes, but not without reins!” I say. We jump over another fence.
“Watch this,” says the girl. We have reached a small cliff, which drops a good 30ft or so into a waterfall hollow with a small pool in the bottom of it. We leap out over the edge of the cliff, fly through the air, kick of the opposite edge of the hollow, the horses body twists around entirely and we land on top of a small stone ruined castle, which I didn’t even know was there.
I’m breathing heavily, exhilarated but glad we’re still alive. The girl laughs.
7th February | 2015 | Delft - The Netherlands
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