asmodeus, batibat
asmodeus: on whom do you want revenge and how would you take it?
I think who/what I want revenge on is too nebulous (and possibly, on some level, blameless) to really put it into action; I want revenge on the group, historically and currently, that makes the world what it is. I want revenge on… all of us? Human nature? The difficulty involved in real and lasting change for the better? But I’m not trying to make some sort of ideological point here; I regularly wish what I am talking about here was personified so it could be destroyed. I’m not sure what we would be like, or what would happen to the world, if we did though.
Any smaller desires for revenge are so fleeting I honestly can’t recall them for you.
batibat: talk about the worst nightmare you have ever had.
I might have mentioned this before on tumblr, but oh well. (I wrote more about my nightmares here, as well.) When I was a kid I had some recurring nightmares, and the one that bothered me the most, by an order of magnitude, is this one. I haven’t have it in two decades or more now, and I still can bring to mind vividly what it was like.
The dream is basically just my mind shifting back and forth between two images. The first is of some sort of bucolic field, with a muppet standing in the sunshine (the sky is yellow instead of blue, I think), happily bouncing a ball on the ground. There is nothing wrong or scary or disturbing about this part of the dream. I am filled with a sense of well being and calm and safety. There is no awareness in this part of the dream, on the part of me or the muppet I am watching, that anything bad could or would happen. The muppet, a human-like one like Bert or Ernie, whistles a happy tune while it bounces its ball.
At some point, after happily viewing this scene for an indefinite time, my viewpoint is suddenly flipped. I am now seeing a giant field of machinery. It’s as if my vision (I never have a body or agency in this dream, I’m just looking at something, unable to blink or move or anything else) is suddenly suspended above a vast, limitless field, or is resting just in front of an endless way. The machinery crowds every square centimeter I can see, and I can perceive that it stretches away to infinity on every side. There is nothing overtly evil or scary about this, but it is loud and dark and constantly moving and to complicated to follow with the eye and huge and old and rusted and leaking. It is so loud, the sound of industrial production makes my head hurt.
After this first switch, the dream starts shifting back and forth between the two scenes. Each time, we seem to cut back to the machinery, the machine planet or whatever it is I’m seeing, a little quicker. I know, with dream knowledge, that the second scene is getting closer to the first, is somehow descending on it, and that the field and the muppet and the rest of that world will never notice the machinery, and will have no way to resist it or slow it when it arrives. I am so, so scared.
