June 2003 Dreams

June 7 2003

The aliens have landed, at least one shipful. Are they hostile? I encounter an alien on the stern of a boat moored on a pier – I'm climbing a ladder, it is inside the cabin. It reaches out and touches my hand with its tentacle. It speaks, apparently naming itself (the name sounds Viking or Norwegian). I touch my chest and say my own name.

We're afraid the aliens are hostile invaders, but they seem to be interested in trade goods. We trade various things for alien artifacts. Their spacecraft, when we examine it, is actually shoddy and flimsy. They came to Earth in *that*? Our fear of them diminishes, and we give them a cheerful goodbye when they depart.

Afterwards, one of us says, "They came here on a shoestring. Now that they know they can trade with us, though, they'll come back on a big budget. Will we be ready for them? The danger isn't over."

We talk about my encounter on the back of the boat. I describe it in detail once again.

* * *

I'm playing with a child who turns out to be the son of one of the original cast of the BRADY BUNCH TV show. I babble a lot about the show. ("How come Alice was the only one shown doing a lick of work?") We take the kid to Comic Relief to buy comic books and graphic novels about the encounter with the aliens. One set of graphic novels has different versions for different intended ages: one for little children, one for teenagers and one for adults. I stack them all up as we pull them, and the stack falls over.

I go looking for Rory Root to ask if there's any more that we've overlooked. I see someone bent over that might be him, but when he stands up, he turns out to be someone else.

(Some time early in June)

It's a dream-recreation of John Carpenter's film THE THING [which I haven't seen] and/or the John W. Campbell story "Who Goes There?" [which, of course, I have read]. I'm on an expedition to the Antarctic, and someone in the group has been replaced by an alien mimic. We've just discovered this, and we are gathering together to get ready to do the blood test (hot needle thrust into drawn blood – the alien mimic blood will recoil from the needle) and there is increasing fear that the alien mimic will attack with deadly force before the test reveals it. Some of the sled dogs are behaving hostilely – have they been replaced by the alien mimic also?

June 18, 2003

(1) Yet another SF convention. I've been up all night and the sun is coming up. Surprise! I'm naked, and I need to get clothes. (I'm locked out of my room. I make my way down to a party room that had been going strong. It's occupied now, though: Doug Faunt is sleeping in the bed. But someone else is making breakfast there, too. I get a towel to wrap around myself. Later, I find some clothes to wear until I can get back into my room to get my own clothes.

(2) SF people are talking about a book being put together for Tor.
It's supposed to be outreach to black readership, and it is an original anthology of fantasy stories about an African-American family: each individual author's story covers one particular time period and one generation – some set in the antebellum South, one around the Civil War and Emancipation, on in Reconstruction, one in the Jim Crow era, and so forth. One of the contributing authors is Kevin Murphy, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden is the anthology's editor. I look over some of the story proposals and observe that they seem to set the members of the family apart from the mass of slaves and descendants of slaves in their values and virtues: They seem to me to be "whiter" in character than other black people in the stories. I remark on the racism of this, to the resentment of the people with who are showing me the book and its contents. How could I call their wonderful bridge-building, cultural-gap-spanning book "racist"?

(3) The dream segues into a scene in a Tidewater plantation in Colonial times, and I am the owner of the plantation. One of my slaves, a boy, has been disrespectful, and he must be punished. He is too young and frail to be whipped, though, so I order that his mother be whipped in his place. This has the "advantage" of strengthening family feeling in the boy, as well as the immediate goal of punishment. The lashes of the whip cut into the skin and flesh of the mother's back. Are five lashes enough? Ten? Much more than that and she might not survive. I awaken feeling revulsion, disgusted with myself that I could order such a thing
to be done.

(some time between June 19 and June 21)

I am wandering around a dark and clammy basement of an old and large building. Something is terribly wrong, and I am searching for the source of the danger. I m frightened.

I hear a noise and turn. There, trying to creep silently into the same basement, is a boy, ten or eleven years old, disheveled dark hair, glasses, etc.

I am furious. "Mister Potter!" I say indignantly. "Following your nose is all well and good; but I suggest that you follow it straight back to the Gryffindor common room. Now, Mister Potter!"