One of my online coconspirators asked me to work on a couple paragraphs for him…painted this little snippet as a result.
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Death strolled in silence of early morning. The sun loomed at the base of the horizon, barely cresting the dark clouds. Beneath the struggling sunrise sat a solitariy foothill to the White Pine Mountains. Seperated from its brothers shrouded in deep forest, the hill was barren in color by comparison. Save for an occasional shrub, the hill was covered with shin-high grass, sighing softly in the pink-grey of the struggling sunlight. To the north of the hill, at the border of the forest, lay a meadow, formed in the windbreak of the trees and bare hill. A small road wound from the northeast to the southwest through the clearing the meadow made. It was along this path that death walked.

Countless eyes peered out of the shadows of the deep woods encircling the hill and meadow. Thier beady sqints held a deep mistrust of light, however unsteady or intermittant. The the border of the ancient forest seemed drawn by an artist’s hand, curving gracefully along the path the wind-tunnel the hill created in the downdrafts of the nearby mountains. The undergrowth shuddered with life, while the treetops showed numerous birds flying between the branches. However, on this morning, all was still The forest was afloat in a bubble of sulking silence, following death’s footsteps along the path.

So I subjected Chelle to some Kurosawa last night. Ran is definitely one of my favorites. Perhaps a bit melodramatic, but as an adaptation of Shakespeare, it is an interesting study. As a snapshot of high-fuedal Bushido, nothing I have seen outside of Kurosawa’s work is better. The closest is Shogun, which is about the fall of said era. Obviously, I am only talking about film.

There is a theory that dreaming, and REM during sleep (when many of your dreams take place) is a process of organizing the day’s activities for memory storage. As an addition to this, I would postulate that the activities of the day lead to the different “kinds” of drems one can have.

Yesterday I worked relatively frantically, all day, then rested my laurels at home watching that Kurosawa flick after a short repast. I think the stimulation I got from that movie, both visually, and somatically (the flute scene for instance) led to some truly disturbing dreams. I didn’t make a 90 minute cycle all night. As a result, I kept having drifting sleep, which clashed with violent dreams that forced me awake… rinse and repeat.

And for the Dickens fans out there, I had macaroni and cheeze for dinner, but it was not moldy.

What disturbed me more than the dreams themselves was the fact that despite my interruptions to thier cycle, they more or less picked up and dropped off at regular points. That is something that does not happen often to me at all. In fact, I think it only happened 4 times all year last year. I may have repeat dreasm, or repeat aspect dreams, but continuios-stream, even with interruption is very rare.

Beelzebub sought to gain dominion ofver humans, and decided that the best way to do so was by destroying a generation; then enslaving the devestated parents, and stealing thiern offspring to raise as his own.

He accomplished this by releasing a plauge of insects which liked to bore into the skin, and then reproduce subcutaneously, eating away all flesh like termites within weeks. Once the eggs were laid, only amputation could solve the problem, and only if the bite area was caught. The insects were more or less immune to anything that wouldn’t also kill the host. Containment was a bear, because they could live on any kind of host, and went through cycles of relative “calm” wehre they did not breed/reproduce rapidly, followed by locust-like outbreaks, resulting in decimation in many of the more heaily populated areas of the world.

My part in all of this, for the first several dreams was a camera. I simply saw multiple mini-stories of infection, interaction, and, ultimately, death.

It ended up that all of this was some sort of huge precursor to my “actual” entry into the scene. The overall role I played in this was ironic at best. As an entimologist, and a physician, I tried to identify/fight the plauge, but I soon became aware of the hopeless nature of my quest on a purely scientific level. After researching; I ended up going through the rites of summoning of an aspect of Mot. I essentially agreed to use my position as a physician to ensure that those who died did so under the mark of a glyph he gave me, so thier souls would go to him. In return he offered to give me a sign to save someone infected by the parasite. I ended up as part of the NIH I guess, and before all was said and done, I was practically running the whole anti-pestellence show.

Unfortunately, this pact came too late to save my daughter, whose soul was the first taken by Mot after I was given the symbols wich could protect one fromt he vermin, and the symbol inscribed on a dead body to transfer its soul to Mot’s court.

They looked like this:
the protection glyph

The glyph of the dead

Before you think I’m totally off the deep end, those symbols do have certain signifigance in Hebrew, which is why I remember them, and was able to recreate them.

So yeah, had to give over soul of my daughter.. quickly began to realize that I was going to have a really hard time selling tatoos as a medical cure. I developed a dye-injecting innoculization machine, that happened to create the symbol on injection. As for the tattoing of the dead, I traded that concession to the government in exchange for the cure.

The other daughter I had remaining alive, and protected, was then the main target of Beelzebub’s agents for the remainder of the dreams. All the time I spent moving her, and fighting off demon/insect combonations. Most of the time, spectres from a past imagined were brought to play on the battlefield for her life and my sanity in a battle between Mot and his old nemesis.

Ultimately, my rational brain (real self here, not dream self) won out over all these things, somewhat in concert with Chelle’s alarm clock. I realized that despite having read and studied various works on Infernalism and Daibolism, as well as the Talmuld, and The Book of Enoch, I don’t belive in the central foundation behind my dream, or those works. From there, it became easy pickings for the rational side of my semiconscious brain to fight past the spiritual/eotional battlements the my subconscious created. The nightmare string was, as timaeus is fond of saying, dispelled in a puff of logic.

So yeah, thats one episode of Fox’ new highborw reality series “Dreams of Occult Stundents Revealed!”.

Too bad noone will watch it. To get half the jokes you need to understand a lot of stuff that isin’t written in english =P.