Thursday, May 13, 2010

We're under attack! Grab a chopstick!

I often wake up remembering a dream or two, and occasionally I remember a dream in detail. Sometimes the dream is kind of boring, like the other night when my dream was about my professor trying to teach me something I think she called "area-time" graphs that I just wasn't understanding. It looked like a bunch of polygons on the chalkboard, but apparently it meant something important. Sometimes the dream makes very little sense, as in another recent dream of mine where I had a lightsaber and was jumping around to defend my companions from blaster shots, but then I was trying to find this other friend of mine who was I think the ex-girlfriend of the main bad guy but she was on our side but had lost her powers, so I went with her to try to get her powers back, which involved getting a group of warlocks to cast a spell on her and I was worried that she'd turn evil again, and worried that they'd find out I was one of their enemies, but then it was like they were actually casting a spell on a cat and this lady at the vet--don't ask how we got to the vet--was worried about the effects of the spell on the cat (answer: not good). Anyway, only very rarely do I have a dream that I remember in detail that is both exciting (and by that I mean geeky-exciting, usually requiring magic, spaceships, and/or combat) and relatively comprehensible. But I happened to have such a dream last night, so I figured I'd share. If I don't write it down, after all, I'm sure I'll forget it before long.

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It was a Harry Potter-related dream. It started out from the point of view of the villains, like a movie or something might. One villain was observing a cabin that he knew Harry was in, but then another villain came up and reported that all of the kids in the cabin had used the Polyjuice potion to switch appearances with each other. They wouldn't be able to tell which one was actually Harry.

The dream then switched to my point of view from inside the cabin. It was a wood cabin with two main rooms. I was in the room at the front of the cabin, with the main door and front-facing windows, with about five other kids. I was looking out the front window, and it was night. There were lanterns hanging in lines by the front walk. Suddenly, I started feeling really sleepy, and noticed that the other kids in the room were falling asleep, too. We must have been given a sleeping potion so we'd all fall asleep and the bad guys could get us! I stumbled through the doorway opposite the main door into the other, larger room where the ten or so other kids were staying. They were all falling asleep, too. At this point, though, I realized that I was sort of shaking off the effects of the sleeping potion. It was a struggle, but I was winning. I called out to the others that they could resist the sleeping spell--"Fight it! Try to stay awake!"--but some of them must have had it worse. Soon most of us were asleep. Three of us--all girls, but considering the Polyjuice potion who knows who we actually were--managed to stay awake.

I heard noise outside. I looked out the front windows and saw a gang of maybe a dozen or so people. One threw a flaming torch onto our roof. I went running back into the larger second room, where there was a shelf with two magic wands on it...and some wooden chopsticks (not sure why no one had their own wands). There were three of us, though, so two of us got wands and I handed the third girl a chopstick. I suggested that we levitate all the sleeping kids out the secret back door of the cabin that led to an underground tunnel. It became apparent, though, that the wooden chopstick didn't work. Rats. Luckily I noticed that a second shelf at the back of the big room had a wand at the very top. I couldn't reach it, and there were no chairs to get it down, but then I remembered the summoning charm--

Accio wand!

It flew into my hand. Now we all had wands. I barked orders for the other two to levitate the sleeping kids out the underground passage while I held off the intruders. As the others headed down the tunnel with our sleeping friends, I used the back door to the passage as a bottleneck so I'd only face one or two intruders at a time. By now, the flames were starting to take down the cabin--bad idea for the intruders who had to enter the flaming cabin to get to us. As they came through the doorway towards the passage, the only spells I could remember were the killing spell, which I wouldn't use, and Confundo*. So as each person came through the door--Confundo! They'd become confused, forget why they were there, and wander off. Confundo! Confundo!

It worked quite well--I was quick. Finally I was down to the last intruder. But, before I could cast Confundo on him, he managed to explain that they weren't our enemy, after all. They were on our side, and they were trying to help us get out of the cabin before we were attacked by the real bad guys.

"So why did you torch our cabin?"

"We have a better safe house for you to use. We'll take you there."

Not a very good explanation as to why they had to burn it down while we were sleeping inside, but, well, you know dream logic. So we went off to their much bigger and cooler fortress. And that's the last of it I remember.



******

Gotta love dreams. Such a shame that the wooden chopstick didn't work. Always worth a try, though...


*Strangely enough, when I woke up I wasn't sure if Confundo was a "real" Harry Potter spell or what exactly it did if it was, but I was basically right in the dream. It seems my dream memory can be better than my waking memory.

2 comments:

Sebastian Anthony said...

I actually thought the leaping-light-sabre bit at the beginning was the dream -- but no!

You've had the light sabre dream too, right?

(Quite an exciting story btw!)

Eleni said...

Yes, the lightsaber story was also a dream, but it was meant to be an example of one that made very little sense, as dreams often do.

(Why thank you.)