Teleidoplex

Weird/good dream this morning.  I was part of an exploration/refugee team on… some planet that was a cross between the New World and the lands beyond The Wall.  Shortly after crossing the Sea/Wall, we stumbled across a peaceful township.  Think Amish meets Mormon.  Very nice community, but a little creepy-cultish.  They all had low level psychic powers, like the woman who brought us food could read the childhood memories that the smell of the food evoked.

The wiseman of the village was a seer: he could read your destiny.  Everyone in my exploration group was excited to chat with him, me included.  He made some cryptic comment to me about how I should consider who my ancestor was, which made me think that I was somehow more important than the others.

I spent a chunk of the dream trying to figure out which ancestor he was talking about, and then it was my turn to meet with him, and I was all proud of myself for figuring his puzzle out.  So in front of everyone I said ‘It’s the navigator of the Pinta’ (which afaik is true in real life: my great aunt had her doctorate in genealogy from Berkeley, and traced that connection as part of her thesis.  Or so family folklore goes).

The seer dude was all, "No. You don’t have any important ancestors.  You’re a tiny nothing of a woman, and you only think you’ll do something important with your life.  You think you’ll find love, but it’s too late for that, and you think you’ll become a successful writer, but you’re not good enough.  You might as well just stop trying, because you’re not destined for anything great.”

Yeah.  My fucking unconscious is an asshole.

I was furious at the old man, and humiliated in front of everyone.  But then I remembered one of the mantras from our Changeling game: Destiny is a system of control.  So I said, "Maybe my life won’t follow the traditional love-marriage-kids path, but that’s okay because I hate living up to the expectation of social norms.  And maybe I won’t ever get published, but I feel better writing than I have in a long time.  And maybe the navigator of the Pinta never found India, but if he hadn’t tried, he never would have crashed into America, so fuck you, old man.”

And I left.  Then I got kidnapped by the enemies of the Amish Mormons, but they just wanted me to go to war against the old man because that was their predicted destiny.  Then a hot faerie brother and sister came along and were all ‘come hang with us and help us be incesty,’ and I was like… hells yeah!

My brain.  Gotta love it.