nightmares_from_books epitome of incomprehensibility This was last summer; the nightmare was mainly inspired by Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism and other books I was reading for my MA project: I was political theorist Hannah Arendt, lying in a bed in a dark room. This time the Nazis had captured me. I heard them talking outside the door: they knew the philosopher Theodor Adorno was my secret lover, and they were discussing whether to kill me or use me as bait to lure him in, when I heard a loud noise and lifted my window blind. I saw a light, like that of a lighthouse searchlight swinging in my direction, and I thought, “Ezra Pound has sold the Great Bass theory to the Nazis” (in the dream, this was the theory of weaponizing noise by causing objects to vibrate at their resonant frequency and collapse) “...and we're all going to die!” The best part? I woke up to a mysterious flapping sound, and the sound of something hitting the blind of the other window, and I turned on the light only to discover a bat flying in circles around my room (it'd come in through the unused chimney, I later found, because I'd opened it by accident). This startled me, but only mildly, because I was now safe from Nazis and their giant noise machines. I turned on the hall and kitchen lights and tried to direct the bat out the door. It disappeared, I went to bed, but it turned up the next day to scare the people upstairs before one of them finally caught it and set it free. 130608 ... e_o_i Concerning dystopias and all, the other one I remember in detail was from last month, featuring 1984, The Hunger Games, plus a modified version of a remark my friend had made about the Song of Ice and Fire series, which I've never read: In the dream, I was having a conversation with my friend J. while walking down University Street, and she assured me that a particular “totalitarian dystopia” had “no rape, but too many adjectives.” I wasn't sure whether to be reassured or frightened, not because I was afraid of adjectives, but because because I figured J., with her reality-warping powers, was about to send me there... Sure enough, “there” I was: I was Katniss Everdeen, protagonist of George Orwell's 1984, sitting around a table with members of the Inner Party. There was a sort of question period, and I happened to mention to Caesar Flickerman (the guy with the blue hair) that I didn't like the traffic. The other people at the table reacted with shock. I knew the government would try to kill me by planting a small amount of radioactive matter on or around my person in the next few days. Sure enough, when I was taking a shower that evening, I noticed too late that my shampoo was glowing blue, and I realized that some government agent had mixed it with cesium. Too late, because it was already in my hair: but I figured I should wash my hair as usual and rinse it, since that's what you're supposed to do, totalitarian dystopia or no. I found myself getting short of breath, but then I had an epiphany: since I had what the doctor called an "asthmatic reaction to colds” instead of “full-blown asthma” I would be okay! The sense of relief was enough to wake me up. 130608 what's it to you? who go blather from