Things to Run Away From Really Fast

That stupid carpet. We're at a new house (again!) and we're talking about pulling up the carpet because it's in rooms that it really shouldn't be in.

---

Wanting to give a talk for authors at the library. My dream mixes up two people that I know in real life.

---

I'm walking through an American university campus. Apparently there's a new trend where entrepreneurs rent out chairs for five bucks. The chairs come with cherries, and there's something to do with cheese? You might be sitting on it, though.

The cherries look pretty meh, and a lot of the people around think it's silly because the whole point is to go for a walk with your chair and then find a good space to hang out. Who wants to walk? And they only take cash.

I go to walk away from the chairs, but the lady manning the chair-pile clears her throat and I realize that I'm hanging onto one of the chairs. I put it back in the chair pile, but she keeps glaring at me and I realize that I'm also carrying a chair in my other hand. I put it back.

On the edge of the chair booth, there's a short plastic fence blocking a steep, steep hill. I decide to hop over the fence, but I have a little bit of trouble with it. The chair-lady moves her chair a bit to let me pass. I get over the fence and I'm falling, bounce partway down the hill and land at the bottom, going into a roll. I have enough momentum that I keep running out of the roll, onto the sidewalk and—

Near miss. A bus almost hits me as it goes around the corner. I laugh, exhilarated, and keep running. If I run through the park, it will be cool enough despite the hot day.

I keep running, and eventually find myself at a library. I go into the building, heading towards the climbing wall (because there's always a climbing wall in libraries.) I'm going to climb it without ropes.

At this point, I stop and say "I'm dreaming. I know I'm dreaming," mostly so that when I do my challenges, my waking self will know that I'm allowed to claim the points.

I jump onto the wall and take the first few holds, moving upwards and then along a "ceiling" that juts out from the wall.

Up and around, and I'm counting as I go "six moves, seven moves, eight moves."

I'm two-thirds of the way up the wall.

I change gears, moving over to the "hard" side on the left. The final moves require you to move out from the wall and hang, unsupported by your legs. They look scary—the theme involves jutting teeth and wild colours.

I reach for the final moves: "fourteen, fifteen—"

And with a wild swing, I push out from the wall and barely keep my grip—

"Sixteen!" I shout, and let myself drop.

At the bottom of the wall, a man working for the library/climbing wall wants to know whether I thought it was too easy (but I tell him that I'm kind of playing on cheat mode, and it's fine). He asks about the first few moves on the "basic" side, and I tell him that they're perfect.

Next on my list: teleporting. I focus on the neighbouring house that I want to use for my Week 1 Comp task, and fwoosh—

Find myself pushed back into the waking world.

★★★☆☆

Four hours of sleep, and suddenly this monstrosity comes along. It's fairly disjointed; I don't have a whole lot of time to play with it, so without further ado...

10/18/10



Harry Potter tries to mess with the fabric of reality, I have diabolical plans, and Dumbledore disapproves as usual.

"Just think about it," I tell her. "With this kind of breakthrough, we could completely alter the way humans perceive reality!"

Sophie looks up at me, skeptical, one hand keeping her place in the textbook. She's holding a pen in her other hand, and she taps it impatiently against her notebook. She pushes a few strands of short red hair out of her eyes, and says, "I know what happens when you try to play mad scientist, Harry."

We're sitting across from each other at a long wooden table. Sophie's studying - this is a library, after all. The interior is almost entirely decorated with red-stained wood, giving the impression of a highly modern, really big log cabin. With lots and lots of glass (and books). Sunlight streams in from the huge windows, and outside is a view of the forest, and the other school buildings in the clearing.



"Chaos, generally." I say, grinning. Some of the other students notice that I'm grinning, and quietly begin to edge away from us. "You say that like it's a bad thing."

skip

There's this thing I have to do on the computer. It's very important. I'm sitting outside on the green grass, trying to do this very important thing, when - hey, will you look at that? Dumbledore's on Skype!

Albus Dumbledore appears in a new window, looking very grave indeed. This is somewhat offset by all of the spinning and twirling metal gadgetry on his desk.

"Harry," says Dumbledore gravely, "I've received word of the research you've begun."

"Really?" I say, looking up from Minesweeper. "Brilliant, isn't it?"

He sighs. "Harry," he repeats, "This is not a road you cannot walk down unscathed. You'll be returning to Hogwarts."

"Um..." I say slowly, "No."

"By force, if necessary."

My computer pings.

"Did you just -" I say, looking at the screen, "Did you just track my location through my internet connection? You realize I'm on a different PLANET? How the hell does that even -"

But Dumbledore's appearing at the edge of the wards, walking into the school grounds the only way he can. I meet his eyes for just a moment, and I disapparate.

skip

Moving through Ixburg, and I'm running. I'm moving through a jobsite, people from my hometown who were, apparently, in direct competition with my family's business. By some sort of mutual agreement, they all ignore my presence, and I pass through completely unnoticed.

Back doors of the grocery store and I'm having a conversation with someone before I disappear again -

Narcissa Malfoy. We're standing in some anonymous hallway of a starship, looking out into the black.

"I don't disapprove of your cutting his influence out of your life," she's saying, "But I'm not convinced that making an enemy of Dumbledore will be conducive to your goals."

"There are greater forces at work here. He may get in my way," I say coldly, "But he can't stop me."

Narcissa nods once, sharply. "Very well. My family is at your service, as always."

I'm closing my eyes, casting my senses out into the nothing. Golden light is cutting through the darkness, pushing it away, burning.

"You need to leave," I tell my informant, and I'm hurtling out into the void of space, an ethereal being of energy and animal and just a sliver of humanity. And the burning, fierce presence is crying out, raising its wings.

Fawkes.

He's found me through Harry's holly wand, called by the phoenix feather within. I smile and pull another wand from my sleeve, one made of ebony. And as the phoenix is upon me, I call up the Void, and I meet the creature's light with an unfathomable darkness.

Boom.

(O'Neill: What the hell was that?)
(Carter: I don't know, sir, but it almost blew straight through our shields. We're lucky it wasn't closer.)

"Grab my arm." I tell Sophie. We apparate from planet to planet, trying to get Dumbledore off our trail. One, two, three, four, five. Hoth, Antarctica, Europa, Tartarus, Miranda.

I appear in the woodshop of the school in the clearing. There's another person in the room.

"Where is my daughter?" The woman asks.

I look around, but Sophie's nowhere to be seen.

Dumbledore.

skip

"Aurors and their locking spells," I mutter, pointing my ebony wand at the door. The lock clicks, and I open the door to the super-secret impenetrable Unspeakable Library. "Well, come on." I hiss at the nervous man behind me.

The two of us shuffle into the library and quietly barricade ourselves in one of the rooms. We're pretty sure that the information we need is here.

The man is flipping through a card catalogue, mumbling under his breath. I'm scanning the books on the shelf, but something seems out of place. I feel a presence. Thinking it's a guard, I make my way over to one of the closed doors and peer through the keyhole. I'm looking for the beam of a flashlight.

At first, I don't see anything. The hallway is white, and bare, and dark. I look through at a different angle, and

look directly into blood red eyes. There's no pupil, iris, sclera, it's all a murderous shade of red, and for a moment, I'm held captive by the gaze. I notice, peripherally, that she's a ghostly little girl in a tattered white dress and everything is bleeding into itself

She flickers, like a strobe light. In and out of existence, and suddenly, she's in the room with us

Harry is terrified, and I'm calm. The ghost is on us, tearing into our essence, and Harry is terrified but I know that there's no danger but I can feel his fear

Everything's going dark

And I wake up, disoriented, in a pitch black room.

Scare Factor: 4/10

Oh. It was a dream.

It made sense at the time?

★☆☆☆☆

10/17/10



I'm sitting at a table in the library, across from a stern-looking woman my age.

"So you want to start a writing group? You realize that you'll be in direct competition with our writing group."

"Hey," I say incredulously, "I just sent out an email asking who was doing NaNo this year."

There's a man sitting beside me with his arms crossed. He snorts.

"Well," says the woman, "Be aware that you won't be able to use the library this week. It's full." She points behind me.

I turn around, and see that the walls are covered, floor to ceiling, with boxes of Corona. I turn back to her.

She sighs. "The Kiwanis club is renting the library for a Christian concert."

Scare Factor: 1/10

07/22/10

I'm travelling all over the continent. I think I'm driving through the US with some family members. We're passing a city on the freeway when I realize that I've been here before. We pull onto an exit and stop for lunch.

I explain to Oma what the buildings around us are, and mention about three restaurants I know by name that I've been to. We go inside one of them. I see a picture of myself on an indoor climbing wall.

I'm in a small town where my grandma used to live. The population is probably under five hundred. I'm moving in to one of the houses there, because I'm good friends with a few of the neighbours, all of whom are under thirty.

Now I'm getting ready to go back to school in Halifax. I'm planning to fly out the next day. I hear a knock at the door. I answer it, and a man hands me a pile of books, that I apparently ordered. I bought one of them, but the other two are from the Chinook (Saskatchewan) library system. I'm disappointed that I won't be able to read them in time.

The dream shifts and I'm in the Ixburg library to return the books.

I'm part of a group now. One of us might be Buffy Summers. A thin man with short dark hair and dark clothing is showing us an Egyptian hieroglyph, holding up a book that it's illustrated in. He explains that the hieroglyph is the symbol of a demon that's plaguing the town, and we have to stop it.

"If you ever encounter this symbol, run away really fast."

Hey, I think dimly, That's the name of my dream journal.

Library Fines. Scare Factor: 2.

The dream takes place several years (decades?) into the future.

The Library is falling apart in the absence of a Librarian. The Library itself is a vast compendium of past knowledge, mostly accessible through computers. It's a surprisingly busy place, in this future, filled up with mostly young people, but it's dying.

I already know how this is going to end. I slam open the door of my house (the library is inside) and walk out. It's a well lit night, and snow is falling lightly from the sky.

"OKAY!" I shout at the sky, "I'll be your fucking Librarian!" I pause at the flicker of a curtain across the street. Most people would think I'm yelling at God or something, but I'm actually communicating with a highly advanced intelligence that has full control over... never mind.

A question forms somewhere in my mind, asking what it would be like to stay in this one place for years, contrary to everything that I am (a traveller). Stubbornly, I continue to assert that I'll do the damn job if I have to - time is fluid in this place, anyway.

I don't receive an answer.

---

I'm in a location I dreamed about last spring. It's almost identical. The local aquatic centre is fused with a rock climbing gym, which we don't have here in Quickton.

In the dream, I'm wondering why I thought we don't have any rock climbing here, since we so obviously do (we don't).


Map


Colour of the walls

Silence in the Library. Scare Factor: 2.