• Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views




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    Creatures of the Labyrinth

    The most interesting part of my dreams, to me, is the worldbuilding. Not necessarily the stories or narratives the dreams create, though that can be interesting as well, but the worlds and characters and creatures and beings that are used within the dream. My dreams tend to be heavier on worldbuilding than on story.

    In accordance with my interests, I plan on making an "unorthodox" dream journal. Not for recording the dreams or their stories, necessarily, but I'd like to focus on the creatures and entities that appear in my dreams, to write entries for and describe them in detail.

    1. Selkies and Vampires

      by , 08-09-2018 at 09:28 PM (Creatures of the Labyrinth)
      Selkies have popped up a few times in my dreams, enough so that I wanted to make an entry on them in this log.

      But before I can talk about the Selkies we need to talk about the vampires.

      Vampires are your standard, Nosferatu-style, blood-drinking undead, with palid gray skin and elongated fangs. However the anatomy of the vampires of my dreams differs (consistently differing across different dreams, oddly enough) from the standard in a few ways. First, the feet of a vampire are more batlike than humanlike, and can be used to cling to cave ceilings. Second, the vampires possess crooked, bizarre "hook hands". The hands have an extra finger after the pinky finger, which curves outward and away from the hand. This hook-finger moves and flexes at odd angles. Additionally the hook-finger, as well as the pinky finger and the thumb, are covered in bone spurs that protrude from the flesh. A vampire can drink blood through it's hands, and when resting prefers to have its hook-hands soaking in fresh, bloody meat when possible.

      A vampire cannot be truly killed, as it will come back to life eventually, and thus the best that can be done is to bury a vampire's body after it dies, so that it comes back to life deep underground.

      Selkies, much like the creatures from Scottish folklore of the same name, are shapeshifters bearing a human form and a seal form, though in my dreams their alternate form is always that of a walrus rather than a seal. Selkies can freely switch between their two forms, and often do so to facilitate movement, since they are faster in the water as a walrus and faster on the land as a man.

      The selkies as a whole are additionally fiercely dedicated vampire hunters, devoting their lives to keeping mankind safe from the vampiric threat. In their walrus forms, they primarily fight vampires using their tusks, driving their massive, ivory stakes through the hearts of the vampire to incapacitate it. In their human form, they favor use of a "flying guillotine" of Wuxia movie fame, a hatlike object on a chain that can be thrown over an opponent's head, the chain then used to trigger spring-loaded blades, causing decapitation. These are favored since decapitation will also incapacitate a vampire.

      After destroying a vampire, a selkie will bury the remains, as a vampire cannot truly be killed. Selkies maintain maps of all their burial locations, so they can intervene whenever new construction might threaten to unearth a disposed-of threat.

      In the course of fighting vampires, inevitably some selkies get bitten by vampires and become vampires themselves. Vampire selkies continue to hunt rogue vampires, dedicating their now-immortal existence to the craft, and are still accepted by the rest of the selkies, despite being vampires themselves. Vampiric selkies partner with the Catholic Church to control their bloodlust, as Catholic communion wine, due to the doctrine of transubstantiation (the belief that communion wine, the "blood of God", is literally transformed to Jesus' blood once consumed), allows a selkie vampire to drink blood without having to actually shed any blood. Transubstantiation is, apparently, a 100% correct belief in my dreams, and can be thus used to sustain a vampire. Vampiric selkies often must get their communion wine through intermediaries, however, as it isn't easy to obtain communion wine without encountering crosses.

      ^w^