Lucid Dream Experiment #7

2004-08-27T14:39:29+00:00

At the insistence of sister sledge and the instigation of brother wonko, I am posting another attempt at lucid dreaming.

The night’s dreams did not get a scintillating start, as I first dreamt my co-workers and I were having a competition to see who was best at using the new photocopier. At some point in the wee sma’s, however, things got interesting.

I found myself in a clearing in a South American rain forest, outside some sturdy temporary housing built for a scientific expedition of which I was a member. Three of us stood about in the clearing, discussing our latest discovery: me, my brother (Nope, I don’t have a brother. Good catch!), and some incarnation of Joxer, the bumbling good-natured Ted Raimi character from Xena. Whatever we’d discovered, it was pretty neat, so we piled into the expedition’s airplane to carry the news to the outside world.

This airplane was bright yellow, along the lines of a biplane, but terribly small. The pilot had his own cockpit, but there was one long cockpit that seemed much like a burlap sack into which the rest of us had to fit. Whether burdened by the excess people or by the conventional reluctance of things that should fly to do so in my dreams, the little toy biplane simply would not take off. We taxied ’round and ’round, until finally we heard that a terribly dangerous gang of bikers (Yes, bikers in a jungle. Your point?) was on its way to pillage and destroy indiscriminately.

Suddenly, taking off seemed a little more crucial than it had when only Science had been at stake! We taxied around a bit more, and managed at last to gain the air. We were rising, rising, out of the clearing and high into the air. The bikers roared into the clearing below, and just as we were about to be lost to their sight above the trees, the plane blew up.

Luckily, we all seemed to have rainbow guidable parachutes for just such an eventuality, and were tethered together. In fact, my companions seemed so unconcerned I concluded the plane had been meant to explode all along. We glided along towards the river, and the bikers changed course to intercept us.

We landed without event on an old wrecked riverboat mired at an angle in the mud. A number of vague acquaintances of ours were there, seeking a hiding place from the bikers. They were friendly enough, but very impractical, as their wearing black suits in the jungle attested, and while they had handguns, they seemed to know little about them, and kept pointing them at friendly people, including myself.

The bikers appeared, lining up between us and the sheltering jungles, their laughter as deep and menacing as their engine sounds. I really don’t want to die like this, I thought. Piffle, you won’t! I replied, Do you REALLY think this is happening?

Well, when I put it like that — I hazily grasped that this was a dream, and, as if in automatic response to the realization, I raised one fist and blasted up through the roof, flying swiftly and surely into the air. (Much easier than usual!)

Suddenly, as I paused in midair above the boat, two things happened. The dream started trying to take control back, and I decided I had to rescue my friends. My lucidity began to fade, but the dream came up against the thorny problem of having a heroine flying confidently above the banks of the Amazon. So the dream settled the matter at once, and suddenly I was blonde and wearing a suspiciously familiar red and blue costume with a distinctive golden ‘S’ shield on the chest. I swooped back through the hole I’d made in the roof and rejoined my friends.

My brother looked at me, and I realized with a bit of a shock that my brother was Joss Whedon. He didn’t seem at all surprised that I was Supergirl — but, of course, supplied the dream, I had saved his life a bazillion times, of course he knew. He had only saved my life once, when we were kids, from a vampire — and he’d created an entire television franchise about a blonde superpowered girl who can kill vampires without her brother’s help just to needle me.

With a grin at my pesky kid brother, I zoomed out of the wreck and started laying waste to the biker gang with casual ease and flying super-strong fists.

Then I woke up. It was a good dream.

The Roulette Wheel of Death and Rebirth

2004-03-18T14:07:43+00:00

Some of you may know – in fact, many people who have a minimal or marginal interest in comic books know – that Jean Grey (aka Marvel Girl, aka Phoenix, aka The first X-Woman) dies all the freakin’ time. So much so that I have it on good authority that the following exchange actually occured in X-Men continuity at a recent Jean Grey funeral:
Emma Frost (reformed villainess and X-Man): snicker
Scott “Cyclops” Summers: Goddammit Emma! It’s not funny!
Emma: Yes it is, Scott, and you know it.

If my source didn’t invent that passage through wishful thinking, then Marvel knows damn well that Jean Grey’s tragic deaths are as predictable as the tragic deaths of any number of Captain Kirk girlfriends. Why do they keep doing it? Why? I think I have the answer.

Last night I was perusing the polychromatic pages of the periodical (okay, I’ll stop now) Batman/Superman. Er, Superman/Batman. Whatever, this is why they have a logo, not a title. And the last frame of this comic book, after several frames of people talkin’ Kryptonian (yeah, Kryptonian. It’s kindee funny-lookin’.) shows Superman telling Batman as he gives the blonde girl he’s been talking to his cape to wear, “This is Kara Zor-El, my cousin from Krypton.” At this point, my head broke.

You see, DC has had this here “Cousin from Krypton” angle before. She was the original Supergirl. Or the second one. Or something. Before Supergirl was an angel, or an alien-human hybrid, or an angel-human hybrid, or a shapeshifting girlfriend of Lex Luthor’s…umm, okay, I’m already confused. I don’t read Superman, and I don’t understand Supergirl history. But I do know she’s been reinvented so many times that even I, who, as I said, do not read Superman titles have seen at least one Supergirl debut â€” she was supposed to be Lois and Clark’s daughter from the future. So do you start to see what I’m saying here?

A long long time ago, someone at DC and someone at Marvel made a bet that he (Marvel) could kill Jean Grey (Marvel Girl) more often than he (DC) could reinvent Supergirl. It all makes sense! At the time, it was a lark! Now, so many Jean Greys stenciled on that Marvel guy’s desk, a dartboard of Supergirl concepts mounted on the DC office wall, it’s a grim battle, each comics titan straining against the other to control the cheesiness of the superheroine ethos. This week some poor schmo at Marvel, with “counterintelligence” scrawled on his cubicle tag, read Batman/Superman and groaned. “Guys? Do you have the next Jean Grey death ready? I mean, have you got her alive again and ready to go? Those wily bastards have hidden it in this Batman/Superman thing – I know, a Bat-title! Sneaky! But “cousin from Krypton” only has one meaning…”

Or, you know, maybe it sells comics.

Posts tagged with "supergirl" - Faerye Net

Lucid Dream Experiment #7

The Roulette Wheel of Death and Rebirth