My brain took “smash the patriarchy” very literally last night, as I took a hammer to the head of a Stephen King-esque father-figure (think Rose Madder, The Shining, It), who kept trying to kill me by making me fix the roof, and then boobytrapping all points of access to it.
Finally, when a huge hammer (meant for my head) fell from the roof to my feet, I took it and went after him. He had lined up his wife and children, and was waving a gun around, talking about how he could kill all of them with a single squeeze of his trigger.
I hit him in the head.
He scoffed at me, told me to do better. I hit him again. I kept hitting him, hard. He wouldn’t go down. After one really good blow, he turned to me, eyes kind. In a gentle voice, he said, “Keep hitting me. Don’t stop till its done.”
And he was much more like my father then, and I was crying, but I kept hitting him with a hammer, because he’d kill everyone if I didn’t. He wanted me to stop him. Anyway, brutal.
In another part of the dream, we had a Gaston-like villain shouting racial slurs and abuses at the top of his lungs. A line of Live-Action Disney Princesses stood against him, shouting back in Arabic.
One of the princesses was the Cinderella. She said, “I lied about my age to work here. I’ve been 22 for 15 years. I’m 37 years old. I used to be a janitor.”
She had a sparkling blue ball gown that was an AI. It had been with her since her childhood, and grew as she grew. It had once been sort of like her teddybear and nursemaid/nightgown, and now it was her confidante and Disney Princess costume. And it looked fabulous.
Then I had to teach a class about the anthology Mad Hatters and March Hares to schoolgirls who didn’t speak English, and only spoke a little French.
So in English, French, and really bad pantomime, I started telling the story of Merlin, figuring you have to begin with King Arthur to even get up to speed on Lewis Carroll? I have a strong memory of saying, “Merlin . . . vie . . . backwards!” And walking backwards.
I tried to explain that Merlin would die just as he was about to be born by pantomiming a pregnant woman. This, the girls understood, and all started talking about how many babies they wanted to have.
So.
There was more. But those were the highlights.
C.S.E. Cooney 