Robot and Trenches Dreams....

So what the hell is up with these dreams I'm having? Do certain dreams come at night, and certain during the day? Because believe me, if this is what I get for sleeping at night, screw normalcy, I'm going back to my nocturnal schedule.

My first couple of dreams were vague and strange; something about artificially intelligent (alien) robots trying to destroy my city. I was more of a "heroine" in my dream, darting around, always just barely alluding them, but it was pretty obvious that their success was going to be inevitable. I had the sense that I fascinated one of the particular robots tracking me, and that if I formed a friendship or relationship with it, I could perhaps preserve myself, if not my city or species. There was a lot of running around in vast glass and steel structures, in this dream. There was also a cold dread that pervaded it.

Though it was the next dream that was really disturbing, and it was only a couple of scenes long. I was standing on a vaguely World War One battlefield, in some sort of second in command position. This was unusual because I was a woman, and I knew that, but somehow I sensed that this particular trench did have some female soldiers, perhaps because the males had run out, or perhaps because I was in a slightly shifted alternate reality. At any rate, I found myself standing at the top of a foxhole, looking across the desolation, when some kind of attack started. There was a handsome blond man standing next to me, one with an incredibly kind face, my only commanding officer. He ordered me back down into the hole, and I briefly argued that I should come, but obeyed him a moment later.

I went partway down the single flight of stairs and waited neart the bottom, looking up at him. He was following, came down a few steps, to his waist, the trap door over his head, and turned for one last look at the battlefield. I wanted to scream at him, but even as I realized what was going to happen, I saw the exit wound of a bullet slam out of his back of his white shirt, directly behind his heart. He toppled back, already dead weight during his fall, and I made a lame attempt to catch his body that knocked me down at the base of the stairs.

I held him...looked down at his glassy eyes...felt the warm blood soaking through my shirt and pants...and couldn't do anything. Thoughts reeled in my head, that I should scream, or cry, or maybe not, because I was now the commanding officer and didn't want to appear weak or frightened in front of the men. I managed to say something to one of the men about summoning the dead man's wife, but otherwise I couldn't seem to pick a reaction. Just holding his warm, heavy body as it cooled, even though I couldn't do anything for it, seemed to be the right thing to do in the moment. None of the men seemed to be able to come forward to help me. I felt an overwhelming panic start to bubble up, that I didn't know what I was doing, and that I was holding the remains of our last real hope, and it was literally dead.

That was when I snapped awake. It's kind of funny, this dream was so specific, so detailed, and so original (that is, it wasn't based on a movie I saw, or at lease I don't think it was), that it makes an emotional case for reincarnation. It didn't feel at all dreamlike. In most of my dreams I don't have a sense of touch, but it was the tangible details that are the most memorable about the dream. I can still feel that phantom weight against my arms and lap now, the sticky blood sopping through my clothes. Strange, very strange.

Wrote a Sex Scene

I'm feeling giddy, almost.

Mel the Supervisor, who assigns me work, didn't bother to do so today until like...3:00 PM, and then it was just a couple of episodes of Inside the Actor's Studio. I was absolutely, irretrievably awake at 9:00 AM, and as such had to find something to do - wander about Livejournal and then do some writing.

I have to admit, it's been a while. But for whatever reason, at some point over the weekend I was infested with plot bunnies (well, more like scene bunnies). Usually they come in the form of a couple of very specific scene, or even just a few lines, and an empathic connection to my POV character's state of mind at the time. What with trying to get in all my work, then staying up to bump myself into a nighttime schedule, then spending yesterday with melissa_actress, I didn't have a chance to do anything with the bunnies except a few preliminary notes. I mostly drifted about, muttering various lines to myself, feeling the emotions ripen. Although this has nothing to do with the film, The Phantom of the Opera sort of put me in the emotional frame of mind I needed to write, and I knocked out several pages before literally dozing off at the computer.

Normally I would not imagine that I of all people, could write right after getting up, but I managed it. I mooned about the house, writing a few lines on the laptop and then getting up to walk around, or writing on the laptop and then rolling flat on my back to contemplate the next moment. Why I do my best thinking flat on my back is beyond me, but that's how it comes. It's a good thing, too, that I wasn't being tracked by any reality TV cameras, as I am quite certain that I looked stoned all day. I mean, think about it - unfocused, glassy-eyed, muttering a two person conversation to myself, periodically rolling around on my bed, getting up, and starting it over. I knew I probably looked very silly as I was doing it.

But...Jesus, did I do a lot of writing. I wrote like twelve pages today. I had to push myself a bit when I first pushed open the laptop, but after about a half a page of straining for every sentence, the story just started flowing out of me. It's a scene where my hero recounts to my heroine his dreadful childhood, including a truly terrible story about his first sexual encounter. It's sort of turned into a key scene, as it will foreshadow both for this book and for a book one or two farther down in the series, and I planned on a rather sweet, chaste scene where she comforts him.

My heroine had other ideas.

Now, I've always had a hard time writing sex scenes. I've written them from my early teens (albeit they were somewhat "fade to black" at that point) and I think I do fairly well at it, too. But from my X-Files fan fiction to my own original work, the actual sex has always been a struggle, to say the least. I practically have Elizabeth Benedict's The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers memorized - as should anybody who wants their sex scenes to be about something important and not just read like monotonous porn (*COUGH* Laurell K. Hamilton, I'M LOOKING AT YOU, *cough*). Nothing takes me as long to write as a sex scene. What do you call certain body parts (Benedict's answer - whatever your characters would call them)? How do you avoid cliche? How technical can you get without it sounding like a manual? And then to write a fairly explicit sex scene I have to "zoom" my inner camera in a lot more than I normally would, which narrows the scope of the scene and how fast I can move it.

Plus...that whole thing about me getting these sort of empathic fits of the character's feelings? That happens too, except that I really hate getting my characters' sexuality tangled up in mine. I've never in my life fantasized about one of my characters during masturbation (zzzzing! Weren't expecting that much information, were you? I like to keep you folk on your toes). So that means concentrating on sex, feeling it from whichever character's POV I'm writing it from (and I'll tell you what...it's no fun to do it from the opposite gender), but not getting aroused myself because that's just kind of creepy and I won't have it. Plus, there's a very faint sort of voyeuristic shame to the whole thing. It's not enough to stop me, of course, but there is a recognition that in recording the scene, I'm exposing my poor characters to the prying eyes of anybody who can read in what should be a very private moment for them.

This was not the case today. Not only did a sex scene seem to magically appear from where I had been planning nothing of the kind, but it flowed effortlessly out of me. And even more amazing was that I was deep enough in the writing mode that even though my character wanted to do some sexual acts that aren't appealing to me, I let her do them after a brief fight over it.

Get your minds out of the gutter; I wasn't writing about donkeys or clowns or something sick like that. I'm just talking about simple, mainstream oral sex, something I just find rather unappealing. Viewing it in porns hasn't improved its image, and I basically have an orifices-should-do-what-they're-programmed-to-do feeling about the whole thing. I'm not going to go screaming off into a corner, and I'll read oral sex scenes in other people's work, but on a fundamental level it just seems sort of...yucky...to me, and I've never written one.

Of course...my heroine first hijacked my brain, she wasn't going to let me dictate her sex scene, on top of it. Or at least, this particular sex scene. She wanted to perform oral sex - for a pretty good reason - and I had a brief fight with the idea before finally letting go and just resolving to record whatever she did. And...man...did that sex scene ever fly out of me. I couldn't type fast enough to keep up with it. And it's good, too. It needs some polishing of course, but the skeleton is mighty fine.

Hm...so sleepy I amost fell asleep between this paragraph and the last one. Good night all!