Dream: The Family

[rowyn]

What I could remember of a peculiar dream from this morning:

The dream is about a sprawling, wealthy, extended Family. The Reaping happens to them periodically; it's a force of nature rather than something the Family does deliberately to its members. It kills some Family members, gives other Family members magical power, and makes some strangers into part of the Family.

Two of the teenagers in the Family are Good Girl and Goth Girl. Good Girl wants to escape the Family but she keeps getting dragged back into it. Goth Girl dislikes Good Girl for being naive and having hope. Goth hates everyone, actually, and she dislikes Good Girl less than anyone. Goth doesn't try to escape because what's the use.

In one of her escape attempts, Good Girl finds two strangers, young kids, who belong with the Family and are dying because being apart from it is destroying them. So Good Girl abandons her escape attempt and goes back to the Family with them. She tries to negotiate with one of the Family adults to get a little slack for the new kids so that there is a chance they will survive.

A Bad New Girl is there and using her influence to make things harder for Good and the other new kids, because Bad thinks the Family is a totem and she needs to climb to the top of it on the backs of all the other kids her age or younger.

Goth Girl is watching this and feels sorry for Good. Goth pretends to call her father to ask him to kick Bad out of the Family. Bad is distracted from her targets and confronts Goth with false bravado: "I'm not afraid of you!"

Goth glares at her and takes a step forward. Bad backs away at her advance. Goth says, "You're pathetic! You think you're hot shit: 'look at me, I survived the Reaping, I have magic powers now, I can do whatever I want, all I have to do is stop being afraid of this one goth bitch and the world's my oyster!'" She continues to advance as she talks, until Bad trips and Goth is standing over her. "Well I've got news for you, kid: I am not the scariest thing in this world. I'm not even on the list."

Comments

[catlinyemaker]

Wow! I wish my dreams were this cohesive, I'd totally read this novel.

[rowyn]

One of the interesting things about this dream was the tone: The Family was definitely this horrific nightmare dysfunctional mess of power politics, where awful things happened to innocent kids. But the dream itself wasn't a nightmare. I didn't wake up thinking "oh man I'm glad that wasn't real", I woke up thinking "Oh WOW Goth is RIGHT, kids around her are scared of her but they should be worried about the MUCH WORSE things in this world. That was so cool! I wish I remembered more."

[tuftears]

I had a story idea something like that once, except it was a science fiction setting and the Family was identified by a unique stigmata that would appear because of something something genetics, like a very ornate F on their face that appears almost butterfly wing-like. Being a member of the Family meant you had wealth and power. *Faking* the stigmata was highly illegal and marked you for death from the Family's enforcers. Actors pretending to be Family members had a deliberately artificial-looking version.

So, this one unaffiliated researcher is just minding her own business, she makes a scientific breakthrough, she's sure to make her name... She wakes up to find the Family stigmata blazoned across her cheek. Uh oh.

I never got any further on that story, but it seems like a promising vein. };)

[terrycloth]

Vampire: The Masquerade?

[archangelbeth]

That is a cool one.

[alltoseek]

Good Girl and Goth Girl are both you. Goth is the depressive, realistic, mortality-conscious aspect. Good is the living, capable, pragmatic aspect.

The two kids Good finds are lut (either lut-in-two, like Goth and Good, or possibly one is lut and the other is your job).

New Bad Girl is lut's cancer.

The real positive, integrative aspect of this dream is that your depressive aspect ('we're all gonna die anyway fuck it all') is united on the side (chooses the side) of Good, who is of course doing what she can to make sure you all prevail over the cancer. So depression isn't going to make you give up. In fact, depression isn't the scariest thing in the world.

Nor is the cancer, since you and lut and all your support are uniting to defeat it.



So how'm I doing? ;-)