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October 25, 2006
monster month - 16
by sven at 8:00 am
Further sketches, contributing to Jeffrey Roche's "Monster Month" event.
Playful Weeble pirouettes, leaps, twirls. Ever since he saw "Swan Lake," he just hasn't been the same. Not all of his bones actually connect into their sockets at any particular moment... But that's to his benefit. He's rather clumsy sometimes, and would likely hurt himself, were he not so rubbery.
There's a forest you've walked through in your dreams, where all of the trees are you. You -- after you've died, and all your limbs have been flayed into dry, stringy tendrils of meat. These blind tree-beings shuffle about in a crowd, silhouettes in the misty light just before dawn.
Stumbling between them, just below the level of their knees, you wonder how many times you've died before... Or how many times you're going to die yet. Are these of a long series of past lives here? Or, maybe, a collection of all the moments when you've forgotten who you are, during this lifetime?
There must be some way to make them take root... To water them, and watch them turn green again. In your imagination, you can see your own face grow back, large and balloon-like, at the tops of all these giants. They would open their mouths in unison... And with a collectively sigh, inhale.
posted by sven | October 25, 2006 8:00 AM | comments (8) | categories: bestiary, sketchbook
Comments
o! i LOVE the weebl! "Ever since he saw 'Swan Lake,' he just hasn't been the same." ee!
you've probably already made this connection, but i think one of the reasons i love the bestiary/monster month is because i love edward gorey's utter zoo alphabet: "the twibbet on occasion knows/a difficulty with its toes."
Posted by: gl. at October 25, 2006 9:35 PM
Whoah dude.... the Carne Asada is extreme! Especially the description. I've seen him in a dream - for real! Well, maybe it was a cousin or an uncle of his actually.
See, I was rummaging through my friend's old house (in the dream.... in real life he was in prison and had been in and out of mental institutions many times, which I think was the motivating force behind this dream). I saw a crumbling hole in a plasterboard wall and I reached inside, and big chunks of it fell away, revealing a space inside the wall full of dust and cobwebs, and nestled away down at the bottom of it was the Crucibus (name came to me in the dream as a voice-over) - sort of a dehydrated shrivelled human corpse. Somehow I knew it was my friend's damaged soul, dried out and forgotten there for many years. I snagged my finger on a nail and a single drop of blood dripped down onto it, and like a dried up sponge immersed in water, it started to expand and flesh out again. It stalked me, a vengeful demonic thing that could not be stopped except by waking up.
Posted by: Darkstrider at October 25, 2006 10:10 PM
@gl.: Of course I made the abecedarium connection. :-) I think I've said before, that often when I'm doing the write-ups, it's predominantly a combination of Gorey's and Lovecraft's voices murmuring from up there inside the boarded up attic of my mind... I just do the transcribin'.
@Mike: Yowza! That's a helluva dream, man! Very cinematic. Reminds me somewhat of one of the flicks we saw at the Lovecraft fest this year: Beyond Dream's Door. Don't know if I should recommend it. I enjoyed it, though... And it's just about to get released to DVD, says the director.
I'm known for doozy nightmares myself ("Sven dreams," they've come to be known as)... This drawing isn't directly from one of them; but I was drawing upon a few related dream images.
There was one where I was riding on my own back -- viewing the situation from both perspectives simultaneously -- and one of the MEs was sawing off the other's head. There was the one where I was feasting on my own greasy, desicated corpse in the middle of a street. There was the one where I was carrying my own head up a mountain...
"Carne asada," btw, is used in Mexican cooking. Roughly translates as "dried beef." Pretty stringy, as I recall. ;-)
Posted by: sven at October 26, 2006 12:23 AM
Yeah, y'know I could probably have a whole blog devoted only to my nightmares....I actually quite enjoy them, sicko that I am.....here's a recurring one from my childhood days that I know Gretchin will appreciate :) I'm 10 or so, laying in bed, staring at a spot of wood panelling on the wall above the foot of my bed...making shapes in the knots as usual...by the time I was 5 or so, I had pretty much decided what everything was....a parade of animals, a Wilma Flintstone, a sideways rubber duck....except I notice something new, a new knot....a big one....looks like a guy chopping down a tree...right above the foot of the bed, right in front of me....how have I not noticed it before....all of a sudden ....chop .....Chop .....CHOP ....the man starts moving, chopping at the tree....I'm terrified, not breathing, and he stops.....slowly turns his head....he looks like a knot in the panelling so he has no eyes, really, but I can tell that he is looking right at me...he turns to face me, raises the axe, and CHOP....I wake up..... I had it a bunch of times until pre-teen, and then put shelves up on the wall in that spot, even though there was nothing at all resembling a man with an axe :)
Posted by: ubatuber at October 26, 2006 4:49 AM
Yow! Heckuva dream! It'd be neat to see you do a dream/nightmare blog, sir.
Hm; there's got to be people out there doing dream journal blogs already... Someone, I'm sure, could do interesting "Cthulhu 2000"-style fiction using that community as a premise.
Posted by: sven at October 26, 2006 10:01 AM
uba: yikes! *squinches eyes together* but you're right, i do enjoy hearing about people's dreams. :)
Posted by: gl. at October 26, 2006 11:02 AM
oh, and sven, i rememberd that gorey/lovecraft connection, i just didn't know if i had forced you to read the utter zoo yet. :)
Posted by: gl. at October 26, 2006 11:07 AM
Interesting synchronicity here.... I just linked two sites with a dream focus, one where a guy writes short dream stories and another where random people have uploaded their dreams. Check my newest entry for the links (or just scan down my links section).
Sven... that's wild.... I've never dreamed multiple versions of myself that I can recall.
Posted by: Darkstrider at October 26, 2006 11:04 PM