Not everyone gets the hang of working with dreams. I wouldn’t say you either have the gift or you don’t, but it’s tricky at first, and most people don’t find it worth the effort, despite the pay. Others take to it like a duck to the water.
I taught myself to lucid dream when I was twelve, before I even knew about dream workers, because I wanted so badly to taste that dream cake in real life. Now it’s my full-time job.
First step is objects. They must be small: you can’t take anything too large or heavy out of a dream. You take only what you can carry, and they reach a fair price as a curio. I sell pieces of jewelry, flowers, books. Once sold a cellphone with imaginary apps and gibberish text still on the screen.
There are some fun beliefs attached to them. Dream crystals are the best to do magic. Dream shoes will never lead you astray. A dream mirror shows your true self.
(They don’t, most of the time. Just weird shit.)
Step two is the abstracts, but for that, you have to learn how to make dream bottles. They’re my favorite thing, though, and there are veryrich customers after them. You bottle the sight of a dark sky filled with the wrong stars and crisscrossed by rings of light. You bottle a beautifully haunting nonsense song. You bottle the feeling of, I don’t know, twirling, twirling on a hazy, grassy, dizzy, light-filled snapshot of a dream, or of kissing a lover who doesn’t—who’ll never—exist.
Then you sell them.
There’s a very particular market for bottles out of nightmares. We don’t talk about it. It pays extra for our silence.
Anyway, I don’t work much in that area. Not a nightmare sort of person.
What I am is a sleepyhead, so the best thing about dream work for me is being able to lie down for a nap after lunch and it counting as doing some work.
At least I told myself it was just a nap, but I drifted awake with dusk filling the room, a new bracelet on my wrist, and my brother glaring at me. The sound of him letting himself in with the spare key must’ve been what woke me.
Buttercup was rubbing against his leg and purring. I slipped the bracelet over my wrist.
“Were you sleeping in the middle of the day?”
“It’s work.” I shrugged and got up to toss the bracelet in the trinkets box.
“There’s dream food in your fridge. You’re wearing dream clothes—I can tell it, they don’t have labels and they suit you toowell. Your house is stuffed full of—” he waved his hands around “—of dreams. Have you been outside this week? When was the last time you talked to someone real?”
I located the coat hanger next to the window. It tends to move around, because it has feet. Guess where I got it?
Huffing (it resisted), I dragged it back to its proper place by the door. “I talk to Buttercup all the time. She understands me. She always meows back at me.”
“She’s a cat!”
Coat hanger now in place, I could retrieve and shrug on my jacket. I was happy to find the keys still in my pocket. Oh, they were real keys—dream ones don’t work—but I’m a forgetful klutz.
“Okay. Let’s go out, then, instead of watching tv.” I twirled the keys on my finger. “Are you coming?”
He snorted as he stood up from the chair. As he passed by my side to reach the door, though, he warned me: “Your hair is still a mess.”
The dream mirror by the door showed me it was true. On the other hand, my reflection on it had green eyes, when they should’ve been black. I was kind of hoping it would sort itself out, but I guess it’s one more dream thing I won’t be able to sell or throw away, cluttering my home.
“Aren’tyoucoming?”
“Coming,” I mumbled, fixing my hair hurriedly before stepping out.
He’s right. We don’t get out much, as we rarely need to. Downside of the job, I guess. I’m lucky I have him, so I’m not talking to dream people all day.
anyway, harry potter Concept where down the road the boy who lived thing becomes less relevant and most people know him from the pictures of when he was a teenager, so by the time he’s middle aged all of harry’s interactions play out exactly like that tony hawk tweet
With all these Renfri drawings, I’ve asked myself what would have happened to her if she actually had survived? Unfortunately, I’m terrible at coming up with ideas for AUs that aren’t just fillable gaps within the canon. @rawrkinjd helped me out with that when they – very spontaneously – came up with the brilliant idea that Renfri could become a pirate in Skellige. So here I present to you Renfri who survived Stregobor because Geralt decided not to stop her (or even help her), and who ultimately becomes a pirate with her own ship in Skellige and makes a name for herself there :>
I also made a playlist for this AU! The playlist follows roughly the story of how Renfri survives & becomes a pirate! Below the cut is a list of the songs and how they individually fit into that narrative, because I thought about this a lot.
Thinking of a happy(ish) Midam AU where Michael sense people being raptured away and, in a blind panic, rips a whole in the space-time continuum to swap himself and Adam with another version of themselves, which happens to be right after Adam says. So that Michael is the one seen in season 15, who doesn’t seem to really care about Adam and is only there to please God.
Meanwhile, after a good natured scolding from Adam for how awful of an idea this was, Michael sets about trying to reverse the apocalypse. They probably have to fess up at some point that they’re not the original ones and are from the future, because why would THE Michael suddenly be down for whatever TFW is doing but also still kind of bitchy about it all, and that is just a whole other mess on its own.
They will succeed in the end and maybe Michael gives his archangel siblings the hugs and reassuring words they desperately need. Also the other angels and Lucifer now have to deal with the knowledge that their eldest brother actually has feelings and all of them are for a little human.
