dream theatre

[fox]

this morning's dream was, i guess, sort of a cross between harry potter and reign of fire -- all the HP characters were there (and i was one of them), and there was a dragon attacking the castle. it couldn't get in -- couldn't get across the moat, i guess, which was a much smaller moat than the hogwarts lake -- but it could breathe fire, and lots of it, through the windows and occasionally smack the walls with its tail and knock some stones loose. we spent half the time trying to fight the thing with magic and the other half trying not to get fried. at one point, a fire brigade turned up, and they were traipsing through the place with big ladders and getting in the way; one of the ladders knocked someone down, but they kept right on traipsing. all the wands had been left behind in a room we couldn't get to any more because of the fire, so dumbledore broke up something -- a piece of firewood, maybe, or a beater's bat -- into vaguely wand-shaped and -sized bits and enchanted them so we each had a temporary one; i remember the understanding being that without a core, they were no good as permanent wands, but they'd do the job better than nothing.

finally, we were out on a balcony, and the dragon was over a ways away from us breathing fire at another balcony, and we saw that the fire stream was a lot less than it had been. so we'd been wearing it down, and we were all proud of ourselves and everything. yay, us. and then it turned and saw where even with its reduced output it could probably hit us on our balcony right between the eyes, and it was all set to breathe more fire, when two of us hit it with an extinguishing spell almost at the same instant. but two things happened: one, we'd meant to extinguish the fire, but it hadn't actually breathed any fire yet; and two, in the context of the dream, the correct incantation was extinguo, but one of us mistakenly said extingua instead -- and the whole dragon vanished.

Comments

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

I dream about grammar. And once (admittedly, this was after an evening of browsing the Indo-European Roots Appendix to the American Heritage Dictionary) I dreamed a long, complex, and totally spurious etymology for the word "fetish". Managed to derive it, "fetus," and "fetid" from a root meaning "to cook" or "to boil."