hmpf

will not do for you:

Help you to wake up gently.

What waking up and immediately putting on a DW audio book and going back to bed *will* do for you:

Make you have the most extraordinary Doctor-filled dreams (when you should be up and working). In my case, the scenario was partly lifted from Christopher Priest's Inverted World, which (sort of) is about a world distorted by a gravity anomaly. Mixing that with the Doctor made for a very wild ride...

"The lower the income bracket an area enjoys, the twistier and narrower the streets are, until they're too small for any but foot traffic. There are families who have bought contiguous properties in all directions, until their sets of interconnected houses extend every which way like tunnels trough a termite mound. Only there can people pool together enough money to break down a few walls and ceilings to make a garden room, a space to breathe, installing full-spectrum lamps and hiring gardeners to make little islands of green in the depths of the city."

Finder: Five Crazy Women; notes

This is remarkably like one of my Strange Architecture dreams. ETA: Of which I just had another, yesterday, which involved a randomly appearing/disappearing (and possibly mobile) hay loft full of human hair. Also, a small bungalow which turned out, in its entirety, to be an elevator to the underground (literal, and political, in this case).

There were also mad scientists, in a musical that turned into a story I was telling someone else in the dream, and then into a picture book that, apparently, I had painted. It was one of those mutating dreams/series of dreams with variations on a common theme.

Dream #1: Winter in the Ukraine

I am visiting my mother in the Ukraine. She picks me up at the station and bitches about my brother-in-law all the way home in her very crappy car. 'Home' is a flight of dreary-grey rooms filled with nothing but rusty steel-frame beds with bad mattresses where she lives with just my brother-in-law. My brother-in-law occupies himself by cooking huge (and I do mean huge) vats (bathtubs?) of some sort of Russian soup. It's winter, there's snow outside, and he claims soup is the best thing against the cold. We give him hell about the amounts, though. I don't know what my mother is doing in the Ukraine, but somehow I don't bother to ask.

(Notes: I have no personal connection to the Ukraine; nor does my mom. I also don't have a brother-in-law. I don't even have any siblings.)


Dream #2: The Unwanted Dog

Someone gives me a dog. I am not pleased. It runs away. I feel guilty because I worry more about the dog possibly harming my neighbour's cats than about the dog's wellbeing. I don't find the dog again, and am secretly glad.


Dream #3: The Crap Resistance of Possibly France

I am with a group of people - possibly the people from the recent study trip - in a big, modern coach. In France. Possibly. An Evil Regime has just taken power, and apparently we are the resistance. Everyone is looking for us. We drive through tiny villages in our huge bus, feeling far too visible. We talk about stealing a less noticeable car, but no one knows how to do that. We talk about getting weapons, either to defend ourselves, or, possibly, to kill ourselves in case 'they' get us. We're a pretty crap resistance, all told. In one village we meet vaguely sympathetic Farscape fans who are selling fancy handmade candles in the streets, but nothing very useful comes of the encounter. We're still stuck with the coach.


Dream #4: Women Are Evil, I'm a Man And I Live In a Closet (Seriously.)

I am a man. I am hiding in a closet in a room. The room may or may not contain an evil witch/queen/female monster of some description who may or may not know of my presence in the closet. I think she's wearing a blood-red dress. There may be clowns on stilts.

(Notes: I'm in the closet? Really... sometimes my subconscious is both ridiculously literal *and* maddeningly obscure at the same time.)