View allAll Photos Tagged Dreamsharing
lasso
there standing...
as though on...
ice...
summer heat...
has siphoned...
shallow water...
remains...
two sticks...
a top...
birds dream...
images of...
pond grass...
mirrored...
in pointed...
green...
a dreamy...
lasso...
pulls me...
in....
-rc
So, apologies in advance for the weird way that this story is set up, and that I'm not doing everything in order. I want to try to keep John as the perspective character in as many of my snippets as possible, because that's how it's supposed to be in the story, but it means there's a lot of random infodump conversations without much action going on! But I came up with the idea for next week already and it will be action packed HUZZAH! And it will explain a lot more of the dreamsharing stuff for people who haven't seen Inception. Also in today's story there's a whole other chunk of infodump in here that is completely unrelated to Evie but I couldn't figure out a way to split it up cleanly so have some extra story yay.
Anyway, here is tiny cute Evie and her literally-never-before-photographed sleeping faceplate. Playing with the perfect LTF body always makes me wish I had more kid characters for anything other than dramatic backstory of adult characters! Also little Evie is the shell I've had the longest (Ethan's character came first but he's been reshelled into a different Abadon!), so hugs to her on that front! Also also I spent a lot of time on that stupid fire in the background knowing that it would hardly even be in the pictures, and then it wasn't, but I do enjoy cutting up tiny pieces of paper, so there's that.
***
Ethan and Alan were bartending, they had no VIP clients, and the night was warm. John had persuaded Claire to stand outside with him, though the Tuesday crowd might only reach capacity at the very end of the night. He’d plied Claire with a Long Island iced tea, her favorite, and under the city moon of streetlights, she seemed to be in a good mood.
“Tell me how you and Alan got started in dreamshare.”
Claire glanced around. No one was in line, and theirs was the only bar on the block. The restaurant two doors down was almost ready for closing time. “Well,” she said, “our uncle, the youngest, he was involved. He went to Cornell for grad work, and studied biochemistry, and got into it that way. When Alan was a freshman, uncle Chris talked him into participating in a study group. Alan had a knack for it, and he got me involved, too.”
“And you had a knack for it.”
“Family trait, I guess. Hasn’t worked out so well in all cases.”
“Oh?”
“Well… look, Alan doesn’t really like to talk about things.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Chris’ wife died, early in the project. They had Evie, she was five at the time. She was the only one home when it happened. There was a fire, and Evie ran out of the house. Evie’s mom didn’t. Chris believed that his wife had been attacked or incapacitated, and that the fire had been started to hide the evidence. He couldn’t believe she’d just had a heart attack. When Evie was seven, he put her in the PASIV to try to find out what she remembered. At that point, the technique of building locked rooms for secrets was still being developed, and anyway, there might not have been a secret there at all. And Evie was just a kid. She brought her imaginary friends along. The PASIV was playtime for her. Her father couldn’t really take it. A few years later, he threw a big Thanksgiving dinner for our parents and some of the other scientists. And he drugged them, and hooked them up to the PASIV to interrogate them about his wife. When they all came to, my dad attacked Chris. He was beating him when Alan’s dad shot him. Then his wife. Then himself.”
“Your mother?”
“She never woke up.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It happened a long time ago.”
“Could I get you another drink?”
“Yes, please.”
John didn’t know if he had an advantage, or if he was just torturing Claire, but, when he brought Claire a fresh drink, he said, “Who’s Dom?”
“Where did you hear about Dom?”
“Oh, it’s one of the numbers in the company rolodex I didn’t recognize.” This excuse was slim, doubly so because John had put it in the rolodex himself, wondering if the continued existence of a rolodex in this modern age made his behavior more or less bizarre.
“That’s odd. We haven’t talked to Dom since before we left Cornell.”
“Oh?”
“He’s—he’s in a coma. I didn’t realize Alan had had the rolodex that long. Then again, it is a freakin’ rolodex.”
“How did he end up in a coma?”
“I think you’re channeling my dearest cousin now. You’re never this curious.”
“I want to learn the business.”
“Well. Well, Dom was a researcher. Alan knew him better than I did. I thought they kinda had a thing, but Alan’s so quiet about that. He—Alan—was with Dom during a run, some kind of drug testing. They ended up in Limbo.”
“What’s Limbo?”
“The bottom. The last dream level. When you’re so sedated that you can’t wake up, but you’ve died in a higher level. I mean, to us outside it looks like a coma.”
“But Alan got out?”
“He won’t really talk about it. It must’ve lasted a long time, because the timer on their PASIV was set for twenty-four hours, and every level down lasts longer. He said…”
“What?”
“He said he didn’t realize he was dreaming for a long time. Once he did, he couldn’t get Dom to understand. He woke up, and Dom didn’t.”
“Didn’t they have totems?”
“Those hadn’t been invented yet, or maybe the idea just hadn’t arrived here yet from France.”
“Totems do seem like an awfully French idea.”
“French dreamshare is way esoteric. They float around in colors and drink music and all this other synesthesia shit. I did one job with a team in France. Never again.”
John led her into that story, fidgeting with the strap on his watch. Evie treats the PASIV like a playground, Dom the maybe-ex-boyfriend was in a coma… Were these Alan’s legitimate reasons for avoiding a relationship?
Sorry I'm posting late, life outside dolls was crazy this week! This is a weird, like, section that wouldn't be in the story normally, because the story is supposed to be from John's perspective, and he finds out about this development from Alan. IDK, bonus features or something ;) . As a reminder, Evie is Alan and Claire's cousin, and Morgan is her grown-up childhood imaginary friend, who exists in the dreamworld because Evie's dad put her in the PASIV when she was little.
***
"Evie, I don't know about this."
"It's going to work. I got into the data from the Cornell experiment on rehabilitating coma patients with dreamshare. They never got anyone to wake up, but the body twitched like it was dreaming when they were in there. So there must be a connection to muscle control, at a minimum. And we're different. You could stay in the body when I left."
"I don't know if I could. I've never been apart from you."
"Of course you have. We work separately in dreams all the time. You think about things in here when I'm gone. You'd just be... thinking about things in a body of your own."
"What about whoever the body belongs to?"
"They're gone. That's what all the experiments were for, to see if they could get those people to wake up. But they can't. You'll just... take up residence in an empty house."
"Someone else's house."
"Someone else's abandoned house. An abandoned car, with no one to control it. What's the point of a car no one drives? What's the point of a body if it's not going to be used?" Morgan turned away, but Evie chased into her, pressing her own face into Morgan's collarbone. "I don't want to be alone in the waking world. I don't want to leave you alone in here. I want us to wake up every day next to each other. It's going to work. And if it doesn't, we just... put the body back. No harm done."
"Getting caught would be pretty harmful. Losing your access to the PASIV."
"Let me worry about that. I have a plan. But we won't need it. You'll wake up in the body."
Morgan pulled back from Evie, studying her face. "Well," she said, "You'll have to find me someone pretty."
So, Morgan's not a "secret" exactly...
AS A SIDE NOTE, my doll story is based on technology from the movie "Inception." If you haven't seen it, A) YOU SHOULD!, and B) basically there is a machine that lets you go inside other people's dreams, 'projections' are imaginary people that fill up the dreams and are generated by the dreamer, but they're normally basically redshirts/filler, and C) in the movie, the dream machine, called a PASIV, is mostly used for stealing secrets from a person's mind or 'incepting' the person to believe something they didn't believe before. I think that's the important parts. Anyway!
When Evie was five, her mother died, and Evie was the only person at home at the time. Evie's father became convinced that Evie's mother had been murdered. He was also a researcher into dream technology at Cornell. Unfortunately, he got the crazy idea to put Evie into the PASIV and see if he could access her memories of the day her mother died. But, as we all know, the machine doesn't work that way. Evie spent her time in the dream playing the way you would expect a five-year-old to do. She had imaginary friends in life, so she had them in the dream. Morgan was Evie's favorite imaginary friend, of course.
Fast forward four years. Evie's father was driven insane by his fruitless quest to find his wife's murderer. He succeeded in persuading his niece and nephew, Claire and Alan, to become involved in dream sharing research, but neither of them ever made any progress into recalling memories on demand, either. At Thanksgiving, Evie's father convinced his brothers and their wives (Claire's and Alan's parents) to join him in using the PASIV. When everyone woke up, Alan's father and Evie's father got into a fight, killing each other, their brother, and Alan's mother. Claire's mother simply stayed asleep.
Alan and Claire adopted Evie. They sold their parents' farm and continued their own research into dream technology for a few years. But Alan had a falling out with another researcher (slash boyfriend), and Claire wanted to grow Evie's college fund, and they realized that Evie had a talent no one else had. Because she'd grown up using dream technology so often, Evie had a persistent projection: Morgan. Morgan could act independently from Evie. Evie could 'tell' her to do something in the dream, and Morgan would do it. They didn't even have to talk to each other, but could communicate telepathically. Essentially, Evie could be in two places at once in any person's dream. Realizing this, Alan and Claire started taking on illegal side jobs, stealing secrets. With Evie as their point man plus one, Alan as the architect, and Claire using her ability to make herself look like anyone, they were virtually unstoppable. Eventually, Alan became concerned for Evie's safety. He convinced the family that they should open up a bar and 'go legit,' designing recreational dreams for wealthy clients (though this use of dreamshare technology is also highly illegal!).
One day Alan walked in on Evie using the PASIV alone. He plugged himself in (which, as a side note, is an incredibly invasive thing to do, like reading someone's diary, times a hundred), and discovered Evie having a conversation with Morgan. He realized that Evie considered Morgan to be a real person, an entity outside of herself, and that Evie was in love with Morgan. From Alan's perspective, Morgan wasn't a person at all, but simply a tool, something Evie could use and control in the dream, but not an individual. He saw Morgan as an imaginary friend. Because of his own rather nasty experiences with emotions in dreamshare, Alan freaked out. He fought with Evie, and banned her from using his and Claire's PASIVs at all.
Evie was sixteen, and she bolted. She sent Claire postcards once in a while, but she maintained herself by taking on odd jobs in the illegal side of dreamshare. She developed a bit of a reputation for her abilities, and despite her attempts to hide Morgan, a rumor started that there was an American girl who could control her projections. By that point, Evie had made herself enough money to be getting on with, and she didn't want to attract attention to herself from the even-more-unsavory elements of the dream community. She forged herself some high-school graduation documents and applied to Cornell, settling in as an unremarkable undergraduate in Biology. She resumed cordial contact with her cousins, and everything was hunky-dory for a while.
Except that Evie was always in love with Morgan, and she had big plans to get her girlfriend out into the real world. And of course, one of the slickest French dreamshare teams decided that they could really use the ability to control projections, and they'd heard about someone who could help them do that...
DUN DUN DUN! ...Or something, I think lots of people actually know what happens next! I'm pretty sure I have talked about it before? ;)
Ten Facts About Samantha Pyatnitskya
1) She is the oldest child of Anatoly Pyatnitski and his wife Masako. Anatoly is a (retired) legitimate businessman. He met Masako, called Maya, when she was a young model in New York, and pursued her back to Boston, where she was born and where there were few other Russian legitimate businessmen with whom he had to compete...
2) Anatoly and Maya spoke only English to their children. Maya grew up entirely in the U.S., as did her parents; Anatoly grew up in Moscow speaking Russian.
3) Samantha's younger brother, Dmitri, is only ten months younger than she is.
4) Growing up, Samantha's parents were loving and pampered her, but her father did not expect her to prepare for any serious career. Samantha excelled at school, got scholarships to Yale and Harvard, played varsity softball, and became an excellent marksman under the tutelage of the 'babysitters' her father set over her. The picture on her father's desk shows Samantha wearing a small tiara, from when she won Homecoming Princess her sophomore year of high school.
5) Anatoly suffered a stroke a few years ago, and began to train Dmitri to run some of his businesses. Dmitri abjectly despises business. Samantha hung around, to care for her father's ailing health, and quietly took over the entire operation, leaving her younger siblings free to dabble in their own expensive hobbies.
6) Samantha is intensely adored by the men in her father's organization. She ensures that their children attend good schools, and has arranged for several of them to have Russian tutors. She has also guided the operation toward greater legitimacy.
7) When it is necessary to eliminate rivals, Samantha sees to it personally.
8) Samantha discovered the non-recreational uses of dreamshare when she looked into her brothers' expensive hobbies. She convinced Claire to do a job for her, spying on a competitor's real estate plans. Alan dislikes taking jobs from Samantha, because the mark is always proficient in the use of weapons, which makes the projections substantially deadlier. He refused to take a job infiltrating the mind of an FBI agent who was tracking the Pyatnitskis, and Claire, Ethan, and John did it without him.
9) Samantha is a cynic, and Claire is a romantic. Samantha bet Claire that inception was possible, and moreover, that it was possible to incept someone to fall in love with someone else, someone they didn't even like...
10) Samantha is exasperated by her younger brothers and their dissolute habits, but she's much more upset by her little sister, who she feels has no reason to do so poorly in school or to spend so much time socializing, to the detriment of her future. Also, their father adores Sofie and finds her the most charming of his children, which doesn't help.
Also, I changed Lem a little bit. He *was* a sculpture student, etc, but while finishing his grad program, he met an Italian legitimate businessman, Peter Moreno, who collected art as a way of protecting his assets. Lem became his art advisor, as well as providing other occasional expertise. He still dates Georgia and has an obsessive crush on Claire. He knows Samantha casually as an important legitimate businesswoman competitor.
1) Lem’s actual name is Lemaître Park. His Catholic Korean physicist father wanted to name him after Georges Lemaître, the scientist who first postulated what became the Big Bang theory, and his Quebecoise astronomer mother, who enjoyed Doctor Who as a child, refused to let him be called Georges, but consented to Lemaître as a first name without actually explaining to her husband what it meant. Lem’s parents divorced when he was a teenager.
2) Lem is a sculptor studying at the same university Jane attends. He likes to work in marble, but obviously that’s incredibly expensive, so he works in other materials as well. He enjoys making small lost wax sculptures, but his major works are in less expensive stone. Most of his sculptures are figurative and realistic.
3) He has a website of time-lapse videos of himself working, titled “Rocks are People, Too.” Because working in stone produces a lot of noise, dust, and debris, he usually works in the parking lot behind the building where the other art grad students have their studios. He likes to think it is his preferred medium that tends to make him lonely.
4) Lem grew up in Boston, where his parents are both professors, but he speaks French fluently and he also studied at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. He doesn’t speak Korean well at all, and this is a bit of a sore point between him and his father.
5) As a kid, Lem was obsessed with models (trains, buildings, anything tiny), and this developed into his work as a sculptor.
6) He also really likes Star Wars, and has a lot of models of Star Wars ships, though not of characters, as he feels most of them aren’t sufficiently faithful or realistic. He is confident that Han shot first and was justified in doing so.
7) Lem dates Jane’s friend Georgia (my F60 Lishe who is waiting on a face!). However...
8) Lem is secretly in love with Claire. He knows Jane is involved with Claire’s work, and he suspects it’s something illegal, but despite his many efforts he hasn’t been able to figure out what really goes on upstairs at the bar. That is, until...
9) Cat, John’s sister, recruits him to work in dreamshare with her, as an architect. Lem isn’t good at developing levels on his own, but he is wonderful at entering a subject’s ‘natural’ dream and slowly warping it to suit his own needs. He likes to think that this is similar to his preference for sculpting in stone.
10) Lem isn’t easily identified as an asshole, and he’s generally nice and polite to people. But he doesn’t see the long-term effects of his lazy, selfish choices on the people around him (not working hard at Korean, not dumping Georgia even though he knows he doesn’t love her, not remembering to warn people not to park near his area when he’s going to be working). He has a lot of superficial friends and very few deep ones. Jane is ambivalent about him. Georgia is repressing her realization that Lem loves Claire instead of her. Indeed, Georgia probably knows him best of anyone, and she thinks he has the charm of a two-year-old.
1) Lem’s actual name is Lemaître Park. His Catholic Korean physicist father wanted to name him after Georges Lemaître, the scientist who first postulated what became the Big Bang theory, and his Quebecoise astronomer mother, who enjoyed Doctor Who as a child, refused to let him be called Georges, but consented to Lemaître as a first name without actually explaining to her husband what it meant. Lem’s parents divorced when he was a teenager.
2) Lem is a sculptor studying at the same university Jane attends. He likes to work in marble, but obviously that’s incredibly expensive, so he works in other materials as well. He enjoys making small lost wax sculptures, but his major works are in less expensive stone. Most of his sculptures are figurative and realistic.
3) He has a website of time-lapse videos of himself working, titled “Rocks are People, Too.” Because working in stone produces a lot of noise, dust, and debris, he usually works in the parking lot behind the building where the other art grad students have their studios. He likes to think it is his preferred medium that tends to make him lonely.
4) Lem grew up in Boston, where his parents are both professors, but he speaks French fluently and he also studied at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. He doesn’t speak Korean well at all, and this is a bit of a sore point between him and his father.
5) As a kid, Lem was obsessed with models (trains, buildings, anything tiny), and this developed into his work as a sculptor.
6) He also really likes Star Wars, and has a lot of models of Star Wars ships, though not of characters, as he feels most of them aren’t sufficiently faithful or realistic. He is confident that Han shot first and was justified in doing so.
7) Lem dates Jane’s friend Georgia (my F60 Lishe who is waiting on a face!). However...
8) Lem is secretly in love with Claire. He knows Jane is involved with Claire’s work, and he suspects it’s something illegal, but despite his many efforts he hasn’t been able to figure out what really goes on upstairs at the bar. That is, until...
9) Cat, John’s sister, recruits him to work in dreamshare with her, as an architect. Lem isn’t good at developing levels on his own, but he is wonderful at entering a subject’s ‘natural’ dream and slowly warping it to suit his own needs. He likes to think that this is similar to his preference for sculpting in stone.
10) Lem isn’t easily identified as an asshole, and he’s generally nice and polite to people. But he doesn’t see the long-term effects of his lazy, selfish choices on the people around him (not working hard at Korean, not dumping Georgia even though he knows he doesn’t love her, not remembering to warn people not to park near his area when he’s going to be working). He has a lot of superficial friends and very few deep ones. Jane is ambivalent about him. Georgia is repressing her realization that Lem loves Claire instead of her. Indeed, Georgia probably knows him best of anyone, and she thinks he has the charm of a two-year-old.
Graphically, I thought to myself this image can either be overdone or simple. I didn't want to over stylized something that can easily stand by itself. As always I was looking into making something that has meaning and can easily have a direct association to something more than itself. It was a brilliant idea to again create out of ordinary items. With also the added help of an arts and crafts store, of course. I wanted it to have some spiritual meaning and a dream catcher does exactly that. Of most things I make I scrap but this one hangs in my closet as of right now.
Knowing it was very difficult to make, I skimmed through the instructions on how to sow a dream catcher. Funny because that was the main point and the most important part. *_*
I used bones from the night we had Wingstop. I put them in a boiling pot of water so later it would be easy to scrape down to the bone. I knew it had to look like bare bones. I bleached them in a zip-lock bags for a few days so they would be entirely white as well.
It took a while and I got frustrated sitting on the lazy chair rocking in frustration. For some reason I first chose to use very fine string which forced me to start over. In all the mess I couldn't tell where I had left off. I started over three times. Finally I decided to use a thicker string so it won't easily tangle in itself. Once I got a flow of things and stopped snapping at people around me, I noticed I was done.
We all are fortunate to act out our most embarrassing or traumatic experiences in the comfort of our own mind. To live out our fear in life is a lot more horrific in comparison.This was all inspired by my nightmares and how they always seem to perfectly project all my fears in a twisted little story. This is me trying to address all of my fears and also appreciate the fact that I don't have to live in horror.
As I said, the Native American holidays are celebrated close to nature and the world around them and therefore the ability to set a definite date not really possible
Because I do not want to give up the option to illustrate the holidays of the Native Americans, so I'll use their definition of "somewhere between late January to early February"
The Iroquois Midwinter Ceremony is held in either January or February. When the dipper constellation appears in the sky directly overhead, you then wait for the new moon to be seen. This is when the spiritual year begins. You then wait 5 days after the new moon to begin the ceremony. The celebration lasts 9 days with a lot of traditional events, as well as choosing new council members for the next year.
This celebration is observed among the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy or The Six Nations:
Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora.
This is also known as the "New Year's Ceremony" because it marks the beginning of a new ritual year. The "Big Heads" announce this ceremony. They are masked messengers who visit the longhouse (a bark covered structure where the Iroquois used to live) now used as a public activity space. The Big Heads invite everyone to participate.
There is no specific order to this ceremony. Each tribe has their own way of doing it. But the usual custom is to first begin with the "Stirring of the Ashes" as a symbolic gesture of showing gratitude for all the blessings bestowed during the previous year. There is a public naming event where all the children born during the previous year are now given their Indian names. There are also two traditional Indian dances, The Bear Dance and the Feather Dance.
The Iroquois also believe that dreams are not just fantasies. They feel dreams represent a cure for diseases and mental disorders. So they have a Dreamsharing Ritual. They feel that by getting people to share their dreams in public, getting opinions on what those dreams might mean, the Iroquois believe that they are better able to resolve whatever problems or conflicts gave rise to the dreams in the first place. They have a group of medicine men known as The False Face Society, who perform the appropriate curing ritual once these dreams have been interpreted.
Here's the first "Divas and Animals" comic for the month of August. While there was no gnome driving around in a go kart version of the Plymouth Prowler at the Rahr for a recent show opening....at least it's nice to know the weather IRL is someone right on target like the weather presented in the comic.
Adobe Photoshop with Sketchbook Pro on the iPad and the iMac M3 via Sidecar plus Uzu, ArtStudio, Frax, Wordswag, ProCreate, LetterMPress, SimplyMPress, Homestyler, Halftone, Silk, Snapseed and iOrnament on the iPad