So last night, I was somewhat stupid, and stayed up way later than I needed to. Granted, I like to do this when I want to conk out right away, but it was after 2 by the time I got off the computer and went upstairs.

I woke up around 9:30 to go to the bathroom, and debated staying awake. Decided to sleep "just a little longer".

It was 12:30 when I woke up. I haven't done that in quite awhile. I was kind of annoyed with myself, since I had all sorts of things in mind to possibly do today.

And then I remembered the dreams I had.

I spent the next hour writing down two of them, one of which had THE most amazing, hauntingly beautiful setting I think I've ever thought of, conscious or unconscious. The dream actually had something like a plot, but it was the plot of a video game, so it will probably be scrapped. The setting, however... The best part is, I can see it clear as day in my head, and I've been thinking about it pretty constantly since I woke up, to help the image stay. Plus I sketched it out like three different ways, and wrote out as much detail as I could possibly think of.

I've been trying to decide if I could put this place into one of my in-progress stories, or if it needs something new. It's definitely something a Phisto could have made, and it might even be something Kris finds attached to her villa in the woods...


An underground room, quite like a cave but definitely man-made, the walls all of heavy, rough-hewn stone. Dark and dank, lichen on the walls, the stone damp. The room, glimpsed first through some gaps in a wall of an approaching walkway, is maybe 30' across, nearly square. A walkway runs along each of the four walls, and a bridge crosses it about a third of the way to one side.


As seen from the bridge:
Down below, there are three pools, each one set farther down than the previous. Thick, low stone walls border each pool. The nearest pool, between five and ten feet below and tucked into the far right corner, has a gentle spring rippling up into the dark water. There are a few plants to be seen in the slowly moving water, vague impressions of green. In the near left corner of this pool, there is a statue.

It is in the shape of a young woman, laying flat down in the water, her face turned to one side, a placid (blank?) expression on her face. Her back is to us, her arms outstretched across the water, which laps gently up around her sides. Her hair is long and wavy, extending out into the water, just as hair would in the motion of that particular pool... as if a girl had turned to stone, lying in that position, or - and this was more the sense of the room - a girl had died in such a position, and the statue was made in obsessive, pained memory of her.

The statue stops at the waist, where there is a low stone wall over which the water silently spills into the next pool, which wraps around the rectangle of the first, maybe a foot or two lower down. This one is filled with plants, the strangely vivid green of plants growing in a dim, moist forest valley. It is somehow clear that these were purposely planted here... their common name is "mermaid's tail", since the shape of the leaves so closely resembles one. The leaves are very large and long, and curl and unfurl languidly in the slight currents.

One of the leaves lines up eerily well with the cut-off waist of the statue, giving the impression of a mermaid, half-bound in stone.

Scattered around this second pool are smaller statues, at a bit of a distance from the main one, so as not to distract from it. They are also mermaids of stone, echoing the first image.

The third pool is a good deal farther down, maybe fifteen feet - though the water makes scarcely a sound as it slides down into it. It is dark, with a few vague plant shapes, but there is little motion, and it lies there somewhat ominous in the shadows clinging to the stone walls.


...somehow or another, the group of girls that were walking around the room triggered the curse on the room, and were attacked by snakes and some sort of tentacled plant or serpent in the water. Along one of the edges of a walkway stood three music stands, the fold-up kind most people have at home, all rusted and half-disassembled. One was clearly a hundred years or so old, one maybe fifty, one only ten or twenty. Putting these together would somehow open an exit from the room, so no-one else would get eaten by the monster. Once out, the long hallways and vast rooms off to the sides became more like an museum or school. I saw inside one room, and it was a giant's playroom, with toys as tall as a person scattered all through, a ceiling you could barely see. There was no dust or decay, but the colors were all faded and faint, and the sense of time was immense. The main feature of the room was a giant rocking horse - in the dream, I recognized it as the Trojan Horse from Unico, and stopped to stare, all sorts of chills running through me. (It's a very creepy character, full of wisdom but so, so unbelievably old.) It looked quite different, hand-painted in a modern version of Egyptian tomb scenes, with a faded handmade blanket on its back, but it was somehow still the Trojan Horse.

It was about this point we were discovered by some sort of authority, and we got kicked out, and I think I woke up.


While the giant's nursery had a great atmosphere, it's pretty derivative - pretty sure my subconscious pieced that one together from Unico, the bit in "The Silver Chair" where Eustace and Jill stay at the giants' palace, and, come to think of it, "The Velveteen Rabbit". But that stone room with the pools...I have no idea where that came from, and I could spend days in there, I can see it so clearly, and it had such a strong feeling haunting the room...