(This actually, or at least oneirically, happened the other week. No sheep were harmed in the production of these Zs. May contain traces of poetic licence.)

And Dream of Sheep

I swam to surface, from the deep
And dodgy currents of a dream
Which I fell into, counting sheep
To rustle later by the gleam
Of moonlight on the haunted moor...
(The honest count was such a bore!)

...I dreamed my mafiosi kin
Had come to sponge a sandwich lunch.
They plotted sheep-related sin
While we spread peanut butter crunch
And whetted knives to carve the beef,
AND NOT A PATRONIZING THIEF

Who kept distracting me from what
I absolutely had to do -
To write a fairy-story, that
Would necessarily come true,
And overthrow the Government,
And crown a King who wasn't bent.

I wrote it up between the beers
And sandwiches. The sequel came,
And so I joined the mutineers
Who rose in the Republic's name!
I would have left it there and then,
But I'd already sold Book Ten...

...To daybreak's edge across the moor
I ran from fifty feral lords
Who wished to dunk me in my gore -
MY CLOCK CUT IN BEFORE THEIR SWORDS!

Since this has come of counting sheep,
I'll try a nightcap, next, for sleep!

...is not the latest addition to the Brainsssslit genre, but only my dream last night. 

I and all the abovementioned were trying, in a very-much-at-cross-purposes way, to solve a mysterious English village murder, of the flavour Agatha Christie generally farmed out to Miss Marple.  We appeared to have insufficient Brainsssss between us for the job.

The Fourth Doctor's attempt to distract a zombie at a critical juncture by performing the Dance of the Single Scarf is an image which shall live long in infamy, however much I wish it wouldn't.

I assisted at the harrowing of H___ by Emma Woodhouse.  This was planned with all the unerring foresight one might expect.  I was not Mr Knightley, but I might as well have been, except for the 'not marrying her at the end' bit and the 'being too busy running around trying to stuff Lamia and the Three Stooges back where we found them for any of that soppy stuff' bit.

This comes of eating devilled eggs in the evening.

I shall now attempt another hour of shut-eye, and hope that this nap leaves me less tired than I started out, thank you kindly Emma!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 190 words.  Bah.  Luke's plan explained in full, and the Slight Setback recounted.  I am tired and manky and peevish, and I was badgered in my sleep last night by the Governor of Wisconsin.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 370 words. Hero-Father's had enough. It's not going to be enough.

Valentine's Night spent on Darkover as written by Anne McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey. Fianna Fáil won the civil war there, and I was obliged to spend certain hours with the survivors of my platoon digging ditches Down Under, before repairing to the pub for some well-earned amber nectar.  We scored some famous victories on the Trivial Pursuit machine, but the dragons never came back for us, and Carcosa was still lost to us when Pertelote my talkative Vietnamese alarm clock woke me up to a working London morning. 

Pertelote is real and wonderful, but the rest was born of sleep and the Old Speckled Hen.

I spent much of last night in extravagant adventures with the story's protagonist Oenone - a sort of lionless Una, overflowing with fangirl squee for a ridiculously pretty, gallant, and transparent knockoff of Sir Lancelot.  Oenone could have spotted Helen of Troy a pawn, a queen, and a Primark tracksuit, and still been more attractive.  I was not Sir Lancelot.

And then I read our reviews.  The novel - which was, as I well knew, our actual adventures and not the mere telling of them - garnered somewhat mixed reactions from the critics.  It was called Theseus and Oenone.  I don't know who Theseus was, but I shouldn't be surprised if his surname turned out to be something like de la Mare.

"Unputdownable!  Unpronounceable!" - Romantic Times.

"The dragon was everything every dragon should be.  However, Lancelot du Lake is not Mary Sue's Legolas.  Lancelot is the bastard son of Muhammed Ali and a brick shithouse." - Unidentified Prestigious Fantasy Reviewer.

Philistines!  What do they know?  I was there, I tell ya!

Even if, while it was going on, I could have stood for a lot less of Mary Sue's Legolas myself.

The Popinjay: 430 words closing the Sister Scene.  Beauty has EVIL STEPSISTERS, but apparently not a flying pink pony.  I am going to have to ration the amount of quality family time these people get onstage, since I doubt I can get away with more than two or three scenes like this in a single story.  Also, I must remember not to try and drink fluids whilst channelling Bright Young Thing's conversation.

Me and my big mouth: Turns out it wasn't such a good idea to make jokes about dreaming Thomas Covenant: the Musical, after all.

Okay, it wasn't a musical.

And of course I didn't get to recruit James Stewart, and especially not Campaspe.  In fact, guess who got to play Our Blithe Hero?  Yes.  How right you are.

And the script seemed to be derived from some alternate volume of the Last Chronicles, Against Creator's Running Out of Money - the scene I was acting being an indefinitely prolonged "Thomas and Linden go to confront the evil powers at Revelstone, but first they must stock up on frozen waffles at Tesco!" slice o' not very much life. 

I and the friend who was playing Linden spent more time kvetching about the wallpaper script than we did actually rehearsing it.  And since, in the way of dreams, rehearsing it meant actually being inside the world it described...  Ah, Morpheus! Forgive!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 570 words, and the repugnant aristocrats and revolting peasants still thrashing around in what's looking ever more like a classical Prisoner's Dilemma.  Don't flunk this one, guys!

A bit of scribbling and feeling out the beginning of the next section of The Popinjay, but no words on that yet.

Last night did again access Creative Energies In My Sleep (TM).  Unfortunately, it was by way of viewing an avant-garde Dutch film called, in English, If Anything About This Made You Happy, I Will Never Make It Again.  Fortunately, I have forgotten almost everything except the title, and the fact that it conveyed the spirit of the film precisely.  Fortunately or otherwise, I've never seen an actual piece of Dutch avant-garde cinema in my life.

This ugliness left me in such a foul mood that, when I woke up, I drifted into a reverie concerning Eros and Psyche, the dream-born Gilbert and Sullivan fan-operetta on which I am in no way working, in order that I could think about something nice instead.  The third-act comedy duet between Psyche and her disciple/deputy Sacharissa still does not exist, because only through a glass darkly could I glimpse either lyrics or music; but it took an unforeseen plot-turn to the dramatic and brought a tear to my eye.  A good tear, in this case.   What thoroughly nice people they both are!  Archaizing comic opera is definitely more me than avant-garde cinema.

Also, Sacharissa is a really lovely name for somebody to have, especially if one is not that somebody.

Health problems which I shall not detail at this time, but the ocular one of which has just been provisionally dealt with by SUPER SCIENCE LASERS!, have rendered today unavailable for my day job and largely useless for writing.  I may or may not have to grab a drop-in appointment tomorrow at my GP's tomorrow to deal with the gut one, since it has had its incapacitating moments and, yea, hours this week.

Its effect on my sleep, i.e. buggering it up, continues to yield strange creative results.  For last night's dream, my subconscious suggested, "Let's put on a sequel to about half Gilbert and Sullivan's operas at once, right here in this brain!"  And once again, the upshot made enough pseudo-sense that I was obliged to scribble on waking - in this case, the rapidly-crystallizing opening number, in order to get it out of my head.

The premise, such as it is, involves Lady Psyche out of Princess Ida setting up as Headmistress of an exclusive finishing school after breaking up with her irrepressibly misbehaving lover Cyril, who comes up with a ludicrous scheme to win her back.  Characters from The Mikado, Utopia Ltd., and The Grand Duke*  appear prominently.  It had no title in the dream, but would of course necessarily be called Eros and Psyche, were I ever so lost to both sloth and shame as to actually fanfic it into existence.

In a welcome nod to normality, this dream did at least have the decency to intermingle the above with a lot of random matter involving bad bookkeeping and continual boozing within the London Green Party of yore, both of which were somehow my fault.  The politicoes were possibly also the cast, and the scintillating lady with the Cyrano-esque nose may have been either our Psyche or the director - either way, it was a merry meeting - but I doubt things were really so cogently arranged as that.

* And also G&S's still more famous opus Pride and Prejudice, but let that pass!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 270 words of circumstantial matrix for Elegant Elder Sister's Moment of Awesome, which is now fully achieved.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: About another 500 words last night, and a field of strange parley.

No new words this morning, because I dreamed that I was stuck for several days at a godforsaken station a very long way from anywhere, even Rhyl, while the train company waited for the rails to dry out in the rain. I whiled away the time by writing a bestseller, which had already been published before the blooming train arrived. It was a pastiche Victorian melodrama with every cliché turned up to 11i, and it might moderately be described as kind of racy.  Amazingly, I remembered the principal plot when I woke up, and spent my breakfast-write scribbling it down before I forgot it.

In extreme nutshell: Villain twirls moustache, swindles hero out of his estates, gets his marriage to heroine annulled by a Wile E. Coyote trick, and constantly attempts to seduce said heroine.  Heroine follows hero into poverty and disgrace.  They rescue saintly matchgirl from certain starvation on streets, and share many hardships, since neither fisticuffs and speechifying (hero) nor weeping and swooning (heroine) prove very lucrative career skills.  Also hero Respects heroine, or something, too much to touch her following annulment.

Heroine ends up accepting villain's proposal, as she comes to appreciate that not only does he Truly Love her, but also that his kinks and hers are an irresistibly good fit.  Hero marries his secret soulmate the saintly matchgirl - who talks exclusively in Dickensian homilies and Sunday school platitudes just like his own - to full angelic choir.   The very-naughty-but-super-nice comic relief characters marry each other.  Heroine and villain live in happy and harmless wickedness ever after.  Hero and matchgirl, with generous funding from villain, sail ecstatically into the sunrise to find their true vocation as missionaries to the benighted heathen.

Everybody has a considerable deal of sex, by no means all of it missionary, but a discerning public buys the book anyway because it is all artistically integral to the plot, especially that scene in the back of the flower-shop from p.134 where the spine always cracks.

I would like to finish by reporting that I am rich and get to live it up also, but in fact by the end of the dream I am still on the train and waiting for my enormous advance, and wishing I was anywhere that was anywhere, even Rhyl.

Should I somehow ever end up writing this and garnering riches beyond the dreams of avarice, I will be indebted to Librivox, Jerome K Jerome's Stage Land, and the fact that I am finding it rather hard to drop off at present.