I had the neatest dream this morning. I was Eilonwy from The Prydain Chronicles, except I was an adult and had become a very powerful magic user. I was living in a huge, beautiful castle, but I had foreseen that someone was coming to assassinate me.
My aide and I started working on a powerful potion to use in a spell that would drive the enemy away or defeat him, but there were two ingredients missing that we had to find. Time was running out, and we began to make preparations to leave the castle in search of the ingredients.
We weren’t quite ready yet when I suddenly met the assassin on a grand flight of stairs. He was tall, with black hair and either a mask or a beard, and he was wearing red and black robes. There were two others with him, similarly dressed. He started to say something to me, but before he could even finish I knew his purpose, and I took off and flew–literally–over his head and out the huge window beyond the stairs, accompanied by my aide and what little we had packed so far.
Then we were on the run.
We kept moving through the forest as fast as we could, but when night fell we took shelter in what (supposedly) used to be Taran’s home. (Taran is the protagonist of the Prydain Chronicles, and Eilonwy’s love interest. Sort of.) There was an older man there, a tough-looking farmer, who made us dinner and took care of us. I believe at this point there were other people in our party, but I’m not sure who they were. I learned from Taran’s mentor/father/whoever that Taran had married another peasant and settled down somewhere, and I was a little upset. (Simultaneously, I broke the fourth wall and thought, “What a great twist! I need to write this down!”)
We lingered as long as we dared, then headed on our way. I believed that I would be able to sense when the enemy was nearing, as he would certainly be using magic to find us, but the only thing that drove us on was my own sense of nervousness. One of my companions suggested we stop somewhere else–I think it was my old home, but Eilonwy used to live in a tower, and the place seemed to be a modest peasant home in the dream. At any rate, I refused, because the enemy would know to look there.
After a long time of scrambling through forest, we came out into a beachfront city. A modern beachfront city. There was a huge concrete bridge ahead of us, and an old man was joking, “People keep asking me how to get onto the bridge! You have to go towards the water!” (It wasn’t funny in the dream, either, but he sure seemed to think it was.)
I led my companions onto a bus that went to the river, planning on catching a boat downstream. I reasoned that if we didn’t use any more magic in our escape, the enemy would have trouble pinpointing our location. (By the way, it never occurred to me that it might be odd in the modern world for a woman with long flowing hair and white robes and magical talismans and her similarly mystical-looking companions to take public transportation. I don’t think it was even an issue.) My aide mentioned that when we used magic, we put off a sort of magic molecule (there was really cool term for it in the dream, but I forget what it was), and I told her I was aware of that and had been plucking the molecules out of the air as we went along.
So sure was I that I’d covered our tracks nicely that it was rather surprising when the enemy suddenly appeared, rocketing through the air towards the bus!
I don’t know what happened after that. It felt kind of like how I feel when I suddenly reach a point in writing a story where I have no idea how I got there or what to do next. That’s probably why the dream ended.
Still, wasn’t it awesome?