(no subject)

My dreams for the past few nights have been quasi-nightmares where disaster threatens but never actually arrives. What makes tonight different was that I brought my coping mechanism in to save the day. Well, night. I was trying to defend my friends from a malevolent entity haunting a mazelike mansion or hotel. The problem was, I couldn't see it, so I ended up creeping through the rooms playing a metaphysical game of "hot or cold" with the overwhelming sense of dread that accompanied its presence. At some point I noticed the hotel's cat - a long-haired calico I've never encountered awake - hissing at something I couldn't see, so I picked it up and used it as my ghost-detector. This all came to a head with me cornered in a dark bedroom with a snarling, terrified cat in my arms and an angry spirit ready to tear me to shreds. And then I knit myself up a shield of light. Don't ask me what the yarn was made of, or where I got the needles, but I surrounded myself with a shimmery gold-rose-peach veil that the entity couldn't touch. It took concentration to maintain its existence, and I knew that my protection would disappear as soon as I faltered, so the dream turned into a struggle to keep the shield in existence while the entity attacked its boundaries. The whole mess was terrifying and deadly serious while I was in the dream, but kind of hilarious once I woke up and realized that I actually used knitting to protect myself. Considering that nowadays whenever I get too stressed about the multitude of obligations I have to fulfill and the uncertainty surrounding my future I start absently thinking about what's on the needles and planning future projects, it was interesting to see it show up to serve as a more literal shield in my dreams.

Of course then I switched to become a crewmember on a tiny spaceship running from the Big Bad Government. And they had boarded us and were going to take what they needed and then shut off our life support, leaving the crew to die horribly in the vacuum of space. I think that we had managed to contact a new race - they might have been AI, or possibly plants, but all I get when I try to remember them is an image of a fractal - and/or information on a new type of weapon, but either way the BBG wanted it and didn't want anybody else to know that they had it. Hence our planned horrible death. Only this being a dream, they just let the crew run around on the ship while they took what they needed and programed our ship to kill us, so we were all trying to find a way to stop them. Which was still pretty nightmarish, what with the looming threat of death, but at least I could see the people who wanted to kill me and be proactive about preventing it.