Good lord, my subconscious has suddenly caught on to the fact that I'm all wistful about the comparative dream-lack in my recent life. Last night it presented me with the following:

1. An extremely high-speed motorbike ride to Jo'burg with my friend Michelle, racing each other on separate bikes. (I think she won).
2. My desperate attempts to photograph a medieval church which was projecting a mirage image shaped like a gigantic, glowing white elephant.
3. Hanging around with my mother and Obama in the latter's private airport. (Not aircraft, airport. Grimy, and full of middle-class families with screaming kids).
4. Some kind of military scenario aboard a battleship in which the captain was deliberately sabotaging things by flipping strategic switches on enormous switchboards. We later sank.

I am somewhat unsurprised to have woken up rather tired, and with a sore neck. Also, this mutant glowing red eye is becoming more mutant and painful by the hour. Hopefully the judicious application, to a complicated schedule imposed by the Nice Replacement Doctor (mine's on leave, the slacker), of two different sorts of eyedrops will somewhat lessen the sensation of having been plugged in the eye by a red-hot curried baseball bat.

Random Ginormous Epic Fantasy Series Month continues! And, in the Department of Multi-Volume Fantasies I Inflicted On My Hapless Masters Supervisor, Patricia McKillip! More exactly, McKillip's Riddlemaster of Hed series, which squeaks in under the wire as a Ginormous Fantasy Epic only because it was published in three slim vol.s rather than one fat one. It is, however, one of my favourites. McKillip writes dense, evocative, luminous, sometimes difficult prose which makes you both work for your meaning, and damned well enjoy it. Her world is small-scale, slightly domestic, filled with wonderful eccentrics and landscapes through which her heroes, Morgan and Radaerle, wander with a vague and slightly bloody-minded determination. The plot, world, quest all revolve around riddles, presented ritualistically, their posing and answers central to identity, destiny and history. More importantly for my bunny-hugging Masters purposes, rulers of the various realms in the story have a land-sense, a magical connection with their demesne which both underlines and permits their stewardship of it. It makes my little ecological heart go pit-a-pat.

In a nutshell: riddles, arguments, quests, travels, love stories, the cussedness of kings, bonus shapeshifters and incredibly beautiful descriptions of same, harps and harpists, storms, lost children, ruined cities, these were pearls that were his eyes. Occasional moments of blank incomprehension owing to having been socked between the eyes by an indecently good turn of phrase. Too short.