It's official: I can't stop doing this! I have no desire whatsoever to have new story ideas at this time. I want to get on with the lesbian western, finish the research and get into that comfortable chapter-a-day groove of creation. And I still have plenty of old ideas to put up at the garage sale. Last night before going to bed I briefly considered which one I should blog about today; and what do I do? Dream a trilogy!
It could be three books, three movies, three graphic novels, or a three-season television show with a high rate of character turnover. I'm not sure how it broke itself down into three distinct parts (I don't think I woke up in between them) or how it relates to the other dream content I recall, and the details have blurred under the onrush of necessary Sunday chores, but the rough outline is clear enough.
Part 1: A woman with supernatural powers is pursued by a group with similar powers. She fears them, is hostile to them; but she also fears her powers and what she might do to people with them. I don't think she was a vampire, but an authoritative middle-aged Suit in the pursuing group was; he had none of the sadomasochistic sex appeal of the modern literary vampire. (Hmmm...neither did the last vampire I dreamed and blogged about. This guy wasn't played by Patrick Stewart, though - he had hair.) When, after numerous action-packed adventures in which she manages to keep her moral compass, she is finally taken, she learns that she had gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick about her pursuers. They are an agency whose job is to locate, evaluate, and recruit or restrain people with oddball powers. They have access to trainers, researchers, therapists, and other helpful resources. Since she has chosen the moral high ground time after time, she is offered an education and a job.
Part 2: After some lapse of time, the protagonist of Part 1 is leading her own team to contain an active threat, someone who has gone rogue from the agency. It wasn't clear to me why a more experienced leader didn't have this job, and the middle-aged vampire who became her mentor does not appear. You can always think of a good excuse for this kind of thing, though. She has to step into a leadership role, form a coherent team, outsmart someone who knows all the procedures and powers to be brought against him, and fight the bureaucracy on the side.
Part 3: The protagonist of the last two episodes and the middle-aged vampire are missing, teams are reshuffled, and strange orders are coming down from on high. The second-in-command from Part 2 (who resembles me; I was less of a spectator and more of a POV character in this part of the dream than in the first two) is not supposed to look for her, but of course does so anyway. Lethal force is authorized more than it used to be, team leaders are given much less autonomy in the field, narcs are planted in the teams, and supernatural people who in the past would have been recruited or considered so inconsequential as to require only casual monitoring are being confined. Solving the mystery of the disappearances also reveals a shift in the policies of the agency. It's warping from an agency that serves and protects to one that controls. The vampire leads some of the characters in going underground, while the protagonist determines to work within the organization to turn it away from the disastrous path it's on.
Obviously, this was setting up Part 4, but I woke up. The concept doesn't suck, but my husband reads this sort of thing a lot more than I do, and all the characters were adults. Besides which, I've already got a book to work on. Maybe it'll simmer and turn into something, but I doubt it. Certainly, I could have dozens of dreams containing story concepts as good or better by the time I felt able to focus on it.
All you have to do is prime the pump a bit. Once you have the habit, you have it, and can't turn it off.
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