I had a weird dream last night. Or, since I was awakened by Toop at 3am and this dream came after I fell back to sleep, I guess it was this morning.

Actually I had two, but I don’t remember much about the first. Something about dreameling, as a matter of fact. He’d moved into the top floor of my childhood home back in Fremantle, and converted it into some sort of studio apartment. It was quite neat actually (well, it’s dreameling so of course it was neat … but what I mean was, it was cool to see). Not sure what that was about. Separation anxiety about my boy Aaronthepatriot turning to him for conversation while I’m out of the loop, probably.

Anyway, in the second dream there was a big crowd of people, divided into several sections. One section was really just a big mass of folks, another was a big mass of spectatory-type standing-around people, and these were separated by a guarded fence. I entered this second crowd by way of an admittance gate, and then found that there was a third crowd, a sort of disorganised line leading through the fence and into the first crowd. So, never one to ask “why the line”, I lined up.

Turned out the line was actually a bunch of prisoners of war or internment camp victims of some kind, and they were being returned to their people after some peace treaty or other. The first crowd were representative of said people. Russians, unless I’m much mistaken. They were cheering and crying as we came stumbling through the barrier and paraded through them, headed.somewhere.

Yes, for some unfathomable reason I’d decided to stay with the line (probably because I’d waited in it for like twenty minutes already, damnit), and pretend to be a Russian expatriate headed home after a long exile. Nobody could hear anyone talking, and all the exiles were wearing mismatched charity clothes so I didn’t exactly stand out.

Plus, the returning exiles were getting gifts. They were pretty crappy, wooden puzzle-things for the most part, but a prezzie’s a prezzie. And when our little parade reached its goal (some embassy or other), there was more: the old belongings of the exiles, held onto by families and ready to hand back when the time came. It had obviously been some twenty years, so kids were now returning as adults – it had a bit of a ‘stolen generation’ vibe – and family members left behind weren’t necessarily around anymore, but the embassy had held onto the junk.

And it was mostly junk. I know, because I went through it. I’m just a bad person.

Eventually, though, I found a weird heirloom: it was a handwritten manuscript, by a little Russian boy whose nickname had apparently been “Chuck”, which was odd enough for a Russian – and a freaky-enough coincidence – that I felt obliged to claim that this long-lost kid was me. “Chuck”, it seemed, had been quite the writer.

The manuscript – and from here I fell into a second dream, about the story (although I woke up shortly thereafter and didn’t get the whole tale in any detail, and it was scrawled by a nine-year-old in any case) – was about a vampire apocalypse in some non-Earth quasi-futuristic steampunk high fantasy realm, which was a cool enough idea that I may have to use it for reals.

Sorry about that, Chuck. Hope you get home one day.