A complicated house

I've talked before about how I've got a very visual imagination. One of the reasons I can't really watch horror movies is that I have trouble sleeping for weeks afterwards. Not that I'm scared, particularly, but because the visuals lodge into my brain and give me king-fuck nightmares, the kind of thing you just don't sleep through, and don't go back to sleep after.

The nice part of this is that my regular dreams are pretty sharp, and always very layered. Last night I dreamt that I was in this house, as part of some noble family caught in an internecine squabble. Every room in the house had certain aspects, four or five, and as an individual you would be allied to some aspects and opposed by others. Moving through rooms meant negotiating with the room's aspects to gain safe passage. Objects in each of the rooms would be associated with one of the aspects.

In the middle of all this moving around and negotiating, the house had become infected with a malevolent spirit. The spirit would take over some of the aspects in a room, corrupting them. When that happened, the objects in the room that were associated with the infected aspect turned pitch-black, night black, like they had been cut out of the universe and left a hole behind that showed the dark matter of creation.

To fix it, an associate and I had to go through the courtyard in the middle of house. It was a lovely, traditional old estate garden, with hedge mazes and latticework corridors and all that. The courtyard only had two aspects; Full Moon and Crescent Moon. Unusual, because most places have twice as many aspects, and also because both aspects are so closely related. The Crescent Moon was infected, too, so it was likely that Full Moon would become infected. My associate wasn't worried about it, felt that we'd be able to travel through easily because we were strongly allied to Full Moon, but I was worried because we didn't know how the infection moved, or how quickly, or even what happened if you were in a room when all the aspects went black.

Because of its aspects, it was always night in this courtyard. What stuck in my head, when I woke up, was this image. Walking out into the garden through a set of french doors, the gravel crunching under our feet. There's a fountain in the middle of the courtyard, and hovering over the fountain are the aspects...a diamond white full moon, with a dead black crescent cut out of it. Just the beauty of that, the light and the dark, the soft twilight garden. It woke me up. I wish I could have stayed, to see where it went, but at least I have the image. And now you have it to. Enjoy.