Nightmare Fandom

I was watching VHS tapes of shows that David Tennant had been in. My sister was there at first, but eventually she went to bed and I was left alone with the tapes. When I ran out of videos, I started to make up stories in my head about Tennant. I imagined if I were to run into him in an elevator, start talking, just get the chance to geek out with him. As I ruminated, I glanced out the window. Tennant stared back at me. I jumped, knocking over the remote, which accidentally turned the TV off. The Tennant through the window disappeared, and I realized he'd just been a reflection. I went back to my fantasies and eventually fell asleep.

I spent much of the next day lying about and continuing my mental movie, building a fictional friendship with an actor I'd never met. I asked my sister if she thought I was taking the fantasy too far, but she assured me that as long as I could tell real from imaginary, there wasn't anything to worry about.

Late that night, I got up from my bed to use the bathroom. As I walked down the hall, I caught a glimpse of someone standing in an open doorway. I froze. Before I could decide what to do, a passing car's high beams shined through the window, illuminating the doorway to reveal empty space. I continued to the bathroom. As the florescent lights flickered into life, I passed the mirror. For a moment, I could have sworn my reflection was replaced with someone else's. He did not look happy.

Unnerved, I did my business and hurried back to bed. I kept my eyes down while passing the doorway again, but I couldn't keep from glancing behind me before entering my room. A thin man strode down the hallway towards me. I rushed into my room, closed the door, and locked it. I took a breath, convincing myself that it was just shadows...and that the lock was secure.

"You shouldn't make up stories." I wheeled around to see David Tennant standing across from me, face grim. "They might not like the way you tell them."

Dream Engineering

I was having a fairly standard dream. Tyrion Lannister is on the run from some King's Guard jerks while his squire is disguised as a Vestal virgin, but the guards hear someone might be hiding in the virgins' ranks, so the priests line them up in short skirts so that a man with a cross literally built around his loins to prevent them from stirring or whatever is allowed to hobble past and guess if they're actually women by the sight of their legs, since no one else is allowed to see any more. Normal stuff, right?

The squire passes inspection (I think the cross guy let him pass because he took pity on him), and he sneaks off to try and find Tyrion who has become completely lost in a labyrinthine palace. Before he can find his master though, a stranger appears and pushes Tyrion through a secret door just before some guards come around the corner. This door, it turns out, leads to the secret sanctum of a steam-punk order that's been hiding from the rest of Westeros for decades.

The most prominent object in their collection of doodads is what I remember best, though alas not well enough to reconstruct. Imagine a loom whose pattern is "programmable". By tying the strings that raise the  heddles to various overhead gears powered by a crank, the order of  of their activation is determined. However, instead of the heddles lifting and lowering the warp threads, they shifted plates to create a track along which an arm traveled. Attached to the arm was a feather quill. In short, it was a purely mechanical handwriting printer.

After that, I kind of ignored the rest of the stuff with Tyrion. I'm sure the stranger introduced himself or something, but I was just staring at the gorgeous machine before me. The dream then shifted into the far future where the machine had been placed into a museum, and my sister promised to let me play with it for the rest of the day if I helped her give a tour to a group of rambunctious children.

I did my duty, but did I get to spend an afternoon programming the machine as promised? No! I got to turn the crank one measly time before some emergency with swords and cultural insensitivity got in the way.