Synchronicities

BSD held Games-Club-in-Exile at his place today; only four folks showed up (Matt, John, Aaron, and myself), and Matt, John, and I had to wait in the lobby while BSD and Aaron were out doing something or other (eating, I think). We eventually got around to playing Gargon, but not Meuterer, grumble grumble. Then we watched vid files on BSD’s laptop — anime music videos and Invader Zim.

I’ve experienced three creepy bits of synchronicity so far while reading Declare:

• A thunderstorm arriving while I was reading the part about a magical thunderstorm.
• BSD’s doorman commenting that he couldn’t be in two places at once while I was reading the chapter in which a character explains his childhood ability to bilocate.
• Matt and John pulling out their issues of The Economist to read just a few lines before I got to the bit where a it’s mentioned that a spy character’s cover is a journalist who’s published in The Economist.

Tim Powers is an especially scary author to have these sorts of experiences with, since he incorporates a huge amount of real-world detail into his fantasy plots. I’m going to sleep rather than think about it any more.

Bice

I just had a dream about Neil Gaiman, only he looked like a cross between Neil and Morpheus from Sandman. In my dream, Neil rode around in a custom-built cart displaying stories to people stuck in traffic jams. The stories were hand-written on stretched canvases with sequence numbers on the top edges, and there was a frame on the side of the cart for slotting the canvases into.

He showed us (I don’t remember who the rest of “us” was, but I do remember there being more than just me) several stories, but I only remember part of one. The protagonist worked for a group that maintained certain secret things about the world. There were secret species of animals that most people weren’t supposed to know existed, like the bice, or bone mice. These were tiny, flea-sized mice that live on (or maybe in) bones. In order to keep the animals secret, the protagonist’s group invented new animals, like swans. In the story, there were no real swans — every swan you’ve ever seen was a cunning construction of bones and feathers, inside of which bice lived, swarming up and down over the bones, hidden beneath the feathers. The bice control the swan as an organized group, just like sailors controlling a ship.

That’s all I remember about the story. Anything earlier than the bice is lost in the haze of my memory, and just after that part I got distracted by noticing the physical mechanisms by which Neil’s cart operated, and missed a chunk of story. Then I got into a discussion with Neil about ways of putting these stories onto the Internet (which, in the dream, seemed much more difficult than it ought), and then I woke up.