Bice

[avram]

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.

Comments

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

This is such a wonderfully Gaimanesque dream. I love the idea of the bone mice, but Neil riding around, displaying stories to people in traffic jams is so purely a thing he might do. Thank you for sharing this.

M.

[laurel]

" 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)"

Hee! Seems fitting somehow. (Sez the girl who first talked with Neil about getting an official website online with a journal and everything in 1993. And not much came of that, you see. He only got his official site going with journal and everything in the last year or two).

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

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

I really really like that image. Yeah!