I dreamed a Xanth novel last night. This might require some background in order to be understandable to most people, I suspect – probably more background than I'm really willing to give… so perhaps you could spend some time on the topic using the wikithing if you're really interested (and who, reading this blog, is really interested?). My feeling about Piers Anthony's Xanth novels is that they're not as good as they seemed to me at the time when I read most of them, but they're not bad, either. They are good, optimistic, teenage boy nerd-lit.
OK. The dream. There was this dwarf or hobbit-looking character, who wore blue pajamas, and his special magic power was that his presence intensified the feelings of community and togetherness and the social cohesion of the people around him. A lot. But it worked very subtly, and in a way that did not make it obvious at all that his presence was the cause. Somehow I was on a quest – possibly to figure out my own magic power. All very typically Xanthian. There were weird espionage things going on, and I was peripheral to the central plot, more of an observer than a participant.
We sailed off across some sea, Dawn Treader style (see CS Lewis's Narnia series – and by the way, that's the only Narnia book I genuinely liked – and no, I've never seen any of the Narnia movies). The details of the dream have faded quickly since waking up, and so … I don't know exactly what happened. We landed on some new continent. There was a distraught princess who felt threatened by the dwarf character – perhaps she was aware of his magic power and was threatened. There was a fractious community that resembled an English hagwon that slowly became more harmonious because of the dwarf's secret magic. But then the dwarf was assissinated by a mule that had George W's face, and while the princess held the dead dwarf's hands and cried, I woke up.
Setting aside the annoying, brutalist symbolism toward the end, I'm genuinely interested in the narrative potential of the aspect regarding a "magic power" that intesnsifies communitarianism. I've long been intrigued by – and drawn to – concepts of intentional communities. I was deeply influenced by my "borderline hippy commune" childhood, no doubt. I suspect if there is a character in my real life that resembles this peculiar blue-pajama-wearing dwarf, it might be my mother – someone who sometimes seems better at creating community around herself than being in that community. I was struck by the aspect in which my role in the dream was as a spectator of community being built by others, rather than as a participant, myself. I wish I wasn't like that, but I accept that it's my natural role, maybe.