I tend to dream a lot, so it’s hard to choose. A lot of them are cinematic in nature and fantastical. Sometimes I wonder if I should take their stories and write novellas on the ones that I find interesting.

One that stuck with me the most was about a war in a fantasy Middle Eastern country. It was about two brothers, one late teens and one in his tweens, who were child soldiers.

The younger one was blinded by shrapnel, so the older one wanted to take him to a witch doctor to heal his eyes, but that requires crossing the desert.

The desert was filled with “dragonflies” that caused sandstorms. They were a hybrid of dragons and dragonflies, and it was their wingbeats that caused the storms.

After a long journey, they don’t find the witch doctor, but a tower. Inside the tower was Death, and he was stood in front of three mirrors: the Past, Present, and Future, and asked the boys to approach a mirror to change their fates and the outcome of the war.

Then my cat licked my face until I woke up.

I suppose the wildest one was about “the Granddaughter of the Ocean”. Her grandmother was the goddess Tiamat, the primordial chaos. It involved a lot of trippy shit that involved floating in the middle of the ocean and talking to a disembodied voice.

The children of the ocean were Lovecraftian deepsea hydras that would emerge sometimes to breed with humans. A human man who disdained women got her pregnant and watched her walk into the ocean with a swollen belly, causing him to reflect on his disrespect towards her because he thought she committed suicide. He’d visit the ocean every night to grieve.

She walked back out naked months later. In her arms was a bundle of white, writhing tentacles that cried like babies, and she told him that it was his son. She asked if he could accept being its father.

He had a bit of an existential crisis about fathering a monster, but eventually agreed to try to raise it. There was a lot of hiding it from the military, who were alerted to the presence of “sea gods” in the area and were staunchly against them.

I remember he was cradling his child and hiding on a ship, trying to convince the military on the other side to leave.

Then I woke up because my cat was licking my face again.

Having your eyelids licked by sandpaper isn’t a pleasant experience.

Throw a half-eaten pizza onto the floor right next to a bin.

I passive-aggressively bitched about it loudly to my friends and he eventually picked it up and actually put it in the bin.

How you gonna walk right next to a fucking bin and then deliberately not use it.

My mum said when she had no money she lived off eggs, rice, spring onions (which you can just continuously regrow from the bulb) and dried fish.

I don’t know the nutritional facts of this meal, but it worked for her.

If you switch out the fish for chicken or something like spam or corned beef, and add onions and garlic, that’ll do me.