And again, that thing I don't do
Jun. 18th, 2012 06:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceIn my dream, we were walking through an unknown city to a known destination, when a Chinese temple float came by us. The novelist Kari Sperring (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
la_marquise_de_ on LJ) had a brief conversation with a couple of women as they passed, in a Mandarin I could recognise but not follow (she does this also in real life); and she told me that time to the Chinese mind was pulled out of shape by delay, whereas money was always sixteen seventeenths: sixteen in, seventeen out. Money, we agreed, was easier to understand than time.
And then, as we walked on, I realised that this way of thinking about time was exactly what I needed to map onto an alien mind for an SF story I was writing.
And then I wondered if it was appropriation, to take a dream-Chinese concept and use it in a story that didn't actually exist: which was how I knew that I was waking up, even before I heard the sound of Mac under the bed trying to hork up a hairball.
In the same dream, te le - "with knives" - was a suit of handmade downloadable armour up for auction, with such a high potential value that you had to pay (in uploadable tokens) simply for the right to view it.
la_marquise_de_ on LJ) had a brief conversation with a couple of women as they passed, in a Mandarin I could recognise but not follow (she does this also in real life); and she told me that time to the Chinese mind was pulled out of shape by delay, whereas money was always sixteen seventeenths: sixteen in, seventeen out. Money, we agreed, was easier to understand than time.And then, as we walked on, I realised that this way of thinking about time was exactly what I needed to map onto an alien mind for an SF story I was writing.
And then I wondered if it was appropriation, to take a dream-Chinese concept and use it in a story that didn't actually exist: which was how I knew that I was waking up, even before I heard the sound of Mac under the bed trying to hork up a hairball.
In the same dream, te le - "with knives" - was a suit of handmade downloadable armour up for auction, with such a high potential value that you had to pay (in uploadable tokens) simply for the right to view it.