Complex Numbers

Barber-ians at the Gate

It's hard for me not to think of a certain scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail with this one.

PROMPT November 9^th

You are having a very realistic dream. In this dream, you are approaching a castle. What unusual reason do you have to be at this castle? What do you say to the two guards standing outside it to gain entrance?

And yes, I was referring to Castle Anthrax.  

You are having a very realistic dream.

I have two kinds of realistic dreams: ones where I know it's a dream, and ones where I don't. I know people have wondered whether their actual waking life is, in fact, a dream, but in my experience, if I end up asking myself, then either it's reality, or I'm about to wake into reality. While I'm in the dream, I either know it or I don't.

In other words, no, I'm not a butterfly   dreaming I'm a man. That's just silly. Zhuangzi must have scored some of the really good opium.

Still, dreams are weird.

In this dream, you are approaching a castle.

I've seen mock castles here in the US, and seen (and toured) real ones in the UK. Obviously, the latter are more impressive. There was one somewhere in the North, but I don't recall the name, that was rumored to be haunted. I had a feeling I knew exactly who started these rumors, because inside this castle, there was a sign up: "See for yourself if the castle is haunted... if you dare! Spend the night, 100 quid." I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it. Hey, British peers have to make money somehow, and telling everyone your castle is haunted is one of the better ideas I've seen.

Beats working for a living, I suppose. Haunted or not, 100 quid (at the time about $140) really isn't that steep for the experience of staying in an actual castle. (Of course it's not actually haunted; nothing is. But people can convince themselves of just about anything in the stony darkness.) I didn't do it, though; I was staying with friends.

And yet, my main experience with castles has been in the fantasy realm. D&D, mostly. I can't count the number of times a character of mine approached a castle. Usually using stealth, under cover of darkness.

That said, I can't recall ever actually dreaming about a castle. I suppose it would have some subconscious significance. Power, wealth, protection, something of that sort.

What unusual reason do you have to be at this castle?

The way my dreams usually work, it'd be something completely unrelated to what we think of as the normal uses of a castle. Let's go with "getting a haircut." If you've seen me recently, you'll recognize that this would be the kind of dream known as a "nightmare."

So in this hypothetical dream, there's a succubus bound to the castle who makes extra money by providing barber services. Hopefully, she can trim my goatee, too.

That is not a euphemism; this isn't that kind of dream.

What do you say to the two guards standing outside it to gain entrance?

So I'm approaching this dream castle to get a haircut and beard trim from the millennia-old succubus who resides therein. Again, since this is one of my dreams, I'd be going up to the guards and saying something completely unrelated to castles, haircuts, or succubi. Something like... I don't know... "The falcon cries at dawn."

Fortunately, that just happens to be the day's passphrase.

Unfortunately, the succubus ends up stealing all my vital energy. Which, in retrospect, I really should have seen coming. After all, who the hell gets a haircut from a succubus in a well-guarded British castle? I wake up just as the demon shoves my withered body out one of the castle's murder holes.

Dreams are weird. But then, so is my imagination.