Personal Dreamworld

[Olga Veresk]

My personal Dreamworld would be something with melted glasses, like Sagrada Familia

Spoiler: show

[Hedge]

I gotta say, bit lame but I think mine would be not unlike Lalli's. Open birch woods, small pools but with some more open bog/moorland area as well. Small peaty streams and mossy, granite overhangs.

That's beautiful, it reminds me of the corrie at Lochnagar in the Cairngorms.

[Róisín]

You know the Cairngorms? Wonderful area. Which in turn reminds me somewhat of Callanish.

[Vafhudr]

Hmm. I think that my dreamworld would be like a lot of people's here - a place that I really enjoyed as a child. Namely, my great-aunt's cottage in northwestern Quebec.

Heavily wooded area with sandy soils - there was a sand pit just before the small road leading to the cottage, with a field full of wild raspberries and strawberries. There was a long stairway leading down to the porticoed cottage. I have always went during the hottest days of summer, so it always smelled strongly of wildgrass, flowers and a mix of pine and kerosen that always makes me think I am in the woods/or on vacation. Very mountainy region - a few of them can be seen in the immediate distance. There is an island in the middle of the lake. The lake itself is full of fish. I don't their names in english: Achigan (a very proud and fighting fish), perchaude - caught in the late afternoon. Barbotte - catfish - caught at night when they come to the shore. The brochet/pike - the patient hunter, who feels like you snag a log when he goes after your line. And then there are the old trouts, the monsters hidden in the deepest, coldest reaches of the lakes - there is a picture of my great-aunt with a fish almost as tall as her from a time where pictures were only black and white - and when they were probably the only ones around the lake. There were also chipmunks whom she fed peanuts, and raccoons came by the lake at night to feast on clams. The deck also had a small cage for crawfishes.

The house itself is a modest cottage. There is a cuckooclock from the black forest of Germany. Stain glasses of fishermen and hunters. The house smells of pine and all the covers and drapes smell of mothballs. There were rugs everywhere, as was the old fashion.

Our only contact with the outside world is a unsteady radio. The mountains break the signal. When it was really bad, it meant that a storm was approaching.

There is always something pleasant about a storm on a lake. Maybe it's the sound of water on water. The summer storms were especially violent and quite a show to watch from the portico, until we were chased inside by the rain.

I wish I could have seen it in fall and winter. She is dead now and I have not set foot there in at least a decade.

[Solokov]

Did some thinking on this (no I'm not hanging off the top of a tree to post today).

My personal dream haven would be a bit of an amalgom of my favorite places.

In the center would be a small pond/lake with tall grasses around it surrounded by ancient giant sequia trees, leading to the west from there a stream from the lake that rolls through a mixed conifer forest that ebbes off into coastal redwoods before hitting a rocky beach and a foggy pacific shore.

To the east from the lake would be a low granite ridge that leads into a desert area consisting of old lava flows, alluvial fans and a few crates like ubehebe out in death valley, and some decent cliff faces with deep columns. Wild cactus, sagebrush buckwheat manzanite and creosote brush would be predominat here.

From the south out of the lake would lead a ditch through simmilar woods to the west before opening up into sparse valley oaks and cottonwoods, before hitting a flat tilled plain, depending on the season it would have things ranging from cotton to summer sudan grass hay and winter wheat with dryland oat hay.

To the north a river leading into the lake would roll in from granite mountains, mixed conifers leading into more alpine firs before opening up into a high lake fed by glacial melt and eternal snow and ice capping the mountains.

I'll dig through all my photos and see if I can find examples from the places i'm drawing inspiration from.

[Keeper]

Mine would be a beach on Cape Cod Bay. One of the beaches that has small dunes with tall grass when you enter it, then a stretch of sand down to the water. And at low tide, I could walk into the water and see little creatures underneath and keep walking, into pools between sandbars, a mile or two out and still not have the water reach past my knees.

And since this is the dreamworld, if I kept walking out into the water, I'd eventually reach that in-between part. The sky would get darker as I walked further, and soon the water would be much deeper but it wouldn't feel much different because I'd be standing on top of it. 

[Jenny Islander]

As it happens, I have one!  It's like my hometown, but...not.  Like, one of our road-ends (I live on an island) is actually a gate with a SEAL base beyond it; if you call ahead, they'll usually let you hike along the coast, outside the inner perimeter fence.  The base stands on a broad, flat wooded area.  There is a very nice beach and a trail through the woods overlooking a series of sheltered coves full of interesting tidepools.  (I think they let people visit all the time because they're using us for stalking practice, BTW.)  But in my dreamworld, you go down that road and it turns to gravel where the gate should be, and gets narrower and bumpier, and finally dwindles into a footpath that ends on a low ridge with narrow beaches on either side.  Beyond the end of the ridge are some steep-sided little green islands.  You can see that the islands and the ridge all used to be part of one much longer peninsula.

The whole dreamworld is like that: it's shaped generally like my home, but only generally.  I've visited it so often over 35+ years that I could almost draw a map.

[JoB]

(I think they let people visit all the time because they're using us for stalking practice, BTW.)

(Announce a group of five and have three people go in one by one, then. )

[Tr]

As it happens, I have one!  It's like my hometown, but...not. 
....
The whole dreamworld is like that: it's shaped generally like my home, but only generally.  I've visited it so often over 35+ years that I could almost draw a map.

Okay, this is super cool! I remember my dreams a lot, but I don't have any sort of recurring place or haven. If I did though, it might look like this:

[Róisín]

Tr, where is that? It's very beautiful. Such lovely rocks!

I tend to have a lot of dreams that take place in the same area, a landscape into which I regularly dream myself. I do fairly ordinary things there. It's just a little different from anywhere I know in this world, but could quite possibly be somewhere here, it's just not a place I know. Not a Haven though, just a place, with people, towns, bush, animals.

If I had a Haven it would probably be somewhere with interesting topography - desert, mountains, water. And very well hidden!

[Tr]

Tr, where is that? It's very beautiful. Such lovely rocks!

Watkins Glen State Park, New York. I haven't been there in a while, but I remember being fairly awed by how lovely it was. I loved all the interesting nooks and crannies the water carved out of the rock.

[Jenny Islander]

If I had a Haven, it might be like a dream I had as a child, when I was going through a very bad time whose details are not germane to this post (plus depressing).  I dreamed that I was going down a very narrow alley of brown brick like nothing in my actual hometown.  I had to negotiate a tight corner formed by a shed/shack/booth/tent that was backed almost flush against the alley's mouth and then I was in a huge bazaar in a country in some other world.  Everybody I saw looked like somebody from the southern coast of Mesopotamia/India and nobody spoke my language, but I wasn't afraid.  I wandered among booths selling all kinds of beautiful things--scarves, bells, brass trinkets, candles, sequins, ribbons, musical instruments (I heard music), incense--and a nice lady in a sari handed me first a handful of raisins, then a juicy fig, and finally a round biscuit-white fruit.  She showed me how to crack it open.  The thin shell was inedible, but the thick creamy interior tasted almost exactly like plain cheesecake.  I was visited with a powerful feeling that I was completely safe there, that I could go anywhere without harm, but it was time for me to wake up. 

I've never been back there since, but the memory of the dream carried me through some bad days.

[pinkie]

Yaay, I made the picture work!

[Jenny Islander]

Okay, this is super cool! I remember my dreams a lot, but I don't have any sort of recurring place or haven. If I did though, it might look like this:

...good grief, it's Rivendell.

[Purple Wyrm]

So many environments appeal to me that my Haven would have to be the size of a small country to fit them all in! High, bleak moorlands and bogs like in Scotland and Iceland. Desolate coastal flats with miles of reedbeds and the cries of seabirds. Mossy green forests with rocks and waterfalls. Impossibly neat pine groves with log cabins and snowy mountains like the pictures of the earthly paradise the Jehova's Witnesses used to hand out.

I think if the Mage authorities came to me and forced me to pick just one place though, I'd go for a strongly built wooden cabin at the end of an upland finger lake, at night, with a blizzard blowing outside. Outside it's horrible, but inside it's nice and warm with a fire blazing and the wind and snow battering ineffectually against the windows. There's plenty of books, a nice warm bed and no need to get up in the morning (since there never is a morning).