Starting with an Idea

This is how many of my books start, though sometimes these things end up as just a scene within a different story. Last night I had a dream. In this dream, magic was commonplace and we were moving a castle. You might think this entailed a good deal of work but it seems, either it didn't, or someone else was doing all the heavy lifting. Anyway, as is common with many of these dreams of mine, this one had a history, and I remembered that I'd had a previous dream on the same subject. In that one the final location was picked out for where we were going to move this castle.

During the course of last night's dream, the passage of time was marked by the seasonal transformation of a hanging plant I was tending. There were other details about the move too. At one point we were crossing or going down a large river (it had to be very large) and there was debris floating along with us, but it was passing us by. 

As the season progressed, the plant lost it's leaves, and then the moss growing on the outside of the pot fell away revealing a round black pot like you get a plant from the store. This pot was different from the 'other' such plants I had, so I transplanted it. Why I wasn't worried about these plants surviving the winter hanging in their pots, I don't know, but winter was setting in and it was time to find a place to stop for the winter.

The lord of the castle came up to me as soon as things were settled and we were discussing the inefficiency of the move. We should have been moving at least as fast as everything else floating on the river, if not faster.  I apparently was the person responsible for seeing that this didn't happen again.

Hmmm - I wonder what the next dream installment will bring.