I revamped the entire dream diary experience + added visuals to one dream (27-10-2025) + one new dream about returning to an old home that never existed

two strange, lore-heavy dreams

i kept putting off updating this, because I've been writing so much and i just keep having to paraphrase reviews I've already written (sigh... self-imposed yet wouldn't change it for the world etc) . reading the carnivorous lamb now.

dream that started fun and then turned into a fucked up nightmare near the end. what the hell

also i did NOT read pale fire because of reading my dark vanessa just before it. that was INCIDENTAL

I simply must know, how did you fare reading Kinbote's commentary?

@ashavedbear I thought it was SO funny. took me a bit to get through of course but I loved how he managed to turn everything back to his own story. It was really fun to read but I feel like in real life he'd probably be a pretty annoying person to talk to lol. kind of reminds me of how if you're really into something suddenly everything you see/listen to seems to have some relation to that thing

....which is also probably how, embarassingly, kinbote and shade kind of reminded me of liam and noel gallagher respectively, what with liam claiming all songs noel wrote were always about him, and all.

I wouldn't consider it embarrasing, or otherwise odd, humans are very referential, and pattern-seeking, by nature. When I was reading the commentaries I ended up skipping large swaths of the Zembla ramblings. I was very interested to read more on events and such surrounding the poem, and interested in Zembla as it relates to Kinbote - but not enough to read such an excessively intricate account. I don't think there's

... been another work where I've skipped such large sections. Which is interesting in contrast to the poem wherein I'd reread sections frequently.

hmmm I don't know, I think there's merit to the zembla bits especially if you read it as (and this is an option that might not be the most 'accepted' one but it is fun) being about being gay. the Charles from the Zembla bits is quite openly gay or at least into men, and near the end Kinbote tells Shade that he has a secret to tell him to which Shade replies he's pretty sure he already knows the secret. What if

... Shade thought that the secret Kinbote was going to tell him that he was gay? What if the Zembla story was indeed a fiction, but one Kinbote genuinely believed in, to soften the blow of his own homosexuality, something he found difficult to come to terms with? I don't know, I just think it's kind of compelling.

I could see that. Though, I skipped/skimmed the [later] Zembla sections because they were unavoidably, dreadfully, uninteresting to my sensibilities.

... Which is to say that my reason for skipping was not due to lack of merit, but of the way it was written.

yaya I get what you mean. I'm one of those people who feels like I "cheated" when I don't fully read a book I'm afraid >_< but it was fun in this case. And since my friend recommended it to me I really wanted to like it too, for his sake. so I'm glad I did :)

Indeed, that is much better justification to have read it than my own (it's referenced in Blade Runner 2049, which is how I learned of it at all). It felt like I was cheating at the time, but I was faced with either cheating or getting none of the parts that interested me. I should probably give it a proper reading eventually