I can't write. I've spent a lot of time recently at the library, staring at the screen, and I just don't have the motivation to continue my current story — a pastiche about bloggers in a post-apocalyptic society — past twelve double-spaced pages. I haven't cared about Post for almost a month now.

And yet I can't come up with a new idea that interests me either. So I'm concentrating on all my other classes and letting the 50-page deadline creep ever closer.

Right now I've got two potential sources of inspiration: either I make a bet with Ol' Layout to write something outlandish for Lawrence Literati points, or I mine my subconscious for ideas.

Ah, my dreams. I've been having the strangest dreams lately. I know that, as a general rule, other people's dreams are among the least interesting things in the world, except where they can be interpreted in interesting ways — take for example Jubb's recent dream, where he's living with the pope on the only cannibal-free island in a post-Apocalyptic world, and the pope forsakes God and starts worshiping crocodiles — but, well, I find these dreams interesting and no one's forcing you to read any of this. So so there.

In the same vein as Jubb's space pope, my dreams recently have been incredibly vivid sci-fi fantasies. I'll give you the two most memorable, for brevity's sake:

Dream 1: I'm inside a body, possibly my own, with a sidekick of some sort. I think it was either a wookiee or a robot. An alien race — which, probably because I'd spent the night exploring Graham's legendary people page with the Wayback Machine, was known as the Voerds — had constructed a base inside and we were trying to infiltrate and destroy it.

The Voerds are disgusting by the way. Like slimy flesh-toned versions of the Alien from Alien. They have huge disturbingly phallic heads for which I blame a week of Michel Foucault.

At some point my sidekick gets captured, and I'm opening all the steel doors in this prison hallway to look for him. Most of the rooms just have random Lawrentians chatting, oblivious to their imprisonment as far as I can tell.

Dream 2: I suspect that this one took place on Mars, because of all the tonal and thematic similarities to Ray Bradbury's short story "August 2002: Night Meeting." Wandering about one starry night, I end up with a group of progressively stranger companions. The second to last one is a mysterious Frenchman, who smokes a cigar with a nickel hidden inside. Somehow this protected the cigar if anyone should steal it, because they could only smoke it up to the nickel.

The last companion was a burly but nervous-looking type, more foreign-seeming than even the surrender monkey. He was a berserker, as we figured out in the next scene.

I shudder to think that my subconscious is cribbing from Dean Koontz's Seize the Night, but that's really the best explanation for my dream logic in the scene that followed: a demonic pterodactyl with a small head, beady red eyes, rectangular wings, and a very long neck and tail came from the fifth dimension and started menacing us. The berserker, apparently familiar with the beasts, somehow jumped on top of it and started attacking it.

There, that wasn't so hard. If only they weren't narrative fool's gold so that I could actually use them to write a story with. Ah yes, I know. Look at the precious "artist" with his "integrity."

Speaking of which, a bunch of us watched George Lucas' Clone Wars tonight in preparation for the midnight showing tomorrow. It wasn't as bad of movie as I'd remembered, maybe because I wasn't with a theater-full of fans who cheered at the worst [non-C3PO] parts and I knew to brace myself whenever Anakin was pitching woo.

I'm still impressed by every scene on the cloners' planet, except the one where he uses the Force to open an automatic door. Yeah, I used to do that to, but I grew out of it.

And, for whatever reason, I found myself wondering at Yoda's language, which seemed even stranger than usual. Linguist Geoffrey Pullum, required reading in my "The English Language" class, has analyzed the jedi master's syntax over at Language Log, but some of his sentences in that movie just don't make sense (i.e. "sound like Yoda in the original movies") to me. Prime example: "To the command center take me," a rare case of imperative-mood Yoda-speak; he'd be better off saying that in Standard English.

New camera tomorrow? High hopes.