Had the most amazing dream the other night. In the dream I was Willow, but more weirdly, it was as if the dream were something of her psyche instead of my own.

I was standing in a backyard with Buffy, and I was feeling the guilt of everything I'd done, all my magical sins. My power was rising in me again, manifesting in the world, which shook like an earthquake as a storm built. The wind was whipping, highly charged, and Buffy was running around looking for things to save, even though I kept screaming at her to leave, to run away. She grabbed a bird's nest from a tree to try and save the bird, but the egg inside was broken. I screamed at her that I was making the storm and she should leave, go home, but she didn't hear, and then I called her names--bitch, stupid bitch, cunt--trying to get her attention. Finally, she ran past me, ran home.

I let loose with a terrible scream and a huge storm crashed across the neighborhood--rain and wind smashing across all the houses. It was night, and I flew into the storm, and I swung from power line to power line on these long ropes, like Tarzan, cutting power all over. Sometimes I miscalculated and power zapped me with searing pain to my hands. I flew and screamed and as I did, magic spilled across the houses. People were coming out to see the storm, and may have been stupidly oblivious to the magical aspects of it.

After the storm ended, the morning after, I lay stunned in an empty house, horrified at what I'd wrought. I remembered that I'd copulated with a dog that my magic had lent brief human intelligence (he even paused to comment on artwork) and I felt sick to my stomach. I tried to hope I hadn't gone so far with anyone else--made them do things of this kind. I glanced out and saw the chaos the storm had left. I cast a spell: reverso. I glanced again, and everything had returned to a tidy facade of normal. But the people would remember what had happened, because as Giles had once said, magic may reverse spells, but the scribe in our heads keeps recording, too powerful to undo.

I magicked up a bottle of whiskey and sat and drank, and somehow found myself in a park, where families were out picknicking. I picked up a young girl, maybe fifteen, black, bare-chested, and persuaded her to take me home with her. We left in front of her nodding family, my motives crudely obvious, but obscured to them--or perhaps they approved. Hard to tell. One of us carried the bottle. We were going to get drunk and I was going to use her.

As we walked to her house, Dawn was with us. We were all going to have a debauched orgy. "Isn't she a little young?" she asked, though. We reached the girl's house, and the girl began to fumble with a key to let us in. Dawn and I stood behind her on the steps. Dawn turned to me. "Am I even real?" she asked. I rejoined with a stupid "What?" of confusion and terror. Dawn began to flicker in and out of reality and I realized then that she was all in my mind. I had conjured her as a companion to this, to try and interject some normality into what I was doing, but I'd just dragged her into the dirt with me.

Suddenly I was standing alone, without Dawn, on the porch and the girl's mother was inside, glaring out at me. The girl was tugging on her, telling her that I'd propositioned her--made some remark about finding virigins. The mother said something like, "You say you just wanted to make a call. How did you even know where the phone was? You went through the door." She appeared to my left, standing in a second door of the house, which was wide open. I said no, I hadn't opened that door. No, I hadn't made that remark to her daughter. And then her daughter said that I was a "charm" (that I had spelled her) and her mother stopped trusting the daughter's story, and the daughter stopped trusting her *own* story, and I left in relief.

I walked back to the neighborhood I had stormed. I was increasingly wracked with guilt--literally wracked--I had three sheets of paper in my hand that only I could see, with writing on them to remind me of my guilt, and I shuffled the papers, but to anyone else it would look as if my hands were shaking madly, crazily. I needed to atone, or to rid myself of magic, or something. I was mad with the aftermath, and I crept from house to house (which became room to room in, like, an apartment building), trying to see what damage I'd done.

In the first room was a strange man I didn't know, surrounded by mirrors and glassware. I felt sure I'd have broken them with the storm but they looked fine. After a while he spotted me and invited me in. He said that other people had their glass broken in the storm, but that to make up for it, they'd all been given chalk (I imagined pieces of it floating to them) and told that evolution would be explained to them. But this information struck me badly, and I just shook in denial. The man then said this had been great news, and he moved to show me a chalkboard on which he was trying to work out the translation of a new word that he'd discovered during the storm. He asked for my help, but I couldn't help him.

I ran away, and finally Giles caught me and laid me down on the ground. He knelt next to me with everyone else--Buffy, Xander, etc--and they all discussed what to do with me. They needed to cure me of my insensibility but didn't know how. When someone suggested magic, I let out a high, terrible scream and kept screaming until I woke up.

posted 10.10.2002 @ 12:20am -- right-click here to grab a link