7:14am February 4, 2015

Yay hypnagogia!

Wow that one was actually cool.

I closed my eyes, and had been thinking of a book I’d read, fictional, by Jane Meyerding, who I’m writing a post about right now. The book was a murder mystery and her way of dealing with all the weird social scene she saw in the seventies lesbian-feminist world.  (Which she partly entered seeking answers to why she was genderless – the answers they gave her, however, didn’t sit well with her and she left that community eventually, more confused than ever.

But anyway, I’d read her book, Everywhere House, before.  In my headcanon, the main character is autistic.  Jane says the main character is very much not like her – in fact she finds people like the main character annoying – but that she did base her off of some people she knew in real life, one of whom she’s pretty sure is on the spectrum.  So if you can stomach a story about the seventies lesbian-feminist scene and all its weirdness, with an autistic main character muddling through it while trying to solve a murder and learning distressing (but not illegal) information about the prime suspect, which she has to keep a secret in order to avoid destroying the community’s confidence in the suspect (which they’re kind of losing anyway, because… prime murder suspect).

Anyway, so I had my eyes closed, and in my head, Harriet (from Harriet the Spy, who is often headcanoned as a baby dyke) started walking down the streets that i envisioned as a map of the setting of the book.  She walked down the graffitied corridor shown on the front cover, she walke through the campus, she walks down the street towards Everywhere House, the feminist collective the main character lives in.

And aside from the fact that the backgrounds were full color and almost photorealistic, and Harriet looked like a cartoonish cardboard cutout in black and white except for her hair, it worked beautifully.  In fact, it worked beautifully because of that.  Maybe one day I’ll find a way of photoshopping elements of the two together, because I certainly can’t draw or paint realistically enough to do it justice.

I don’t normally get hypnogogic realistic images.  Mostly I get voices combined with the way a room maps itself out when you have a vision problem, plus lots of instant backstory on the characters involved.  So this was unusual, and entertaining, and app 

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