Phoenix Apprentice

Part 7 begins today, the final part.
          
          I may provide halfhearted updates on my work at the Arcom for the next little while. Truth be told, I'm a little depressed. Not because of working in an archive where apparently literal magic exists, it's just that external things aren't really going my way lately. I am glad I have Oculus around, though, since I lost my cat. Even if he stays in the Arcom and is usually only around when I'm there to explore dreamscapes, he has sometimes visited me during the day shift. It's odd, because when I see him at night he seems like some mysterious entity so much more than a cat, which he is. But when he's with me during the day, he does all the normal cat things--batting at my feet to get my attention, rolling over and exposing his belly only to grab my hand with his claws when I touch it, begging for treats. It's a night and day difference--ba-dum tssss. Though he can still talk and that's what makes it different than when a normal cat annoys you. He can specifically tell me what he wants and why I should give it to him through some sort of telepathy. Well, it's good to be liked by someone, I guess, even if that someone is a cat who is just one part of an imaginary hivemind creature that metaphorically represents untold stories.

Chapter 49 is ready to post! It's the end of Part 6 and I totally forgot. So, after this, there's 7 chapters left.
          
          Life hasn't really let up for me since my last update. I'm actually not sleeping well. Which, for a job that requires you to sleep, is pretty rough. When I get stressed, I either have very vivid dreams or nothing at all, and I seem to be mostly in a nothing phase. My coworkers understand, fortunately, as does my boss. I've temporarily switched shifts so that I can organize the dreams that my coworkers have catalogued. I'm with a few people I don't see as much now, but who are also part of the dream archive. It's not like you can really get to know all your coworkers very well when you're always asleep anyway. I do feel like I should be better about making friends though.
          
          Here's hoping things turn around for the better, though. With Dark Within being nearly done I'm a little anxious for what comes next. The next book still doesn't feel done to me, even though it is. Well, maybe rereading it will help me figure out if there's anything that needs to be changed. I'm not sure yet when I'll release it, but maybe it'll be next summer. That's something to think about after Dark Within is finished, though.

Chapter 48 is ready to post.
          
          It's been a whirlwind of things in my life right now and I'm pretty depressed. I'd update more on Arcom but I'm not feeling up to it. I'll write something next week.

It's that time of the year again where time turns into a blur of confusion filled with family members, pie, long nights, and continual chaos. Nevertheless Chapter 47 is ready to post, even if I did wake up late this morning, feeling like 2 weeks have passed in 1 week.
          
          At work we have had holiday time off. Arcom recognizes all federal holidays, so I had a lot of free time on my hands this week. Well, not really. I've been cat sitting for my friend's little black kitten. I seem to be surrounded by black cats lately. Not only at work with the Muse of Forgotten Dreams, but in my everyday. There's a stray black cat my neighbors have been feeding and letting into their garage--but she clearly favors me as she's always hanging around outside my door. There was also a black cat owned by my friend's roommate who I saw when going to take care of the kitten. Then another one of my friends found a black kitten as well. The black cat distribution system must really be working full time this year.
          
          I know this post isn't really about the happenings at the Arcom, but it's just because I had so much time off this week. Curious to know why they give us so much time, I texted Antonio about it, and all they had to say was that it's difficult to keep employees at the Arcom, so the ones that stay get treated well. Not exactly the response I was expecting. I suppose it does seem rather short-staffed, though. There aren't a lot of employees, even when I looked through the employee records.
          
          Well, I suppose that's all there is to say about that. Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. I did, but ironically, didn't have much of an appetite! But it was still good. And it was good even though I'm now gluten free. Turns out going gluten free was the best thing I've  ever done, 'cause after the initial shock of suddenly changing my diet I feel a lot better and have more energy. It's great!

Chapter 46 is set to post!
          
          The dreams I've been archiving have been very vivid lately. I attribute it to the help of Oculus. Apparently, according to my coworkers, bonding with the muse helps a person access dreams more readily, since it is the muse of forgotten dreams. Some of them I'd rather forget, though. I've been to a lot of weird dreams, and I discovered the Arcom has a special dedicated section for, well ... let's just say *spicy* dreams. And it is very large.
          
          I asked Cynthia why they have that section as it doesn't actually seem to serve any purpose. But her response was that the Arcom is an archive of ALL dreams. We may be after the more coherent dreams as our primary goal, but we also archive other dreams as well. Even the most nonsensical ones. The Dream Archive is huge, too, and I seem to only have been to a fraction of it. Whereas before I struggled to find this place, now I struggle to find the main section of the Arcom where I used to work. Kind of odd, considering I go through the same entry doors to the building as I always have.
          
          Well, not much more to be said about that. It's just another oddity of this place. Until next week!

Chapter 45 is set to post tonight!
          
          My clumsy fingers almost typed 455. It would be crazy to imagine writing that many chapters in a book, though I've probably written that many over the course of my lifetime. I did a lot of writing on Tumblr and internet forums as a kid, and that didn't include chapters, so it's hard to say. You know, it's said once you've written a million words you're supposed to be a master, but I sure don't feel like it. I feel like any sort of art form the goal posts keep moving, whether because one's own personal style and preferences change, or society's. It's pretty difficult to say what makes a "good" or a "bad" artist, and you know, that's one of the things I like about the field.
          
          I'm mostly just rambling because, well, not much has been going on at work. I've learned no more than what I last wrote about, I'm just in the mode of cataloging. I have tried (and failed) to find more information about what happened to the Dromisse dreamscape, though I haven't gotten anything useful from Cynthia. My coworkers say there's something moving through dreams, but they don't know what it is--but their cats are all obviously anxious about it. Every time they encounter it in the dream they have to file a report. They've been calling it 'the Grume' and when I asked where that name came from, no one could tell me. I looked up the definition of the word and it seems to mean a 'blood clot.' Which makes some sense, because Oculus said something about 'homogenizing' which is where things clump together and blend. But it's all just happening in the dream world, so it shouldn't affect us in the waking world--I assume, anyway. Well, it affects me and my coworkers, if only that it makes cataloging dreams more difficult. But the wider population doesn't even know that dreams are sort of kind of real, so it shouldn't affect them.
          
          Anyway, until next week.

Chapter 44 is set to post, and if you need a refresher on what Sidney and Phoebe are up to, their last chapter was 39.
          
          I'm feeling a little better this week now that we've put the hour of sunlight back to the earlier morning. I used to hate fall back, and it's not the greatest, but I'm more prone to waking up early these days than I was when I was younger. Well, except last night I didn't fall asleep until what felt like 3 am, but that's because I messed up my sleeping schedule sleeping 10 hours the night before. I was just locked in this fascinating dream about ... well, I wrote it down after I woke up at work, but I don't really remember it anymore! I've been having way more vivid dreams lately though, and it's helping me catch on with archiving stuff. I'm also getting better at finding Oculus in the dreamworld when I go to sleep, and he leads me to what he wants archived. Because he's kind of actually the boss running the show here.
          
          I met some of my coworkers' cats as well. Each cat is an extension of one 'muse', the Muse of Forgotten Dreams, but they all look and behave like separate entities. Harriett and Wilford's cat looks like something of an eldritch nightmare, covered in orange eyes, and with six spindly legs. Fittingly, they've named that one 'Insect'. Antonio's has empty white eyes and is named 'Ghost'. Denise's cat looks a little like Oculus, only its entire head is a yellow eyeball and it's named, predictably, 'Eyeball'. Abdul's looks like a regular cat except sometimes its head floats off, so he named it 'Headless'. Each person who comes to work in the Dream Archive gets their own companion from the Muse of Forgotten Dreams, though I haven't met Cynthia's yet. I asked Oculus about it, but he said not even he knows about all of his parts. Like the forgotten dreams we curate, the entire muse itself is scattered and misplaced. Oculus did mention, however, that cataloguing forgotten dreams makes him feel more whole.
          
          Anyway, until next week!

Chapter 43 is up!
          
          Not really feeling like updating today. Felt rather depressed this week. Seasonal depression is here and it's kicking my butt. I've got a sun lamp but some years I just get hit harder than others. Not much to note at work anyway. I'm sort of out of training now but I still don't feel very good at my job. Oh well. It's not like it's a normal job I guess, there's bound to be a learning curve.

Chapter 42 is posted! It's one of my favorites, not going to lie.
          
          I'm back to archiving rather useless dreams at work. I walked into someone's dream about owning a large and labyrinthine apartment that also once doubled as some sort of spa service? And it was a unit above a really fancy pizza restaurant. And the apartment's previous tenants had pet mice which they kept in plastic pantry organizers, and one of the mice was particularly adept at escaping. After my dream in Dromisse, with the red sky and red X shapes in it, Cynthia advised me not to try dreaming about it again. She said I could continue posting my story as it showed the apparent history of Dromisse, but that we couldn't access the dreamscape currently.
          
          I find it a little odd and disappointing that the story I've worked so long on actually was someone else's idea. But Cynthia reassured me saying that every idea has already been thought of, and what we really do when we're making stories is taking pieces of those ideas to make something that appears new. She said that just because a work is inspired by something doesn't make it any less important, because what matters in the creative world is less the originality of one's content and more giving it one's unique voice. I suppose I've believed that for a long time, it's just odd to see it so clearly happening.
          
          Oculus gave me a bit more information about the red dream I had. Well, not much. He says a lot of things to me that don't often make sense. This time he said that the red stuff "hurts him" and that he doesn't "want to be homogenized," that "human ideas aren't supposed to be homogenized. They're supposed to be diverse." He was in the red dream with me, as he accompanies me into all the dreamscapes I go to. Usually he's just a silent observer, or he guides me to whatever he wants me to archive. I've actually met some of my other coworkers' cats, too. But I'll talk about them later as I've nearly hit character limit.

Chapter 41 will go up. It touches back on some things that happened at the end of Part 4, so if you need a refresher, I recommend going back to Chapters 29-32 and rereading or skimming.
          
          I started trying to make Dromisse my dream archive project at work this week. But, weirdly enough, I wasn't able to directly enter it while I was dreaming. When I tried, all I dreamed about was the color red, red Xs filling a red sky. Apparently this has been a problem for others of my coworkers as well. Some dreamscapes appear to be locked behind this strange ... force. We don't know what it is. No one I've talked to can give me an answer. Cynthia just gave me some paperwork to fill out about the incident and told me to keep writing Dark Within. Apparently that works just as well as a dream archive project where I actually insert myself into the dream, as it turns out, I didn't make Dromisse up myself. Cynthia told me it feels too old to have been invented by me. She explained it in that how sometimes people have ideas they don't act on, and those ideas then end up with someone else who will act on them. I've had that happen before; I made Disney's "Inside Out" way before they did, but it was just a random story from when I was a kid that got buried on my hard drive. She thinks I've actually been pulling the basics of Dark Within from the dreamscape as it was in the past but not the present. That it was someone else's idea originally, and that's why I'm able to write about it but not actually dream about it now. I don't know. I barely understand anything she says.
          
          She actually started to imply that Silvia Rie might have been a real person, but I had to leave shortly before we got too deep into that. I heard her mumbling to herself about searching census records before I left, so either that's her project for this week or mine. I hope not mine, because when I get to work I need to sleep. I'm tired by the time I arrive. Anyway, hopefully that all makes sense. More updates next week.