The Fanstastic Ms. Fox

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And this is where the dream becomes lucid. Not as in "aha, I'm dreaming!" more like, "coffee would be nice but I prefer agency."

Well. This place is closed this early. Let's see what's ahead - what's in the future for sex-work?
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As I mentioned earlier, my gender in my dreams is catching up to my self-concept in waking life.

Back in the day, I'd have the odd lucid dream - a few a year. And changing my sex was one of the things that I'd try to effect. It never worked well. Always incomplete or interrupted by waking or otherwise destabilizing to the dream or me I guess. Limited. Frustrating; not in the aggravating sense, so much as in the eating-at-your-heart sense.

Then I had a dream or two wherein I was female. And different ancestries as well, I think. But I was someone else, somewhere else. Decidedly so. Still, I remember remembering them fondly.

After sorting things out and going into transition I was still almost always male.

A year or so later, the fact that I was transsexual started creeping into my dreams.

There were one or two where I was definitely transitioning, but so what? I was still female.

Most recently, after the end of the CFS thing has given my brain time to catch up, my dream-self is going to "female, full stop." Transitioning or cisgendered hasn't come up. It's nice. When this occurs, I have been a myself as a woman who gets mistaken for a man - much like real life, except that people are a lot more up-front about it (i.e. squeezing a breast without invitation), and I am more upfront about being female (by saying "uh... actually I'm a girl").

Irregular, bumpy, but progressing. Like a stock chart.

I am grateful for this change.

My blue-and-grey coveralls match the concrete walls of the prison. It's an informal jail - on an island I think, maybe a comfortable gulag? The guards watch the prisoners work and we chat amicably, but I know my work-team's foreman/jailer is corrupt, and he may have murdered a prisoner. Good thing it's the end of the shift.

Everyone is wary of the approaching ship, which smells like poor sanitation, which is roughly the moral state of the convicts within.

A newly arrived convict with a street-worn face comes across me while I sit in the loch-chamber at the end of the shift. She makes a shorp comment on my shoes' state of disrepair: the ones I used to traverse Eastern Europe in `04. I should buy a new pair at the concession, the guard tells me. Apologetically she adds that 'you can only buy things at the concession with money you've earned through labour,' which isn't very much, but I have a handle on it, possibly through being a cigarrette king* or something.

"You're here because you're some kind of supervillain, aren't you?" a convict asks. He's right, I'd been doing the criminal empire thing and here's where I wound up, but it's not too bad: I can even keep up my old habits.

The prisoners and guards sit around a table, talking about tonight's movie. I'm awfully close to one of the guards, in more than one sense it seems, as we neck during the conversation.

Our labour requisitioned, they take us to a square in a 1920's Chinatown. A man, much like Fu Manchu in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but with a more contemporary haircut, terrorizes he city with his firework-spewing airship and acid-spraying robot spiders. They assume, that due to the nature of my sentence (i.e. for Supervillainy), I will be of some use in resolving the situation.

We hide in a bank, and I realize we can get the spiders to spray each other if we drop our fingers in between them. Situation: solved.

Out on the street again, in the sun, I realize this may be a dream but I'm enjoying it, so I try to forget this fact. A professor wants to ask me about how the spiders work, but I'm no engineer, sadly.



*someone who buys a full smoke ration, then sells it at the end of the month; often involved in other light black market prison activities,