PIANOTM'S PROFILE

Thank you. RMN is such an awesome place.

CLEAN YOUR LINT TRAP!

Since nobody has mentioned...

THX1138 starring Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasance, directed by George Lucas. Recently found a special edition copy of this on DVD

Blade Runner with Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Daryll Hannah has action elements but this is as hard core sci-fi as it gets.

Mission to Mars with Gary Sinise also fills your requirements, but I found it a bit on the dry side.

Gattaca with Ethan Hawke, Jude Law and Umma Thurman, certainly one of the most surrealistic movies I've ever seen.

District 9 was a fantastic movie.

Tron (if you don't already know this one)

12 Monkeys with Bruce Willis (but then again, I have thing for Terry Gilliam movies)

Yeah, I'm a geek.

Well, you don't do it overnight. Tolkien did it only after he had established a world in a book. After that, he began exploring that world. I've done the same thing. It's almost a paradox. You need something to base your mythopoeia on, but at the same time, you need to establish the rules that your mythology follows. In "The Garden", a fantasy I'm writing, all living things are permanently linked to their ancestral home through magic. Earth's magic is thin, overused, and spread throughout the population, but the main character, being from a different world with strong magic, isn't confined by Earth's limitations because her magic obeys the rules of her world.

You know what I suggest that really helped me? If any of your characters have a fantastic language, try developing that language. So much of language is defined by the world the speaker lives in. Even the sound of the words tells you something about the place it comes from. Try writing an English to whatever dictionary, like you see in so many fantasy novels. Actually, the appendices of Return of the King are an excellent example of a mythopoeia. The Inheritance Cycle (Eragon and those books) doesn't have as fleshed out a mythopoeia as The Lord of the Rings, but the rules of the world are pretty well laid out in the story. The Dune Chronicles, probably is the best example. It doesn't have much in the way of appendices, but the Dune Encyclopedia includes an incredible wealth of information about the history of Paul Muad'dib, the Golden Path and the Scattering based on Frank Herbert's notes that even leaves Lord of the Rings in its dust.

Note that in each case, the writer has created one or more fictional languages for his mythopoeia.

author=Corfaisus
What does it say about willingly drifting just above the sidewalks around the neighborhood close to one's house? The most pleasant dreams I have frequently focus around my ability to harness my mind to become weightless as others around me continue to walk, bound by the laws of gravity.

Or better yet; what can be made of a dream where a female character of your own creation that you also happen to be dating is going into labor (coincidentally, I had a dream some months prior of the two of us copulating (don't worry, she was on top cuz I'm a gentleman)) and you're the only one flipping shit trying to clear a path through what appears to be a school to the car while everyone else is taking their sweet time with the warmest smiles on their faces, including your beloved? And what if the supposedly pregnant woman looks the same as always (no signs of pregnancy) while they're wheeling her down the hall in a wheelchair? And then for no other reason but to be a nuisance, some nerd walks up and wants to show you some collectable card he's proud of. You reach out to grab it just as you're waking up and you find yourself trying to catch the sunlight coming in through the living room window that lays straight in front of you.

Also, I hear that birds dream about singing.

Yikes! Your dream of hovering over sidewalks is one of satisfaction and euphoria. Perhaps you're happiest at home. On a spiritual level, this can signify enlightenment.

But your pregnant imaginary girlfriend? This is the birth of an idea, from which the context of the dream suggests, one you are rather uncertain about. Why she looks the same? This is subtle and is going to depend on your own impressions. This dream suggests a bit to me in a spiritual context that you may not agree with.

Also, I hear that dogs dream of chasing rabbits, although mine probably dream of chasing cats...my cats, the cats that torment them every day of their lives.

Hang on a second, the KETCHUP dream...

author=seiromem
Now can you explain my dream of being in a world with no ground, the sky being blood red with regular clouds, and me standing in my undies on top of a metal grate-like platform with a pool of lava inside. I feel compelled to jump in the lava so I do, but it's not lava, it's actually KETCHUP and I start to become enveloped so I start to flail around crazily and wake up in my bed doing so. (I literally woke up flailing my arms and legs, was quite the ruckus that no one heard.)

Frankly, your dream is bloody. Red is the focus here. Red has its strongest associations with blood. Where red occurs in a dream, even subtly, there is a strong sense of fear, horror, and terror. In magick, blood features prominently, red wine (wine being a spirit) being substituted, whether it is used in a Pagan ritual or in the rituals of the Christian churches. This is the easy part of understanding this dream.

Ketchup: hum. Consider this. When you eat fries, do you have them as is? Probably not. If you're like most Americans, you try to make them more interesting by applying ketchup. The problem is that ketchup is so overused that it has become as mediocre and dull as the fries you are trying to liven up, so we've begun to try other other things. The French dip their fries in mayonnaise. The English smother them in malt vinegar (my personal favorite). I can certainly imagine ketchup being more like mud than water and not so easy to swim in. Again, ketchup is red.

The muck you're caught in is mediocrity, which is as dangerous as anything else. Allowing this situation to persist destroys futures, buries ideas, and stymies progress. Without more information about this dream, I'm afraid this is all I can do.