Mezentian Bridge

So in last night’s dream, I had recruited a group of friends to re-enact the famous game of bridge played in E.R. Eddison’s classic fantasy novel The Mezentian Gate.

The Zimiamvian fantasies of Eric Rücker Eddison deeply impressed me when I first read them, age thirteen or so.  I loved the stirring Jacobean prose, the fact that the characters were proper Medieval aristocrats rather than prim Edwardian moralists, and that there was a fair amount of absolutely deluxe sex going on.  I think these were the first fantasies I read that actually had sex in them.  (See “Edwardian moralists,” above.)

(Of course these were the days when Sprague de Camp was bowdlerizing Conan stories by taking out the lesbian bondage-and-flogging scenes.  And what’s a Conan story without a lesbian bondage-and-flogging scene?)

A friend representing King Mezentius was N, and I, as the Vicar of Rerek, was his partner at S.  Friends representing Barganax and Fiorinda were partners (of course) at E and W.

There was a good deal of trouble actually getting my friends to sit down and play bridge, since they were much more interested in hanging out with each other.  I had stacked the hands to correspond to known cards played by the characters in the novel, though the rest of the cards were distributed at random.

I tried to inject elements of roleplaying, since my Vicar of Rerek would of course rather have stabbed Mezentius in the kidneys than partnered with him, and would rather have smashed Barganax’s skull than overtrumped him.  (The Vicar’s attitude toward Fiorinda was never clear, but when all was said and done, he never meant good toward anybody.)

I don’t know what possessed my dream self to want to do this.  I like Eddison, sure, and I used to play bridge regularly, but I haven’t in decades, and wrangling a bunch of unenthusiastic but compliant friends into playing bridge with me, let alone in costume, isn’t the sort of thing I’d normally do.

And then I woke up, and I realized that there was no famous bridge game in that book, or any book by Eddison.  I, as the dream’s author, had inserted a nonexistent scene into an actual novel, and then compelled me, who was not only the author but a character in the dream, go to the trouble of trying to re-create it.

I suppose that, insofar as I am my own author, I’m allowed to order myself around, but I hope it’s to better effect than to re-create a famous hand of a card game that never existed outside of my own brain.

Or maybe I was telling myself that anything that I labor to accomplish is no more useful than to re-create a game that never existed.

Or not.

Frankly, Dr. Freud, I’m stumped.