I dreamed the battle itself vividly.  I did delete fighting with the swingset-chain, moving that to an earlier chapter where a swingset had more of a reason to be.  In the original, the mansion was my childhood home–a crackerbox house expanded by the dream to palatial proportions, and the garage turned into a warehouse-sized storage-space.  (Grandma really did store grain-goods in there, in an old, broken refrigerator which still had a tight-seal against weevil-moths.)  And in that dream, being much taller and more grown than my child-self at the time, I pulled the swing off my swingset and fought with the chain.  But I knew of no one in my waking life who looked like General Layne Aliso, though I had dreamed of her before.

The fighting in this dream came through much more vividly than in most, though perhaps I have described it less than some.  The sense of bodily memory in particular has lasted over decades; when I want to reconstruct what I did in the dream, I think into my muscles and it comes back to me.

Getting confused over which way south lies in the dream convinced me more than all the other factors combined that Deirdre had pushed herself way past her limit–hence the prior bridge-chapters to get to this point.  All other dreams show her surpassing everyone around her in her sense of direction.  And I also had a feeling, in the dream itself, of already having stretched my endurance to extremity before I even got there, of shaking constantly, of struggling to think, struggling to push my body, even as I felt exhilarated, simultaneously energized and depleted.

            At some point in the dream I developed a split awareness, some of us coming up out of The Canyon, some of us coming down over a hill that doesn't exist in waking life.  The cliffs stood in the background; in waking writing I added people coming down that way, too, since the road attacks would not have sufficed in the presence of cannons.  And the dream continues into the next chapter...