Carabas

I'm someone who's investigating a woman, and my partner and I are searching her apartment. I'm going through old chat logs on her computer. As we leave, walking down the stairwell, we talk about something I found in those logs. I'm saying to her something about "the desire to feel someone else can understand your experience, your point of view. The internet can be great for that." I'm thinking that I'm starting to understand this woman we're investigating, to know how she thinks; I can relate to her. I'm also thinking that the internet's never worked out that way for me - but then I think, feeling alone in something is a universal human experience in itself.

Connecting directly to that feeling-alone-in-something thought - we get to the bottom of the stairwell and walk out the door, and outside, we're in the ruins of an apartment building where I used to live. Everything I can see is covered in debris. We're standing in front of what used to be the indoor pool on the first floor - there's no water, there's a layer of debris at the bottom, and there's no wall or ceiling, the pool is the only recognizable part of the building left. This is a memory of where I was when my wife and daughter died. I climb down to the pool ladder, trying to recreate the moment. But I'm shorter now than I was then, the perspective's wrong. Getting the right eye level means putting my feet on a different rung of the ladder than before. It's not quite right.

Looking around, I find something in the debris. It looks like a cartridge for an old video game console; from the pictures and words on it, I get the impression it's not a game itself, but a soundtrack. My partner takes it from me and looks it over and says, yeah, if you don't know what you're doing it'll just be a soundtrack - but this contains a hidden emulator.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fantasy setting loosely based on ancient China. As a disembodied observer, I'm watching a man teleport into a large tunnel or cave, only to immediately crumble into dust. I'm thinking, whoops. Let's retry that.

Earlier, a woman showed that man a dark green and glittering substance kept in a small, rectangular, light green bottle, and explained that to use it you simply rub it over the palms of your hands and clap them together. Having seen him crumble into dust, I can tell she was tricking him, deliberately leading him to his death, but I'm also aware that this substance really is something of value - this man only asked her about it because he's seen her use it before. There's an old man listening to their conversation, and when she's left that old man catches the younger man's eye and takes the bottle himself, tucking it into his sleeve. The scene skips ahead to a moment when those two men are surrounded and need to escape in a hurry; the old man produces that bottle, rubs the contents over his hands - which causes them to look claw-like - and claps his hands together. Both men are teleported to that tunnel - this time around, the original teleporter lives, and the old man crumbles into dust.

A sort of ancient China-based fantasy setting. Someone's left an offering of a fish for me at my shrine, and I'm suspicious of it, so I only take a taste. It turns out to be fine. Now I feel regret; if I'd known it was good, I would have eaten the whole thing. From my perspective, after I tasted it, the rest turned to stone; I'm aware the humans offering it would have seen it differently.

Nearby, there's a man talking with his wife in their home late at night. He's going through a sort of existential despair, and he's sort of thinking through it out loud, talking more to himself than to his wife. Someone else appears and tells him that this existential despair is good, it's an indication that it's time for him to move on to the next stage of life, to become immortal. The man totally buys it. I'm a disembodied observer, but I still have the mindset of the character from the shrine in the previous scene, and I'm extremely irritated with that new person/creature. I think of this man and his wife as mine, and I don't appreciate others attempting to mislead and take advantage of them.

Outside - I remain in 3rd person POV and lose that shrine character's mindset. That couple's house is part of a small complex of several buildings enclosed by a wall, and elsewhere within that wall there's a woman who hunts demons, dressed like a man, chasing after a three-eyed crow, with another woman (a local, not a demon hunter) trying to keep up with her. They don't manage to catch it; it flew over the wall, and it didn't seem at all concerned about its pursuers. She's seen that crow before, the one controlling it has caused trouble for her in the past.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm traveling through a forest, and changing into a suit of chainmail. It's gleaming white, head to toe.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A fantasy China setting again. There's an elf woman dressed all in white, head to toe, and there are two men taking her over to an island in a rowboat. One of the men is young, the other is middle-aged and has been recently disgraced in some way, he's cut off his hair to reflect that. Reaching the island she wants to go to involves passing through several veil-like things in the air covering the opening between two cliffs.

When they reach the town on the other side of that passage, the older man immediately jumps out of the boat and heads off through the streets, moving quickly. As a disembodied observer, I follow him, and I'm thinking that I've seen this scene before, from the younger man's POV. (Which is probably a false memory, but there's a chance it's true - it's true that I was in the young man's POV in a scene just before the rowboat, and I can only remember very vague fragments of that scene.) I'm thinking now that last time, that man had met up with us after we'd taken care of some business, just before we left the island. I had wondered what he was doing while he was gone, but he'd refused to say, he's always very secretive - I'm pleased I'm going to be able to find out now. (Of course, as soon as I thought that, I woke up.)

3rd person. A military camp at night, raining hard, ground's mostly mud, the dogs and eagles used for running messages are having a rough time of it - at which point the dream switches to 1st person. I'm standing outside the dream, watching it, complaining to a woman with me about the use of animal messengers. "These people can create magic doorways linking one place to another, why are they still using messengers? Why do they even have supply lines?" She tries to say it's probably just shorthand, but I'm not impressed by this excuse. It annoys me that magic is only being used for flashy combat techniques and such when it could be put to so much better logistic use, it's a complete waste of manpower.

The next ASOIAF book comes out, and I skim the first few chapters and find a pleasant surprise: another Melisandre POV chapter. I settle in to read.

3rd person, following a woman who works at a newsstand that former president Bush II used to walk past every day as part of his routine, a long time ago. Now he's here with a bandage around his head, blood showing through, looking dazed. This happens twice. Both times he's found and picked up by his own security, but the woman is thinking to herself he 'looks the way he did in 2004,' meaning on the verge of death. The second time this happens he nearly walks into traffic, looking as if this isn't something he wants to do but is unable to stop himself. Unable to think straight, his mind is following an old routine.

A woman took me back to her home and left me to sleep, and now I'm hiding behind a door and watching her tend to a crying man, seeming to comfort him. In actuality, the scarf she wears around her hair is soaked in tears; this is how the witch feeds.

(Woke up with comparisons to Circe on my mind for that last one. Back to sleep.)

3rd person following a couple who meet for lunch every day, sitting at the outdoor tables of a cafe in a major city. He's a writer, and she used to read his stories during her breaks and tell him what she thought at lunch, but with this most recent book she finds she's got less and less time for it and finds herself making excuses: "I had a few moments in class, but..." He dislikes that she seems to feel obligated to read it, and tries to tell her there's no reason she should be spending all her free time on his writing, but when he says this out loud it just sounds like they're drifting apart. He gives her a peck on the cheek as they stand up from the table, and as he leaves he passes two women bending their heads together for a kiss.

I'm running some kind of transdimensional superhero team (though everyone here's wearing suits and ties, thank god, or casual clothes in Banner's case; no spandex in sight), and we've just encountered this reality's version of Superman, a version who grew up not on Earth but as the only living creature on a dead planet, raised by recordings, never understanding what had happened to everybody else.

3rd person. Kimahri's become a leader of his people, but he's having trouble. There's someone who's not considered very trustworthy, and he gave this guy a chance to prove himself, letting him broker a deal with an outsider for a very important supply. But there have been delays, and the people are beginning to worry that this guy isn't going to come through for them. They're having something like an informal town meeting, arguing about it, and the guy who brokered the deal is insisting that things will work out if they just wait.

1st person, I've struck a deal with someone whose face I never saw, only heard his voice. He sends me to sow something he designed in the cracks of the border between two countries. Greenery grows from the cracks and spreads into the neighboring countries, and it looks beautiful, peaceful, so no one will recognize it as a threat until it's too late. I see the landscape as if on a map, watching the borders shift in a chain reaction, watching control of land flip from one country to another, sending ripples through the ground under my feet, and I can hear that guy who designed all this, now telling me to watch, to learn how this works and to use it myself, but I already know how it works and all I want is to get as far away from the shifting borders as I can. When I get far enough from the conflict to get a clear look around, I can see the country I sabotaged is now completely surrounded, about to be destroyed. I head north, as far as I can get.

3rd person. Sansa Stark's come back to the north, as far north as it's possible to go before the Wall, and she's sneaking into a hidden tunnel leading to a tomb. She pays her respects and then leaves the tomb to wait in the tunnels, and one by one her brothers arrive - first Rob, then Jon Snow, then Bran (who is walking, and was never crippled in the first place). They're all glad to see each other of course, but Bran's the one they've been waiting for, the one who made a deal with the demon Cassux on behalf of their family. (Cassux - when I wrote this down it struck me that's probably a contraction of Castor and Pollux.)

Scene changes to a flashback: the recently orphaned Stark children 'captured' Tyrion (he probably could have left at any time if he'd cared to make the effort) and 'interrogated' him (nothing unpleasant, more of a casual conversation really). He's wearing a lion-fur cloak, and he's saying, "not such a bad thing, the Old Ways, not having to work so hard for everything." During a time of desperation for the Lannisters, he'd discovered the demon Cassux in his books and made a deal on his family's behalf, and because of that, everything in Westeros has changed.

(Fragments: I noted down 'veve' and 'garden party' and went back to sleep. I can't remember what either of those were about.)

3rd person, following a lady's maid in a castle. She's with her mistress, a blonde woman, very angry at the master of the house right now, a man with very long black hair and a very deep voice, and the master sends the maid away to go wait for a delivery of fabrics, from which the materials for the mistress's new wardrobe are to be chosen. The servant does as she's told, thinking of how hard it is for her mistress to adjust to her new husband and the customs of the empire, and while she waits for the delivery she weaves some threads into Scholar's Knots, a game for the mistress to unravel later, to calm her down. She makes the knots that represent the Emperors, and then, although they don't traditionally go together, she makes the knots for the Richards kings, which she thinks her mistress will appreciate. As she weaves she thinks, as a way of welcoming the mistress into the empire, welcome to your first thousand years.