Carabas

Transitioning from a scene where I'd been holding a sword, thinking about the danger of carrying a sword without a sheath, fully aware this wasn't about literal swords.

Three siblings meet on a road after a long time apart. One of the brothers is wearing armor and leading a small group of people fighting for some cause in his name; there's less than a hundred of them. The other brother and sister have just appeared hovering in the air, having traveled a vast distance in moments. The brother, I think of as a young version of myself; he's dressed in black, and says nothing throughout the scene, and there's a bloody vertical line over his heart, which I associate both with the heartless motif and with the sword in the previous scene. The sister is dressed in vibrant green, and I think of her as a witch. I'm thinking how much they've all changed since the last time they saw each other.

The brother with the small army asks his sister if he could move like they do. She says he could, but he'd have to start wearing higher collars. It's a reference to the scar over the other brother's heart, who looks uncomfortable at the mention; the implication of her words is that this isn't something to enter into casually.

I'm looking at the army traveling with him, and thinking about how much they've changed as well; I remember them with paint on their faces, thinking of them then as closer to a family rather than a lord and his followers, and I'm thinking that they've lost their identity, changing to suit the land they're traveling through. I'm thinking they were better off before they took up this cause.

A woman is standing in my home - I'm not physically present at the moment - and looking into a mirror that's showing her various visions. Currently it's showing her the man she loves with a very beautiful young servant standing underneath a tree, carrying out an affair. This isn't a surprise - she was already aware of it.

The scene in the mirror changes, showing her an image of herself in a shop. There's no sound but the shop owner seems to be repeatedly asking her something that she refuses to respond to. When he approaches her, she throws out a hand to tell him to back off, but her nails brush his throat and cut it open, covering her with his blood. She looks shocked, but quickly recovers and hurries out of the shop.

This second vision reminds her of my instructions to her. She has to eat a human heart tonight if that young and beautiful body I gave her is going to become hers permanently. And regularly after that, but that's not important, that's just basic dietary needs - the important part is this first time, making a deliberate decision.

She steps through a portal back into her world, the courtyard of her own home. But as she looks around things look strange to her - most notably, the sky is covered with grey clouds that seem unnatural to her. It's as if she's seeing both her world and mine at the same time, and she wonders if this is how I see her world all the time. I'm thinking, you're getting a bit mixed up about which world is yours now.

Hellblazer, I/Constantine had been working with this teenage girl in the previous scene; now she's gone alone to a hospital to see her kid brother. He's in a ward with a lot of beds, and he's kneeling up on the end of his bed to talk to her. He's saying, "Is it possible that Grace is only after Constantine?" Grace is a surname - the Grace in question is a middle-aged man. And when the kid says Constantine, 'uncle' is implied. "Because he's not exactly a... us anymore." 'Us' meaning a person, a human being. I'd made one deal too many. Which has made it possible for me to be summoned up and controlled, used as a tool - that's what they suspect Grace is after.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After an unsuccessful night looking for blood, I have to rely on Elsa, a sort of servant. Last resort. We use transfusion tubes to draw out the blood, to avoid any unwanted side effects on her, and I alter her mind to make it pleasant for her. I compliment her on the quality, she's changed her diet since the last time we had to do this. I'm speaking German-accented English.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm climbing up a stairwell, climbing up through years. As I pass the platform that will lead to the 1990s, getting close to home, I hear voices up ahead. I come across a man and a woman leaning against the wall; the woman's saying, "No, it's 203. They changed the calendar - finally. I was starting to lose track."

Further up, another group having a conversation, talking about the cracks in the walls. A woman's saying, "They're glitching so bad a man could get in."

I reach my door, present day. But just beside my door, the cracks in the walls are so severe that they've formed a sort of second door - I think I could walk right through. The black sort of skittering motion that appears in all the cracks is more visible here. But the scene just before I entered the stairwell had involved accidentally intruding in a place where I shouldn't be, disrespectfully, and trying to make up for that. I decide against stepping through the cracks. I take the door to the present day.

I step out into what's meant to be an apartment where I live, distorted in a sort of cartoonish representation of hallucination, like you might see in an old music video; it seems to be underwater. Then my field of vision pulls back - now I'm looking at a screen containing an image of this room. It's labeled as a game preview. I'm aware that if I'd stepped through the cracks, the scene still wouldn't have lasted for much longer, since this is only a preview - but that's where the real storyline would begin.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've taken my clockwork heart out of my chest to work on it. I have a mental association with the Snow Queen. I'm in my workshop, full of various clockwork devices, and I'm carrying on a conversation with my apprentice. The image changes to show the subject of our conversation - a bird whose flight over the desert is taking it over a pair of dark horses at the moment. I'm saying, "It doesn't matter if the bird is clockwork or flesh and blood." Either way, it'll fly the same repetitive pattern every year.

This guy's telling me about his cremation plans, saying that in a distant future, they're going to be able to revive people using their ashes - or rather, something about the carbon - on a specific distant planet or star or location in space he refers to as "G" followed by a short series of maybe three numbers. Seeing that place, I'm looking at vast stairs in the air, green, made of some vaguely moss-like material. Examining it, I see that it's made up of small, incredibly thin squares stacked on top of each other. The guy talking about cremation is still talking - he's saying these can be stacked so as to seem thick or thin, and they're used here in the perfect ratio to create a true geometric stairway to heaven. ("Heaven" used here to indicate something like perfection rather than afterlife.)

I'm on a green, grassy hill with two friends and a large crowd of other people waiting for some event, standing near our car. To the right, there's a great view of mountains below us, very green. I'm looking down at a town of mostly red buildings and can make out the steeple of a church; I'm aware this is somewhere in South America. There are a few other people around here enjoying the view, but among them, there's a man beating a young boy, presumably his kid. I jump in and stop him, and as we're fighting I demand what he thinks he's doing. His wife's standing here now, among other people watching, and as an answer, the man produces some letter he'd written. It talks about not being human. The wife sympathizes with him, but I'm outraged by this response, and since I'm not human either, I take personal exception to him using that to justify his behavior. We start fighting again.

Scene transitions during the fight, focusing on the blood on my wings which had come out during the fight. Now I'm in a motel room with a girl who's helping fix the feathers. A guy, a friend, comes in then and says "You two are (something about the fight and something we're looking for). I found the (thing we were looking for)." He holds up something that looks like a map, and I get up to go look at it. The girl with me is seriously upset with this guy, related to the fight, or more specifically the way I was fighting and the way he encourages me. She tells him that the guy I'd been fighting had swallowed my heart, and she'd watched me take it back from his throat with talons - she demands of the guy with the map, "That's better?!" As she says this, I remember how it had felt, though it hadn't been part of the dream before.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Setting's a sort of fantasy version of Korea, 16th century-ish. This guy has been working for an organization that's just had some great victory, completely defeated this opponent that they've been working against for a long time. Now he's just returned to their base and is alone with their leader, a tall foreign woman with this elaborately painted face like a mask and gold ornaments in her hair. But as she's congratulating him on this great success, he becomes suspicious - something's off about her. She sees this suspicion, and attacks him.

In actuality, this isn't his leader at all. 'She' is revealed to be the man who he thought they'd just killed, using an illusion (in addition to the physical costume and makeup - the illusion itself has been dropped now, the rest remains) to impersonate the leader. The enemy complains that he went to the trouble of portraying his own defeat just so the POV character would finally let his guard down, and it still didn't work! How frustrating! It goes unsaid, but they're both aware that since the POV character isn't human, he's impossible to kill unless he lets his guard down.

Two other people burst in there, an old man and a young servant, who tell their 'leader' that the POV character - who has now disappeared from the room, and I've switched to 3rd person - has knocked out two of the guards and used some kind of gas to put everyone else to sleep. One of them says that he had just been starting to like/trust that guy. The enemy in his disguise as the leader keeps one hand raised over his mouth to prevent them from noticing his identity. They move out of the room.

In the hallway, I see the shadow of a hand with long claws reaching down from the ceiling, just above the 'leader'/enemy's head; then it retreats. It's the former POV character on the ceiling. He generally tries to behave like a human being, and killing the enemy in that way would go against that effort, tempting as it is. So he loses the claws, drops down into the now-empty hall and looks around.

Just a name: Sven Odinson.

I've got some government job in which I'm part of a team of people in suits protecting someone, and we're currently in a hospital, when I pass a room where a team of people in red uniforms, EMTs maybe, are preparing for something. Something about them catches my attention as odd, and I mention to a coworker the possibility of a disguised threat. She agrees with me.

Something about political opposition to dances in cathedrals by night.

A zombie apocalypse setting, in which someone was approaching the house I was holed up in and we nearly shot each other, wrongly assuming each other to be zombies. She tries to convince me to come with her to some camp and I agree only because I'm fairly confident about being able to escape her along the way if it seems necessary, whereas if I start a confrontation with her here and now I'm fairly confident she'll shoot me. She's traveling with someone who joins her then and gives me a checkup, and she takes a very long time to find my pulse. When she finally says "Found it," I say, "Look at that, I have a heart. That's one for the books."

A little girl saying "(something) to read hearts, death to solve the mystery." A choice between two different goals, reminding us to match the approach to the goal. This is a girl who I and the people I'm traveling with met a long time ago, and at the time she just seemed like a tragic figure, sole survivor of some massacre in which she watched the deaths of everyone else in her castle and the surrounding village. When I'm thinking about this, I see a memory of one of the people I'm traveling with standing in a pool of water with her, up to his neck in the blood and gore surrounding this girl. The journey we're on somehow involves the spirit of a certain place - either we're searching for it or it's opposing us or something - and we met this girl fairly early in that journey, but now that we've met her again, we realize she's more than she seems; the tragic figure we met originally was at least partially an act, and I strongly suspect she is that spirit.

Now she's saying, "Sure you shouldn't just make perception your goal?" That's following on the death-to-solve-the-mystery thing she said just before. One of the guys I'm traveling with says, "Sorry, our goal is to take the cat out of the box." A Schrodinger's Cat metaphor; we don't want to just find the answers for ourselves, we want to eliminate the mystery completely.