Carabas

As FK's Nicholas, I saw an image of a vase of white roses, bleeding a few trails of red blood - I believed that this was a hallucination, thinking of it as "a bit of silliness" - and then I saw a mental image of Janette lying on a white couch, looking unwell, somehow connected with those roses. Now I'm sitting on that couch, and Janette's lying on her side with her head resting against my thigh, my hand in her hair. We're talking about a particular time in the past when things had been better between the three of us. As we talk, I'm thinking about how easily I revert to this version of myself when I'm around them - without thinking, my body language, my speech patterns change automatically. It's like taking off a mask.

POV shifts to show LaCroix. He's at some kind of charity event. At the moment he's talking to a man near a buffet table, a man he knows in some professional capacity, and a moment comes when he has to either eat or make some excuse. Without hesitating, he puts some item of food in his mouth. As a disembodied observer/Nicholas, I'm incredibly jealous of his ability to do that without flinching. It would make my life so much easier if I could pretend to eat - socialization revolves almost entirely around food and drink, so just imagine how much easier it would be to blend in. After a moment, LaCroix makes a displeased face, reaches for a napkin, and removes the thing in his mouth. He makes some comment about the poor quality of the food this year compared to previous years, and the man he's talking to agrees. LaCroix's posing as a gourmet, picky about what he eats - it's his usual trick, insulting the food wherever he goes. They make a joke about not being able to trust the food in a place that has such skinny staff, and then the man LaCroix's talking to complains that this event has gone downhill in general - disappointing for such a worthy charity. LaCroix makes a comment about the decline of morality as time goes by. He manages to say this with a straight face.

(Yesterday.)

I'm a man trying to calm a situation down so that I won't wind up in a cell. It would be for a minor charge, but my situation's complicated. There's this woman I made a deal with a long time ago - I brought her to this world ('this world' is for all intents and purposes the same as IRL), and she freed me from the curse that had locked me up back in our own world. But there's a catch - if I'm locked up in a cell even for one night, that old curse will find me again, I'll be trapped again. I think of that as her 'winning' - we help each other often but I don't like her much. I'm afraid of being trapped, but I'm also afraid because if I'm trapped I won't be able to keep up the illusion that makes me look human.

(Today.)

A woman and I had been standing in the middle of a road surrounded by trees, discussing something - a car comes, the driver sees us, he swerves, he crashes. I'm irritated at the interruption, but I go over to the car so I can get a meal out of this before emergency services arrives. The scene changes abruptly - one moment I'm walking towards the car, the next moment time has passed, emergency services have already come and there's a crowd of people around. The woman and I leave and transform into a cloud of bats. In all my vampire dreams this has never happened before, and I pause to enjoy the novelty and absurdity. My perception's different. The sky is a brilliant saturated blue with something shimmering about it, and the air gives me the impression of containing new angles, like unseen tunnels.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I and a group of other people, all of us foreigners in this place, had been talking to a group of women on a small 'island' - just a heap of stones really. We're very frustrated. We're trying to get them to do something for their own good, and they're not cooperating. They end negotiations and vanish into thin air.

Still as the POV character from that last scene, I'm walking around the grounds of some large estate on a hill, with a gated entrance visible not too far away. I'm speaking to a woman all in pale gold - everything's pale gold, her robes, her hair, her skin, the mask that she wears that covers her whole face something like a welder's mask, only revealing one eye. She has her own issues with the people from that 'island' - she's saying they're against her and her plan simply because of her mental illness. She resents them.

I'm sitting on a wooden throne and talking to a man who's going through a bout of existential despair, and he's asking me about coping with vast spaces of time, with immortality - how do you do it? I find this hilariously awful - you're asking me?

There's this vampire who went through a bit of a rock star phase in the 60s. During that time he had this assistant who would occasionally arrange for the vampire to wake up with one of his groupies locked in the same room. The vampire resents this. He compares it to throwing a live, venomous snake at someone - neither the snake nor the victim has any choice in the matter, the snake is used as a tool.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

This woman, thoroughly soaked by the rain, just completely drenched, has just been put into the back seat of a car. The man who's just gotten out of the car and insisted she take it is now standing in the rain. After just a moment the woman gets out of the car again, makes this sort of exasperated sound, drapes her coat over his head to keep the rain off, and gets back in the car. The coat is thoroughly drenched so this does absolutely nothing to keep him dry, but he gets this big lopsided grin.

There's another guy standing in the rain with him, and my first impression - before the woman had gotten back out of the car - had been that the two men were enemies of some kind, but that the first guy was obliged to go along with him for something. But looking at the second guy again now, on second thought I'm thinking of him as a friend.

The scene changes to show the woman and that first guy again, parting at a rural train station sometime in the 1800s. I'm thinking about how during the scene in the rain, they hadn't remembered each other from this time. Part of immortality - it's important for them to forget every so often.

False awakening. I try to write down this past scene, and write that there were three different ways things could go for that pair in the rain. The best route for them is associated with fire.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm a man passing a large arched opening in a stone wall, and as I look at it I remember that someone had asked me to fetch something for him from down here. I hadn't intended to, but since I'm here anyway I might as well. I go inside, into an immense underground stone dome with a dirt floor. It's empty, and large enough that it's difficult to see the other walls, but I'm aware there will be a door off to the right leading to a place where things are stored. As I'm walking, I hear a voice accusing me of enjoying blood. I don't see a physical source of the voice, but I expect he'll show himself eventually. I sort of laugh at the accusation but otherwise ignore him and keep walking. The voice continues: "If you are one of the evil dogs, care to know as much as I do?"

A dream ends with my mother's death by self-inflicted head wound, in a scene comparing her to a woman who'd shot others in order to protect the family; this is followed by several false awakenings in which my IRL sisters and I realize we've all had that same dream and argue over whether to go check on her - S. was against waking her. (There was also a room behind S. that I recognized as out of place, though I rationalized it away.) In the last false awakening we finally do check on her, and the head wound turns out to have been a metaphor for a stroke she experienced in the night; I go to call 911, only to have her stop me and explain that the stroke is also a metaphor - she removed something from her mouth which had been distorting her speech and features.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm in a field looking at scarecrows tied in place with gold that shines in the sunlight. I've just been hearing a story about how they got here - they were people once. Dead now. There's a mist starting to come down from between the mountains at the far end of the field, as it always does at this time of day though I've never been here to see it before, and I'm watching it make spiraling patterns in the sky. It's very beautiful.

As Spike, I'm sitting in a classroom that Buffy's gang is using to talk about an apocalyptic threat - something involving a demon from another dimension - I'm annoyed at how blasé they are about it. I'm aware this is normal for them, but it's something that shouldn't be normal for anyone. It's as if they're not taking a warning seriously.

I'm looking after a little girl and a little boy. My IRL father's recently married their mother. At the moment we're heading for the car, and the little girl asks to stop by our parents' new house. I say sure, we can swing by and take a look if you want - it has pretty steps, doesn't it? She says that's not it, she wants to go inside. I tell them we can't do that yet. The little girl doesn't understand why not - she says the divination's already been done. I hadn't been aware of that. The results of the divination must have been bad. I see an image of something being driven into the ground outside the house with a hammer - if it's blocked by anything, if it doesn't sink completely into the ground in one blow, then it's a sign of misfortune and they'll have to clear the misfortune before anyone can enter. I see my IRL father walking away from that divination and getting into a car, and I think about the traditions associated with the place our families come from.

Transition to that place - it's a small New England town. I'm walking down main street - well, 'walking'; I think I was disembodied at this point - and I overhear snatches of conversations with words like "dreams" (a girl pointing to a phrase in her friend's book) and "luck" (a goth girl talking on her cell phone about her boss). I pass by a church where the window is covered by cardboard. People are milling around outside, just left a service, and someone's commenting on how the priest here never gives any blessings and never reads from the Bible. Someone who works for the church is insisting, offended, that the priest is not a vampire - he's just unwell.

Transition to see that priest - he's giving a speech to a group of graduating students on an overcast day. He's making a point to appear in public during the daytime, to prove that he can. It's a small graduating class, maybe thirty or so people, and they're standing around him in a circle, very casual. The priest looks like he's in his 80s or 90s, slightly hunched, and he's got Nosferatu teeth. As he's speaking, the clouds are beginning to thin - the sun will be out soon. I'm mentally trying to get the priest to notice this, but he doesn't. Eventually one of the students comments on it, and the priest finally looks up. He finishes his speech and leaves in a hurry.

There's this pair of vampires in an apartment, a young white girl and a tall black man, and today slavery has officially ended. There's celebrations in the street, fireworks. But the sense of time's a bit off - although the vampires and the apartment look like the 1800s, at some point in the conversation it's mentioned that this is 1933, and the view outside the window looks it. The girl turned him a long time ago and they've been traveling together since. It's been a good deal for both of them - since she looks like a kid, she needed someone who looks like an adult to get by in the world; and under slavery, he needed someone to pretend to belong to. Now that's over, he intends to leave. The kid was surprised by this, hadn't expected it at all - they're close, it's not just a convenient arrangement for survival, so it hadn't occurred to her that he'd want to be on his own if he could. They went straight from celebrating to fighting.

He's saying, "You don't think I prefer another kind of life for-" I'm not certain which pronoun he used then - I wrote it down as 'you', and I think he'd been talking about his concern for her at this point, but she responds as if he'd said 'myself.' She went cold and distant before answering. By another kind of life, he'd meant as opposed to vampirism, and she doesn't take that well. So after a long pause, she says, "But you've got mine."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm Howl, a version with black feathers cropping up - a patch of it at my throat at all times, and mixed in with my hair - speaking English throughout the scene, but no Welsh accent. I speak very mildly and seem distant - it's an affectation, particularly when I'm annoyed, and at the moment I'm very annoyed.

Sophie got fed up with me and left after a day or so in the castle. But now my spells have alerted me that she's back in town - just sitting there, inexplicably, not coming home. I'm seeing an image of her sitting down on a low stone wall somewhere, grumbling to herself. Since she's gone to the trouble of coming back to town, we both know she'll be back at my door eventually, she's got nowhere else to go - I'm convinced she's just refusing to come back now out of sheer stubbornness. So I spell her back, have the winds scoop her up and carry her through town, into the house, and drop her in a chair at the table. She complains about this of course, but now that I see her up close, it occurs to me that possibly she couldn't physically walk back to the house - she looks tired and sore.

I'd been in the middle of making dinner when she turned up, and I bring her a plate while she complains at me. Talking about dinner and ridiculous stubbornness, at some point I compare her to my brothers, and she looks aghast at the thought of me having brothers. Did she think I sprang from the ether? "Monstrous. How many of you are there?" I have quite a few brothers actually. Our mother's immortal, like myself - I've visited her just recently as a matter of fact. Sophie says, "You're like rats in a field."

When someone characterizes me as a monster, my habitual response is to prove them right, so I'm leaning into her from across the table in a way that's not physically humanly possible. "Our father's place is human," I say, very mildly. And in response to something else I know she'd been wondering about, I add, "And I'm a married man." I retract back to my side of the table. The point there was less a reference to my wife, who's out of the picture, and more a reference to the existence of my son, confirming that the boy whose pictures she'd been looking at earlier is my son.

(Woke up. Side note: It's been ages since I've had a Howl dream, so when I saw the HMC task of the month I'd hoped it would spark something like this. Success! Not a success at the TOTM of course - this wasn't the task, or lucid at all - but a non-lucid dream with the plot I wanted is even better.)

And a quick dream from yesterday: As Rumpelstiltskin, I'd been following someone who'd stolen something from me. I used a spell to keep the light from falling on me, and then another for shadows to hide me. Then I'd walked myself off the road and left my body hidden among the fallen leaves while the rest of me went on. Finally I tried some spell that failed - I lit up with golden light from within with the effort of it, shining through the lines in my skin, but I was unable to succeed. Giving up for now, I call Belle. She asks, "What has (some name) got on you that-" I interrupt her. "My dagger." She goes silent. It's not the thing they stole at this moment, and they don't know how to use it, but they have it; they're a threat to be taken seriously.

Visiting the McKittrick, I've been following the taxidermist - a bald man with sunken eyes, looks starved and intense - as he talks to a young blonde man with a heavy jaw who works for the hotel, very earnest type. When it's time for the final banquet, they meet up with two women in clothes from the Victorian era and accompany them down the stairs - but I come to realize their final scene won't be with everyone else at the banquet at all. The women dance down the stairs, floating from one bannister to the other. Standing with them on the bannisters, so close to the ceiling, I'm very aware of Hecate's influence on the floor just above us.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've just walked away from a room where I'd been talking to a woman. Now I'm standing in the ruins of a building, on a street where a lot of buildings have been destroyed. Nearby there's a large brown rat on top of a pile of rubble, and I have a sense of fellow feeling as I watch it. I don't really want to go out into the street - it's much too exposed - but I don't see any way around it. Once in the street, I catch sight of a woman in a white dress two or three buildings down, behind a wall of iron bars. She sees me and jumps up and down to get my attention. "Nick! It is Nicky, isn't it?" I recognize her, we're close. I (or rather my POV character here) use several different names - 'Nick' is for all intents and purposes my (POV character's) real name, but I haven't heard it for a long time, so this is something of a reunion. But I'm debating whether I want to take the time to rescue her from behind those iron bars.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've been walking around backstage at a sort of club in the 1930s or so after leaving the audience of a show on stage in the main room. Talking to various people, overhearing conversations by dancers. I'm just now leaving a smokey room where two men have fallen asleep. I've been looking for someone, a specific woman. There's a disaster or a tragedy that's about to occur here, and I have to find her first.

The show in the main room ended while I was backstage, and everyone's straggling out. In the lobby, I come across a large man I remember meeting earlier. He's putting on his coat. Near the doors, his wife and daughter are waiting for him, and he introduces them to me. I recognize the daughter as the woman I was looking for - she's just a kid. I hadn't been expecting that she'd be a kid in this era. I kneel down to introduce myself to her eye to eye, using the name "Deacon Willfire" - it's the fake name I've been using here in the past, but Deacon is similar to the name I'll be using when she meets me as an adult in the future. She's very shy here, can barely look at me, but I'm aware that meeting me here will make an impression on her, and the similar names will help that memory along when we meet in the future.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm in that kid's room, standing by an empty fireplace that's so large I could easily fit in it just by ducking a little - it's grabbing my attention. But I'm also talking to the kid, saying to her, "A 300-year-old vampire for an imaginary friend?" (I'm referring to myself. She thinks I'm imaginary.) "You're trouble for sure." I'm thinking about the way I'm meeting her at various times in her life out of sequence. From her perspective, proceeding through time in the usual linear fashion, I've wound up being someone she grows up knowing, someone who's been around for most of her life.

I'm with a group of people looking around the ruins of this small castle or fortress. I'm trying to track someone down - I don't expect her to be here, but I know she was here sometime in the past.

Switching to third person view, there's a hidden room in the ruins somewhere below us. There's a kid inside, a little boy, the son of the person I was trying to track down. He's been a kid for 170 years. The spell or curse or whatever it is that keeps him frozen in time also means he can only speak for one day in each year. He's listening to us move around over his head, and thinking about how he's saved that one day of speech so he can give us a message now.

That same boy is walking down a suburban street, and he's spotted and recognized by a young woman in a passing car. She tells the driver to pull over, and he does. Her name's Giselle, and though she's a vampire she's never killed anyone - she's been kept away from people by the man driving the car and his wife, her sort of self-appointed guardians. They feel some kind of personal responsibility for her, but they're very nervous around her. They're looking particularly nervous right now, as she gets out and talks to the kid. She's very friendly, she's delighted to see him, but without really thinking about it, when she gets close enough she bites his throat. She can't help it. As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking that she's going to wind up serving as a sort of adopted mother to the kid, and it'll work out well for both of them as far as that goes. But I'm also thinking that this is a sign that our - her, me, the kid, the kid's mother, some other people - our window of opportunity to become human is closing for this timeline. Once we've missed that opportunity, we'll inevitably wind up dying off one by one - the timeline wrapping up loose ends.

Near Dark-based, I'm enjoying watching Diamondback as this motel desk clerk tries to fight her off. She's just come around behind the counter, and she takes out her knife and stabs the desk clerk straight through the back of the hand, pinning his hand to the desk.

FMA-based, Ed's automail arm's bothering him while he's staying in a sort of underground village, and he's talking to Al. I'm briefly wondering why Al has a human body at this point in time, but then I remember that he retrieved his body very early in their journey, and then spent the rest of the time trying to retrieve something along the lines of his mind or memories or soul.

I've just entered into some wealthy household, and the lady of the house is greeting me. She uses formal greetings that trick me into responding in a way that formally declares us to be on friendly terms. By doing this, she's effectively prevented me from being able to bring up past grievances. This is very irritating. I'm thinking about how this way of manipulating words is something that she taught her husband, and it's the main thing that allowed him to make his fortune - that and the skill of building false walls that she also taught him, both things that she learned in her time working for a kind of illusionist or something similar, before she married. As I'm thinking about this I'm seeing an image of a false wall in their house which they use to spy on visitors, and then a scene of her visiting the court of a nobleman. She's raising a glass and saying "To the ruler of the land, Sho Haoon!" Calling him the ruler of the land is sort of overstating things - it's a position that's in question. She's been flattering him a great deal in order to get what she wants.

An earlier semi-lucid fragment - I'd been riding in a car someone else was driving, they took a turn much too fast and swung wildly into the next lane, and I was thinking to myself with some annoyance about how ridiculous dream driving can be sometimes.

There's two women locked up in a circular stone room with no apparent doors and a ceiling so high it can't be seen, like a well or a small tower. I get the impression they're a couple. They're both blonde, one with darker hair and wearing purple, the other with hair so light it's almost white. Hovering around the one in purple is this sort of little glowing gold ball; she's leaning towards the other one, who's unconscious, but who starts to softly glow when that glowing ball gets close to her. They're rescued by people who break through the wall - an old woman and several people I think of as Hunters who've been doing something with a fountain in the center of the room on the other side of the wall. The old woman looks at the hovering glowing ball and calls to the Hunters. "Got one more for you - two!" she adds when she sees that the unconscious woman is also glowing. As they get both the women free, the woman lifts this fancy white horn and says to the woman in purple, "It's yours." And then she quotes a riddle or poem or something similar that led them to this horn - "With the wit, the way." Wit turns out to have been a pun on wet, something to do with that fountain in the other room, and it's those two women locked up who'd figured it out.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man trapped inside something like an enormous hourglass, tied to a chair in the bottom half. It's slowly filling with this black liquid. I'm following this from the POV of a man outside the hourglass, watching. This is something like a form of brainwashing - the man in the hourglass is on the other side of some conflict, and a serious threat, and we're turning him to our side. But as a 3rd person observer, I'm aware this is going to backfire; we seriously underestimated how insane that man was to begin with, so making him loyal to us doesn't actually mean he won't still be a threat to us.

Still as that same character who'd been watching the hourglass, I leave the room and go to meet a woman I work with for lunch. But just before we start eating, someone bursts in and stops us - the food's been drugged, something connected to that man I'd left in the hourglass. We leave with that person who burst in, and as we walk he's saying, "We all talk about the war, but does anyone remember what it was about?" We don't. He explains something to do with Skins - the gold or silver markings on our skin that remind the 3rd person observer side of me a little of circuits. Mine are gold, the woman I'm working with has silver; in earlier times, we'd have been on opposite sides of the war. We find this an uncomfortable concept.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm a young man walking around our castle at night with a girl from a visiting family. We're supposed to get married sometime in the next year or so if negotiations keep going well. Neither of us are supposed to be out of bed right now, but we both were sneaking around on our own and happened to meet up. Right now we're hiding behind a door, watching the leaders of our families talking in the next room. I'm thinking that the colors they're wearing make them both look like they're part of the same family; my family's colors are red, gold and black, but right now our patriarch's only wearing black, except for the sword pin at his throat, which I think of as "hardly red at all" - a dark red, nearly black.

There are two women sneaking around a castle at night. They'd been intending to escape and then come back when the vampires are asleep and destroy them, but they've just now realized that the vampires never sleep; and on top of that, they've just realized that one of the vampire women here is the exact same woman written about in Quincey's journal. Reading this journal is the thing that made them realize their hosts were some kind of monsters - they don't know very much about vampires at all except what they've read in this journal. So it's a shock to discover that the women in this castle don't age or die, and the idea that the monster in Quincey's journal still exists makes them feel like they can't win. At some point Ephesia is mentioned, a woman's name, though I can't remember whose. One of them suggests giving up on their plan, since it seems hopeless, and tries to convince herself that becoming one of them wouldn't be so bad.

I walk into a room where I have to complete some challenge, a kind of game. I have a vague sense of danger, it's not quite a nightmare but it feels similar, as if it has the potential to become one. I'm semi-lucid, in that stage where I'm aware that I'm dreaming and can easily control my surroundings, but still following the dream storyline. Small rings of light form around my wrists - at first I'm not sure what this is, then I think of it as both something that this room provides for the challenge, and something that I summoned myself. I decide that the user has to make the light take a solid form before it can serve its function. Focusing on it, the light condenses into a metal cuff around my right wrist; the left one fails, it remains light. Looking at the right cuff, I decide it represents a kind of shield, a personal force field. I focus on the left one again, without looking at it this time, trying to make it condense into the other cuff, and I decide that it's worked, though I don't want to risk looking down to check; I can now feel the shield working in the air just around me. I move further into the room and start the game, which involves running a course and using the shield to deflect small projectiles. A woman's voice keeps score. At the first curve in the course, everything goes black.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Due to a conflict with someone else, an immortal has been forced to enter another immortal's territory. Although they appear to be different species - the one the territory belongs to is a sphinx, the other one looks like a human man - they're still similar enough to require separate territories, so this has led to a confrontation, although on the surface it looks like a casual conversation. It's night. The one that looks like a man is saying something about how anyway, this isn't the same city he agreed to stay away from - it's partially joking (the city's changed names in the years since that agreement), but it's also partially serious, grasping at straws, looking for an out. The sphinx has no particular ill will towards him, and understands his situation, but nonetheless can't permit him to stay here.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A vampire guy's in a subway car, picking out a meal. There's a small group of others with him, people he'd turned, but he's the only one doing the hunting. One of the others, recently turned, is impatient with him. Finally she says to him, come on, let's just take the whole car, let loose once in a while, please? The other vamps are a little annoyed with her - they're impatient too, but she's being childish - but he's considering it. I'm in first person now, though I'd started out in 3rd and I have no sense of when I switched; as one of the other vamps, I look around at the number of people in this car. There's a lot of them; the car's not full, but there's enough that they outnumber us. I'm thinking about crowd control. I notice a couple of them looking this way, starting to pay attention to the conversation between our leader and the new girl. Without saying anything, I get up and move to stand by the door to the next car, to block the exit. I look through the window into the next car, and consider the number of people in that car, too.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man I think of as a legendary king riding on the back of some enormous reptile through a completely black space. He's not human, at least not anymore, and this isn't a physical space; he's something that is sometimes summoned into the physical world. The creature he's riding is covered in trunks and carpets and cages piled so high that I think of it as a moving mountain; I can't tell how much is luggage and how much is the body of the creature itself, but the whole thing is maybe four times the height of the man riding it, who is sitting cross-legged just behind the creature's head, front and center. At the very back of the creature, the king's servant is opening the top of one of the cages. It contains a small and unhappy creature that they've just captured, something very rare; the top of it opens up like a flower and contains a kind of liquid, which contains some 'essence' that the king is after.

There's three people riding a motorboat through a river in a jungle. They stop when they pass a man standing waist-deep in the river, working at something, and one of the guys in the boat talks with him about a foreign researcher who's made some big discovery that's driving up prices in the area. The guy standing in the river is saying that pretty soon they're all going to be out of a job. The guy in the motorboat says it wouldn't be the first time they've had to live out of tents; they'll survive.

My IRL sisters are visiting me and we've been bickering as we walk to the door of my IRL house. There's a dead girl standing in the driveway, staring at the door, and - sarcastically, it's related to what we were bickering about - I say to her something along the lines of "Well? Are you coming in, too?" This is said more for my sisters' benefit than for the dead girl; she doesn't seem to react.

Inside, I get online and read a news article. The powerful old guard of some country have been giving themselves promotions. One man is referred to by the titles Ulmo (name taken from Tolkien, but at the time I believed it was a reference to some eastern European mythology) and Eleusis, and a rank which translates to Old Knight. The Ulmo of myth is (in this dream) associated with beginnings and the dawn, and that was symbolic for this man's political duties, but as these people have given themselves promotions those myth-derived titles have become more literal - he can now literally control dawn, and other forms of time related to the beginnings of things.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a caterpillar in my IRL house. I pick it up, and although it keeps wriggling away, I eventually manage to take it outside. When I put it down in the grass, it immediately tries to get back inside, and I realize there's a beetle out there it's trying to get away from. The beetle tells me that this is the spirit of a dead girl. It tells me a story about this girl and a hockey player who's also now dead, and about two guys who took a deal not to talk about something that happened between two hockey players and two girls. I see the hockey player and the dead girl on a train, and she's staring blankly into space with these wide, round eyes.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm watching an extended version of Near Dark with various extras. The one I'm watching seems to be an interview, but with the characters themselves, not the cast/crew. The family's standing around a Cadillac convertible, and Caleb's talking to someone about how he first joined the family, a long time ago. He'd been driving with a woman, she'd been drunk, when the family found them she hadn't realized the danger they were in. He talks about Mae, and then he holds up her hand and says "and lucky me - no ring." He laughs. Jesse looks a little disgusted by the way Caleb talks about Mae, but he laughs too. Caleb's wearing a belt buckle shaped like the head of a snake with fangs bared.

I decide to go back to the main menu. This isn't just for Near Dark, but for a wide variety of movies, and one displays a picture of John Constantine with a title that references immortality and love and/or betrayal. The menu images are constantly shifting, and he slips off the screen. There are at least two layers of the image, and I think of those layers as somehow acting as mirrors, both of the viewer and of each other. By changing the angle I'm standing at, I get Constantine back in view.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Someone's telling a story. The listener asks, "Was it the wrath of heaven?" The storyteller shakes her head. "It was the wrath of the humans." Following someone's advice led to some captured human surviving and leaving the fortress where the storyteller lived, an isolated building in the center of a vast field stretching to the horizon, the only landmark I can see. He returned with many soldiers. As a disembodied observer standing on the top of that fortress, I can hear the soldiers shouting to each other. They're speaking Korean, I don't understand them.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A setting based on a fantasy version of ancient China. An elegantly dressed woman is telling a terrified human man to "call me elder sister." He frantically agrees, although he nearly calls her something more along the lines of 'mistress' as he does so; he's thinking about her connection to his master. She releases him and walks off, through a fence, passing through the solid object like it's not there. Looking at this, the man says or thinks "What a way for owls to fly around at night."

A similar fantasy China setting. There's a man leading a human woman around a palace, talking about truth and the inability to lie. "Like this," the woman says, holding up the candle she was given by the woman who rules this place. It has words carved into it, which she believes promises her safe passage in some fashion. He laughs, and says that's a careful bit of phrasing, which causes her to look concerned. He reads it out, and it says something along the lines of "The human will want/feel no hunger." He points out that this statement will be true even if she stays here forever - she won't want food, she won't feel hunger. But actually eating solid food that will sustain her life, or returning to her own world to do so - that's a different subject entirely, and it's not covered by the carefully-phrased promise on the candle.

In a modern setting, I'm staying somewhere for the night with a small group of other people. Other groups are here as well, and there's concerns about space, so when I finally see the room we've been given I'm surprised by how big it is. There aren't many beds, but there's a lot of floor space, there should be no problem. We all sort out spaces for our bedrolls, and some of us go over the movies we have between us. I wonder if I can convince the others to put on Near Dark. The floor's becoming crowded, and I just manage to find a space for my backpack; on top of the backpack I place a stuffed animal shaped like a dog, which I'm aware contains a guardian dog spirit who protected me from the ghost of a dead girl earlier tonight.

As Louis, I'm standing next to Lestat and looking down into the hold of a ship. It seems very dark, and I'm remembering a previous incident where he left me trapped somewhere. I tell him, "I've learned," and we're not going to go through that again. He acts exasperated, like I'm being ridiculous, and of course he wouldn't do that to me again, that was centuries ago, don't be so paranoid.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After trouble trying to talk to my IRL father on the phone - I couldn't hear him clearly, but I also couldn't make the phone disconnect - I'm now meeting him at some event. I'm trying to save four or five seats, but that causes trouble with the people next to me; I get the seats I wanted, but the group of teenage guys sitting next to us are annoyed with me now. The one right next to me puts his feet up on the row of seats in front of us at an angle, crowding into my space, until he's practically in my lap. I call him a gay slur, then immediately wonder why I said that; meanwhile, he backs off and looks hurt. One of the other guys with him starts getting into my face, and at one point he suggests that maybe everyone here is dead - "I'm dead, you're dead, we're all dead," in a sing-song tone. I say to him, sure. Land of the dead, dreams, Underhill, it's all the same thing. Everyone around me has a rather unpleasant look on their face after that, and I think it's because I mentioned that this is a dream; then I think that this only happened because I picked up that expectation from other lucid dreamers. In any case, I get up and walk out of the room into the hall.

Thinking about that Underhill reference, I think it's important that I find elves - they're much preferable to the people who think they're dead - and I look for a door, but this building is built on an open sort of plan, with rooms opening onto each other at strange angles, not easy for me to control. I eventually come around to the back of the building and walk out a door, trying to use the door as a portal and thinking about elves, but feeling like I had only limited success. The door opens onto a stable, and there's a car parked here, and a woman in a ballgown getting into the car with a man who's wearing a uniform indicating he works here. On a closer look, he looks rather elfish. I think about hitching a ride.

Bit of a fragmented memory after that - I don't wind up getting into the car, but me and that guy walked out of that stable and into the woods, where we had some encounter with someone else. False awakening after that: waking up in an unfamiliar bedroom, I get my journal out of my backpack beside the bed and start writing down a dream about a (nonexistent) vampire movie involving that woman in the ballgown; as I was writing I believed it to be based on a real movie.

Various non-lucid scenes: two immortals discussing faith and religion while rummaging around one's kitchen; the owner of the kitchen and her mother are both christian, and I'm surprised and intrigued since I hadn't found that to be very compatible with physical immortality. Rose and Martha meeting all the past incarnations of the Doctor in the TARDIS. There's some fantastical mystery involving spirits, and I was tasked with demonstrating the rational, physical origins of the events - the drama with the spirits is still considered real, but as a sort of reflection of the physical world, not actually physically present there - however, now that I believe it's all been solved and wrapped up, I'm asked a series of questions that force me to go through and reevaluate all my conclusions, suggesting there may be another answer. IWTV references, thinking about Lestat's life-has-no-more-meaning-what-if-i-could-give-you-a-new-life speech, resulting in a bit of an IWTV-themed power trip. That ended in an unpleasant party, which I left and returned to my IRL home.

In my home, looking out the window I've noticed various construction or roadwork or similar workers out in the street, and one of them's walking up the driveway. I move away from the windows since I need to go put some proper clothes on, but before I can do anything more than that I hear two of them inside the house, just in the next room. I'm aware that when I deliberately moved away from the windows, they'd mistakenly believed there was no one home and came inside. So I step into sight now and ask them wtf. They're surprised to see someone home. They talk briefly to each other. One of them says, "He's not going to forget. How do you want to do this?" After that, the two of them raise tools as if they're weapons - one of them's holding a hammer, the other a mallet - and although I'm aware this is a dream (I'm thinking as if I knew it all along but felt no need to act on that knowledge before now), I have difficulty defeating them or removing them. In that case, I decide to summon up something to remove them for me - I think of a dragon. One doesn't appear, but instead, as a direct result of that thought, I have a feeling that I think of as "a part of me that hasn't been fed," and with a voice much deeper than my own I say "Get the fuck out of my home," after which I see fire. Then I'm looking at the fire from a distance - I'm somewhere outside, and neither the burning cottage I'm looking at nor the scenery has any resemblance to my IRL home, I've completely changed scenes. Despite this, I believe that I've succeeded in removing those two from the house and feel satisfied.

False awakening. I'm in a bed - not one I'm familiar with IRL, though I believed it was in a relative's house - and I reach for my dream journal. I can't find an empty page to write in, and I realize this is an old journal, one I'd already filled up. A few pages have been torn out.

A scene ended with me getting into a car and driving away. While I'm driving, however, something goes wrong, I keep weaving into the other lane, and I wind up getting pulled over by a cop. I'm thinking, good thing this is just a dream. And I'd rather not stick around for this, so I go incorporeal and float through the roof, invisible. I look down at the cop being surprised by the car without a driver, and then I decide to bring the car with me: I turn it into water droplets, which collect in the palm of my hand.

There's a memory gap, but I doubt the semi-lucidity lasted long after that. Next scene I remember clearly is non-lucid: a woman is consulting a witch, asking her to do a spell or divination for her. When it's over, the witch asks the woman what that looked like from her end - meaning that during the course of the spell, the witch realized this woman's got some magic of her own. And the god this witch works for may or may not have an interest in this woman. The witch asks her a question, about why she's trying to (do something) when she's got too much on her plate already. The woman explains: there's a guy who loves her "pretty bad" - no mention of whether it's reciprocated - and she "can't hear him anymore," by which she means hear him in her head - it's a vampire thing - and she's worried about him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm temporarily working for a doctor with a small private practice, I'm in training. The doctor's showing me a patient's chart and is asking me if anything jumps out at me - I say the patient's lost 10 pounds, but I'm thinking, that could just be a diet. The doctor points out what she wanted me to see: this patient's been suffering from hallucinations, describing strange sights and sounds. But she lives in the city, and there are all sorts of strange things there; and on the date that she experienced these 'strange sights and sounds,' there was a parade. I'm doubtful. I say, "I don't know, it's pretty difficult to confuse a parade with a hallucination." The doctor admits this is true.

There was a scene where I went to talk with that patient, and by the end of that scene we've wound up talking casually in the waiting room, she's very pretty and very easy to talk to. Then a baby belonging to one of the other patients crawls up into her lap. It's got a dripping diaper. This eventually leads to an unpleasant confrontation with the mother, who denied that the baby was the cause of the mess; the mother becomes so outraged that she takes out a gun, points it at the ceiling and shoots.

I grab the woman's arm holding the gun. The other patients in the waiting room all run out the door, except the one I'd been talking to. I get the gun away from her before she can fire the other bullet - it's a two shot derringer - and I hand it to the other patient. As I do so I say something along the lines of "Hold this for me, honey." Then I think, wait a minute, she was my patient a minute ago, that's very unprofessional, I can't go around changing a DC's relationship to me mid-storyline just because we shared a nice conversation and a life-or-death situation. The woman has pulled out another gun, and I take it away from her and hand it to the patient again - there wind up being 4 guns total.