Carabas

I walk through a door and come out in my IRL yard, thinking about how to get out of this situation (what that situation was, I no longer remember), when I remember this is a dream. I start flying, which I think of as a useful way of escaping that situation - my first instinct is to continue the dream storyline. Then I realize that since this is a dream, there's no reason for me to continue to deal with that situation at all. I'm looking up at a gibbous moon (it's in a different phase IRL. Also it was night in the dream; and there was no snow on the ground, though the trees were bare; and there was a bush that IRL was cut down years ago). Looking at that moon, I immediately (and accurately) remember two lucid goals that have to do with the moon, and I decide to fly up there. However, I get distracted thinking about those two different goals - the second one doesn't necessarily have to be done on the moon, and I wonder if trying to focus on both at once could throw me off.

Slight memory gap. While flying, I've somehow wound up getting entangled with some Christmas lights my IRL neighbor put up near the power lines - red, white and blue ones - and I've managed to damage the string of white lights. Although I'm still aware I'm dreaming and still intend to fly to the moon, I've lost some lucidity - I think I have to fix these lights first.

But after accomplishing that, I find something else that distracts me - a Bowie album called 'evil on sale' - and lose lucidity entirely.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a child who's the young, orphaned, lord of an estate. He's been asleep or unconscious for some days after some incident that put him in danger, and now that he's woken up he's found that his servants - one in particular, who's also a magician or something similar - have changed things about the house while he was unconscious. This house used to be full of secret, magical things - taking care of them was part of the duty of the lord of this particular estate - and now they've all been removed, for his own protection. The lord doesn't like this at all. He's run down to the cellars, where a locked door used to open onto a place where they kept a pair of unicorns, which are no longer there - that magician servant is here in the hall outside that locked door, up on a step ladder, dusting a lamp. The lord's talking to a young, blonde servant girl who'd been the one to inform him about the changes in the first place, he's desperately hoping that she'll tell him the unicorns are just outside in the fields, but he knows that won't be the case - they're gone.

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.

I'm in a store that sells various forms of blades, among other things, and my attention's caught by an iron mask with a strangely curved dagger set into it, removable. (After I woke up I realized the dagger's shape was inspired by F/SN.) The mask's face seems very narrow, but I believe that the mask's features will fit themselves to the wearer. The eyes are particularly narrow and I don't see any holes to look out of. There's a long and narrow stylized beard that reminds me of ancient Egyptian art, which would cover the wearer's neck, and the mouth is designed to look as if it's been sewn shut. I like it.

I'm distracted by the sound of more people arriving outside. There's a brief confrontation but they dismiss me and the people I'm with as not threatening, which irritates me. There's some debate over whether this post-apocalyptic, breakdown-of-society situation we're in will last, or whether things will return to normal in a few days.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There are three astronauts who've said or done something that their bosses wouldn't approve of, and they've ceased broadcasting in a way that implies they're dead or soon will be. But when I talk to someone who wasn't watching their broadcast live, I find she's got a different impression of events, she believes everything's fine, and some reasonable-sounding excuse has been given for why the astronauts are no longer broadcasting. Their previous broadcast has been censored or changed.

I'm playing a piano, using sheet music for a jazz tune I'd never heard before. The sun's going down, and the light gradually darkens until I can't make out the sheet music in front of me.

I'm about to open a portal for someone, and I'm trying to explain the difficulties of this type of teleportation to them. I'm saying, no, it doesn't have to be a place I've been to before, but I have to be able to keep the precise location I 'feel' in mind. Things like direction or distance from here to there, those matter - what the place looks like doesn't.

As Rumpelstiltskin, I'm using magic to sort of scan someone for some information, together with Belle, and Belle is able to feel it - she's surprised by the feel of it. It seems like it's happy; she didn't expect it to have a mind of its own. And it worries her that it seems happy, when the person we're scanning is sick. I'm thinking, the magic doesn't care about the person being sick one way or the other, it doesn't really understand what people or sickness are, it's just happy about the way it's being used - it's got a life of its own to a degree but it's not that sentient.

I'm outside my IRL home at dawn, and there are all these beautiful birds. A great horned owl on a tree stump, a snowy egret walking across the lawn, a variety of smaller birds that I don't recognize in the trees, and four peacocks that show absolutely no fear of humans, I'm standing right next to one and it's not bothered, I'm thinking the peacocks must have been tame.

There are two guys climbing up a rock - they think of it as a mountain, but it's barely a hill - carrying a radio and a guitar. A musician they like died here, and one of them has insisted on making a sort of pilgrimage, to play his music at the place he "breathed his last breath." At the top of the rock they turn on the radio. A female vocalist sings "At last the time fell-" The guys brought their own instruments and are joining in. One of them is on the guitar, but the one who insisted on this trip has some small metal instrument that looks vaguely like a comb, played with the thumb.

Dean and Sam are trapped inside a house they were investigating, something to do with a piano and a song that was being worked on at the time of the composer's death. As Dean, I'd been calling someone on my phone the moment the house trapped us inside, a woman we've worked with before. She'd been having lunch when I called her, and after a while the phone is taken by some guy she was eating with, someone who doesn't understand anything about what's going on and who tells me off for being rude, insists I should "use sir and ma'am" or else he'll hang up. So I call him "sir and ma'am" and piss him off. Thankfully the woman from before takes the phone back. I have the impression that if I hadn't been on the phone already, if I hadn't already had a connection established, the house would have prevented the phones from connecting; if this call ends, we won't be able to contact the outside world at all.

I've got a creature perched on my finger that's something like a crow and something like a bat - it's furry rather than feathered, but it's got a beak. The feeling of its talons around my finger is odd - not exactly discomfort, it reminds me of holding a mouse in your hands. I raise my hand and launch it into the sky.

There are two little girls, elementary school age, who are carrying out some illegal deal, weapons or something similar, something stored in the trunk of a car. They have some mentor who usually does this, he doesn't realize that they're here in his stead, he would have stopped them if he knew about it. This meeting with the customer was supposed to be an initial negotiation, a sample, but one of the girls declares that they're going to do the deal now. The customer reacts badly. The other girl gets shot, the one who'd declared they were doing the deal now takes a gun out of the trunk and shoots the customer, the cops come, they're all put in handcuffs, and the customer is bewildered, he was a good customer and doesn't understand why they tried to change things. The girls escape, go home, and try to cut the chains around their wrists with their father's tools.

I'm in a house which contains a dollhouse which is an exact model of the house, even containing a miniature version of the dollhouse itself, which in turn is a perfect model with its own miniature dollhouse inside, and so on; the dream camera zooms in through what seems to be an infinite series of nested houses, and I say "It's recursive."

Inside one of these levels of houses, I can hear a woman's voice singing, not a recording or anything professional, it's the way someone might sing to themselves around the house, going "la la la" instead of words. I'm in a hall, passing by a woman's bedroom where there are a few cardboard boxes open on the floor, one with old Victorian clothes spilling out, and a mirror in a gold frame. The mirror catches my attention and I go lucid. I'd been thinking earlier (while awake) that mirrors are often linked with magic and summoning in my dreams and I'd intended to try using that deliberately the next time I had a lucid dream, so I look at this one now and try to summon Julia, who I'd expect to be the easiest character for my mind to summon. After a moment I see a woman moving in the mirror in the distance, too far away to see much, but it's not Julia. I start to try again with a slightly different approach, but then think that I'm a little too close to waking up for this. I lose visuals.

I 'wake up' in bed and reach for a pen to jot this down, but I drop it and have to get out of bed to look for it. I'm irritated by this, thinking I'm going to forget the dream - then I wake up again.

I'm reading a scientific news article. There's a video of a man with a fox, and the fox is crying - as in, shedding tears. Through the use of some frequency, the man is able to induce "conscience." Reading this, it's causing me to rethink the nature of violence in the wild and morality.

Two extremely elegant women I'd been sitting with at a restaurant have gotten up to tango. I remain at our table, enjoying the view. They were the only two dancing at first, but a few other couples join in as the song goes on. The couple from the table just to my right gets up and goes to the dance floor, and they choose to place themselves directly between myself and the women I came with, blocking my view of my companions. I consider this rude.

There's a woman having a sort of Cinderella transformation - rags to ballgown - but she doesn't seem in the least bit impressed by it. I'm vaguely annoyed at her lack of reaction, but on with the show. She enters a throne room and asks something of the king, who says "But first answer me this. When did you become the Evil Queen?" She doesn't know what to make of this. She says, "I'm not a queen." "Your father is dead," says the king - her father was also a ruler, she became queen the moment he died. The king here holds out a collection of brown papers. He says it's something her father had been putting together the night he died - last night - something urgent, something for her, since she'd been away on this mission.

I'm looking at a book containing a moving image representing En - a small boat on a river, stylized lotus flowers, a lot of gold paint. The color's faded and chipped in places, but still beautiful.

A musician's writing a letter to a friend of his, trying to comfort his friend, and he's thinking about how limited words are, how it can't replicate the sort of things he'd do if he was there in person, even the simple act of putting on a familiar tune. He goes to the gramophone and puts on the tune he was thinking of, and sits to listen to it before he continues writing, thinking that perhaps the feeling he gets from this song will come across in his words.

A couple. A blonde woman is laying out cards on the floor in five columns, representing the guy's past relationships; he's lying on his back next to her, not looking. She observes that his two longest relationships followed the exact same pattern: lasted the same amount of time, ended the same way, with the same warning signs beforehand. She says based on that pattern, if (event) happens at (time into relationship), he might as well bail immediately.

One of the shorter columns is unique in that every card represents things going well, and she wonders why he'd split up with that guy. Privately, she's realizing that he ended things shortly after he'd had some non-romantic encounter with her, and she's wondering if she was the reason for the split. But out loud she just points out how odd it looks that they broke it off considering it seemed to be going so well. He teases her, saying "yeah, I'm starting to miss a bit of swordplay" - part of the joke here is that the guy in question also did something involving literal swords - and she hits him, lightly, on the arm; then she puts the cards down and straddles him, and says something along the lines of "Not like that. I mean, you had a different dynamic than you did with anyone else. Not in a good way. I mean, I liked him, when he was alive - oh, god." He's laughing at her. What she'd been trying to say by 'not in a good way' was that although the two of them clearly got along, they hadn't seemed really emotionally attached, but she's stumbling over this conversation. He assures her, yes, the guy in question had indeed been great when he was alive - teasing her about her reluctance to sound disrespectful of the dead - he was lovely and wonderful and all that, and she's also lovely and wonderful and all that. There's a lot of laughing from both of them over how ridiculous this conversation is.

ASOIAF-based. Jaime's face is covered in burn scars on one side, recently healed; Cersei's pale and has something wrong with her skin, grey spiderweb patterns in small patches on the sides of her face, wearing widow's black with a high collar. Jaime's sitting down next to his uncle - whose face is also scarred, on the opposite side from Jaime, from a cut from a weapon that left a permanent hole through his cheek - and he's saying "Look at us. Three grotesques." He's not including his uncle in that; he means the three siblings, specifically in their role as Tywin's heirs.

He folds his hands on his chest, and something strikes me as odd about this; I focus on his fingers and feel like there's too many of them. (For reasons that were obvious once I woke up.) He says, "We remember (name of some famous military tactician)" - and then says some quote relevant to their current situation; as a disembodied observer, I'm less interested in the quote and more interested in why Jaime's saying it. I'm thinking that this time period, immediately after all three Lannister siblings had become disfigured, ended up being when they really started to come into their own; that Jaime specifically became serious about various responsibilities that he'd had little interest in up until now, became more philosophical, and wound up distinguishing himself as a tactician.

Jaime's still talking - he's just mentioned a prophecy which includes a mention of monogamy, and he sneers at the reference, and says something along the lines of 'if only I could get me a good prybar' - he's stuck in an engagement he desperately wishes he could get out of, but which he's resigned to.

I'm leaning against a wooden fence, wearing a heavy fur coat and digging a bullet out of my side with my fingers, blood all over my hands. It can't kill me, but it's unpleasant. I'm saying to someone, "Wish you hadn't come." Didn't want them to see this.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragments: A photo of a small island containing 6 towers arranged in a hexagon, with a wall around them so that they can't be seen from the water; the photo's accompanied by a note mentioning Florida and Puerto Rico. A girl with a shapeshifter for a brother. The word supranatural. Song lyrics: "Feed on the sickness." Dialogue: "You're familiar. I'm just glad to see familiar-"

Five teenagers heading to an abandoned playground; three of them are aliens in human form, and they need to go somewhere isolated to temporarily drop the disguise. The other two are humans, their girlfriends, in on the secret. One of them has seen this before, but for the other, Laurie, this is new; although she knew her guy was alien, actually seeing it is a shock. She sits down on a bench attached to a picnic table, and she's thinking about when she slept with him. The other girl, the one who's seen this before, is watching her and feeling sympathetic. The boyfriend comes back over to her and asks what's the matter, except English isn't really compatible with his mouth in this form - he's something vaguely like a very large spider - so "What's the matter, Laurie?" sounds more like "Wassama'ar? Lau-rie?" The other girl comes over and puts her hands on Laurie's shoulders.

Rumpelstiltskin/Gold has a daughter. She's building a snowman in a park with her mother, along with a large group of other parents and children doing the same thing; Gold's not there, but he's using magic to talk with her from a distance, now and then. She's named her snowman Lefty. It has 3 left arms, one of them with a hook. But while she's not paying attention, one of the other mothers breaks Lefty and uses it as materials for her own kid's snowman. This doesn't come as a surprise. Gold's daughter isn't treated well in this town, she's always ostracized. Gold, hearing about this, starts to encourage her to (do something I no longer remember.)

While he's encouraging her, Rumpelstiltskin has a flashback: in his castle, with Regina in full Evil Queen mode. He's ranting about some Council which he blames for manipulating him into becoming the 'evil creature' he is today, and which he's now turning against. The rant has a reap-what-you-sow kind of theme. Regina had been on that Council up until very recently and is encouraging him in this; she's the one who informed him how he's been played.

Fragments, one involving finding an old sketchbook with an image of a character I haven't drawn (or thought about) in years; another involving a song called Sleepwalker.

A man and a woman in an old abandoned house, the woman's become possessed by the spirit of her ancestor who'd lived there. She says she's hungry, which I, 3rd person observer, am certain is a lead-in to her doing something unnecessarily creepy. She catches a rat and starts chewing on it. I mentally compare it to evil overlords using skulls as building material, too over-the-top and nonsensical to actually be creepy. The possessing spirit knows this man, and she's saying to him, "I will say, however, this is the first time I've seen you in anything but pain." When she says that, he thinks briefly of a relationship he has with someone, but he says, "Come on, be serious -" He then deliberately misremembers her name, trying to downplay the authority she has over him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

FMA-based, Al is on some huge vehicle, like a train but so large it has a deck like a ship. An old man wearing armor and automail is introducing him to what appears to be a little girl, introducing her as a 'mechanist' who works on the human soul, something that's commonplace here, and which Al's been researching and is excited to finally get a look at. There's a good chance that she's not human but some kind of automaton, that's often the case for mechanists; Al isn't aware of this. She's thinking the same thing about Al, she expects the inside of his armor to be full of bolts and springs.

The old man who'd introduced the two of them gets his automail caught in some piece of machinery, which is dangerous. Al and someone else, a large man, work together to free him, but in the process the machinery pierces a hole through Al's armor, allowing the little girl to see inside and realize it's empty. Al is very self-conscious about this, but the girl's thinking something about how impressed she is that "he'll continue investigating the secrets he was investigating, not the secrets of his body" - the research he's been doing has no bearing on his own problem.

Ed is on a different train. Kimblee, a prisoner, is being transported in the same car, it's a car for military personnel, and Kimblee's saying something about whether (something happens) or (something else happens), he just doesn't care; this annoys Ed. He gets off the train and heads for a stadium where he's supposed to meet Mustang, and he's supposed to make it look like it's a coincidence that they both happen to be there, since they're being watched.

A psychiatrist talking to another doctor about music and musicians, saying this is the type of personality that in these days uses hypnosis to tell themselves "this is my fanciful, flighty dream, that no one lets die." In other words: treating a wild dream as a practical career path, and being convinced to abandon a dream, are both viewed as mistakes.

There's a group of women in a small village, they all wear black and cover their hair, and a while ago they summoned up the Devil. Now he can't leave until a certain thing happens - he's trying to cause that thing to happen, the women are trying to prevent it. The women are talking about another, younger woman, who's either new in the village or has been away, and so isn't aware that this thing must be prevented.

The scene changes to show that Devil, who's been posing as a human man in that village, and at the moment is trying to get home without being caught by the sun and without being seen by his wife, who believes him to be human. He gets out of the building he'd been in by crawling down the side of the wall head first, and sneaks into his own home through the kitchen window, just before his wife enters the room. She finds him there casually drinking a glass of wine, and he mocks her for some supposed addiction problem of hers.

Someone's playing a waltz, I'm looking at LaCroix dancing with a blonde woman. I don't know him (I'm not playing Nick's role this time, though I'm not myself either), but something about seeing him gives me the sense that I'm seeing a path not taken. As I'm watching him and the woman he's dancing with, I become aware that this is Underhill, and a dream; and possibly those are synonyms. (This wasn't lucid at all - the character I was at the time was thinking of this scene as his own dream, not mine.)

I'm standing by a light switch in pitch black darkness, and the lights won't turn on. I question whether this is a dream, doubt it at first, but then realize yes, it is. I have a sort of false awakening in which I still realize I'm dreaming, but now I become aware that I'm lying on my back in a bed in the guest room of my father's house (no resemblance to anywhere he's lived IRL), with his cat curled up against my legs - nothing's changed visually, it's still pitch black. I look up at where the ceiling would be and think about stars, and about a previous lucid dream where I removed the roof and floated up into the sky, and debate whether to do that again. I feel like there's something else I want to do here first. I can hear my father and his girlfriend watching TV in the next room and talking to each other. As I listen to them I forget that this is a dream.

Memory gap - some time later I'm standing in a different room, again trying and failing to get the light switch to work. I hear the sound of my stepbrother coming home and going straight to his own room. This light switch has several different switches and dials that I can't see in the dark, and this time I wind up taking out my ipod and holding it up as a flashlight. I can see the switches and dials now, but I still can't get them to work, and then I remember that this is a dream.

(Woke up at 5:30, half an hour after getting to bed. Back to sleep.)

I'm going to visit someone I owe thanks, bringing a guitar to play for them. One of the strings snaps.

At my father's house, some guy is trying to talk to my sister S., he's angry and seems obsessed, and while they're arguing he picks up a knife - not to threaten with, but it's the last straw, me and my father kick him out.

At my mother's house, one of her former students is at the door with some friends, and he's talking to her about some technique that's recently become a fad. Everyone's very impressed by his expertise, and it's driving me nuts because this technique is just a cheap knockoff version of something I've been doing for years that no one's ever taken seriously, and this popular version is much less effective. We get into a really idiotic argument which leaves me feeling frustrated even after I woke up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm lying in bed in the wrong house, and some boy shakes me awake to tell me I have to go. I apologize and try to explain that I'm not there to do anything bad, I just got the wrong place, but I can't remember the word for 'place' in Japanese and have to fumble around trying to find a different way to say it. He gets the point but doesn't really care, he didn't seem particularly threatened by a stranger in his house to begin with, he just wants me gone before his mother wakes up. I walk out a back door that, aside from a little ledge, opens directly onto the river. The kid tries to correct me, pull me back inside so I can use the front door and actually leave, but I just step out onto the river and stand on top of the water, which is a normal thing for a witch like me to do. The kid's surprised, the water and the light are really vivid, it's all very pleasant. As I'm appreciating the vividness, I become aware that I'm thinking of this as a dream.

I walk a few steps into the sky and start floating, heading somewhere specific. As I float above the river, I pass various people, and I start to hear a song, people are singing it. I pass two brothers sitting in chairs having some fashionable procedure done, a row of string sewn above their lip, to me it looks like they're having their mouths sewn closed. It strikes me as odd, but I remind myself that this isn't my time period so I don't have the full context, not for me to judge.

I reach a roller coaster, and there's a man and a woman riding it, the people I've been looking for. They're also singing that song that's been going on, and the lyrics tell me a little about their history. She has (or possibly had, up until very recently) a life-threatening heart condition. Their song is about the possibility of fixing a heart only to get hit by a bus or something similar, and the way people think they have time. The guy, singing in English with an Irish accent, sings a verse about how if (some name, some guy he knows) died he'd be singing a toast to him.

Song's over. Now that we've all met up in a dream, as planned, the guy asks whether we should wake up now. I'm inclined to agree, mission complete, but I think it's a little ridiculous to waste a lucid dream, there ought to be some fun we could have before we go. The guy leaves anyway, the girl stays. She says to me, "I have questions." I say to her, "I... probably don't have answers." She starts to say something else, but I become aware that I'm consciously thinking up her next dialogue for her, and that I'm waking up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Forever Knight-based setting, I'm Nicholas, and I'm being posed a question: between Janette, LaCroix, and an apple which represents my hope for humanity, I can only save one. What's my first instinct? I dismiss the apple completely but can't decide between the other two, which is annoying since the entire point of this exercise was only to see which came to mind first, without overthinking it.

Scene changes to an Umineko setting - Beatrice, who'd posed the question, is annoyed with the way I've spoiled it, and she retreats into the other room with aunt Eva. She says something to Eva that I can hear through the door, something about how the only hope is the "good key (name of key)."

I'm saying "Amen," the end of an exorcism. I'd been dealing with a demon and got in over my head, and I'm conflicted about whether exorcising it is the right thing to do - seems rude, you can't go around summoning people up and then flipping out at them - but either way it's been kicked out now, laughing as it leaves, which is never a good sign. I float back down the hall to bed, observing the lack of footsteps, and then get into bed, surprising the cat.

(Woke up, about half an hour after going to sleep. The cat had curled up at the foot of the bed while I was asleep.)

A fragment with a character who's king of a small people who don't necessarily want him - he's traveling.

A guy who runs a tavern screwed up a recipe, using potato instead of sweet potato, and his house elf tried to help by offering some spices to cover the taste, so the master blames it all on the house elf, starts yelling at it, then hitting it. I'm seeing this as I'm walking past the door, and I'm thinking that this is a particularly ugly house elf, only one eye and covered in bruises - but then house elves always look a little suspicious. Which makes me think - they're also very traditional, and use the term 'Dark Lord' rather than 'You Know Who,' so I wonder if maybe I could entrust it with a certain thing I need taken care of - but when I start to talk to it, it gets scared and disappears off to wherever it is house elves go.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragment of a scene involving a teenage guy talking to a vampire woman carrying a sword. Now he's home and sitting down on the couch, and the dream switches to 3rd person to focus on his father's husband, who'd been at his desk in the same room but goes to the door now to accept a delivery.

The guy at the door is a friend, or a professional contact anyway, someone who's personally delivering a book he'd requested. It's a living book. His friend delivering it warns him that he'll need it back tomorrow, someone else had reserved it. The man says that's fine, he just needed to speak with her - the spirit in the book - tonight. Although he doesn't say it out loud, there's something going on tomorrow that he's worried about, and he wants to talk it over with her. He's also thinking about a new room that's being built. The man who delivered the book says she's been reading sheet music lately; although he doesn't need to say it out loud, it's an implied request for the guy borrowing the book to provide her with some sheet music when he's done talking with her, as she doesn't like being left alone with nothing to read.

The first of several gods is watching the first humans age, and aging himself to match the oldest of them.

I'm walking past a shrine on a holiday, and hearing kids sing a song that I recognize as being part of a game like tag or hide and seek. There's a cloud of something floating in the air, I can't tell if it's tiny petals or some kind of dust, but it floats through the shrine gate and where it gathers I see a brief image of some great horned creature.

There's some futuristic family watching a concert, wearing shoes that let them fly, but the youngest girl can't get hers to work right, can't sit still, keeps flying off in different directions. Finally her mother catches her and makes her turn the shoes off, angry with her.

A brief nightmare - I'm at my mother's IRL house, the lights won't turn on, and this is dangerous. I consider whether this is a dream, but decide it isn't. I'm thinking that dreams and waking life feel different, and while dreams might feel real, you can't mistake waking life for a dream. So I don't do any reality checks. I do, however, do my anti-nightmare Apollo trick, but I feel a bit self-conscious about it, since I'm awake, and in my mother's home, and she'll be able to hear me. Afterwards I realize it was just one burned out light bulb, and there's no danger. Outside, it's incredibly bright, even though it's night - the sky is clouded over, and I wonder whether it's a full moon, but it seems too bright even for that. There are incredible gusts of wind, very inviting. My mother comes down to the front door where I'm standing and asks if something has flooded - there are occasional waves splashing over the wall at the edge of her yard. She says she used the incorrect settings on something, and it's caused things to get out of alignment, putting stress on the whole house that will eventually break it down. She needs to go outside and correct the settings. There's a ram standing in the street, looking at us; I point it out, and she says they always come in pairs. A herd walks down the street, from the same direction the waves came from.

I'm online, reading a conversation between several people, with one of them promising to scan some information about Renfield.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm taking a train from Rome to Boston, going over a map and coordinating plans.

There's a guy on his way home from a war, making what he thinks of as a 'deal' with whoever's listening, God or whatever else - he just wants his childhood neighborhood to have survived unscathed. If that place was bombed, what was the point to any of this?

That same guy is at a party, there's talk about political factions, blaming the faction that 'has the princess's ear.' Although this guy doesn't realize it, the princess in question is there at the party, disguised.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A rich family is discussing inheritance issues after their father's death. His illegitimate daughter from one of his many affairs, a very sweet girl, is the source of a lot of jealousy.

I'm walking down a street, and through the cracks in a fence I can see statues and ancient temples. I find a way through the fence and walk around, admiring them, wishing I had my camera with me; then I remember the camera on my phone and start taking pictures.

I walk into a building with a walkway overlooking vast, dark spaces, and I take pictures of those, lighting them up, resulting in beautiful abstract images made up of points of light. One of the spaces overlooks an opera company rehearsing, and there are a few people sitting around here watching, they don't welcome my presence but they don't stop me from taking pictures either. Another space contains a field of snow, and there's a beautiful woman lying there, dead or unconscious, beside some broken wooden boards. As I'm taking photos of her, I say "Nostradamus" - the name of the opera being performed. A woman next to me, one of the ones who'd been watching the opera, asks me how I knew its name; I say I hadn't known until I said it. The woman lying in the snow wakes up, and climbs up onto the walkway. I offer her my arm if she needs it, she looks unsteady - I sound overeager to myself. She doesn't take my arm.

Outside, the woman asks me how long I'll be staying in town. I'm thinking that I'm stuck here until I can find my portal home; out loud, I say it'll be a few days and I let her know what part of town I'm staying in. She reminds me of a promise I'd made to her, something involving her uncle, and she walks away.

I go to see her uncle, walking through the streets of a city in Italy, old alleys where cars are off-limits. I want to find a place to stop and go through my phone, delete some photos, make room for more, but most places are closing at this time of day. Finally I find a bookstore that's still open and I sit down. On my phone, I'm looking at a menu for creating shortcuts on your phone, arranged in the shape of a stylized butterfly.

3rd person, Rumpelstiltskin visiting Belle in a dream, he's smiling and she's saying, "I know you, don't I?" She doesn't remember him, and when she wakes up from these dreams she usually doesn't remember dreaming them; even when she does, she believes he's just an imaginary character in her dream.

She wakes up, and for him that dream had been like taking a break; now it's back to business. He's creating a dream to send to someone else, a red-haired man; he creates it by narrating it out loud as he walks through the woods, following an image of Bae which is part of his own dream. Rumpelstiltskin can't enter the waking world himself right now, so he needs this man to act as a go-between for him; he doesn't bother meeting the man in his dreams directly, he just creates dreams in advance and leaves them behind as messages. Right now, Rumpelstiltskin's not happy with the go-between, he's screwed up one of the previous instructions, so he's making sure this dream will make him wake up crying. As he's narrating the dream and following Bae through the trees, I start hearing music, with the lyrics "After you forget."