Carabas

A man talking about an opponent: "He had fallen on the might of (something), and he himself had fallen back and disappeared." The 'he' in question is described to me as "one of Fate's creatures," Fate being our enemy, but this guy is on a completely different level from those we've been fighting up until now. The man speaking is trying to get through to me just how serious a threat this guy is. He says this guy participated in "sanguinary" interstellar wars (that's the second time this month I've had dreams emphasize war with blood-related adjectives; seems redundant, but the dream seems to think that changes the meaning significantly), and in "civilized eras" he attached himself to prison transports, weapons transports, and managed to gain influence through this.

(Woke up, back to sleep.)

The queen of this country is always seen accompanied by three men attending her in robes, one red, one blue, one gold, all intricately embroidered in white, and I worked hard to become one of those men, but now that I've gained the position of the blue, I just feel chained down. Once we leave the Queen's presence, we're instructed by an aide to remove the robes, and with them the role we played. Such a role exists only in the Queen's presence, and it seems to me as if she exists in her own bubble, reality shifting with her presence or absence, so that she never touches the real world.

Fragments:

My roommate's watching a surreal horror movie called Repo Man starring Nic Cage and Meg Ryan. I comment that I had a dream about those two starring in a vampire movie the other night. (Which is true, I did.) I wanted to watch something else, though.

Something about David Bowie and outer space.

I'm saying "Where is all this going?" and in response the scene changes to show me and the people I'd been talking to sailing off into the sunset on a yacht.

Trying to read a document with errors in the font. When I go to change the font, I scroll past a font called 'lucid dreaming.'

Near Dark, back when Homer's actual age was close to his apparent age. He and Jesse are in a motel room with a guy who appears to be a friend - not like them, exactly, but not someone they intend to kill either. This guy's offering to teach Homer to play poker, and Homer says he already knows, but it's no fun because he has to give Jesse all the money he wins afterward.

(Woke up at 5:51 am, after going to bed at 4:30. Back to sleep.)

A young man has somehow traveled to another world, one populated almost entirely by vampires. They subsist off each other's subpar blood, donations are required and a vital part of the economy. Unaware of any of this, the guy from another world has walked into a store run by this world's equivalent of a friend of his, the magician who sent him here. She isn't a magician in this reality, and can't help him. It takes her a while to realize that he's human, they're so rare and unexpected, but she can smell his blood and when she figures it out, she has him in a trance before he realizes he's in danger. At that moment, her equivalent in his reality pulls him back to his own world - but the vampire follows him.

(Woke at 7:37. Back to sleep.)

A fragment of a scene involving Dracula, theater, and mythogenesis, using that term specifically.

A woman genetically engineered as a mate for a certain clone. The clone leads a double life, with a job and a wife who is unaware that he's anything other than a normal human, but he's also in close contact with the doctor who created both him and his 'brother', who he is somewhat obsessed with, and he suspects his genetically-engineered mate is secretly in love with that 'brother' - the brother is entirely unaware of any of this and believes himself a perfectly normal human, although the genetically engineered woman has recently appeared in his life and dropped some cryptic hints. The clone pulls the genetically engineered woman into his lap, which she tolerates, and demands that she tell him why she likes him, him specifically, "not the other one." She, with a charming accent I can't place, says it doesn't matter, and it's clear she's bored with his insecurity and instability.

(Woke at 9:40. Back to sleep.)

Three people whose lives are connected, although only one of them realizes it.

The first: A young man who recently beat cancer, legal guardian of his two younger sisters. One of them's been acting out in school recently and he's jokingly threatened her with calling in his biological mother, a woman who works with delinquents. But he is seriously wondering whether he should arrange for them to get together casually and talk - he doesn't mind her skipping classes but he's worried about what's going on in her mind.

The second: A teenage girl in a cancer ward, the same place where that man had been treated. Her death has been predicted to fall within the range of (the note said either Apr. or Aug., I couldn't tell which) 10-24. She has nightmares where this death is accompanied by a swarm of wasps. She doesn't fear death, but she hates wasps.

The third, and the one who is aware of the connection: A man who visits the hospital and watches the girl and the angel who lives there. The angel's voice can shatter glass, and it's going to kill this man someday - but it won't do anything until after that girl's death.

(Woke at 12:10.)

(After valerian root was mentioned in a previous dream, I looked it up and found it was used for insomnia, and gave it a shot in an effort to get my sleep schedule back in order - I've been going to sleep around 6-7 am, a good 2-3 hours later than I prefer. Marvelously effective tea, managed to get to sleep before dawn. Predictably, dream recall was terrible - but since I'm only using the tea to help me get back to my usual sleep schedule and don't intend to use it long-term, that's acceptable.)

Just the one fragment: an image of an absurdly beautiful man representing either St. Michael or Apollo, with a comparison between the blue of his eyes, the blue-within-blue eyes of Dune, and the blue lotus.

A classic black and white movie called Death in the Rain, with Ingrid Bergman, and a reference to Rappaccini's Daughter.

Labyrinth's Sarah falls into an oubliette, but it's a fairly large and well-lit spherical room built of pale brown stones, a few fallen leaves drifting around, and with a pale gold stylized metal sculpture in the form of a double helix rising in the center. She's just walked all the way around the circular room with one hand on the wall searching for openings, when Hoggle appears and she asks where he came from.

Playing the role of a man who lives in a major city. Two detectives have just left my home after questioning my family and everyone else on the estate, and stressed out, I go to the park for a run. The tree branches are all bare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One guy telling another a story, talking about certain things he'd been taught to believe about people in the city. "Were they right?" "No, it was Inanna." (Meaning a festival.) "Everyone was pretty much partying."

A guy enters an underground medieval fantasy city, and quickly manages to get himself suspected of thievery by the blacksmith's daughter who marches him over to the jail. The jailer takes him off her hands, then tells him confidentially that actually, he's got a job in mind and could use the help of a more experienced burglar, if the stranger's up for it.

The word 'bokor' written backwards as a spell.

An old text adventure game's been converted into a movie, and it starts off with this adventurer falling out of his spaceship - which is an in-joke for the players, about how if you typed the least thing wrong you'd get the character killed in a variety of creative ways, and most people managed to die at least once with their first command, just trying to walk out of the spaceship.

A guy's giving a friend a pair of gold gloves with protective octagonal symbols on the back. He's been concerned for a while - the friend receiving the gloves holds some important, inherited religious rank which requires him to handle a ceremonial weapon on certain occasions, and he's meant to take good care of his hands because of that. But lately he's been getting careless, particularly when sparring with someone, allowing them to go too far.

3rd person, following a blond guy named Colin. He's frustrated with his relationship, and as he's lying in bed, he decides to invade the dream of an ex-boyfriend. The ex, a kind of hippie-looking guy with curly hair, is in another relationship now and doesn't want to cheat, even in a dream, which Colin thinks of as ridiculous but also part of why he's fond of this guy, so he just transforms himself to look like the ex's current boytoy.

But a stray thought about the failed relationships he's had since this guy causes the dream scene to change to show those relationships. (Meaning my dream, not Colin-and-his-ex's dream.) For a while he'd been hooking up with a demon, who was a real sweetheart but they never managed to turn it into anything more serious than occasional hookups. Then for over a year he'd lived with this guy who works at the expat bar, and Colin can't believe he put up with that guy for so long - great lay but massively uncomfortable with witchcraft. He would never even set foot in the basement where Colin worked, and he'd make these 'in the closet' jokes about 'broom closets' and then explain the joke every time, hahah, closet, broom closet, witches, get it - what a douche. Colin thinks he should've done it the other way around - hookups with the bartender, move in with the demon.

Bounty hunters, or at least people who do odd jobs including bounty hunting. A member of my team, Regina, comes back to the motel we're staying at to tell us she's got a job at a local bar, which solves our immediate money problem. She's been trying to talk us out of hunting down that bounty we've been focused on. There's another woman who left the team over this bounty, she wouldn't talk about it but it seems like she had some personal connection that none of us had known about until she left.

Scene changes, that woman's come back, taken care of whatever business she needed to take care of. She's a beautiful, melancholy woman, and as we drive out of the city she's reflecting on all her memories, 'some bad, some good, but all worth having': her and her orphaned brother, the threat of war, their childhood determination to end war; a white Cadillac with fins, and the driver, a man who'd just struck it rich, tossing money into the air.

A few fragments: a thief who became a Buddha, and how that story's changed over time. Lucifer going through a Bible and scribbling out words here and there.

3rd person. Some centuries ago this guy's life was ruined by getting mixed up with a demonic creature using the name Elinar, which looks vaguely like a rabbit. (Or possibly Elihar. Can't read my own writing.) Now he's working together with a witch, and when he visits her in her workshop for the first time, he finds Elinar there, serving as her familiar. Up until this moment neither he nor the witch had been aware of the other's connection to Elinar, and now a lot of the 'coincidences' that led them to work together are starting to look suspicious.

Fragments from earlier: A woman pretending to be blind is followed by men in black suits, who aren't aware she can see them. A musician reminisces about the time about a hundred years ago when he'd played for a town that had never heard of alcohol, and found the place surprisingly refreshing.

I've been blamed for a crime I didn't commit, and if I'm going to avoid being staked, I have to find something before dawn. I thought I knew where it was, but I was wrong. Dawn has come -

- but I've managed to buy myself a little extra time. Same setting, new backstory: this is all a game. Someone on the staff by the entrance, without realizing it, let slip the location of my final goal. But in order to reach that goal, I need an intermediate piece of the puzzle, a Bible. I find it - it's not an actual Bible but a book of many different passages, one of which looks like a Bible quote, and a few words are written in red, reminding me of one of St. Germain's codes. It's in Swedish. I head back to my room to translate it, but I lose the passage and can't find it again, and flipping through the pages, I find -

- a family tree representing the Baratheon family with stag symbolism, with a crown for Joffrey. I'm Jaime, sitting in a pit of a jail cell as I turn the pages, with the Starks looking down on me, and one of them suggests in an almost sympathetic tone that I've lived long enough. So many days down, so many more to go.

There's this rich and powerful old woman who sends her goons to fetch me and Julie. One of the guys working for her warned me that she's got a thing against shapeshifters like us, and I'm pretty sure we're in danger but Julie's already gone with them. She's not entirely right in the head, off in her own world most of the time, so I don't know if she can read the atmosphere, realize there's a problem here. When we get to the old woman's place, she's lying on a bed with more goons in black suits around her, but she stands up to greet us. There's a line of tiles in the floor inlaid with zodiac designs leading from the door to her bed, and it's important for ceremonial reasons to step only on that path, like the old woman does; but me and Julie just walk naturally, sometimes on and sometimes off the tiles. The old woman makes casual conversation as we approach, pleasantries, and I worry again whether Julie will be able to recognize this as a dangerous situation, but when I look over at her, Julie's got a knife in her hand. She looks happy.

3rd person. Two sisters were raised by their grandmother, and the grandmother favored the younger one over the older one, to a ridiculous degree. The older sister confronts her grandmother on this, which she's done a thousand times before, but this time the grandmother tells her a story about her past. One day the grandmother's wayward daughter, who'd disappeared months before, just turned up on her doorstep with a girl who looked about 4 years old, a creature created by magic. She didn't explain where she'd been or what she'd been doing all this time, she just left the creature and disappeared again. Now the grandmother feels she's done her duty by the little monster just by taking her in and raising her at all, so now that the truth is out, she expects the older sister to understand the favoritism and quit complaining.

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

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

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

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

I'm drinking with a dead soldier from ancient Greece, and we started out talking about Dionysus and Hades but we've gotten around to talking about Chiron in comparison to Buer, and he complains to me that Chiron's been greatly misrepresented, which he blames on a line in Homer that people take out of context. He says that Homer had some nerve to characterize the guy as overly fastidious while he was killing everything "from here to Salamacia" - meaning some campaign they'd been on together, and I see the soldier's memory of Chiron washing the blood and dirt off in a river, stripped to the waist and with so much blood on his hands it looks nearly black. He's human; extraordinarily tall, but human.

I'm traveling, spending the night in an old stone tower. Thranduil's standing watch out in the woods, I can see him through the window. The rain's coming down pretty hard, much harder than it was during my watch and I'm still trying to warm up, sitting up brewing something hot to drink. I'd like to call him back inside, let him stand watch from the window instead, but I know he wouldn't. Everyone's still on edge about that Balrog. I hear voices at the bottom of the tower, one of the Men with us calling to Thranduil, telling him to quit haring off on his own like that. I can't see where Thranduil's gone, but the two Men who'd been guarding the door are looking around the edge of the woods. Then a leather wing covers the window for a moment and blocks my view, something flapping around the tower carrying a rider, and I shout to the others to wake up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm sitting at a bar drinking something green in a shot glass, when iron handcuffs are snapped around my wrists. Some crime has been committed, something which I'd planned to do. I didn't go through with it, though. I'm innocent. But it's still my fault that someone else carried out my plan, and I'm willing to take the punishment.