Carabas

There's a vampire who looks like a kid, who'd been having some kind of serious problems, but is assuring a friend of his that he's past them now. He's also discovered that, as a result of those problems, he can eat solid food now, and he's trying to stay off blood. He's optimistic about it. "I've been having some sickness, but-" His friend laughs, patronizingly. As a 3rd person observer, I side with the friend - this is a bad idea.

There's a woman working at some kind of community center, and a man who seems to be drunk outside, holding a knife. She's saying to him through the door, "Go home, Ray! You're sick! You need help!" Afterwards she starts thinking about fated events, and timing.

I'm working with a team of bounty hunters to catch two people, allowing one of them to lead us to the other without letting him realize he's being followed. We catch up to them in the woods, and they're both here, but they're unconscious, and surrounded by two "Wraths" - some semi-divine role, working for Ares. They're waiting for their master, who arrives just after we do.

Three people discussing a conversation they just had with a police captain who hired them. One of them uses the slang term "NeuTrooL", a pun on "new" and "true" and "neutral", which means information given by someone who mistakenly believes their view is an objective truth, completely neutral, when in fact it's influenced by their own bias.

A woman's telling me about her dreams, with a large cast of recurring characters and ongoing storylines. She's telling me her most recent one, about "the Prince and the Magician", and says that the Prince is captive but still playing an active role in events. As she talks, I see the prince sitting in a room that has something crystalline about it; he's a fae-looking thing, and he's sitting in front of a mirror with a spell on it, talking to someone at a distance. The creature in the mirror is very large, and has fur. The woman telling the story mentions the name Ba'alrael.

There's this guy running from some gang. It's about the patent for something he invented. He can't believe his invention is something anyone would be willing to kill him over, but I remind him it's not the invention they want to kill him over, it's the money. He's got some legal document - not the patent itself, but related to it, possibly he hasn't filed for it yet - which is what everyone's after, and after I get him to reveal it to me, a man who is my brother appears and snatches both the guy and the document away and runs into the forest, just as the gang catches up to us. This was our plan, the woods are my brother's territory. I act like I'm on the gang's side, or at least as if I want to catch that guy as much as they do - they were already aware from past interactions that I have an interest in the guy with the patent, and they've assumed I want the document for my own reasons. So they follow me when I lead the chase into the forest, into my brother's traps.

The path into the forest that I lead them on - and which my brother appears to be on, we catch glimpses of him now and then, though I'm aware he won't stick to the path - curves back and forth in strange ways, it's disorienting. I see an odd bullet coming - dark green like a beetle's wing - and I make sure I'm out of its path, that it picks off one of the gang as intended. It was fired by one of three men who work for/with my brother, people I know well. Time seems to have slowed down, and when one of the gang starts grumbling about the strangeness of it, a man emerges from the woods, the second of my brother's men. He explains that it's the insect-birds. They're insects which mimic birds and sing constantly, disorienting the birds and causing them to mistake night for day, and for us, creating an illusion of time slowing. They prevent violence being done in my brother's forest. But "their element is in possessing one," he says; that is, the insect enters and controls a single bird.

I'm reading a book. In it, the main character is looking at a river and thinking "The mare of time." The river surface usually looks calm, but it's been disturbed due to the ongoing combat. There's a thought that it's only humanocentrism that makes him see the 'calm' river as better/more natural than the 'disturbed' river. There's a reference to a distant place he's been searching for, or came from, or that otherwise has been referenced frequently in the story before now; from this point in the story onward, that place will no longer be a major part of the story. There will be a few minor finds, items from that place, fruits, henna - accompanied by the line "It was a good henna, but not enough to sit in front of the Skillet-mirror" - but the place itself will never appear in the story again, which gives the story as a whole a sort of surreal feeling, with storylines that go nowhere and scenes that don't quite match up, aside from always containing the same main character; a focus on imagery rather than plot. It reminds me of a less surreal Maldoror, or a more surreal Gormenghast, and I start thinking about the surreal in my own writing.

There's a Lost Boys tv show, currently showing the Boys versus some vampire skinheads.

A doctor who is giving up his practice and moving to an isolated island, moving in with the couple he loves. He's talking to his mother (a relatively young woman who insists he refers to her as his sister in public) about his intent to stop practicing medicine. They're standing on a small wooden hanging bridge high over a river, surrounded by tropical plants with broad leaves and looking out over the sea; it's very beautiful.

I'm in a marketplace filled with angry people. They don't like being guarded by off-worlders like us, and we're trying to arrange things so we can get at least half the guard duty covered by their own people. One of our guys in uniform is saying something about how surveys indicate the majority of locals don't mind having some off-worlder presence, and we're trying to find the best solution for everyone here, and more research is going to have to be done. I'm not joining in the discussion, I'm sitting in the dirt at the edge of the marketplace, out of uniform, just listening and watching. There'd been a chance of a riot here, but the danger seems to have passed. Now that things seem to have calmed down, the kid who alerted me to the situation and led me here reaches out and picks up the chips - money - that I left beside me on the ground. I put it there for him, but he seemed unsure if it was really okay for him to take it. When he sees me looking at him, he looks scared and smiles at me; I nod, and he grabs the money and runs off.

Someone with a different face than usual is explaining to a horrified listener that he's learned to shapeshift. The listener asks who he can shapeshift into; the answer is something along the lines of "oh, people I've eaten, people I've physically bonded with, anyone really." The listener wonders, but doesn't ask out loud, what physically bonded means exactly; he's wondering if just seeing someone is enough. "Objects, even." The listener, horrified by all this, asks, "What happens to your personhood?" The shapeshifter says he's removed a piece of himself and keeps it separate in this box, which he's now asking the listener to deliver to his aunt for him for safekeeping. It looks ordinary, and the listener asks if this shouldn't be labeled in some way. The shifter mocks the idea. It's not necessary to know something's significance to keep it safe; often it's the opposite, it's simpler and safer if they don't know.

A pair of time-travelers who've recently reunited are stopping by a football game they've been to before. They kept meaning to get around to changing this one little moment in time, and now they've got the chance. There's a guy who's been meaning to propose to his girlfriend, and they're about to be featured on the big screen; the first time around, neither of them had noticed they were on camera, and something unfortunate happened afterward. This time around, the time-travelers are sitting just behind the couple, and they poke them and draw their attention to the camera. The guy takes the moment to propose, the girl accepts - but they both seem rather awkward and uncomfortable with all the attention.

I've been living in a foreign country, working as a live-in tutor, but this is the end of my last day and I'm about to leave. I'm packing up the last of my things and then head downstairs. Downstairs appears to be the house I grew up in, but I'm thinking to myself that this stuff isn't really here, I'm dreaming, and this is only being used as a convenient background, so there's no need to pack it all. Despite this thought, I don't become very lucid; I just focus on sorting out which things only seem to be here because it's a dream, and which things I actually need to pack.

Julie's patting a big, shaggy old dog, in a room with four guys behind her, talking to her, though I can't make out what's being said. I'm using magic to check in on her from a distance and I don't have a very good connection in this room. She gets up and goes into the corridor, where I can't see her at all, but I recognize the sound of her sister's voice. I realize they're heading outside, which is convenient, there's tons of running water out there I can use. I switch the spell to a bit of water running down the side of the wall, and see that they've gone out into the courtyard and are sitting down on the benches around the fountain - even better. As I move the spell, I remember seeing a post here on DV with a title about learning to control the elements in dreams, which I hadn't read, since thinking of the elements as something you have to learn to use sounded counterproductive. I'm thinking about how helpful water spirits have always been. Again, I don't go lucid; the spell's POV has been moved, and I go back to focusing on the view. They're in the courtyard of a building made of large sand-colored stones, surrounded by potted and hanging plants, and from the fountain I'm looking up at Julie's sister, a woman with long black hair, wearing a black dress. She's saying something about "outlanders."

I'm with a group of people crossing a desert, when a girl - Julia - arrives in our camp on foot. She'd been following us after we left town, refusing to take her with us. She's an English woman, dressed in Victorian clothing; she looks as if she must be very hot in those clothes, but she's kept struggling along. Then a scene change, just a quick image: Julia walking in the desert on foot, while I and a woman sitting behind me are riding a horse, far ahead of her.

A fragment: an image of cities and towers in domes surrounded by wilderness, one of which has been heavily decayed, but which appears to rebuild itself as I'm watching; it's related to the breaking of a Sleeping Beauty-style curse.

Part of a castle has been blocked off to the public for a photoshoot I'm working on. There's a woman hanging around just outside the blocked off area, watching us; she's very pretty, with long red hair under a hat. It starts raining a little and we take a break, and I go over to smoke by the entrance. That woman comes over to me and we start talking. After a while, she tells me she's the daughter of someone I know, someone I watched die in hospital just yesterday. Thing is, in the present, that daughter is just a young child; I have a mental image of seeing her, as a child, in the hospital. There's something to do with timelines or the dead going on. I don't believe her. She tells me she's wanted to see me, and implies that in her own time, I'm dead. Some other people from the photoshoot come over then and distract me for a moment, and then the woman is no longer there.

I can't get a couple light switches to work, and realize this is a dream. (Noteworthy: that's a common dream sign for me, but up until now, it only happened if I went to sleep so early that it was still dark IRL, usually around 5 AM. This time I went to sleep at a normal hour, after sunrise.) I have a false awakening: I'm in my IRL bed, but am fairly sure I'm still dreaming. I wonder what to do with this - I look up at the ceiling and consider removing it and going flying. However, I'm distracted by the sound of a crash, and I see my computer (an old desktop model which I don't actually own IRL) has fallen over and broken. I forget about dreaming and get irrationally stressed about having to replace the computer. (I suspect there may have been an actual noise IRL that affected the dream.)

Based on F/SN, a bunch of photos showing the future of various timelines. I focus on one showing Saber in a park by a lake, with skyscrapers in the background, and it becomes the setting of the dream; someone who I at first mistake for Archer is teasing her, and he winds up falling in the lake. He's wearing some sort of uniform that I associate with the Mage's Association, and which I think of as being 'Saber's colors' (it's blue and gold), marking them as partners; then I realize he's an older Shirou, not a version of Archer.

I'm approaching a dance in the woods together with someone I know, and I recognize the song playing - Bottom of the River, Delta Rae. We walk over to three woman sitting around a fire, to speak with them. I think of the Fates and the Graces.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm Shirou, and Tohsaka's just walked away from those three women from the previous scene, and before I follow her, one of those women says to me, "Nothing like that to make your magic full of fear." I'm thinking that I have just enough awareness of Archer's memories to know there's something I don't want to remember; remembering it would cause me to repeat the same choices he made, and that's not what this timeline's for.

I'm reading an article about genius, stating that long-term caffeine use has disruptive effects on the brain.

I'm trying to buy something but I've upset the woman working the counter somehow and she's refusing to ring me up, or any of the other customers for that matter. She goes so far as to call the police. I literally offer her the shirt off my back - a basketball jersey, something that's worth something to her. We strike up a conversation, and she winds up being friendly.

An advertisement for a Christmas event called the Forest of Lights; Christmas shopping in a small store that has cookies out on display, someone exclaims over them, saying that they're just like the ones his grandmother used to make, which he hasn't been able to find since she died, not knowing what they were called.

A grandmother talking to a baby which is also herself: "You're going to be just fine." She's a woman who grew up in the present era, then somehow mentally time-traveled to the past and became trapped there, and wound up living out the life of her own grandmother. She's at a family gathering now and talking about a business she owns, when she has to sit down abruptly, and then holds out her hands and comments on how they're shaking. She's sure this is the moment when she dies. She's very calm about this, to the point that the people around her think she must be joking. There's a narrator then, saying something about how a part of her always expected that when she died, she would simply wake up back in her real body in the present. But she doesn't. It was a mind-soul transfer, the narrator says. When she died, she died. That was it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm looking at a grave marker in Erana's garden, and examining the spell on it; and then admiring the spell over the rest of the garden that makes it a sanctuary, and noting how even the water of the two rivers which flow around it are affected by the spell when they come into contact with it. Looking at all that running water, I'm having doubts about whether this will be the best place for Olivia to stay over the next few days, even though we're on her native soil, and even though it's otherwise ideal. The river running under the bridge at the entrance to the garden is just a trickle at the moment, but there's an image in my mind of that river growing wider, turning the garden into an island. I start to walk into the woods, and I pass Rogerian coming the other way with an animal he's caught for the two of them to eat. Olivia wakes up and says something about the meal, sounding delighted.

3rd person following 3 people traveling through time, one woman and two men. One of the men, Billy, winds up being left behind, the other two have to abandon him in a place where he's "condemned by the powers to a life of battles." But they've just now encountered him again, as the 9th "killer" they have to face in a place of challenges, carrying a sword. A great deal of time has passed from his perspective and he's almost unrecognizable, cold and intimidating.

They've returned to their own time, in the hotel rooms they were in before all the time travel started. Due to timeline shenanigans, the woman runs into a 'past' version of Billy in the hall, a version who hasn't done any time traveling at all yet, smiling as usual.

The 'killer' version of Billy is talking about the souls left "there," abandoned by her. The other man who'd traveled with them questions that phrasing, 'souls' - "Are there really any souls in hell now?" Due to timeline shenanigans, is the implication - before Billy'd been abandoned, the two of them had a longstanding debate on what happens to the people in erased timelines, whether they still exist in any form. Billy's smiling, which is not a good thing, and saying they can finally conclude that debate.