Carabas

Fragment involving Ben Affleck and people complaining about a Fantastic Four movie.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

X-Men fragment involving Erik and Charles (as played by McKellan and Stewart) having an argument about something involving a young man, a mutant who lives with them; one of them leaves with the young man. Scene changes so that this is a movie I'm watching, I'm explaining to someone who just came in that this was the last time they saw each other for 9 years. On screen, it's now some kind of opening credits for the Avengers showing various backstories, some actual Avengers characters (Loki, Banner, "Hawkguy", deliberately misspelled - nothing for Iron Man though he shows up later for the fight sequence), mostly characters made up for the dream, one guy with a Buddhist hell motif, leading into a fight sequence in New York, complete with a very dramatic soundtrack featuring classical singers.

Scene changes, ditches the TV framing. Dream's now following a man in a suit who's standing on a New York street, looking up at the Avengers flying around fighting each other, when this woman says to him, "But do they care a touch for the wedding of the moor folk?" Moor here meaning the type of land, moor folk meaning faerie folk. They hold each other's gaze for a moment, she grins, he laughs, low and strange. She continues, "You weren't thinking, were you?" She's a red-haired woman with an Irish accent, wearing a veil, though the wedding she mentioned isn't hers, and looking very out of place on the streets of New York with a bunch of flying lunatics duking it out in the background.

(Woke up. Reflected that this was obviously inspired by a conversation yesterday, about the spin-off show starting today and how I still haven't gotten around to seeing the Avengers movie, and how that must have made me subconsciously remember the X-men movie that I also haven't gotten around to seeing - completely forgetting at the time about the Affleck dream which seems to have actually kickstarted this whole superhero thing. Although I haven't seen the latest Batman either, so I guess that still fits the theme. Anyway - decided to finally get around to watching that movie before the spin-off airs, went back to sleep, and making that decision seemed to do the trick, no more superhero dreams tonight.)

Fragment involving driving to the beach with IRL acquaintances and seeing Iolaus on the side of the road, looking out over a river.

False awakening - don't remember the actual waking up part, but I was in my IRL home talking about the previous dream scene as a dream, and went on to talk about skinny dipping and Xena (separate topics). Over-steeped the tea while I was talking and went to toss it out, outside.

Outside I'm on a city street, and the trash can I use is right in front of a bookshop. Looking over the books in the window display, I start thinking about idolizing people and forgetting that they're only human, and eventually seeing their flaws and feeling let down, although you're the one who put them on a pedestal in the first place. Thinking about viewing the work and the writer separately as a balancing act, being able to see a writer's flaws as a person and to love their stories without the one contradicting the other. And the flip side of that, thinking about the stress on people who are idolized.

As I walk back to my apartment, I pass a cafe where a writer I know (a DC, no resemblance to any IRL writers I'm aware of) is sitting at a table with two women young enough to be his daughters or granddaughters. I stop to talk, and I say to him something along the lines of, yeah, you're idolized and you're only human, but the way you use your young, impressionable groupies is seriously creepy. One of the women gets up and leaves. The other stays.

But when I'm back in my apartment (which no longer bears any resemblance to IRL) and making a fresh cup of tea, I turn around and find that the woman who'd stayed is now sitting in my kitchen. I offer her a cup, she says no. She tells me haltingly that she's thinking about getting a job to support herself - maybe working for a political campaign, maybe going back to college, getting a degree and working in publishing - instead of relying on her writing.

I'm at a shrine at the top of a hill, and this girl's just shoved me down onto the ground, so I'm lying on my back looking up at her as she's spraying this canister of salt into the air between me and the shrine gate.

There's these groups of vampires, many different factions, and I've joined up with this one - on the one hand, I'm a little annoyed at myself for not checking out all the others first and just going with the first ones I found, but on the other hand, I'm certain this is the group I would've picked anyway. But there are so many rules I keep breaking, mostly because I don't know what they are - at one point I found a list in my contract, but having a copy of my contract is also against the rules. (Although I understood the contract, the text wasn't written in a real language and seemed like it had too many consonants.) Outside, under a bridge made of bones, I met a little girl looking like something out of Alice in Wonderland, who seems much more at home here than I am.

The word "Vendetta" being sung.

Fragment: "So the little girl had a last (something) request."

Buffy setting. Angel has a son (not Connor), and someone is threatening to turn that son into a vampire. The vampire's trying to convince Angel that this would be a good thing - not trying too hard, he intends to do this for Angel's own good whether Angel wants it or not - and Angel's trying to show him why it's a bad idea. He calls out a kid vampire he'd made himself, Angel's holding him by the shoulders and the kid says he died when he was 8, looks older but not by much, and then says "I'm good with math, but facial recognition..." The point is that the brain stops developing before its time.

There were some earlier fragments in that same setting - talking about once-in-a-lifetime perfect happiness vs. just plain everyday happiness, and watching Buffy walking down a sidewalk past a brick wall.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Reading about Josephine Baker, a sister who'd died and a mother she'd admired.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Forever Knight setting. As Nicolas, I'm with some humans in a public place, in a hurry, when just for a moment I spot LaCroix and Janette in the crowd with someone else, a woman either I or Janette turned relatively recently, within the past century or so - I desperately want to be with them. I'd been cut off from them. I can't just abandon my humans here, but I have to at least get a message to them. I make my excuses and head back to where I saw them. (I'd seen them dressed as they did in the 1940s - symbolic for happier times together. Also a connection to a kid vampire, so this dream was probably partially inspired by the Angel one.)

In a hallway. LaCroix was here a moment ago, sitting in a chair at the end of the hall, and I'm looking at a telegram that was on the table next to him. I wonder if that bit about text in dreams changing when you look away is true. I focus on an 8; I look again, and it's a 58; then 8 again, then a Cyrillic н. I guess it's true. (As I was expecting it to change, this seems a bit pointless.) I then resume looking for LaCroix.

I'm riding in a truck with a man who spots a pair of coyotes and stops the truck to shoot them. I knock the gun off target.

With that same man, I'm standing over a pair of bucks who are lying on the ground with several arrows in their sides, suffering because I knocked the killing shot off course.

I'm with someone else, a guy from the city, and watching that man pull into his driveway with the body of a horse in the back of his truck. We're standing in front of his neighbor's house, a chubby, long-haired, middle-aged hippie who is burning something that looks like a sphere of hay the size of a beach ball. The fire spreads to the ground, and then to his neighbor's yard, burning in strange geometric shapes, circles and lines. I start clapping, seeing that man's property on fire. The hippie tells me about a protest he's about to go to, a bunch of people are going to jump off a clocktower, do we want to come? The guy standing with me isn't interested, but I'm up for it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A man and a woman with accordions warming up for a show in front of a mirror, the man comments on how beautiful the red of his accordion is.

I'm playing a piano duet with that man, and while his part is beautiful to listen to, my part has so little to do that I lose track of where we are and come in late, I play slow and haltingly. I wonder why he doesn't just play the whole piece himself, he could easily play my part with his left hand.

A machete being given to someone as a gift.

My IRL sister S. calls me and describes a place she stopped at as "a Twin Peaks diner." The use of Twin Peaks as an adjective makes no sense to me - what, do they have great pie with a side of prophetic dreams?

Twin Peaks setting, 3rd person, as a disembodied observer I'm looking at the trees along a mountain road, bare of leaves, small and spindly trees, so close together that none of them really had a chance to grow. A jeep comes down the road, driven by the sheriff, with Cooper in the passenger seat. Cooper's talking about how cold it's gotten, and he's pleasantly nervous about his date tonight.

There's an accident of some kind, an earthquake or a landslide, and the jeep gets stuck; the sheriff gets out of the jeep to walk along a footpath into the mountains. Cooper wants to take care of something in the jeep before he follows, something to calm him down before his date. The landslide or whatever it was that trapped the jeep has opened up a second path next to the usual footpath, and as a disembodied observer I think 'You are obviously being invited on a personal quest. Take it.' The sheriff doesn't take it. However, the usual path crumbles beneath his feet, and he lands on the second path anyway. At the moment the footpath crumbles beneath him, so does the road holding up the jeep, and it falls into a crevice with Cooper still inside.

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.

(Technically lucid, in the sense that I clearly knew I was dreaming, but there was no more control than usual and no particular moment of becoming lucid that I remember, I seemed to have simply started out that way. Then again, I can't remember how this scene started. Background info: I recently read something claiming dreams usually don't include all 5 senses, mostly just sight.)

I want to test out that bit about how senses work in dreams, so I float up to my bedroom ceiling and run my fingers over the ridges of the plaster. My sense of touch seems to be working fine to me. I even break off a piece of the plaster and taste it - the taste is probably not what plaster really tastes like, and it's very bland, but the sense of taste is certainly present. I decide I need to wake up to write this down.

(And I did. Rather than being any more aware than usual, it seemed more like I'd unintentionally programmed my dream self to complete this task, and my dream self was just carrying out those orders, without me having to take any active control of the dream. I went back to sleep for a few more hours.)

I'm playing the role of Louis de Pointe du Lac and watching a performance of Les Miserables in french. The girl playing young Cosette reminds me a little of Claudia, which makes me remember the songs she used to sing around the house. Their voices are similar. But Lestat's distracting me, talking as we watch the performance, telling me about his run in with Daniel and how he'd given him that 'choice I never had' line. And then he says to me that really, that was something of a lie; Daniel was already 'for the blood' as he puts it, since he'd met me.

There's this man I'm hanging around waiting to talk to. He'd said something about an old massacre involving the Minoans, and how events are about to repeat themselves, and asked me to wait around. But I'm getting impatient, and the longer I wait, the more I'm convinced that this is all nonsense anyway. Finally I get up to leave, and ask this other guy, this kind of hanger-on, to give his boss the message that I couldn't wait.

Instead, he tries to convince me to stay. He starts talking about how that Minoan disaster wasn't my fault, that I shouldn't have blamed myself for my inaction, that I couldn't have stopped it even if I'd stuck around, but that if I run from my sense of guilt now, I'm just going to make sure those events repeat themselves. Annoyed by all this, I make fun of him as I try to shake him off and leave, but he follows me out to my car. He talks about the time I married into the family of Lot and found the women practicing strange magic, and in my horror, slaughtered them, including my bride. He talks - and eventually, sings, operatically - about this long litany of disasters caused by running from my guilt. This ends in an operatic pronouncement of doom as I finally drive off.