Carabas

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.

(Fragments: I noted down 'veve' and 'garden party' and went back to sleep. I can't remember what either of those were about.)

3rd person, following a lady's maid in a castle. She's with her mistress, a blonde woman, very angry at the master of the house right now, a man with very long black hair and a very deep voice, and the master sends the maid away to go wait for a delivery of fabrics, from which the materials for the mistress's new wardrobe are to be chosen. The servant does as she's told, thinking of how hard it is for her mistress to adjust to her new husband and the customs of the empire, and while she waits for the delivery she weaves some threads into Scholar's Knots, a game for the mistress to unravel later, to calm her down. She makes the knots that represent the Emperors, and then, although they don't traditionally go together, she makes the knots for the Richards kings, which she thinks her mistress will appreciate. As she weaves she thinks, as a way of welcoming the mistress into the empire, welcome to your first thousand years.