Carabas

I'm being told a story. There's a man, a shapeshifter who can seem to be anyone, but when he smiles you see the shards of glass filling his mouth, grotesquely. I see the moment he'd died, falling from a horse and landing on a glass bottle full of something he'd been carrying, shattering it.

The story shifts to the woman he'd loved when he was alive. She was called a witch, and a mob took her and chained her to a tree in the forest, with a circle of some kind of wooden pegs placed in the ground to prevent the body from leaving that spot after death. Her body's left there without her head. I 'hear' the body briefly feel a dim sort of awareness of the presence of something familiar and loved nearby.

Over time, the body comes loose from the chains as it decomposes, sinks into the ground and is covered by - I hear the word 'loam', but I'm seeing moss growing over the body. The arms separate from the rest and hang from the chains. At one point, a horse that had belonged to her while she was alive comes to the tree and noses at those decaying arms, and they reach out and pat it. At another time, the body rises up from the ground and seems to dance, with those arms dancing along as if they were still attached - slightly altering how my vision works, I can see dark strings which would be invisible, manipulating the body like a puppet. That man with the mouth full of glass shards is pulling the strings.

Later, a scene in which I'm using Mephisto as a pseudonym.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

On a ship after some incident in which several of the crew died, the captain came to me privately to ask a question. He's under the mistaken impression that I can see the future. I don't see the future, I just have more memories to draw on to recognize old patterns playing out again. The captain asks, essentially, whether any of those who died were important - he uses the word 'cheap.' I say to him, "No life is cheap." He acknowledges that this was poor phrasing, but "I need to know-"

As he speaks, I see a go board. The point is made that certain moves will have a drastic impact on the outcome of the game, and others won't. The captain needs to know if any of the people we lost would have been necessary for this journey to succeed, in ways he can't foresee himself.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm looking at paintings hanging on a wall, a series mostly depicting figures of the zodiac, with one in the center of a man labeled Dream.

I'm meeting with a man named Snow who'd initially tried to conceal his identity from me. He's disappointed to find I recognized him immediately. The persona he'd put on for me was this sort of affable type; the real Snow is - well, he gives the impression of being intimidating but I'm not personally intimidated, I'm just enjoying watching how complete his transformation is.

The majority of the scene after that reveal consists of a tango, during which he leads - which is different, but I find I have no difficulty following. Great fun. He's proposing some kind of deal - there's something about him recognizing the way I've been challenging myself, and how working for him would be beneficial for both of us, something about working for a greater cause, a sense of direction - but when the tango's over and he wants an answer, I just start laughing. Man, have you got the wrong guy. I'm thoroughly enjoying every aspect of his presentation - the intimidating attitude, the seriousness of the deal he's proposing, the song and dance, his whole look - it's all incredibly appealing, but I have no intention of taking it seriously.

A woman who's been flirting with me - neither of us seriously - is taking my hand under the pretext of palm reading, turning it this way and that. She'd been joking around, but as she's 'reading' my palm, she notices the tiny raised circle on the tip of my thumb that holds a retracted needle and she stops smiling, though she doesn't understand what she's looking at.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've been sitting in a lounge room in the McKittrick. There's a host and a microphone, allowing the guests to listen in on his internal thoughts as we eat and drink. He's been sitting in the booth next to mine, having a conversation with a woman, another resident of the hotel. But when she leaves, he comes and sits across from me. He's bewildered as to why I've spent so much time here tonight. Of course the guests are all free to enjoy our stay at the hotel in any way we choose, there's no wrong way to go about it, and if I want to just sit here and watch his story unfold, that's fine - but my stay is half over already. Why don't I go out and see the show?

I'm thinking that I'll come back another time to enjoy the show - but nonetheless I leave the lounge and walk up to the next floor, which is in complete chaos thanks to the work of the three witches. Fragmentary memory here - I remember seeing the boy witch in passing and being annoyed with him, but no context beyond that. In a small room, I came across a woman who I realized has been/will be the next bald witch - right now she's another lost soul who came here on a mission but wound up getting drawn into Hecate's world. By the end of the night she has/will have shaved her head and altered her body language completely, transforming into one of the three witches for the next night.

The last of the three witches and the people under her sway are surrounded by sexual images. I only saw her briefly in passing as she led a young prince off down one of the halls. But instead I come across the naked prophetess who'll be taking this witch's role for the next night, currently in the process of transforming into that role. She puts her hands on my shoulders and pushes me to my knees in front of her, and I'm thinking that it's always a man she chooses for this part of the performance - the other guests in the room with me are all women, and they remain standing, pressing in close around us, watching her with a look of worship. She has a woman standing guard next to her during this dance, making sure none of the guests attempt to touch her without her permission. One of those women watching laughs off this restriction, and to show how ridiculous she thinks it is, she reaches out and puts her hand on the prophetess/witch's thigh with a familiar attitude. The performance comes to a complete stop. In the trouble that follows, I move away from the crowd and into the staff-only halls of the hotel.

A young woman stands downstage center, facing the audience; she never turns around. She's performing a simple, faltering version of the whirling, intricate dance going on behind her - contemporary ballet, the entire troupe on stage behind her. Everyone is in black and silver and painfully beautiful. This is her dream we're seeing play out behind her, her ideal. But the music is melancholy, nostalgic even - it's a waltz in a minor key, reminds me of Dvorak. Starts with just a music-box-like piano, but the music swells as the dancers behind her become the focus, all strings. I get swept up in the overwhelming sound of it and the movement of the dancers, until in the end it gradually fades away again to those music-box-like piano notes. A woman's voice from offstage calls to her to come to bed, the sun has risen. I focus on her profile as she turns to look offstage, towards that voice; when I look behind her again, the dancers have vanished. She leaves the stage.

There's a girl dancing at my shrine, a little marker in the woods that's rarely visited. I'm paying attention but I have a hard time understanding what she's communicating with some of the moves of the dance. I'm wondering why she keeps changing the form of it when she comes here; it would be much easier to understand her if she'd stop changing it.

I shift to 3rd person (although the pov character was also disembodied, so there's not that much of a change) and realize that it wasn't actually one girl who comes to dance, it's actually different girls who came over many generations; the god/spirit of the shrine didn't really understand the difference, or didn't see the difference as important. On top of that, the moves of the ritual they perform weren't always passed down directly; some of them learned at least parts of it from writings and illustrations, without anyone to correct them.