Carabas

A young woman's walking quickly through the woods just before dawn - the trees are sparse and thin, lots of fallen leaves from past seasons covering the ground; she's wearing simple dark clothing and a white cap, from maybe around the 1500s. She's very nervous. I follow her as she steals a black hen - she's thinking about some dog as she does it - and makes her way to a well.

But just as she reaches the well, an older woman grabs her and shouts, "Witch! Possessed!" This woman's familiar to me. Painfully thin, red hair so short and strangely cut that I suspect it's growing out after being shaved off completely, wearing a nightdress as if she'd just seen my witch and jumped out of bed to stop her, but I don't believe it's a coincidence that she's here; I believe hunting witches is something she's done before.

The scene changes. Three men - two middle-aged, one older, all still looking like it's the 1500s - are discussing the woman who'd been caught as a witch, and her mother. Her mother had been the same, accused of "magical transformations," but she'd died years and years ago, and the daughter had been raised by another since she was a child, changed her family name. The last these men had heard of her, she was to be married to some knight. They frame this marriage as a very good thing, that she had a good life that she's thrown away; but I hear them say this and I think indeed she was married to him, and that had gone very badly for her, and that's why she summoned me.

Later. Different scene entirely, my IRL home, a pair of men attempted to break in and I turned them into cats. Cat burglars. They made for very angry cats but I was pleased with myself for the joke, and my sister had been wanting a white cat anyway.

A nightmare involving a creature called the Sandman whose facial features are fluid, constantly slowly changing; and then a false awakening in which the Sandman creature is approaching my POV character's bed.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm walking around the grounds of a mansion where I've been staying. Talking to someone, he's looking at something behind me and says, "Look at that, straight out of a painting." I turn around to look. The sky in the distance is yellow-tinged and nearly completely covered by these two dark slabs of storm clouds, like solid walls. The opening between them makes me think of the parting of the seas. The water beneath those clouds is being tossed up in such a way that it's revealed an old and famous shipwreck, it's been pulled out of the depths. Another ship, a modern one, is thrown out of the sea by the winds, and it crashes straight through one of the massive floor-to-ceiling windows of the mansion.

(A false awakening mostly about trying to describe that last scene, then actually woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm looking after an enormous, shaggy black 'dog' - more like an enormous wolf - that belongs to my neighbor. Most of the dream revolves around playing with him and petting him. When I go to feed him, his water is kept in a intricately curved copper tube, almost like a French horn.

I'm looking at a man with the head of a dog, carrying something like a whip made out of live snakes, driving a chariot through a large underground hall. He's a good and trusted friend, and I've given him a highly respected position here, something to do with training or teaching. There was an assassination attempt a while ago, and ever since then he's refused to come above ground, except for twice a month, different days every month, and even then only at specific locations.

A flashback to a time shortly after that assassination attempt, from 3rd person now. The dog-headed man was resting up in a garden in an area separate from the rest of the compound, for the intelligence workers only. There's a woman there, and he's wondering if she's the one who took care of him while he was delirious. He doesn't completely trust her. She's told him before that she was designed by her masters to be a partner for "Riker" - although the dog-headed man doesn't realize it, this is a codename referring to the leader of the compound (my pov character in the previous scene. When I hear the name Riker, I associate it with Dune's Paul). While talking about various things, she complains that "my Riker's" role won't come into play until later, so for now all she can do is wait.

My IRL sisters are visiting me and we've been bickering as we walk to the door of my IRL house. There's a dead girl standing in the driveway, staring at the door, and - sarcastically, it's related to what we were bickering about - I say to her something along the lines of "Well? Are you coming in, too?" This is said more for my sisters' benefit than for the dead girl; she doesn't seem to react.

Inside, I get online and read a news article. The powerful old guard of some country have been giving themselves promotions. One man is referred to by the titles Ulmo (name taken from Tolkien, but at the time I believed it was a reference to some eastern European mythology) and Eleusis, and a rank which translates to Old Knight. The Ulmo of myth is (in this dream) associated with beginnings and the dawn, and that was symbolic for this man's political duties, but as these people have given themselves promotions those myth-derived titles have become more literal - he can now literally control dawn, and other forms of time related to the beginnings of things.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a caterpillar in my IRL house. I pick it up, and although it keeps wriggling away, I eventually manage to take it outside. When I put it down in the grass, it immediately tries to get back inside, and I realize there's a beetle out there it's trying to get away from. The beetle tells me that this is the spirit of a dead girl. It tells me a story about this girl and a hockey player who's also now dead, and about two guys who took a deal not to talk about something that happened between two hockey players and two girls. I see the hockey player and the dead girl on a train, and she's staring blankly into space with these wide, round eyes.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm watching an extended version of Near Dark with various extras. The one I'm watching seems to be an interview, but with the characters themselves, not the cast/crew. The family's standing around a Cadillac convertible, and Caleb's talking to someone about how he first joined the family, a long time ago. He'd been driving with a woman, she'd been drunk, when the family found them she hadn't realized the danger they were in. He talks about Mae, and then he holds up her hand and says "and lucky me - no ring." He laughs. Jesse looks a little disgusted by the way Caleb talks about Mae, but he laughs too. Caleb's wearing a belt buckle shaped like the head of a snake with fangs bared.

I decide to go back to the main menu. This isn't just for Near Dark, but for a wide variety of movies, and one displays a picture of John Constantine with a title that references immortality and love and/or betrayal. The menu images are constantly shifting, and he slips off the screen. There are at least two layers of the image, and I think of those layers as somehow acting as mirrors, both of the viewer and of each other. By changing the angle I'm standing at, I get Constantine back in view.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Someone's telling a story. The listener asks, "Was it the wrath of heaven?" The storyteller shakes her head. "It was the wrath of the humans." Following someone's advice led to some captured human surviving and leaving the fortress where the storyteller lived, an isolated building in the center of a vast field stretching to the horizon, the only landmark I can see. He returned with many soldiers. As a disembodied observer standing on the top of that fortress, I can hear the soldiers shouting to each other. They're speaking Korean, I don't understand them.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A setting based on a fantasy version of ancient China. An elegantly dressed woman is telling a terrified human man to "call me elder sister." He frantically agrees, although he nearly calls her something more along the lines of 'mistress' as he does so; he's thinking about her connection to his master. She releases him and walks off, through a fence, passing through the solid object like it's not there. Looking at this, the man says or thinks "What a way for owls to fly around at night."

A similar fantasy China setting. There's a man leading a human woman around a palace, talking about truth and the inability to lie. "Like this," the woman says, holding up the candle she was given by the woman who rules this place. It has words carved into it, which she believes promises her safe passage in some fashion. He laughs, and says that's a careful bit of phrasing, which causes her to look concerned. He reads it out, and it says something along the lines of "The human will want/feel no hunger." He points out that this statement will be true even if she stays here forever - she won't want food, she won't feel hunger. But actually eating solid food that will sustain her life, or returning to her own world to do so - that's a different subject entirely, and it's not covered by the carefully-phrased promise on the candle.

In a modern setting, I'm staying somewhere for the night with a small group of other people. Other groups are here as well, and there's concerns about space, so when I finally see the room we've been given I'm surprised by how big it is. There aren't many beds, but there's a lot of floor space, there should be no problem. We all sort out spaces for our bedrolls, and some of us go over the movies we have between us. I wonder if I can convince the others to put on Near Dark. The floor's becoming crowded, and I just manage to find a space for my backpack; on top of the backpack I place a stuffed animal shaped like a dog, which I'm aware contains a guardian dog spirit who protected me from the ghost of a dead girl earlier tonight.

I've just started working in a shop run by two hara, training dogs, and I've been talking over a problem with the owner. The other har is someone the owner purchased, but I'm thinking you wouldn't get that impression from seeing the two of them interact; I think of him as aloof and 'leonine' and that he's 'best left to his own devices.'

There's two close friends who made some archaeological discovery many years ago, as a result of which, the choices they respectively made caused them to drift further and further apart. Now a girl's delivering a message to one of them, who has become a demon, informing him that the other is on his deathbed. He has only a mild response.

There's a woman looking at a 'falling star demon' - a spirit of a star which would have been considered simply a spirit when it was in its place in the sky, but a demon when it falls - and she refers to it as her assassin. The falling star is a sign of her own fate. I'm thinking about whether there are any choices to be made here, or which could be made at an earlier point in the timeline; any options other than her dying here and now.

A teenage girl with long red hair is standing in a field at the foot of a mountain. The image changes to show her standing in this same field when she was younger, standing under a tree while her father spoke to her with his hands on her shoulders, while the rest of the family walked away into the woods and left her there. She was known as something like a witch. She shouts after her family not to leave her, and when she tries to calm herself down some sympathetic man - also present in the scenes where she's a teenager - tells her no, go ahead and shout that if it's what you feel, call what you see, refuse to be quiet, make it your power.

She's older now, and as a disembodied observer I'm watching her walk across that field towards the mountain, watching her from behind and I'm struck by the vivid colors of her now compared to when she was younger - the red hair in a thick braid now and down to her legs, the vivid blue skirts. She's walking past a wooden house with something going on in the woods on her mind, something urgent, possibly dangerous, her thoughts feel very determined and she's intercepting a group of people walking across the field towards that house - I think of them as the Freyhella (name taken from Wraeththu, but the resemblance stops at the name). As she walks towards them she takes a knife and cuts off her hair, right to the scalp. "With shorn hair," she says to them, the first words of a ritualized phrase, citing her right to be heard as one of them, as their neighbor, and as a 'witness' - a reference to whatever it is that's going on in the woods that she was thinking about earlier, and that she needs their recognition for. She ends by saying "Turn, and you can't yield to this," and she gets this hard expression I fall in love with.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Her again, in the woods, walking a path around some people at a distance far enough that she won't be seen, forming a protective symbol around them.

I'm walking along a road and find a dog walking around on its own, separated from its owner. I read the owner's name on the collar, and I bring the dog back into town with me, ask around after the owner and almost immediately find her apartment building. I ring the buzzer and ask her to come down.

When she comes down, she gives me some water to carry. The plotline's changed: there's no dog, we're going somewhere together, two distinct groups traveling together, I'm in one group, she's in the other. I can feel the added weight of the water in my backpack and am annoyed at having to carry more than I'd originally packed. Some of the people in the other group stop to get some water from a stream, and most of the people in my group find this disgusting. My IRL sister L., with my group, says there's nothing wrong with it, running water is clean; the rest of us disagree with her, saying that's not exactly wrong but not exactly true either, and then saying that it's a matter of belief. IRL sister S. says that's why she and her friends have agreed to stop believing in anything, it affects too much.

A woman who used to work with some kind of 'private security company' - which in this case appears to be a euphemism for something not entirely legal - who left that job a while ago and is now a manager at a hotel, currently talking with an old friend, a woman still working at that 'security company,' about how much faster emergency services respond when there's gunfire reported.

Vague fragments involving combat, next scene I remember clearly the combat's over and that hotel manager's picking up her dog, Max, from the dog daycare service - but both dog and daycare service had been involved in that combat scene and the woman running the daycare now refuses to allow Max to come back there again. The hotel manager protests, saying that "We're doing really well," and the daycare woman hesitates over that 'we', highlighting the parallel between dog and owner here, then stresses 'he' - he, Max (and by extension his owner), may seem like he's doing well on the surface, but he has these undercurrents, things that are always going to come back to the surface eventually, and because of that she can't have him around. The friend from the 'security company' is there throughout this scene, petting Max and not saying anything.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: "Covered in ashes, the boy king Yuuma."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: A party at my IRL home, some people have passed out, someone suggests putting on a Terminator movie and asks whether I've seen them. I point out that the last thing I need is to see those movies again after dreaming about them for a month straight. (That's actually true, except IRL it was 2 months.)

A man, a professor, is having an affair. He'd planned to meet his mistress today and finally leave his wife - but at the last minute he's realized this was all a terrible mistake, and he's confessed everything to his wife, Julia, who already knew. (Despite the name, the wife here is not the same as my recurring DC Julia.) She insists on meeting the mistress, and he agrees, taking her to the place where he and the mistress had planned to meet for lunch.

As they park across the street, the mistress is just leaving the building, and he points her out to Julia. At first Julia doesn't believe him. She'd expected some silly college student, the midlife crisis cliche. The woman across the street is beautiful as a movie star, long blond hair and dressed smartly and conservatively in all black, poised and polished, everything about her indicates power. Julia suspects her husband just pointed out a pretty woman in the crowd to throw her off from meeting the real mistress, it's so unbelievable that her husband could be with this woman - but he's gotten out of the car and ducked into the woman's taxi, talking to her. He points back to his wife, and the mistress, confused, looks right through her, saying, "Where?" She saw Julia and immediately dismissed her as someone this man would be with. (Julia is thinking of herself as a plain middle-aged housewife in comparison to the mistress, but in actuality she's quite stunning herself. Short curly red hair, wrapped in a white fur coat and gold jewelry.)

The professor goes back to his car and the scene switches to follow the mistress as she arrives at her destination and gets out of the taxi. The professor stops her in the parking lot - he followed her taxi. He says to her, "Maybe I slept with the body of the garden, but the meat of it hardly tasted." He means by this that throughout their affair he never really got to know anything about her beyond the surface, and that he'd like to. Nonetheless, he's going back to his wife. He doesn't like the way he's dressed, in the nice suit and white scarf he'd put on to meet his mistress, as if to keep up with her pace; he feels quite ridiculous. Rain is beading on the top of their umbrellas, but it's red, and I, disembodied observer, wonder whether that's the rain itself or a trick of the light, a reflection of something I can't see.