Carabas

There's a party full of drunk and pretty people I've gotten caught up in; it's being held in the honor of someone I don't really know, and when a group splits off for the private party, I go with them. The door closes behind me and Jules. Jules is dead sober - I'm not - and he doesn't look amused.

I'm talking to him about the person I've been trying to meet up with, a guy who's meant to be part of this group of party people somewhere; I'd first met him in a cell in Bangladesh, where I'd been trying to track down a particular object. I'm trying to stir Jules' memory of that time, but he just nods, goes yeah, yeah - he's annoyed.

He says, "Was I shot?" in a tone that suggests this happens frequently, and is probably my fault.

"In the left arm," I tell him.

He looks at the fingers of that arm, and I see a mental image of the neck of a stringed instrument. The implication is that getting shot affected his ability to play. Jules says, less annoyed now, "I do remember that one."

I walk through a portal that takes me up to this stone island floating in the air. Mostly it's this pillar of rough stone but the top, where I'm standing, is level. I walk around the tree in the center and through a second portal - this one takes me back down to the surface, just a few feet away from where I started. Superficially, it doesn't really seem like I'm doing anything aside from walking around - but the act of someone passing through the portals in sequence is leaving a mark, setting something up. I think of stitching a thread through fabric.

To get to the next portal I have to swim across a river. As I'm swimming, I think briefly about growing gills and just walking across the bottom, it might have been more pleasant. I decide to stick with what I've got.

The next portal takes me to an almost identical stone island, except this time there are five portals up here. I step through the first one, and it takes me only a few feet away, in front of the next portal. I'm exasperated by this setup, but I go with it, passing through each portal in sequence. But before I step through the last portal that should take me back to the surface, I step to the edge of the rock and look down, curious about where I am exactly.

Far below, I can see a mountain range. There are two rows cut into the side of the mountain, one on top of the other, with closely-spaced openings for doorways carved into the side of the rock. There are rooms inside - I walked along those paths on my way here. I remember looking up and seeing these two floating islands, and wondering how to get up there. But something occurs to me - I look around for the other floating island, the one I was on just before, and confirm it. Yes - it's still floating upside-down, with the flat surface and the tree on the bottom instead of the top, like an Escher sketch. When I was standing over there, I must have also been standing upside down, at least relative to here. I feel dizzy.

As Hemlock Grove's Roman, me and Peter have just entered this old abandoned tower, and I'm showing off some of the tricks I've picked up since the last time we saw each other. I turn myself into a cloud of bats, thinking of this as something I'd learned from that one previous dream, and I come out of it high on the wall, looking down at Peter watching me, able to hold myself up against the vertical wall just by gripping with my hands - it's not completely effortless, but it's still easy. It's a rush. I'm having so much fun showing off with Peter, I want to laugh. This makes me start thinking something about connections with people, and then there's a memory gap.

The next scene I remember is in a different part of the same building, the memory gap only lasted for about one or two changes of scene. I'd climbed up into the metal rafters and I've been heading up in a spiral, and I've just come across a closed door; but I'm not playing around anymore, I'm in a hurry, either chasing or being chased by something. The door has no handle on this side, so I hammer on it and shout, "Open the door. Open the door, mom!" (I was thinking of someone specific by 'mom', but whoever she was, it wasn't my IRL mother or the mother of the character I'd started the scene as - I'm not sure I'm still playing his role by this point.) Door still doesn't open, and I'm not surprised. I step back and look at it. There's no way to open it from this side, just a keyhole big enough to look through - I can see some light through it, and I have the feeling I'm meant to look through it, and that thought pisses me off. I grip the side of the door, forcing my fingers into the gap between the door and the frame, and I wrench it open.

The other side of the door leads to somewhere else completely, unconnected to the building I was just in. It's incredibly vivid, nothing like the dream I'd been having up until this point - which hadn't seemed un-vivid in any way, but I'm thinking of this as a completely different way of seeing things. I'm in a stone hallway, brownish-yellowish stones, filled with many doors, all of them wooden, arched, narrow, dull red. I still have that sense of being in a hurry, and I immediately go to open the first door to my left. But as I do, I hear a woman's voice - the mother I'd referred to before - shouting this strangled "No!" and I hear the sound of a door closing, and footsteps in a hurry. And then I'm awake.

(Really awake, none of the usual transition, just footsteps and "No!" and suddenly in my bed with my eyes open. Was convinced I'd been woken up by the actual front door and actual footsteps - which is not unusual, I sleep while other people are up - but no, just the dream. Back to sleep.)

As Constantine (rhymes with turpentine), I've been in a police interrogation room for a while now when they let in this elegant older woman to see me, calling her "Mrs. Constantine." She's supposed to be my mother, which is a lie of course, my mother being long dead, but I instantly play along with the act. Memory gap, and then I'm being put in a holding cell, and I try to convince someone I pass along the way to have the police find that woman and pick her up, quick. Not sure I made myself clear, though, I'd been passing out, having a hard time staying conscious. I can see the brown smoke of her spell wrapping around me. Blacked out.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I had a classroom scene, so I went lucid and walked out. I didn't have any particular destination in mind aside from getting out of the school, and the first door that I reached for took me into the kitchens - still meant to be part of the school. The next door I can find is a refrigerator door, and I give that a shot - no good, I open it and find food inside. I think to myself that this is probably too strong an association to bother trying again, so I remove the refrigerator from the wall. There's a white wooden door behind it. This one opens onto a satisfyingly different scene - rolling green hills and a mountain in the distance that I mentally compare to Mt. Fuji from its size and the way it dominates the landscape, though otherwise they don't look alike.

I walk along a paved road leading towards that mountain. At one point I come across a house, and the road divides so that one path leads up a slope to that building and down again to rejoin the main road on the other side, and I'm admiring the organic shape of both the road and the house. It's a white one-story building composed of several rounded rooms, with a reddish-brown shingled roof with little spires over each rounded room. There were quite a few plants that I was admiring, and gardening tools, but I knew this was going to be too much detail for me to remember, and a lot of it didn't have any IRL comparisons I could easily make, to make it easier to remember. I focus on a couple woven baskets lying on a bench, with lids with little spires like the ones on the roof, the last thing I focus on as the path leads me back down to the main road.

The path leads me into a town, or a small city maybe, starting in a little square with two clocks standing on black iron poles. Both of them show the same time, 3:00, with the second hand pointing down at the 6; a bell tolls, and then they both run backwards, until every hand points to the top, midnight exactly.

The path leads on to another square, this one with a big brass bell. There are a fair number of people in the streets around me now, but I'm only paying attention to one - a man standing beneath that bell. He calls me over. He's this older man, and I mentally compare him to Mister Rogers, that sort of friendly and wise and harmless impression. His speech is slurred and very deliberate, as if he has a hard time forming English words. He says quite a few things about me heading for the mountain, and preparing for that, and he mentions K., an old IRL friend who I haven't gotten in touch with for a long time. I'm a little frustrated by knowing I'm not going to be able to remember all these details when I wake up, and I'm having a hard time picking and choosing which parts to focus on, but I hold up a hand to stop him and ask about K., ask him to clarify - is he saying I need K. with me at the mountain, that I can't do it alone? He's surprised by the question. He says, no, you can go on alone. And he compares me to "a dry martini: high in the hand, but hard to keep it." Okay, that's suitably convoluted phrasing that I'm definitely not going to remember that unless I wake up now. I choose to wake up so I can remember at least some of what he's said. I regret this decision almost instantly.

I'm listening to a man die while I remain in hiding. I'm thinking that maybe I should have moved sooner and saved him, even though I'd have risked being seen - but I don't have any particular emotion about this, except maybe a little irritation at myself. I've been sent into this old stone ruin of a fortress, and I'd intended for only five particular men to be spared. Now I'm down to four. It's not ideal, but I'll have to live with it.

I couldn't hear her very clearly from my hiding place under their bed, but the woman who stabbed him said something to the effect that he should have recognized her. Some personal revenge thing - none of my business. Now I'm seeing the sort of smoke haze of colors passing before my eyes that I associate with life leaving a body. I watch it dissipate in the air, and I'm irritated at the waste. Waiting around is pointless now - and the woman should be directly above me. I stab up through the mattress.

When she dies, my perspective shifts. I'm floating in the void, with this massive black slab of a door in front of me, as wide as it is tall, some kind of geometric symbol across it. It's standing on this sort of grid far below, like a chess board where all the squares are black, with the door as a line across the center of the board. There's a few gravestones occupying some of the squares of the grid - that's new. I realize immediately they represent the previous targets the door sent me after - one of them must represent that woman whose death brought me back here. The door's saying something in my head about bringing it wisdom for the dead.

A woman's looking over a small art collection - sketches of the building she's in from various earlier eras, collected in a large book. On the wall directly over the book is a recent painting of this same building, but showing it thousands of years earlier when there was a lake here, with the door opening directly onto the water. She finds this painting a little funny - unlike the historical sketches, she believes this one's a sort of what-if image. The building's old but it's not that old. But the man who commissioned the painting, the owner of this place, she's thinking of him as being oddly precise about where the lake should be in relation to the building; as far as she's aware there's no evidence that there was ever really a lake here at all. The title of the painting is Lake Hae or Hayle or something along those lines. Although the building in the painting and the building in modern times are identical, somehow in the painting it gives the impression of being someplace sacred.

She turns the pages of the book - she's careful with it, it's very valuable. After the sketches of the building there are a series of anatomical sketches and portraits. She's on a page showing several sketches of an old man, mostly bald and with a sort of rounded profile. As a disembodied observer, I'm fond of the sketch, sort of nostalgic about it - both about the subject and about the sketch itself. She keeps turning the pages, and there's a sketch of a young man with a very square jaw; looking at him changes the scene.

Still in the same room, but a couple centuries earlier; the walls are lined with bookshelves. There's a woman sketching, holding a conversation with a man sitting in a chair. A servant comes into the room - he's that young man from the sketch - and the man in the chair stands up to speak with him. A man all in black and with very long black hair, he's the same man who owned this building and that art collection in modern times.

I've spent the past few scenes in this huge house, and I'm currently walking through a door that I expect to take me back to a place I'd been in earlier in the dream - there's a character I'd intended to meet up with again. Instead, I find myself in a room I think of as resembling a sanatorium - there are long rows of beds on each side of the room, with a few curtains here and there for privacy. On each bed there's a woman in a hospital gown, writhing like she's in a bad demon possession horror flick.

I go lucid and try to remember if there are any lucid tasks I'd wanted to perform of the ask-a-DC variety - no, there aren't any. But I believe dialogue is the only lucid trick I can do right now. So I ask something of the various women and get short, boring answers - I don't remember what I asked or what those boring answers were. The last one I asked gave me a longer answer involving a reference to an earthworm - I noted her response as nonsensical but phrased poetically, which I thought of as a step up from the straightforward and boring responses from the others. I'm now mentally comparing them less to demon possession horror flicks and more to Greek spirits - Furies or such.

Towards the end of the row of hospital beds, there's a woman who's much older than the others. She objects to me - calls my behavior intrusive. She takes my hand in hers, saying this will help her see me - representing that this should be a two-way conversation, rather than just me one-sidedly questioning them. Closing her eyes for a moment, she asks what's blocking me. My first instinct is that she's referring to meditation, mysticism, that sort of thing. But since she didn't say so specifically, I go with a safe response: I talk about general life concerns. She cuts me off and clarifies that she was indeed asking about meditation and mysticism and such. I, sounding annoyed, say I was getting to that - which is a lie.

But we continued talking about general life concerns anyway - specifically career things. Everything we said on the subject sounded sensible (even after I woke up), and she pointed out a good solution that I disliked - I thought it sounded like more effort than it was worth. She quite reasonably laughed at me for that - for wanting a perfect solution to just come along without any effort.

I started questioning the dream in a fairly dull IRL-based scene, and then questioned why I was questioning it - but I did eventually become lucid. Once becoming lucid, however, I as Jaime immediately started looking for Cersei.

(Side note: this was an interesting level of lucidity. Fully lucid in most respects - lucid about the fact that I was dreaming, lucid about my ability to control the dream, no desire to stick to the previous dream storyline - but I wasn't lucid about my own identity. On top of that, I only started playing Jaime's role when I became lucid - up until that point I'd been my IRL self. It's standard for me to play the role of other people when I'm non-lucid, but I'd thought that conflicted with lucidity - apparently not.)

I was still in a room that was meant to represent my IRL home, but it had no doors, which I understood signified a resistance against me taking control and changing the scene. I had the feeling I had to get out in a hurry if I wanted to maintain lucidity. So I turned around in a full circle in order to create a door that would be there when I turned around again. It was a wooden door, rounded at the top, and when I opened it I saw a scene that was meant to represent my IRL neighborhood.

I closed the door, called out to Cersei, and opened it again, understanding that this will have changed the location it links to. Now on the other side of the door there's a dark stone enclosed walkway with large windows overlooking a castle courtyard. Better, but this isn't the place I was looking for. I have a mental image of a glittering gold-and-white castle that I want to get to, where I expect Cersei to be. I try again - I close the door, call to Cersei, and open it again. The scene on the other side of the door hasn't changed this time - it's still the dark stone walkway. I decide that this means Cersei must be in this scene somewhere, so I walk through the door.

Recall gets increasingly shaky after this. After walking through the castle a bit I found Cersei in the courtyard, and after a short conversation she took me to a rowboat that we'd both have to row - she gave me some explanation involving the word 'knowledge,' and I made an (apparently less than successful) effort to remember her phrasing so I'd recall it after I woke up, it seemed symbolically important. The boat carried us briefly along a waterway running through the castle, and I think I began losing lucidity at this point. There's a memory gap, and very little recall after that - before I woke up I'd wound up back in an IRL-based scene, and I'm unsure how much lucidity I had by then.

A false awakening during which I tried to write down the previous dream. The dream I was writing down was a Rumpelstiltskin POV, and I'd written that in Belle's version of their shared dream there had been no corresponding scene with Bae. When Rumpelstiltskin found this out from her, he had a sort of bitter "aha!" reaction to it, as if this proved him right in doubting something. But now that I was 'awake' and writing this down, I thought he was mistaken in that reaction. There was more I wanted to write, but my pen ran out of ink. I went to fetch another and was distracted by various things.

(Woke up for real. Back to sleep.)

There are four servants in a mansion, one who's getting ready to serve guests. The other three have to stay out of sight of the guests, and two of them have stepped out a back door to talk about something.

The other one of those three servants, the only woman among them, finds those two standing around the open door and is very upset at them for leaving it open. They have some reason for it - but while doors are open, the spell that freezes time inside the mansion weakens. Allowing a few minutes to pass here and there means very little to them, but that fourth servant, the one currently serving the guests, is human. He only has so many minutes in his lifetime. She wants to preserve that limited life of his for as long as she can, even if it's only a few centuries. She's furious at them for allowing any of it to slip away.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A car crashes out of a portal onto a hill. The woman inside is unconscious, and when she wakes up, she gives the name of a flight that crashed with her and her husband on it. She believes that she's just woken up after that plane crash; she doesn't remember the car or the portal. That plane crash happened days or weeks ago. But she's taken to the hospital where her husband is still staying.

When her husband sees her, he's shocked to see she looks much younger than before she disappeared. He takes out her compact mirror from her purse - he has all of her things that were found at the plane crash site - and hands it to her. As he does so, I see an image of her at three ages. Her appearance now is a young woman with strangely large eyes, blonde hair worn straight back under a headband, neatly dressed. But I'm also seeing a version of her several years older, with long wavy hair and a loose dress; and at the same time, a version of her that's about 5 years old. I realize that she became younger while she stayed in that place on the other side of the portal, and if she'd stayed longer she would have reverted to that 5 year old image.

Shortly after passing a man whose head is a snake, three creatures are presented as things I'm meant to fight. But they seem harmless, and when I walk up to them, they disappear. Past them, I walk into a hidden door set into a tree, and spend some time walking through a series of rooms. The passageway I'm walking through makes a large circle, and when I get back to the start (there were a lot of scene changes along the way, so this "start" wasn't actually the same place as the tree-passage from before), I notice a flight of stairs heading down that I hadn't seen before, with small, glowing blue arrows hovering just above the floor, pointing down.

The stairs lead down into an enormous room filled with books and a portrait of a man I recognize as someone infamous named Corvo - he's someone I've heard of often, in the context of being a doctor or a researcher or something similar, responsible for some tragedy or some sinister event; but I personally think of him positively, even though I know very little about him - mostly I feel curious. I realize this was his room, and these are his records.

I'm standing in a city street in Corvo's POV, sort of - I'm aware that this is me going through his records, his reflections on the past. At this moment in time, he'd been disgraced, along with some other man who I'd also heard of, someone who's walking away from him right now. I have some mental connotation between this man and violence but also think of him as a better person than Corvo, someone who dislikes Corvo intensely but works more closely with him than anyone else, I have the impression Corvo somehow forced him or manipulated him into carrying out a lot of dirty work for him. Now Corvo's looking at the open gates to the city, looking at the crowds of people entering, aware that they're unknowingly carrying some danger that others refuse to listen to him about, and feeling powerless. With the knowledge that this is a flashback, he's feeling an incredible amount of pain over this moment in the past and whatever it eventually led to, and I feel that same emotion so intensely that I have a false awakening or something similar and spend it looking for some space to just calm down from that scene.

I went semi-lucid during a nightmare - a scene involving IRL characters - and wanted to change the scene in order to get away from the nightmare. I had a false awakening - possibly two, memory's vague on this point - either way, I eventually wound up in my IRL bedroom, lucid (now unsure on whether or not I lost lucidity in between).

The room's dark, and I'm frustrated, feeling trapped. I've got the impression I'm stuck in some in-between state, not dreaming properly (whatever that means) and not able to wake myself up, and I'm trying to escape this state. I'm thinking about lack of control, and I look at an object in my hand and turn it into a sword, thinking of this as somewhat pointless, and thinking something about the way the dim light affects this. I find myself moving along the ceiling, as if I'm held up there against my will. There are two windows, and I manage to claw my way over to one while avoiding being pulled toward the other. I slide it open and tear out the screen (I was thinking something I can't recall in detail, something about the way the window responds to my actions by opening or not opening due to it being a part of a dream rather than a physical window), and with great effort manage to crawl through the window.

On the other side, I'm floating over water, surrounded by cliffs and hills covered in snow. It's night. There are wooden buildings and people outside, dressed in clothes from at least a few centuries ago. My perspective is moving, but I'm still partway in the window; when I look behind me, I can see the window hovering in midair. I'm moving toward the town center, and I can hear people talking - not a language I understand, but from some of the words I catch I believe it to be German, or some variant of it. There's some event about to take place, I believe it's something religious, some ritual.

I enter a building. Memory goes spotty here again, but eventually I wound up speaking with an old woman who gave an impression of beauty and power. To her left was a woman sitting asleep in a throne, dressed in a costume that could have been straight from the LotR movie elves - I specifically compared it to a costume while I was looking at her. I wondered if she was Julia. (It's unusual that it's something I wondered about, as opposed to just knowing.) The old woman was telling me about her plans, including something she was going to discard, and I requested that she give me that thing. She was surprised but amused and granted my request, but afterward I thought of this as a missed opportunity - I became distracted by the thing she gave me, I should have just listened and followed along with her.

I've just walked back into the McKittrick Hotel. It's the middle of the day, so the place is mostly closed, but there's a guy at the front desk who tells me the owner has died. I climb up a few flights of stairs and come to a room with an old glass bottle hanging on a rope from the doorknob, with a red liquid like blood inside. Hanging next to it there's a card with a series of about 10 questions about the purpose of your visit. One of the questions mentions Maximillian, and reading it, I realize that each question is a reference to a different riddle to solve or mission to carry out, each given by a different resident of the hotel. If a visitor has completed one of these riddles/missions but didn't have a chance to report back before the end of the night, the hotel will permit them to return during the day, to wrap up unfinished business.

As Louis, I'm standing next to Lestat and looking down into the hold of a ship. It seems very dark, and I'm remembering a previous incident where he left me trapped somewhere. I tell him, "I've learned," and we're not going to go through that again. He acts exasperated, like I'm being ridiculous, and of course he wouldn't do that to me again, that was centuries ago, don't be so paranoid.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After trouble trying to talk to my IRL father on the phone - I couldn't hear him clearly, but I also couldn't make the phone disconnect - I'm now meeting him at some event. I'm trying to save four or five seats, but that causes trouble with the people next to me; I get the seats I wanted, but the group of teenage guys sitting next to us are annoyed with me now. The one right next to me puts his feet up on the row of seats in front of us at an angle, crowding into my space, until he's practically in my lap. I call him a gay slur, then immediately wonder why I said that; meanwhile, he backs off and looks hurt. One of the other guys with him starts getting into my face, and at one point he suggests that maybe everyone here is dead - "I'm dead, you're dead, we're all dead," in a sing-song tone. I say to him, sure. Land of the dead, dreams, Underhill, it's all the same thing. Everyone around me has a rather unpleasant look on their face after that, and I think it's because I mentioned that this is a dream; then I think that this only happened because I picked up that expectation from other lucid dreamers. In any case, I get up and walk out of the room into the hall.

Thinking about that Underhill reference, I think it's important that I find elves - they're much preferable to the people who think they're dead - and I look for a door, but this building is built on an open sort of plan, with rooms opening onto each other at strange angles, not easy for me to control. I eventually come around to the back of the building and walk out a door, trying to use the door as a portal and thinking about elves, but feeling like I had only limited success. The door opens onto a stable, and there's a car parked here, and a woman in a ballgown getting into the car with a man who's wearing a uniform indicating he works here. On a closer look, he looks rather elfish. I think about hitching a ride.

Bit of a fragmented memory after that - I don't wind up getting into the car, but me and that guy walked out of that stable and into the woods, where we had some encounter with someone else. False awakening after that: waking up in an unfamiliar bedroom, I get my journal out of my backpack beside the bed and start writing down a dream about a (nonexistent) vampire movie involving that woman in the ballgown; as I was writing I believed it to be based on a real movie.

I walk through a door and come out in my IRL yard, thinking about how to get out of this situation (what that situation was, I no longer remember), when I remember this is a dream. I start flying, which I think of as a useful way of escaping that situation - my first instinct is to continue the dream storyline. Then I realize that since this is a dream, there's no reason for me to continue to deal with that situation at all. I'm looking up at a gibbous moon (it's in a different phase IRL. Also it was night in the dream; and there was no snow on the ground, though the trees were bare; and there was a bush that IRL was cut down years ago). Looking at that moon, I immediately (and accurately) remember two lucid goals that have to do with the moon, and I decide to fly up there. However, I get distracted thinking about those two different goals - the second one doesn't necessarily have to be done on the moon, and I wonder if trying to focus on both at once could throw me off.

Slight memory gap. While flying, I've somehow wound up getting entangled with some Christmas lights my IRL neighbor put up near the power lines - red, white and blue ones - and I've managed to damage the string of white lights. Although I'm still aware I'm dreaming and still intend to fly to the moon, I've lost some lucidity - I think I have to fix these lights first.

But after accomplishing that, I find something else that distracts me - a Bowie album called 'evil on sale' - and lose lucidity entirely.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a child who's the young, orphaned, lord of an estate. He's been asleep or unconscious for some days after some incident that put him in danger, and now that he's woken up he's found that his servants - one in particular, who's also a magician or something similar - have changed things about the house while he was unconscious. This house used to be full of secret, magical things - taking care of them was part of the duty of the lord of this particular estate - and now they've all been removed, for his own protection. The lord doesn't like this at all. He's run down to the cellars, where a locked door used to open onto a place where they kept a pair of unicorns, which are no longer there - that magician servant is here in the hall outside that locked door, up on a step ladder, dusting a lamp. The lord's talking to a young, blonde servant girl who'd been the one to inform him about the changes in the first place, he's desperately hoping that she'll tell him the unicorns are just outside in the fields, but he knows that won't be the case - they're gone.

A note from an earlier wakeup that I no longer remember: "Rescue mission. 2 people ready to bodily drag this guy away from the queen, not realizing he has his own plan."

I become lucid. (I no longer remember what was happening before this, if anything.) I'm standing at the bottom of a short flight of steps leading up out of a shop, onto a street, and there's two guys I'm with who are heading up the stairs, and if I want to follow the storyline of this dream I should head up those stairs with them. But given that I've just become lucid, I'm not sure the lucidity is stable enough to last through a scene-changing doorway, so I decide to abandon the storyline. I look around the shop instead, looking at the wooden pillars and ceiling, wondering what I'd like to do. There's a guy working the register who's grumbling, in a bad mood, and we start talking. He's attractive.

The scene changes; we're elsewhere, having sex, and I can feel everything I do to him as if it were being done to me. He's aware of the sudden scene change, and he's confused, but up for it. His appearance gradually changes, and I become aware that without consciously deciding to do so, I'm changing him to better suit my tastes; now that I've noticed I'm doing it, I consciously encourage specific changes. Everything I change alters gradually, but then suddenly his whole appearance changes in an instant, now a goth/punk look, pale and with half his head shaved; I hadn't intended to do that. I'm thinking that all the gradual changes I was making must have pushed him to some tipping point, and I'm a little annoyed with myself. He's now becoming distressed; I don't think he's aware that he used to look very different, but he's aware something's off. The dream disappears, and I'm in darkness, no visuals, no body, thinking over what went wrong.

I become aware that I'm lying in bed. (False awakening.) I open my eyes: I'm in a dorm, I think of this as a place associated with dreaming. The room's filled with many bunk beds, reminds me of hostels, and although I should have this room to myself, there are a bunch of people here now, new students who've arrived in the night. I try to go back to sleep, although they're very noisy, and I overhear something about framing someone for something as a joke, and something about cats and bad luck. Eventually I remember that I don't live in a dorm anymore, therefore none of this is real and I don't have to be here, so I get up to leave. One of the students tries to stop me, referencing cats and bad luck again, and I get really, irrationally, over-the-top irritated by this - by the idea of a DC standing in my way and wasting my time. I put my hand around his throat - my hand has long claws as I do so - move him out of my way, and walk out the door. (And then woke up.)

Fragments - song lyrics misusing the word indigent ("all the charm indigent in you" - I assume it was aiming for 'inherent'); and later, a fragment involving a tribe called Indogen, immortal creatures that were 'judged unworthy by god' and sentenced to stay in this land (wherever the dream was currently set) instead of continuing on their 'journey to the sun.'

An apocalypse scenario; I've run through this scenario two times already and failed both times. First, I have to leave this building quickly, and avoid getting involved with this group of people; that was the mistake I made last time. Second, I can't forget to (something to do with a virus and immunity or a vaccine or similar); that was the mistake I made the first time around. Third, I have to track down three men: one's a scientist whose theories are closely related to the events that are about to happen; the second is a specific doctor.

When I leave the building through the back door, the storyline changes; I'm caught up in some kind of street performance going on just outside, and a woman in the crowd sees me and recognizes me, and comes up to thank me for something I'd done for her in the past involving her ring.

Another apocalypse scene then: a woman who's carrying her son, looks around 3, is begging me to take him with me.

Rumpelstiltskin. There's a horrible smell coming from somewhere in the castle, and finally I've found the source: there's a dead body, someone who broke into the castle and got himself caught in one of the traps designed to stop such intruders from stealing my things. Belle and I have been calling back and forth as we were trying to figure out where that smell was coming from, and I'm pleased I found it before she did. I call to her now, telling her that I've found it and am taking care of it, without letting her know what it was. I magic it away.

Julia's ranting to me about something to do with the news, full of righteous anger. There's some important event going on in the world, some tragedy or disaster or outrage, and she doesn't feel they're covering it well; she's specifically talking about CNN's failure to report on real issues. I'm happy about all this - happy about her righteous anger, that is, not the tragedy or whatever it was - I love how she cares so deeply about these events that I've come to see as commonplace.

There's a girl, a witch, stopping in a school hallway to stand before the memorial to a recently-dead classmate, covered in flowers and candles. The dead girl was also a witch, although this isn't common knowledge, so although she didn't know the dead girl well, she takes this very personally. She's thinking about how she has something that belongs to the girl's killer, and about the girl's mother, and about poison. The candles burn down to stubs as she looks at them, and various other things around her start to catch fire; a boy who was close with the dead girl had been watching nearby, and when he sees this, he starts to run away. She stops him, corners him. He asks what she is; she says he'll never know, but that since he failed his friend, now there's someone else he has to protect - her.

A woman is introducing two of her friends to each other outside a mausoleum, introducing one of them by the nickname she calls her, "Little N." It's N's family mausoleum they're standing in front of. N introduces herself as "Anekhet (last name sounds something like Sastemony) - or Little N." From her tone, which is pleasant, it's still clear that the Little N nickname is a name for only this particular friend to use, not the man she's being introduced to. The man introduces himself with a bow as her ancestor and the founder of this town, and a "comocido" - which in the dream seemed to be a word related to suicide or homicide, a word that indicated the specific way in which he was killed, hundreds of years ago. Anekhet is surprised but not particularly thrown by this.

Integra is watching a map showing enemy vessels approaching England, trying to calculate how much time she has left, torn between two objectives, and finally she dispatches Alucard to a certain ship, to destroy it if he doesn't hear otherwise after a certain amount of time. Alucard drops out of the sky onto that ship, and in his head he's intensely focused on the form he needs to take at any given time, it's almost like psyching himself up, or like playing a role.