Carabas

I'm walking in the garden, mentally composing a letter. When I'm ready to start putting it down, I go to where I've left my portable writing desk. There are a few bees hovering around it, interested in the vine I left it under. I'm thinking about moving it somewhere I won't disturb the bees, but then I see an envelope that's been left on top of it.

The letter inside is written in classical Chinese. I have no difficulty understanding it, but rather than actually reading the letter, I'm thinking about the woman who sent it - even without seeing her name, there's only one person who writes to me in this language. I'm seeing a mental image of the two of us walking through a rough stone tunnel next to water, with light reflecting off the water, rippling patterns reflected on our faces.

That was a memory, but the next image I see is the present, through her eyes, something that can sometimes happen when I'm thinking about her. She's looking at a painting of a woman I think of as a saint, with an image of a dragon behind her; then her vision moves up to the ceiling, as if she's falling back. I see an image of a pile of roses turning to ash, and my connection to her is gone - not just this vision, but the connection of our blood is gone. She's dead.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man who's been sent back in time, and now several other people who've gone back to rescue him. He'd been involved with the woman leading the rescue team. They've just met up now, and very nearly attacked each other - both of them sneaking around a fortress, trying to avoid being seen. Having sorted it out, it seems he's working together on a mission with a woman from this era, and fallen in love, and has no interest in going back to his original time period. He's just broken her out of a cell in this fortress. The woman who came back to rescue him is thinking it was foolish to chase his spirit into the past when she had his (something) in the present.

The scene transitions to a modern-day park; that man was brought back to the present against his wishes, but so was that woman from the past. They're spending time in the park with their infant son, distracted and unhappy.

My attention shifts to other people in the park, a group discussing magic, specifically one man mentioning a "listen and learn" spell with leaves, as a second step for those just starting to work with trees. He describes trees in general as "a bit froggy, though."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A private performance of a show based on Frankenstein. The 'bride' character speaks beautifully; the 'creation' character is silent, and his hands are bent backwards at the wrist as if they've been broken. When he'd been alive, he'd been the doctor's student or lover or something close.

Various non-lucid scenes: two immortals discussing faith and religion while rummaging around one's kitchen; the owner of the kitchen and her mother are both christian, and I'm surprised and intrigued since I hadn't found that to be very compatible with physical immortality. Rose and Martha meeting all the past incarnations of the Doctor in the TARDIS. There's some fantastical mystery involving spirits, and I was tasked with demonstrating the rational, physical origins of the events - the drama with the spirits is still considered real, but as a sort of reflection of the physical world, not actually physically present there - however, now that I believe it's all been solved and wrapped up, I'm asked a series of questions that force me to go through and reevaluate all my conclusions, suggesting there may be another answer. IWTV references, thinking about Lestat's life-has-no-more-meaning-what-if-i-could-give-you-a-new-life speech, resulting in a bit of an IWTV-themed power trip. That ended in an unpleasant party, which I left and returned to my IRL home.

In my home, looking out the window I've noticed various construction or roadwork or similar workers out in the street, and one of them's walking up the driveway. I move away from the windows since I need to go put some proper clothes on, but before I can do anything more than that I hear two of them inside the house, just in the next room. I'm aware that when I deliberately moved away from the windows, they'd mistakenly believed there was no one home and came inside. So I step into sight now and ask them wtf. They're surprised to see someone home. They talk briefly to each other. One of them says, "He's not going to forget. How do you want to do this?" After that, the two of them raise tools as if they're weapons - one of them's holding a hammer, the other a mallet - and although I'm aware this is a dream (I'm thinking as if I knew it all along but felt no need to act on that knowledge before now), I have difficulty defeating them or removing them. In that case, I decide to summon up something to remove them for me - I think of a dragon. One doesn't appear, but instead, as a direct result of that thought, I have a feeling that I think of as "a part of me that hasn't been fed," and with a voice much deeper than my own I say "Get the fuck out of my home," after which I see fire. Then I'm looking at the fire from a distance - I'm somewhere outside, and neither the burning cottage I'm looking at nor the scenery has any resemblance to my IRL home, I've completely changed scenes. Despite this, I believe that I've succeeded in removing those two from the house and feel satisfied.

False awakening. I'm in a bed - not one I'm familiar with IRL, though I believed it was in a relative's house - and I reach for my dream journal. I can't find an empty page to write in, and I realize this is an old journal, one I'd already filled up. A few pages have been torn out.

There's a set of boxes which, when arranged properly, will display a poem by Rumi; it's a game, a puzzle. Each box is engraved with a few lines, the trick is in figuring out the proper order, and there are hints, such as do not separate the loved ones, send the child to school, don't leave him to wander the shore with the mermaid and her knife. The last part is easy enough - one box ends with a line about water spirits, another box starts with a line about a child, I'll just be sure not to connect those two; but there are quite a few different lines that could be interpreted as 'loved ones.'

A woman is sending a message to her employers, as a result of which the building she's in will be locked down and everyone inside will be killed, including herself and her two assistants. Her assistants are artificially-created humans, and display no emotion, but I'm thinking that the loss of their lives is just as important as any other life.

A woman has just been teleported into a castle, somewhere very dangerous, by someone named Anna, and she's very annoyed about this. Although Anna isn't here, the woman yells about it anyway, on the assumption that Anna will be watching her with magic. It's not just the danger that's upset her; at any other time she would have killed to be able to get into this castle, but right now, she'd been in the middle of something urgent, and she really needs to get back to it, so she looks for the way out. A hooded figure appears and reveals a passage to her, a passage that seems to violate the laws of physics and which is filled with a seemingly endless line of graves, and he tries to speak to her, to guide her into that passage, but she ignores him - she's spotted the main doors. As she walks away from the graves and towards the exit, she passes a box with some marking on it that makes her think about dragons, thinking of them as the product of elemental spirits that gathered together and festered.

There's a crowd of people leaving a castle - although the castle looks historical/fantasy-ish, the clothes the people are wearing are futuristic, as is the glass-enclosed walkway they're leaving through. A woman who works for the castle as a kind of hostess is escorting a small group of people at the head of the crowd, congratulating them for winning a spot on some vessel, and then she says to the rest of the people following them, "Good luck in the race!" By which she means - these people are following the winners because they intend to take their spots by force, and the moment they're beyond the castle's protection it'll be every man for himself.

At the end of the glass walkway, the hostess leaves them, and the people pass through some barrier. The people in the walkway had seemed, not necessarily good-looking, but like people who put a lot of effort into their appearance: well-dressed, well-groomed. Once they pass through the barrier, this changes: they're naked, they look like they haven't bathed or shaved in months, more fat, less muscle. The castle was a kind of retreat, but everything it provided was an illusion; now that they've left, the illusions disappear. The people's reactions vary - most of them are shocked, but there's an old man who seems to have expected this with a sort of I-told-you-so attitude about it. There's a teenage boy with a bad knee who's particularly horrified, as he'd believed his knee had been fixed by the castle; he's complaining to his parents that they might as well have stayed home, at least at home they had servants. The castle had its guests doing a variety of chores, citing the spiritual benefits; now it's clear that was a scam.

A woman's saying, "It must not have been a good reality for Vanessa and Vilya." 'Vanessa' is an alternate version of herself. As she's speaking, I see the two people she's talking about, sitting before a very large fireplace. Vilya suddenly leaps up, as if he's just been hit by some stroke of inspiration, and he rushes to a table set up with a variety of alchemical instruments.

Three people in an underground room, grey stone walls lined with bookshelves. A woman and an old man who she's close to, and a young-looking man who made some kind of deal with them - I'm a disembodied observer, but I recognize him from my most recent lucid dream, as the 'future version of myself' who doesn't actually resemble me at all and who looks more like he's from the past. They've barred the doors in the hopes of giving themselves a little more time before someone arrives to stop them - guards or police or military, something along those lines, they're expecting some specific group and they know it's just a matter of time. But they've come to this room to find something specific, and there are hundreds or thousands of books here and no obvious organization to them. The woman's saying "Wherever (something) it'll take us forever to find it." The young-looking man had been sitting down with his eyes closed; now he opens them. They're glowing yellow, which startles the woman. He says, "I have found it. He has used the Britannica articles-" He continues talking, but I've become distracted by curiosity about that locating technique he just used; I associate it with a search technique I'd used in yesterday's dream.

3rd person, I'm looking down at a wide stone staircase in a castle, and descending the stairs there's this woman wearing buckskin who I think of as some kind of hunter, she's talking with the king. She's saying the words "-get our answers."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm taking my IRL youngest sister, L., to the sands to get her first dragon. (Relevant to upcoming IRL event today, sans dragons.) (Edit: Nevermind, the IRL event actually did wind up involving dragons. Or the word 'dragon', anyway.) I was talking with a few older relatives about the dragons, and L. kept trying to hurry us up, anxious about getting there in time to see the dragons hatch; but for the rest of us this is all old hat, so we wasted time talking, and now we're running late. We keep telling L. that it's fine, we'll make it on time, and even if we miss the hatching you've still got a window of a few hours after the dragons hatch to bond with them. But when we get down to the sand, the eggs are already gone. We have to catch up with the hatchlings in the barn instead.

Before we leave for the barn, I see what I think of as a king cobra in the sand - it's huge, as wide as a person, which I think of as normal for king cobras. I pick L. up and there's a chase sequence that ends with me tossing the snake over a wall, but then I notice a scratch on my finger. It must have bit me.

I can tell I'm starting to pass out. I go inside a house and find my IRL sister S. with a friend of hers, and I tell them about the snake bite and ask them to call the hospital or treat it somehow. The friend takes my hand with the bite and looks at the veins, which look broad and red and cloudy, like they've swollen or burst under the skin, and she gets me some cream to put on my skin. I recognize it as some ordinary skin cream that's not going to help, and I try to convince S. to take me to the hospital before I pass out.

(Woke up with my hand hurting where the snake bit it - turns out I really do have a tiny scratch there IRL, might be a papercut. Just after I finished writing this down, I got a phone call from S, letting me know she'd been taken to the hospital on account of almost passing out from unknown causes. A few hours and a not-too-serious diagnosis later, I tried to get a little more sleep.)

I'm lying in bed in some mansion, with a few of S's friends around bothering me until I get up and go somewhere with them. As I walk through a doorway into the hall, I realize this is a dream. It's not as vivid as I'd like - I can see everything fine, but it doesn't feel quite real, more like watching something on a screen - so I try a mantra to make it more vivid. Instead, everything disappears. (In retrospect, that seems obvious. I was focusing on the words instead of the surroundings.)

Next scene I remember is a woman using the family name Gale, returning to a Spanish-style house on the west coast, overlooking the sea. She's lived here a few times over the years, and for a moment I see it in sepia tones and with flowers in the windows, as she's remembering an old photograph from when she'd first lived here with her two daughters, before she became immortal. She's thinking that even though she's coming back earlier than expected this time - something on her mind about trouble on the east coast - she was still gone long enough that she can pass herself off as her own cousin.