Carabas

Generally food while lucid tastes pretty bland for me, but tonight's managed to produce realistic raspberry, lemon, and salt flavors. That hadn't been a particular goal; but I wound up in a kitchen with bite-sized pastries and salted nuts around and was trying to figure out what they tasted like, thinking about how poor my sense of taste tends to be in lucid dreams, and then found the flavors became stronger when I had another. I thought of it as needing to train the tongue, or the mental sense of a tongue anyway.

I'm coming out of a mine with a box a man gave me. Sitting down at a table across from a woman I know who's eating lunch, I open up the box and we have a look at the books inside. There's a two-volume set on healing magic that catches my attention; I've seen the first one before but the second is completely new to me, I'm very pleased. The woman asks me for a demonstration, and I laugh, saying I've barely got any understanding of it - it's not something you can learn from books, they're just for pointing you in the right direction, it takes time and work to actually put into practice. She's disappointed and leaves. As I look through the book, I call up a blue healing light that plays around my hand. Reading, the book is saying that it's impossible to progress further without "the Lady's smile."

I see an image of said Lady, a woman in a void. She's aware of my attention, though her eyes don't focus on me; she talks as if this is a visit from an old friend, sounding surprised and pleased, saying that I've come earlier this week than expected, and calls me by a name that starts "Shari-" But she cuts off partway through that name, and gives the impression of focusing on me, though still not with her eyes. She says then, "Isfael? Is that you?"

The observer side of me splits off, recognizing that this Lady and Shari-whoever are figures that often appear in stories together under various identities. When she correctly called me Isfael, I realized that Isfael is one of those identities, a specific young version of Shari-whoever without knowledge of his older self.

A place based on the Heian era, a woman's emerging from behind a curtain that partitions off an inner room and moving between two wooden tables where a couple other women, her friends, are eating and talking. She's dusting the tables as she talks with them. I'm standing off to one side and watching her, feeling fond but bemused. I've just noticed the wrinkles she's developed, and I wonder how long it's been since we first met. When she gets to the end of the table, I stop her and ask why she's dusting - she knows this place is an illusion I'm creating for her, she doesn't need to clean it. She says she's probably being silly, laughing, and she hands me the thing she was using to dust. I'm feeling vaguely sad about this.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm walking across the moors, heading towards a building I think of as haunted - then I mentally correct myself, it's not haunted, it's a dream of a haunted place. This distinction matters to me; something deliberately created to present a certain experience.

I'm standing in a cave with a group of people, discussing a man who came through here just ahead of us, someone we need to seal away - this is something he'd requested but now he's running. Our time is limited. A woman is suggesting that we use a certain box - it fits in the palm of your hand - that her husband had originally designed to seal himself in case of an emergency. She believes that her husband is no longer a threat so the box can be turned to a different purpose, and I can see her joy in that. But I refuse. No matter how safe her husband seems now, we need to save that option for him.

Following the man we need to seal, we come out of the cave into the open. There's a group of people living here who view him as a god; we avoid encountering them directly. Two of us get into a discussion on the nature of worship, talking about projecting the way your own perspective works onto a macro level, with a powerful leader to control things and a drastically overvalued role of consciousness. I make a comparison to a machine that can feel every impact of cogs and gears.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragmentary scenes with that woman who led the pilgrimage through the mountains earlier:

I'm sitting at a large round wooden table, eating a snack, while she's saying to me something about "would you bear hope" or would I be "a bearer of hope." I'm a little taken off-guard by this conversation, and I'm annoying her by not giving what she's saying serious consideration.

I'm surrounded by wolves, or something like wolves - they've got faces that seem built for snarling, I think of them as someone's nightmare of wolves. I can feel them as they each brush against me, rubbing closely against my legs. They're mine now apparently. I can't believe that worked, this is wonderful. I look over to that woman, standing a short distance away - I want to see her reaction. She has this sort of "you have got to be kidding me" expression. The wolves had started out attacking us, and she seems more exasperated by this turn of events than anything else.

We're standing on a snow-covered mountain, the ground here at a steep angle, with some threat above us, and I'm saying to her, "-here. I would rather stand and fight being a single person. And you, we'll-"

Circumstances have caused a woman to temporarily move in with me; we're not romantically entangled in any way. At the moment I'm cooking breakfast and she's sitting at the table - she's asked for eggs benedict. I'm mentioning some gadget that was around in the 50s for cooking breakfast that I'd liked, I don't know why they don't make that one anymore.

As we're talking, at some point I make a reference to something else that had happened in the 50s, and she gets the reference and responds as if she was also there. The character side of me doesn't take notice of this, but the dreamer side of me finds it odd that she got that reference - I take this as an indication that she's also, if not immortal, at least significantly older than her appearance. It's also clear that she knows I'm not human, though the character side of me doesn't know she knows.

When I bring the food to the table, I say something to her and she responds with yes, father, and then immediately looks embarrassed. The character side of me takes it as a joke in response to what I'd just said to her - but the dreamer side of me is thinking, that explains it.

I'm dancing with a different woman in my apartment. She's got short black hair in this 20s finger wave look, deliberately trying to recreate that look from the past, but this is the 1990s, and she's mortal. The dreamer side of me thinks of the song we're listening to as 'bland, inoffensive 90s romance music.' She's describing some kind of dull pain that lasts for weeks on end, and asks if I can imagine living like that, expecting the answer to be no. I have, actually. I try to describe the actual sensation without being specific about the setting, but she figures it out immediately and gets excited: "The Inquisition? You were there?" She always gets excited about these big name historical events she's read about, and they're never the parts worth remembering.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Someone of no immediately identifiable gender, who has been on the road for a very long time, parks their truck outside my IRL home and starts to eat lunch, clearly believing that no one is around here during the daytime. When they see me watching them from the window they start to leave, but I stop them, telling them I don't mind them stopping here.

Unfortunately, the dream apparently took that as an open invitation. While I'm outside talking to them, a great deal of people walk into the house - a married couple under the misimpression that it's theirs now and all their relatives. When I confront them they quickly accept that an error has been made, but they still keep standing around in the house. Telling them to get out does nothing.

So I rephrase, framing it as a narrative instead of a command. "And the people walked out of the house."

And giving no indication that they've heard me, as if it's their own idea, they all turn and start making their way out of the house. I'm pleased by how easy and effective that was compared to trying to control through commands - admittedly I hadn't put any mental force behind the command here, but there wasn't any mental effort involved in the narrative approach either. They're moving more slowly than I'd like, so I continue narrating. "It's a beautiful day, so they all decided to go outside." I'm curious whether the weather will respond to that - it doesn't seem to, but then it was decent weather to begin with. They're all outside now, but they're milling around outside the door. "They all decided to go to the park to catch up with their relatives." They start moving toward the road, and the women closest to me have started discussing some cousin they haven't seen in a while. This is really wonderfully effective, I'll have to remember that in the future.

Somewhere in South Asia some centuries ago where I'm visibly a foreigner, I'm leaving the docks after making some arrangements for my departure. Thinking about how to dispose of the belongings that I don't want to bring with me, I've just offered to give some rare type of food to the man who's walking with me, a human who works for me. He's shocked - he completely refuses. It's important that he and I don't share meals, and apparently this is close enough to count. I apologize, but point out to him that we've shared more than that. He asks me not to talk about this in public.

Talking about differing customs as we walk, we get onto the subject of my own homeland. I describe it as very far to the north, very isolated from the rest of the world, not a place he's likely to have heard of. I'm being deliberately evasive, obscuring how long ago it was that I left, among other things. I have a mental image of a place that's always covered in snow, and a need to retreat.

Thinking of my people causes me to mentally tune in to two of them who are relatively nearby, a man and a woman who I think of as something like a brother and sister to me. Her, I keep in close contact with through letters on a regular basis. Mentally brushing against her now feels sort of like a friendly wave from a distance. Him, on the other hand - last I heard from him, he'd been doing his best to ignore my existence entirely. By accidentally tuning in to him now, I'm surprised to find he was already aware of my presence in this region and has secretly been keeping tabs on me. I'm amused, particularly since he's now pretending not to notice this mental contact.

I get lost in thought for a bit about connections and different eras, and the scene changes. I'm in Europe, speaking Spanish with a woman in the 1700s or so - I think of her as being in a sort of religious seclusion, though my speaking with her now isn't a problem. She's telling me how much she enjoyed the piece Dieter published recently about winemaking techniques, and I tell her I'll pass that along. The observer side of me considers whether or not this short scene is something to bother recording for when I wake up.

In my IRL home, a demon's joined me in the shower. She's in the form of a beautiful naked woman and she's talking to me like we're old friends, but the scene has the feel of a nightmare. She's talking about working together in a way that I'd probably be interested in discussing under other circumstances. But with that nightmare feel, I'm only thinking about avoiding being controlled by others.

I give her the fuck-off-out-of-my-dream variety of exorcism. This doesn't work; if anything, the feel of a nightmare intensifies with the sense of a contest of wills. She's still trying to convince me to come work with her.

Second try: I take a look at the demon's name. It begins and ends with A, so I cover up the middle portion, rewrite it as Athena, and chant an invocation, intending to remove the nightmare by transforming the demon into a goddess. Her features shift, but then shift back. We go back and forth a little bit, but eventually I give up on this method too. She's stopped trying to convince me to come work with her and is now just enjoying this contest for its own sake.

Being as we're in the shower, I take a look at the soap and think of cleansing/purification methods of exorcism. Worth a shot. I start washing her, starting at the top and working my way down. She's intrigued - she clearly doesn't consider this a threat, and the contact is pleasant and similar enough to sexual that she considers this a form of me giving in to her. I'm curious myself whether this scene will end up following her sexual expectations or my cleansing intention. When I kneel down before her, I kiss her just below her navel, and she makes it clear how she expects this to play out from there; but I just move on to washing her legs. When I've finished her second foot, kissing the top of it before putting it down, the sense of nightmare is completely gone. I'm able to cause the scene to transition, continuing with a series of IRL-based scenes.

As Rumpelstiltskin, disembodied, I'm watching a woman lead a prisoner, a teenage boy, into a dungeon. She's complaining about how tired she is of hunting people down and dragging them back here across worlds. We're standing (well, 'standing' in my case, lacking a body at the moment) in a stone hallway, at the top of a staircase blocked by a door of iron bars. She locks that door behind the prisoner, and when she leaves he just sits down right there at the top of the stairs rather than going further down. He looks very confused. I'm aware he's not the only person in the dungeon, there's several people down at the base of those stairs, some of whom I feel personally responsible for, and I wonder for a moment if they've been fed today. I sometimes forget how often my guests need to eat. Then I remind myself that right now, it's not my responsibility to keep them fed - the people who took them prisoner will take care of that, they need their hostages alive. There's someone in that dungeon I want to take back, but I've got a few other things to see to first, while I'm disembodied.

The scene skips ahead in time - no memory gap, just a shift to the bottom of the stairs and an awareness that this is meant to be later. A guard's come to feed the prisoners, and when no one comes to the top of the stairs when he calls, he opens the door to bring the food down himself and check on the prisoners. But when he gets to the bottom of the stairs, he finds me sitting in the wooden chair in the center of the dirt floor. I'm wearing a hood that hides my face, but I always do. There's two kids beside me, royalty held hostage - one of them's my granddaughter, biologically but not officially, though she isn't aware of that and neither were the people who took her. But they should have been aware that I've always looked after her family. I wait until he's seen me, and until the look on his face shows that he knows who I am, and then I create a ball of fire in my hand. I enjoy this.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm returning to a tent in a military camp in some cold, snow-covered place, and there's this man who bows to me two or three times when he sees me, obsequious manner, irritating. I hear a voice as if I'm reading a line in a book: "This was the worst of ___'s nature, he told himself - a ___ who didn't know how to ___." (The blanks aren't things that I forgot after waking up - during the dream, the voice just cut out during those words. The first blank was meant to be the name of my POV character here; the other two had no mental associations.)

I've hidden a human girl in my room, and I'm trying to distract my "sister" so the human will have a chance to escape. It's not difficult - we don't get along at all, so it's easy to pick a fight. We both look and act like and possibly really are teenagers. I walk away from her, giving the impression that I want her to leave me alone, knowing that's the easiest way to make sure she'll follow me. Looking for a drink, I walk into a room where my "sister's" left a human girl lying semi-conscious on the floor. I hate her parties - I hate living here in general; it's like living in a frat house. That's part of why I want to help that human escape - I know she's been investigating us but I don't care, I really, really dislike these people. I haven't been here long, maybe a week, and I'm hoping my "father" will decide to move again soon. I pick up a nearly-empty bottle, take a drink - alcohol. I spit it out and pick up another bottle. I ask the semi-conscious girl, hey, is this my sister's drink? She doesn't answer me, and I wasn't really expecting her to. I drink it anyway. Yes, this one's my "sister's." I hate the taste of bottled blood, but it's what I'm used to. Keeping the bottle, I walk outside.

The yard out back is huge, and ends in a fence with barbed and electric wires running along the top. As I'm walking along the edge of that fence, I come across a padlocked gate. It opens directly onto a dirt road, and on the other side of the road there's another gate - no locks on this one - opening onto a trail leading into the woods. There's something intensely familiar about this - it bothers me. I have the feeling I've seen this a long time ago, like some childhood memory. I say something about this to my "sister," but she doesn't see why that would bother me. As I'm trying to explain the odd feeling, I'm distracted by a sound from the other side of the fence, way off to our right.

On the side of the fence opening directly onto the woods, there's two people who look like hikers trying to climb the fence and look inside. They're talking to each other cheerfully, wondering what they've come across and what the barbed wire's for - to keep something out or in? It's to keep you out, I tell him as I lean over the wires, grab him and smash his head against the wooden part of the fence. It's to keep them out for their own protection, otherwise this happens. My "sister" has taken the woman he was with. Then I hear voices from the woods - they weren't alone. While my "sister's" still busy with hers, I jump over the fence and run down the other three hikers. I find myself humming as I do so - when I've finished, I realize I'm thinking of the tune as an old drinking song from the 1800s. That's odd - I wasn't alive then, where do I know that song from? I have a vague impression of enjoying myself while singing that song in a situation much like this. I look at the hiker I'm still holding, and I think, just a little while ago I was having a conversation with someone killing a rabbit, and I'd said that it wasn't the death I objected to, it was the attitude behind it, the lack of respect. What a hypocrite I am.

I've come to a group of buildings with many rooms, with people sleeping inside. I stick my head inside one, and the woman inside starts talking. I hear her voice distorted, like a phone call with a bad connection; her mouth isn't moving, she still looks asleep. I apologize for waking her up, I hadn't meant to, and when she stops talking I enter the room. I put my hand on her head, and I lose visuals and get an impression of many voices, very quiet. I'm aware this is an opportunity to listen in on her dream.

It seems to be morning now; for a moment I think I've just skipped over her dream entirely. I'm in her apartment, and her bed is empty; so's the bed where her roommate sleeps. I look out the window, and see her on her bike. She's late for class, and wondering why/how she slept so late. She sees me standing on the sidewalk, and tells me I better hurry too if I want to get to school on time. She thinks I'm one of her students.

I leave her and walk through a park near her school, watching a squirrel run along a branch. As I'm walking a woman sitting in one of the trees addresses me. She asks how to get close to a human. It's the usual, I tell her - you talk with them, you create shared experiences, you care about them.

I'm aware that woman's just altered this reality. I'm returning to a home where I live with various people, and that woman from the tree is there; she's a part of this 'family.' She's set things up so that everyone thinks she's this beautiful ideal; someone compares her to Quan Yin. The part of me that still recognizes that this is a scenario she created is amused. Setting yourself up as an ideal isn't a very realistic way to experience being part of a family, but whatever floats your boat. We eat a large dinner of various rare dishes, everyone contributing a different one, and I'm a little irritated because I know I'm not going to remember all these dishes when I wake up, there's too many of them to keep track of, and the dream goes through them too quickly. But when the meal's done, we're all sent out to hunt for some new rare dish to bring back to that woman from the tree. I and one of my 'sisters' wander through an arcade, looking for something rare.

As FK's Nicholas, I saw an image of a vase of white roses, bleeding a few trails of red blood - I believed that this was a hallucination, thinking of it as "a bit of silliness" - and then I saw a mental image of Janette lying on a white couch, looking unwell, somehow connected with those roses. Now I'm sitting on that couch, and Janette's lying on her side with her head resting against my thigh, my hand in her hair. We're talking about a particular time in the past when things had been better between the three of us. As we talk, I'm thinking about how easily I revert to this version of myself when I'm around them - without thinking, my body language, my speech patterns change automatically. It's like taking off a mask.

POV shifts to show LaCroix. He's at some kind of charity event. At the moment he's talking to a man near a buffet table, a man he knows in some professional capacity, and a moment comes when he has to either eat or make some excuse. Without hesitating, he puts some item of food in his mouth. As a disembodied observer/Nicholas, I'm incredibly jealous of his ability to do that without flinching. It would make my life so much easier if I could pretend to eat - socialization revolves almost entirely around food and drink, so just imagine how much easier it would be to blend in. After a moment, LaCroix makes a displeased face, reaches for a napkin, and removes the thing in his mouth. He makes some comment about the poor quality of the food this year compared to previous years, and the man he's talking to agrees. LaCroix's posing as a gourmet, picky about what he eats - it's his usual trick, insulting the food wherever he goes. They make a joke about not being able to trust the food in a place that has such skinny staff, and then the man LaCroix's talking to complains that this event has gone downhill in general - disappointing for such a worthy charity. LaCroix makes a comment about the decline of morality as time goes by. He manages to say this with a straight face.

I'm a man traveling together with an old friend and several people I've met more recently - we're on a mountain road covered in snow, leading horses. A few red berries on the branch we're passing underneath caught my eye, everything else is bare. I'm thinking about the place we've just been turned away from, feeling annoyed. We were counting on this letter written by the head of a monastery to convince the master of some estate or something along those lines to let us stay there until the snow melts, but there was some trouble with the man the letter was addressed to. Right now I'm walking next to a blonde woman dressed in red who's worried about food. I cheer up as I talk to her, and I'm saying that food won't be a problem for tonight, "Dieter and I found a veritable mountain of-"

There's this pair of vampires in an apartment, a young white girl and a tall black man, and today slavery has officially ended. There's celebrations in the street, fireworks. But the sense of time's a bit off - although the vampires and the apartment look like the 1800s, at some point in the conversation it's mentioned that this is 1933, and the view outside the window looks it. The girl turned him a long time ago and they've been traveling together since. It's been a good deal for both of them - since she looks like a kid, she needed someone who looks like an adult to get by in the world; and under slavery, he needed someone to pretend to belong to. Now that's over, he intends to leave. The kid was surprised by this, hadn't expected it at all - they're close, it's not just a convenient arrangement for survival, so it hadn't occurred to her that he'd want to be on his own if he could. They went straight from celebrating to fighting.

He's saying, "You don't think I prefer another kind of life for-" I'm not certain which pronoun he used then - I wrote it down as 'you', and I think he'd been talking about his concern for her at this point, but she responds as if he'd said 'myself.' She went cold and distant before answering. By another kind of life, he'd meant as opposed to vampirism, and she doesn't take that well. So after a long pause, she says, "But you've got mine."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm Howl, a version with black feathers cropping up - a patch of it at my throat at all times, and mixed in with my hair - speaking English throughout the scene, but no Welsh accent. I speak very mildly and seem distant - it's an affectation, particularly when I'm annoyed, and at the moment I'm very annoyed.

Sophie got fed up with me and left after a day or so in the castle. But now my spells have alerted me that she's back in town - just sitting there, inexplicably, not coming home. I'm seeing an image of her sitting down on a low stone wall somewhere, grumbling to herself. Since she's gone to the trouble of coming back to town, we both know she'll be back at my door eventually, she's got nowhere else to go - I'm convinced she's just refusing to come back now out of sheer stubbornness. So I spell her back, have the winds scoop her up and carry her through town, into the house, and drop her in a chair at the table. She complains about this of course, but now that I see her up close, it occurs to me that possibly she couldn't physically walk back to the house - she looks tired and sore.

I'd been in the middle of making dinner when she turned up, and I bring her a plate while she complains at me. Talking about dinner and ridiculous stubbornness, at some point I compare her to my brothers, and she looks aghast at the thought of me having brothers. Did she think I sprang from the ether? "Monstrous. How many of you are there?" I have quite a few brothers actually. Our mother's immortal, like myself - I've visited her just recently as a matter of fact. Sophie says, "You're like rats in a field."

When someone characterizes me as a monster, my habitual response is to prove them right, so I'm leaning into her from across the table in a way that's not physically humanly possible. "Our father's place is human," I say, very mildly. And in response to something else I know she'd been wondering about, I add, "And I'm a married man." I retract back to my side of the table. The point there was less a reference to my wife, who's out of the picture, and more a reference to the existence of my son, confirming that the boy whose pictures she'd been looking at earlier is my son.

(Woke up. Side note: It's been ages since I've had a Howl dream, so when I saw the HMC task of the month I'd hoped it would spark something like this. Success! Not a success at the TOTM of course - this wasn't the task, or lucid at all - but a non-lucid dream with the plot I wanted is even better.)

And a quick dream from yesterday: As Rumpelstiltskin, I'd been following someone who'd stolen something from me. I used a spell to keep the light from falling on me, and then another for shadows to hide me. Then I'd walked myself off the road and left my body hidden among the fallen leaves while the rest of me went on. Finally I tried some spell that failed - I lit up with golden light from within with the effort of it, shining through the lines in my skin, but I was unable to succeed. Giving up for now, I call Belle. She asks, "What has (some name) got on you that-" I interrupt her. "My dagger." She goes silent. It's not the thing they stole at this moment, and they don't know how to use it, but they have it; they're a threat to be taken seriously.

I'm flying down the center of a stairwell.

At the bottom of the stairs, I switch to 3rd person. This is a college, and classes are letting out. There's this incredibly beautiful androgynous person who stops a guy in the hall and talks to him, then s/he gives him this piece of paper with a small square smear of something dark green on it. This color will alter the guy's personality. The guy takes it, and he refers to them as boss and generally acts friendly and cheerful, but he's careful not to actually touch the color. S/he tells him to find a place without any people.

The guy heads up the stairs to the second floor, and I switch to his POV. Most of the classrooms have a few people in them even though they're between classes, but I find one where the chairs have been stacked up on the tables, I figure no one's going to be using this classroom for the rest of the night, and I call the boss over. S/he gives me some more of those papers, with different colors on them and labels giving an idea of their effects, and tells me to distribute them to some of the other students here. I go to do so, but then realize I've mixed up the one s/he gave me with the others. It was clear when s/he was talking to me in the empty classroom that s/he expected me to have already taken it, and now I'm worried about making them mad. When I can't find it again, I wind up taking a different one instead, a slightly lighter colored green, the closest match I could find. Immediately after, I find the one I was looking for, and I wonder whether it's safe to take two. I take it anyway.

I'm talking to someone against the boss's wishes. I consider myself loyal to the boss, but s/he's got a self-destructive streak that I have no problem acting against. Those papers would have prevented me from doing so, but taking two of them sort of cancelled each other out, the changes they caused didn't stick. This guy I'm talking to is a detective or something similar, and I'm telling him a woman's name. He has others working for him and he has them ask after the woman.

I'm a different character in that same college setting. There are police or military or something surrounding an angel - which looks nothing at all like a human, I mostly have an impression of a vast white face like a mask or a doll, twice the height of a man, alien and hostile. I'm thinking to myself that I can't die, it's impossible, like I'm trying to convince myself, but seeing that angel shook me - something about seeing something that old, something that existed before I was created. The disembodied observer side of me is thinking that although the character side of me isn't aware of it, there's some connection between me-the-character and that angel.

As the same character, I'm talking to a woman, and ask her to lend me some money. I don't need a lot, just something to get me into a game, I'm confident as long as I have some money to start with I can easily multiply it. She's disgusted, says it's always the same with me. She gave me a business (I have some mental association here with both religion and gambling) and she expected me to run it, so why am I still doing this? I find this ridiculous of her. I had absolutely no interest in the business she gave me.

I'm talking to someone about characters from Buffy - but all but one of us here are aware that I'm just using them as metaphors to talk about us. The one who isn't aware, who thinks I'm just talking about fictional characters, gets bored and leaves, but I keep using the metaphor. I'm saying, no, Giles's problem was that he knew exactly what his - and more importantly, Buffy's - destiny was supposed to be, and he knew it wasn't going to happen. Hence his downward spiral; he knew what they should be doing, and yet there was nothing he could do. I'm looking at a woman who I equate with Buffy as I say this.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've just driven to my IRL mother's house from a lake, and decided I'm too tired to drive back to the lake tonight, I'll spend the night. Mom gets me a coffee, there's chunks of chocolate floating on the top, I'm thinking about how much I appreciate her thinking to provide comfort food like that. The coffee's too bitter for my taste. I'm thinking that's odd, since I usually drink black coffee. We talk about how tired I've been, and she says it's due to the work I've been doing. I think that's strange, since the job I've been doing is easy, but she says anything you're not used to will tire you out, and relates it to her own similar experience.

Regina is surrounded by people she resents and is saying "Get me my advisor. Now!" As a disembodied observer, I'm pleased to hear this - the advisor she's referring to is Rumpelstiltskin, and earlier someone used a similar phrasing and tone to ask for their father, so I take this parallel as an indication that she's viewing Rumpelstiltskin as a father figure, which was something I wanted.

As Rumpelstiltskin, I've been recently de-cursed but have made sure no one else realizes that. I'm looking through a cabinet for an object related to the situation Regina's currently in. I find it: a small statue of a man in armor standing beside a stone pillar with what looks like Chinese characters on it. I pick up the pillar, removing it from the rest of the statue. I'm talking to myself as I do this, saying "You're here, but are-" I hear Regina's soldiers arriving outside, come to fetch me. I've been expecting them. I immediately pocket the pillar and statue and adopt a pose appropriate for my old cursed self, irritating my bad knee for a moment but making sure no one else will be able to tell it's bothering me, adopting a mindset and mannerisms as if I were putting on a costume and mask, though it takes effort to mimic what used to come naturally - that manic delight and curiosity and energy and attention focused in a million different directions at once. I'm getting used to faking this, though, and am more worried about whether that trinket I'm carrying will work.

Me and Erana (of QFG) are in a cave we believe to be the entrance to hell. I'm looking at something in a glass case near the entrance, she's looking at things hanging on the walls. We found this place by chance; we were supposed to be heading somewhere else, but I believe that other place would have wound up being a dead end, and this cave is our best bet. There are these blue butterflies that live here that are known for flying against the wind. The opening that we believe to be the entrance to hell is unreachable for us due to the wind, but these butterflies can go right in, and as I watch them, I'm planning out how we can use that.

(Woke up. Went back to sleep.)

In some small city. Erana was killed, but she reappeared in the form of a child and grew up within a few hours. This happened twice, and we think it's a result of the time she died and I retrieved her soul from hell - now hell won't take her. I'm not sure it'll take me, either, but I'm not in a hurry to test that. Sitting in our hotel room after the second time it happened, I'm trying to think up a way to use that child form to our advantage, but this annoys her.

We're in a series of tunnels, and we split up to try to work out the correct answer to some kind of game that involves finding the right combination of drinks, or in another room, the right meal. We're meeting back up in the main tunnel to compare notes - Erana's solved the drinks room, I'm still working on mine. I mention that it reminds me of kumiko, meaning that it's partially a guessing game and the solution involves rather poetic references, which amuses me; it's kind of nostalgic, even though I'm frustrated. There's a voice in the distance and I say something about how it must be the guardian of this place. I spot him standing on a balcony over a gate we've been trying to get through, a guard with a head or helmet shaped like Anubis.

Wednesday:

Fragments involving a man with a hook for a hand, giving him a hand and taking his hook myself; a witch who was trying to force the hook-man to sleep so that she could somehow influence him in a dream; a prince and his army who arrived on this scene, with no knowledge of anything going on between the witch and the hook-man; and a man with some form of mental connection to the witch, his sister.

A man visiting his wife's family with her, the first time since they were married. The father-in-law's distant and judgmental. He's saying, "You'll have to understand, we only drink old French wines here - Bordeaux," that being where the mother-in-law's from. Inside, the mother-in-law is a tiny woman with long, thick grey hair, very warm and expressive. She asks her son-in-law how his meditation practice is going, and asks if he's getting by okay in New York - which he loves, but she doesn't understand how anyone could enjoy living in cities. She says, "You've been in that city for about a hundred years, but you seem to have left in a good mood." He finds her energy overwhelming.

In a small restaurant, the baker's brought out samples of new doughnuts for everyone to try, I had two, one with a peach filling, the other blueberry, and I was surprised by the taste of the 'blueberry' - it reminds me of pixie stix and sweet tarts and similar childhood candies, not in the sense of being sugary, it's more the type of flavoring those candies use. I comment on it, and someone at the next table asks what this lump in theirs is. I look and point out to them that it's a blueberry. They've never seen a blueberry before?

While walking across a field, I'm explaining to someone what juice is. I wind up having to describe it as crushing something until its external protection breaks down and its liquid insides run out, and I'm trying to figure out how to make it very, very clear to the creature I'm talking to that this is something that should be done only to plants.

As Rumpelstiltskin, I'm in a dream world, talking to an image of Regina that is breaking down and melting after being attacked by someone else, and I'm saying, "This isn't you." Allowing herself to show weakness, I mean. I say it again, then reconsider - it's possible this is one side of her, or even how I think of her. There had been a young girl with her, and now I take the girl by the hand and lead her away, ignoring the image of Regina that's still falling apart.

Someone's telling me they need me to act as a detective. I cut them off, saying, "What, I'm supposed to magically figure out where the dying guy came from?" But I do find some form of trail, scratches on the floor, leading to what seemed like a wall but which must have some kind of opening.

Vampires. I brought two humans to see a friend of mine, I wasn't intending to kill them, and I'm a little annoyed at my friend, but I'm not making any effort to stop him either. He's saying to the humans that he hasn't decided yet whether to kill them or turn them. His fangs dig into his own lip, and he spits blood on the human he's got pinned down, which has a sort of acidic effect. I, the dreamer rather than the character, observe that it's much like the way flies break down their food.

I've been working on a system of cables to allow transportation around an island. It's something two guys had been using on a very small scale on their own property, and I've been working with them to expand it to cover the entire island. I'm mostly doing this to help out a woman I'm in love with who lives in a very remote area, but it's going to benefit everyone on the island. Now I'm looking at the initial stage that's about ready for a test run, and feeling proud, when a troop of soldiers with wings descends out of the sky. Their leader - who I've met before, in a friendlier setting - arrests me on suspicion of killing the king, among others. This is a setup - I know who the actual killer is, and I came to this island in the first place to hunt that person. I'm blaming myself for getting distracted with this side project; if I'd focused solely on my mission, maybe he wouldn't have had time to frame me.

Thursday:

There's a room on a spaceship that's being converted into a sort of swamp. This alien species needed this certain type of room for some cultural reason to do with the sharing of emotions, and so we set it up for him. One of the other aliens, from a different species, says that if humans turn out to be understanding and reasonable, s/he's going to be very disappointed. I say nah, don't worry, no matter how many understanding and reasonable humans you meet, you can always count on a few of us to mess things up, every time.

A group of vampire hunters. A man leading things over the phone; someone who is either a doctor, a former doctor, or simply someone who steals meds from hospitals, refusing to be hurried by the hunters around him; a recording of a man interacting with someone who doesn't show up on video, with viewers arguing that it's definitely faked.