Carabas

In the 1940s, I'm watching three expensively-dressed women being transported from a large building to a long black car with the top down. They're speaking Spanish.

My partner says to me, if those women take this opportunity to escape, their guards will be killed in their place. She disapproves of this idea.

I say, she can't be sure of that. We haven't met their boss, so how can we know how he'll react?

She says, you don't summon up demon soldiers because you're such a kind and cuddly person.

I'm walking out of a large red tent in the woods. In the previous scene I'd been having some kind of argument with two guards who work for me, but we were interrupted by a man who's now following me out of the tent, someone who I have some kind of deal with. He'd mentioned my son. I want to continue the conversation more privately.

Deeper in the woods, there's no underbrush, and the ground's covered in old fallen leaves. I drop the illusion I'd been using. I've been borrowing the identity of the man those guards used to work for, some kind of ruler, dead now. Without that illusion, there's a sort of shadow over my skin, like a photo overlaid by an image of something else - I (correctly) remember that I've used that specific comparison before in another dream; though I don't remember the details until after I wake up, I'm aware the parallel's intentional.

I'm dismissing whatever the other man has just said, angry. I tell him, "I swore to make this journey a thousand times, but you - you didn't uphold your part, did you?"

A man walks up to a wall and shouts at the guards on the other side, trying to get them to chase him somewhere. It's part of a bigger plan - but I've already seen this happen, and the plan didn't work, we need more people. So I shout to the guards too, telling them this man is a monster, send help, send backup, send everyone you've got. He turns around to look at me and is completely bewildered - he doesn't know me, he has no idea what I'm trying to do. But it works. He ends up being chased by far more people than he was expecting.

They've surrounded him, and everyone's drawn their swords. There's a small audience of people who are thinking of this as a duel, despite the difference in numbers. He's killed immediately, but I rewind time to let him try again. As I do so, I see an image of a page in a book describing this scene as though it were a story - it only describes his actions, the duel, not the part about me turning back time. He keeps being defeated, and I keep rewinding time by moments. He's the only person aside from me who's aware of what just happened, so he has the chance to adjust his actions accordingly, although that's easier said than done and he dies over and over again. But I'm giving him an infinite number of chances to succeed.

Just now he's cut the head off one of his opponents. The people watching the 'duel' exclaim over this. From his perspective that was the end of a long struggle in which he's lost far more often than he's won, but from the audience's perspective, the duel's only just started and he's completely dominating. A woman calls it horrific, the way he coldly executed his opponent. A young man who's an aspiring duelist is admiring what he calls 'the skill that comes with experience,' which amuses me, given my very different perspective on how well this fight is going.

A minor tyrant with some nefarious plan has just provided his elite guard with some new, lethal weapon related to mind control and is staging a private demonstration for two prisoners, people who'd been opposing him. But the guard who's supposed to provide the demonstration, after hearing the tyrant's plans, uses the weapon to kill himself rather than go through with it. The tyrant's reaction to this is mostly just contempt, and he orders one of the other guards to take the dead man's place - but instead, they all kill themselves rather than be involved in this plan. Meanwhile, the two prisoners are set free by the tyrant's heir, a younger brother or nephew, someone who never seemed to take anything very seriously; it turns out that attitude was just an act, allowing him to arrange a rebellion without being suspected. Some seemingly-nonsensical comments he'd made earlier make more sense in light of this.

There's a woman bending over a pool table, two guys - her servants - behind her. A man lounging on a couch opposite her is holding a camera and taking a photo of her, and he's asking her if she's sure she wants to play this way, 2 against 1. The man currently taking his shot tells him to knock it off, the lady knows her own mind. I'm a 3rd person observer, and from where I'm 'standing', I can't see this woman's face clearly, but her hair and her bearing remind me of Janette. I have the feeling I've been looking for Janette for a long time, and I go in for a closer look. There's a resemblance, but it's not her. While I was distracted, the conversation's turned more serious and they've stopped paying attention to the pool game; I get the impression that this is some kind of informal interrogation of this woman, or she's being put on the spot in some way. She's saying, "perhaps we have to suffer, to (justify or maintain or deserve, some word like that) our position." The others don't much care for this theory.