Carabas

A fragment - I'd just been fighting someone who's run off, and I'm looking at the way our fight has corrupted patches of the ground, feeling regret over that.

A woman is riding in a carriage and carrying a baby, with a small tapestry depicting an angel hanging opposite. She speaks to the angel in the tapestry, referring to it as the baby's father. The angel in the tapestry speaks back.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

An odd level of lucidity. I thought of it as feeling exactly like my waking perspective, which I disliked - I felt like I was stuck halfway between something. I had difficulty controlling anything, or even flying properly, though I could float just a bit off the ground. I was at my IRL home, and since I failed to change the scene at the front door, I started walking down the road, figuring that once I got far enough that my surroundings were less familiar, the scene would change naturally.

At the end of the road - which indeed has stopped resembling its IRL equivalent fairly quickly - I come across a small construction crew, and there's immediately an accident involving a passing car and one of the machines. I'm called over to speak as a witness. Eventually the construction worker invites both me and the driver of the car back to dinner at his house, saying that it's too late to be outdoors, it's not safe.

Some barely-lucid scenes at his home in which I meet one interesting young woman with some chronic disease; otherwise I'm mostly focused on finding an excuse to avoid eating anything and keeping my appearance hidden behind the high collar of my coat, which causes people to come to some wrong conclusions about me. I don't correct them. I eventually find an excuse to step outside.

He was right, it is dangerous to be out this late - many people have been infected by something like madness or bloodlust. It's a kind of miasma. I come across infected people in the woods armed with farm equipment, pitchforks and that sort of thing; they've been waiting in this one patch of shadows to ambush whoever comes along. I enjoy this. Whatever this miasma has done to them, it doesn't affect me directly, not in the way it affects them at least; but their resulting madness is something I sort of feed off of, it's exhilarating.

At a crossroads I come across a group of four people who work for me - a blonde woman with her hair in a bun, a very pale man with long black hair, a small man wearing glasses, and a bald man with a tattoo in the center of his forehead. They've plainly been enjoying the night. As we greet each other, that young woman from the house emerges from the woods and attacks me with a sword. She makes this stunningly noble and upright figure, in stark contrast to the general miasma; I like her instantly.

One of my men intercepts her, and as she's fighting him, she's accusing me of being responsible for everything going on around here. She says she recognized me at the house - apparently I'm someone in the public eye in some way - and that she'd always suspected me of being corrupted, and now I've proven it. She's not exactly wrong. I'm not the one who corrupted this place, in fact I'm trying to hunt that person down - but I am part of the corruption, she's right about that much. When my man's got her restrained, I try to explain this to her; we have a mutual enemy. If she wants to hunt him down, my corruption could be useful to her.

A young woman's confronting this guy, a friend of hers, though she's annoyed at him at the moment. He's arranged things so as to create this sort of antichrist kid - it doesn't really have anything to do with her, but she's angry about it anyway, and is feeling tricked and betrayed by him in general. She asks him if he's Lucifer, expecting the answer to be yes.

"Nope. One of the major demons." He says it casually, he's smiling easily through this whole conversation. He's doing some kind of work in a manhole, and she's standing up on the surface with her arms crossed.

"What did you (word that means both infect and possess) my boyfriend with?"

"La'ulb. But it's clean, and I can take it off."


There's this young musician trying to get permission to leave a royal court - he wants to travel to a different country. He has to make a plea before the king, and he's deliberately trying to emulate the speech of an older man, a traveler passing through, who'd impressed him - as a disembodied observer, I'm amused, but I think it's a bad idea; it'll just make him sound artificial. He makes a comparison to a young bird having its wings clipped.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After a short scene in which I'm reminded that cheating on a god out of boredom is not the best of ideas, followed by a shapeshifting fox turning up at my IRL door, I've wound up in a bit of trouble.

I'm now heading for the rear exit of a theatre, trying to avoid being seen by the group of women - not humans - who are coming up behind me; but through the glass door, I can see a pair of fox demons approaching - a pair of women all in white, dripping in silver jewelry. After hesitating, I decide I'd rather take my chances with the fox demons. There's a crowd of people, mostly girls who work here, coming in through that door, but I don't feel very optimistic about my chances of getting lost in the crowd - until one of the girls quickly slips off the blue robe she'd been wearing over her clothes and wraps it around me, and someone else puts an arm around my shoulders, pushing my head down so my face can't be easily seen.

He pulls me over to a side hallway and gives instructions to one of the showgirls to fetch the change of clothing he'd arranged for with her earlier. I know him - he's vaguely sinister but not in a way that I consider a threat to me personally, and I generally admire his skill at getting things done. It's a bit like having Hannibal Lecter on your side.

I'm in my IRL home, and I'm very, very tired. I've got a few things I should take care of before going to sleep, but I'm going to have to do them tomorrow, I'm too tired to focus. It's dark, the lights are off and the sun hasn't risen yet - I realize that's strange, why am I tired at this hour? I hit the light switch as I pass it, but the lights remain off. My assumption is that they need new bulbs. At the top of the stairs, for a moment I think I see something standing in front of me, a person, or more like the shadow of a person, inches in front of my face. It's just for a moment, my eyes playing tricks on me in the dark. As I walk down the hall, I think how this darkness reminds me of those dreams where the lights won't turn on. I don't think about that too deeply at first, but a few moments later I realize that this is, in fact, one of those dreams. But I'm already waking up. (I was disoriented afterward, couldn't remember actually getting to bed, for a few moments.)

(Side note: It occurred to me yesterday, lucidity works best for me when I'm focused on a specific task, as with defusing nightmares, and that's probably something I could put to work for me more. So before going to bed today, I tried typing out one of my dream goals with the heading Task of the Day.)

I was flipping through the just-released final book in a series, the Wheel of Time, when it occurred to me that this series already ended. I get online to explain the discrepancy, and there's some explanation that this new book is an optional epilogue with bonus materials and illustrations and so on. I realize this is a dream. My first instinct is to just continue with what I was doing anyway, but right afterward I think, no, what I was doing was boring. There is no way I am going to waste a dream sitting around my IRL home on the computer. (Although come to think of it, a dream computer could probably do some interesting things too.) That decided, I immediately set out to perform the task I set for myself. (Successfully remembered!) The first step is finding a doorway or other way of changing scenes, so I head for the door.

Before I get there, however, I get distracted: I realize I'm holding the t-shirt I'd taken off earlier in the non-lucid part of the dream. But although I hadn't put on another shirt afterward, I'm fully clothed now, which I think of as a convenient bit of dream logic. I remember a previous lucid dream where I'd tried to transform a shirt into something else, not very successfully, so the presence of a spare now makes me want to try again. I decide to just transform it into a robe, that should be easy, I'll just lengthen it and create an opening in the front. I see there's an opening at the front of the collar now, so I take hold of either side and pull as if tearing it, extending that opening to the bottom, seeing that it's grown longer as I go. I hold it up to look at it - it's got the shape I pictured, but it looks like a poorly-sewn costume, like something a child would make. It's got a piece of plastic sticking out of it, as if a price tag's been torn off, and there's a tangle of loose threads and frayed edges across the opening in the front. I tear that tangle off, then realize I'm waking up. (It occurred to me afterward that both shirts had been specific shirts I actually own IRL. Makes me wonder if I'd have an easier time if, rather than just the general idea of a robe, I'd aimed for something more specific. Still, though: a more successful transformation of an object than the last attempt.)