Carabas

I'm talking to a man, a great inventor or artist of some kind, who's been given an arena to work in. The structure is very white and the sky is very wide and very blue, and the arena's filled with shadowy figures he's been given to work for him, something like automatons, not alive. Human-shaped, but when I focus on them they look a bit like something that's been burned to charcoal, flaking at the edges, except for their teeth, which are white and sharp; inactive right now.

Until this moment I had a lot of contempt for this man. But he's saying to me, "I'm not an idiot," and that he knows he's already made his last great work. Though he's currently working on a project, and though his masters who gave him this arena have great expectations of him, he doesn't expect to live to complete it. His bitterness makes me think a little more highly of him.

Working for these things was a mistake. I don't say this to him out loud. There are a couple floating hooded figures with white masks in the arena, and we're both putting on something of an act for them. They're not his bosses, or guards, exactly, but they are effectively monitoring him at the moment. Something more like citizens, as opposed to slaves like him, however honored a slave he might be. He turns off the music he's been listening to while he works, and he's trying to give the impression that he's simply stopping work for now and going to bed as usual, that there's nothing wrong.

I enter a lecture hall and speak to the man who I believed summoned me, dressed in black with a small white owl on his shoulder, but it turns out the owl is the one that called me; this is news to the man in black, and he's not pleased about it. The owl speaks in a pleasant woman's voice and changes into the shape of a four-sided mask, one face for each direction; three of them are simple stylized masks made of wood or similar, but the fourth is an actual face - it moves, it has eyes - just in cartoonishly distorted proportions. She's been sealed/trapped/stuck/reduced to this. She introduces herself as Loki Laufeyjarson, which is not the name I was expecting her to say but I roll with it.

She talks about each of her masks - in the one that resembles an actual face, she says she'd taken this form and scorned high heels (meaning an artificial way of gaining the height she feels she should have had anyway - 'height' is not really the issue she's talking about). In one of the wooden masks, she talks about using this form for dealings with a magician, and she suspects that magician of having a hand in her current unfortunate circumstances.

She returns to the form of the owl sitting on the man in black's shoulder, and we're now in a yard behind an estate, surrounded by partygoers. The man speaks of my payment and I dismiss the small amount of money he offers; I tell him I expect him to provide me with food and lodgings, pea soup and three packs of smokes a day. (Neither of those are things I'd want IRL, but I wasn't being my IRL self here.) I'm already leaving, stepping over an ornamental pond; it's a demand, not a negotiation. He's irritated, but she accepts immediately. I walk off into the trees along the border of the property.

In earlier scenes, symbols of eyes and blue lotuses above the entrance to a cave, and drinking a polar bear's blood from a glass while wondering about parasites.

A man confronts me at my IRL home, having tracked me down, holding me responsible for something that happened long ago. I hear a memory of something he'd said to me then - "The rule of kings is over. We will take our place among free nations." The scene shifts to show the beginning of the thing he blames me for. A procession through a city, passing by a river, soldiers in silver-colored armor, rows and rows of lances in the sunlight, the king and myself in tall masked helmets and long robes, at the corner of my vision I'm aware of a ship moving along the river with sails and oars and something golden about it, and it's all a striking image, but I'm thinking of something like Cosa Nostra.

I'm flying over a river, and although I don't remember what I was flying on, in effect it's essentially a flying carpet - a small, flat surface carrying several people. Someone else is 'driving' it, I'm just along for the ride. We're taken over a waterfall, with several clouds beneath us, and among the clouds I see a huge gate hanging in the air, supported by pillars on either end. It turns out to be the first in a series of three gates, the entrance to a country - the first is very modern, with images like a billboard; the second somewhat less modern; and the third is very old and very beautiful, more like a decorative lattice made of stone and covered in moss, as tall as maybe a three-story building. I turn back to look at it as we pass overhead. On the other side, we land. I find that I'm excited, much more so than I'd expected to be, about traveling somewhere new. Less jaded than I thought apparently.

I'm surprised - although we've just entered a new country, there don't seem to be any customs to pass through, no guards. We've landed outside of a building, and I understand there are some procedures to be gone through inside; but there isn't anyone around out here, no one to stop us from just wandering off into the country. I intend to go inside, I just took note of it as something odd. There's what seems to be a giant bell planted in the ground, although it's so covered with moss it's hard to tell what's underneath. As I and the other people from the 'carpet' walk around outside, I notice several stone statues. There's a plaque underneath one of them that I read - this is part of the entrance procedure. We're meant to pay our respects by bowing before each of these statues. I do so, pointing this out to one of the other people from the 'carpet' to give them a heads up. The first three statues I come to are divine figures and legendary heroes, I bow before each of them; but then the fourth statue I find is an odd creature in a mask, labeled as a nightmare called Home Eater. I don't see why I should have to bow before my own kind.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There was a scene in which someone was causing plants to grow rapidly among some stone ruins in a cave, and someone else saying to them, horrified, "What have you done?"

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Lost Boys, as David I'm watching Michael drop out of the tree and run away from the killing. This was not the plan. He was supposed to kill someone, not run away. I don't like giving the new ones too much time to think - just do it, make a clean break, then explain what's happened to them. It's easier that way.

Back in the cave with Star, I'm standing off to one side and watching her. She's standing in front of a bunch of pots for plants covering a table. Most of them look empty, although I know she's planted seeds in each of them, and she's been trying to do something with them. But the one she's holding her hands over now is growing right before our eyes, responding to her somehow, like magic. Whatever she's been trying to do, it's working on this one. The other boys come back then, they all exclaim over what Star's doing, gathering around the plant and looking as excited about this as she is - except Michael. He's hanging back and looking at Star with this expression - not exactly betrayal, but close; like he'd thought she was someone he could trust, and now he believes he was wrong about that.

(Yesterday.)

I'm a man trying to calm a situation down so that I won't wind up in a cell. It would be for a minor charge, but my situation's complicated. There's this woman I made a deal with a long time ago - I brought her to this world ('this world' is for all intents and purposes the same as IRL), and she freed me from the curse that had locked me up back in our own world. But there's a catch - if I'm locked up in a cell even for one night, that old curse will find me again, I'll be trapped again. I think of that as her 'winning' - we help each other often but I don't like her much. I'm afraid of being trapped, but I'm also afraid because if I'm trapped I won't be able to keep up the illusion that makes me look human.

(Today.)

A woman and I had been standing in the middle of a road surrounded by trees, discussing something - a car comes, the driver sees us, he swerves, he crashes. I'm irritated at the interruption, but I go over to the car so I can get a meal out of this before emergency services arrives. The scene changes abruptly - one moment I'm walking towards the car, the next moment time has passed, emergency services have already come and there's a crowd of people around. The woman and I leave and transform into a cloud of bats. In all my vampire dreams this has never happened before, and I pause to enjoy the novelty and absurdity. My perception's different. The sky is a brilliant saturated blue with something shimmering about it, and the air gives me the impression of containing new angles, like unseen tunnels.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I and a group of other people, all of us foreigners in this place, had been talking to a group of women on a small 'island' - just a heap of stones really. We're very frustrated. We're trying to get them to do something for their own good, and they're not cooperating. They end negotiations and vanish into thin air.

Still as the POV character from that last scene, I'm walking around the grounds of some large estate on a hill, with a gated entrance visible not too far away. I'm speaking to a woman all in pale gold - everything's pale gold, her robes, her hair, her skin, the mask that she wears that covers her whole face something like a welder's mask, only revealing one eye. She has her own issues with the people from that 'island' - she's saying they're against her and her plan simply because of her mental illness. She resents them.

I'm sitting on a wooden throne and talking to a man who's going through a bout of existential despair, and he's asking me about coping with vast spaces of time, with immortality - how do you do it? I find this hilariously awful - you're asking me?

I'm in a store that sells various forms of blades, among other things, and my attention's caught by an iron mask with a strangely curved dagger set into it, removable. (After I woke up I realized the dagger's shape was inspired by F/SN.) The mask's face seems very narrow, but I believe that the mask's features will fit themselves to the wearer. The eyes are particularly narrow and I don't see any holes to look out of. There's a long and narrow stylized beard that reminds me of ancient Egyptian art, which would cover the wearer's neck, and the mouth is designed to look as if it's been sewn shut. I like it.

I'm distracted by the sound of more people arriving outside. There's a brief confrontation but they dismiss me and the people I'm with as not threatening, which irritates me. There's some debate over whether this post-apocalyptic, breakdown-of-society situation we're in will last, or whether things will return to normal in a few days.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There are three astronauts who've said or done something that their bosses wouldn't approve of, and they've ceased broadcasting in a way that implies they're dead or soon will be. But when I talk to someone who wasn't watching their broadcast live, I find she's got a different impression of events, she believes everything's fine, and some reasonable-sounding excuse has been given for why the astronauts are no longer broadcasting. Their previous broadcast has been censored or changed.

I'm playing a piano, using sheet music for a jazz tune I'd never heard before. The sun's going down, and the light gradually darkens until I can't make out the sheet music in front of me.