Carabas

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?"

I'm at a formal party midway through the 20th century, and everyone's talking about the mysterious disappearance of the leading lady during intermission tonight. I'm as baffled as anyone, though in a slightly different way - I killed her, but I left the body in her dressing room. Someone else removed the body, and I need to find out who and why.

We pair off and start to dance, and I focus on a man who's not dancing, just watching the rest of us - he's in some position of authority in the theatre. I switch to third person, and now I see the scene as he does - he 'saw' that leading lady emerge from between two of the dancing couples, a pale woman dressed in red, black hair pulled back tight to her head, with a haughty and sort of mocking look on her face. That attitude doesn't square with the way I remember her at all; it's clear to me that the version of her he's seeing is his own hallucination, not an actual visit from her spirit.

She puts a hand on his shoulder and begins to dance along to the song with the rest of us, though he's not moving with her. She circles around him, saying that she knew from the start that this wouldn't work. She sings along to the music: "-won't let me leave you, but amore, that's to blame."

My driver's pulling the car over. He apologizes for this - stopping here instead of taking me home. It's on "her" request. (He didn't literally use the word "her," we're speaking Korean.) He'll of course be here to drive me home afterwards, if I don't decide to throw him out and drive myself (which has happened before.) He's bracing himself for a bad reaction - which he probably would have gotten, I'm pissed off and want him to explain himself, but then I'm distracted by the people outside the car. Among all the people on the sidewalk with black umbrellas, there's one umbrella in dull red. I know the woman carrying it. I get out of the car.

I recognize where we are now - there are stone steps set into the white stone wall that runs alongside the road, leading up to a cemetery at the top of the hill. Someone I knew was buried there not too long ago. There are several people here with the woman with the red umbrella - they're dressed trendily, and I think of them as very young though I'm only a few years older than them. They're acting like they're going to a celebration, loud and upbeat. The woman with the red umbrella hangs back and takes my arm, watching my reaction to them. They're a part of the life of the person who was buried in that cemetery, but it's a part of his life that's completely foreign to me, something I never saw when he was alive.

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-"

A Takarazuka production of Elisabeth with a new scene, in which Death is kneeling before young Elisabeth on the throne, kissing the underside of her wrist. Both of them are dressed in red; at the beginning of the scene, Death had been disguised in long red robes.