Carabas

(Though not lucid, this first one was about dream control.)

I've finally figured out how to work with this house. I've begun simply telling it, out loud, what I need from it - not exerting any effort or willpower, just a statement. "House, we need x thing," and the house takes care of it itself, without any effort on my part - simply informing the house what's needed instead of trying to control it. Amazing what a difference clear communication can make.

I'm talking to a servant girl in a room about the size of a closet where she both works and, I'm surprised to learn, sleeps. I ask if she'd like her own room, which of course she does. "House, we need a spare room." I walk out the door and find a new room's appeared, though it's dark and half-finished and covered in dust. "A nicer spare room." Now it's something suitable for living in - and I don't think I looked away, and there didn't seem to be any transition. One moment it had the first appearance, the next moment it was completely different. The girl explores the new room, exclaiming over it. There's a little bundle of fake white roses in a bowl of sugar.

There's what I think of as a wildfire at the edge of the house, just small patches of burning grass but I know it'll grow if I'm not careful. I have the impression this is the result of carelessly reshaping things, creating vulnerabilities around the edges. I have the house stop the fire, and though the fire's stubborn, it goes out as I walk towards it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A servant girl came running into a room at the back of the household after hearing one of the other servant girls shouting, but I grab her at the door and stop her. I can hear voices outside, and I recognize the voices of some soldiers who were causing problems with that second girl earlier, somewhere more public. They were reprimanded. Clearly they resented it and want payback. Realizing this, I admire the girl who came running to help; she's small and only armed with a kitchen knife and completely outnumbered, but she doesn't hesitate. Very noble.

Unfortunately for both of them, I'm in a hurry, so I'm not going to let her go help her friend. I'm just here to track down an object that belongs to me and which was stolen long ago, and which she stole from its most recent owner - a leather journal with a star on the center of the cover.

She showed me her room where it was hidden and ran off as soon as I released her, and I start looking through the journal, full of brief observations and sketches I'd drawn. I stop at the sketch on the last page, Jules sitting in a chair with his head tilted back. I feel like there's something foreshadowing about this. And while I'm looking at it, I hear an old man's voice as if he's looking over my shoulder. He makes a comment that makes it clear he recognizes Jules, and then asks me, "Did you follow me?"

I'm walking through the basement of a tower, grey stone walls. There's some kind of chaos going on on the main floors above me, a distraction while I was taking care of something in the dungeon on the next floor down - but now that it's time to go, I want to avoid getting caught in whatever's happening on the main level.

There's two people waiting for me with two different escape routes - neither of them knows exactly what I was doing here, neither of them knows me personally, and neither them knows about the other. There's a person I work with who'd arranged for a man to meet me by the stairs up to the main floors, but I'm having second thoughts about trusting him. And there's a woman waiting by a wooden door that leads elsewhere; she's not involved at all, she just wants to escape whatever's going on upstairs and is willing to take me with her, recognizing me as a friend of a friend. I believe she would be more sympathetic to what I was doing here, if it came out.

Deciding to go with that woman at the wooden door, I'm doubling back, passing by the stairs leading down to the dungeon. I debate whether I have time to go back down there - there had been something else I'd wanted to look into down there, though it's not a priority. I start down those steps, but it becomes so dark I can't see, and I have a vague impression of massive chains. I can hear a woman's voice crying. I decide I don't have time to be fumbling around in the dark, and I head back up the stairs.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A man is looking at a wall recently painted green in an attempt to emulate some other place, and talking to someone about a man he knows, saying that while he wasn't looking, the man went and got married to people so unsuited - people, plural, meaning both the wife and the stepkids - people he'll have to keep secrets from.

I'm watching light play over the features of the man in question in an interesting way. He's looking at a signet ring with an image of a rose, which he's just removed from a hiding place in the base of a lamp. I'm hearing a kind of tinkling sound like a music box repeating a single measure over and over again.

In some small early 20th century village, I'm the youngest in a family of three sons, and for years now it's been expected that I'll marry the neighbor's youngest daughter when we grow up - we've always been good friends. In the previous scene we'd all been sitting around my family's dinner table; now I've gone to meet her down by the river, which is so full of plants it gives the impression you could walk across them like a bridge. The girl's here waiting, but before I go to meet her, I'm distracted by another girl, a stranger, standing in the center of the river. The observer side of me thinks, I have to remember this.

Her hair is probably blonde, but it's so matted and dirty that it's hard to tell. She's dressed in old-fashioned men's clothes, a shapeless and colorless coat over a blue velvet waistcoat with a pattern of rosebuds. Then I realize that while I've been focusing on remembering the details of her appearance, I've been missing the conversation the character side of me is having with her. I drop back to focus on what the character side of me is doing.

Years later, but near that same river. One of my brothers is handing me a silver pocket watch that belongs to our father, and telling me that he's in Madrid - they've known this all along, apparently. My brothers got me to come back here on the pretense that our father's missing - I'm annoyed but not surprised to find that was a lie. There's a woman here, somehow connected to that girl in the river but not the same person, and something about biting down on a chain, and her little fangs.

I'm carrying one end of a wooden box through what looks like an abandoned house, with that woman holding the other end - it's not particularly large or heavy, just large enough to be awkward for one person. I'm looking at our hands on the box, close enough to be nearly touching. Her nails look thick and discolored, greyish; there's blood ingrained around the nail, but I'm thinking that the blood's not what's causing the dark greyish appearance, since there's blood all over my hands too.

That woman is kissing me and holding me in place, not letting me turn my head to see what's going on, telling me not to move when I try to. Something is very wrong. There's other people here; the observer side of me recognizes this moment and I switch to third person to avoid it. The scene still continues in front of me, they kill her, but I don't see much of it, focusing on remembering the earlier scenes.

I'm entering a large garage, looking for the owner. Off to the right I see a white truck I recognize from the first time I met him, when he'd kidnapped the queen. There are three vases full of red roses sitting in the truck bed now. The man I'm looking for is further into the garage, off to the left, along with another man who I also met during that kidnapping incident. I exchange the usual greetings with this second man, then walk up to the one I came to see. He's an incredibly big guy, tall and muscular, and he doesn't turn from what he's doing to look at me. Neither of us say anything for a moment - I have a hard time deciding how to talk to him - and then when we do speak, both of us start talking at once.

He asks about the queen at the same moment I say, "(the queen's name)'s sick." Dying, most likely.

He's shocked and horrified, as expected, and asks me a bunch of questions about her. As we talk, we raise the question of whether her sickness is a reflection of the state of the land, or whether the land's sickness is a reflection of the state of the queen - that they're linked is obvious, but which one started it, which is the cause, that's the question.

The other man joins in the conversation at this point. They'd been tracking the changes in the land on their own, not realizing what was happening to the queen; and comparing our information, the two of them become convinced it started with the land. That second man shows me one of their maps on a computer screen, showing when a giant creature associated with cold moved into the far northwest and burrowed deep into the earth - that was the first one, the one that started it. They'd already been planning to remove or kill it. It goes without saying that I'll be coming too.

As I'm looking at his data, I'm thinking, amused, how convenient, making this into a problem that can be solved with our skillset.

I'm walking in the garden, mentally composing a letter. When I'm ready to start putting it down, I go to where I've left my portable writing desk. There are a few bees hovering around it, interested in the vine I left it under. I'm thinking about moving it somewhere I won't disturb the bees, but then I see an envelope that's been left on top of it.

The letter inside is written in classical Chinese. I have no difficulty understanding it, but rather than actually reading the letter, I'm thinking about the woman who sent it - even without seeing her name, there's only one person who writes to me in this language. I'm seeing a mental image of the two of us walking through a rough stone tunnel next to water, with light reflecting off the water, rippling patterns reflected on our faces.

That was a memory, but the next image I see is the present, through her eyes, something that can sometimes happen when I'm thinking about her. She's looking at a painting of a woman I think of as a saint, with an image of a dragon behind her; then her vision moves up to the ceiling, as if she's falling back. I see an image of a pile of roses turning to ash, and my connection to her is gone - not just this vision, but the connection of our blood is gone. She's dead.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man who's been sent back in time, and now several other people who've gone back to rescue him. He'd been involved with the woman leading the rescue team. They've just met up now, and very nearly attacked each other - both of them sneaking around a fortress, trying to avoid being seen. Having sorted it out, it seems he's working together on a mission with a woman from this era, and fallen in love, and has no interest in going back to his original time period. He's just broken her out of a cell in this fortress. The woman who came back to rescue him is thinking it was foolish to chase his spirit into the past when she had his (something) in the present.

The scene transitions to a modern-day park; that man was brought back to the present against his wishes, but so was that woman from the past. They're spending time in the park with their infant son, distracted and unhappy.

My attention shifts to other people in the park, a group discussing magic, specifically one man mentioning a "listen and learn" spell with leaves, as a second step for those just starting to work with trees. He describes trees in general as "a bit froggy, though."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A private performance of a show based on Frankenstein. The 'bride' character speaks beautifully; the 'creation' character is silent, and his hands are bent backwards at the wrist as if they've been broken. When he'd been alive, he'd been the doctor's student or lover or something close.

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.

After going lucid and abandoning the storyline I'd been in, I'm walking to a simple full-length mirror leaning against a wall. I focus on my intended destination - the rose garden, a meeting place. As I place my hands through the glass, I lose all visuals. My hands sink into the glass as far as my wrists, but no further. The 'hole' beyond the surface of the mirror that acts as a portal isn't open enough. I can feel jagged edges against my right wrist, as opposed to the heavy liquid-like feeling of the portal. It's like I've broken open a hole in a frozen lake. I stay focused on the destination and mentally dig at those edges until they give.

I can feel a wall of thorns all around me so that I can't move. I still have no visuals, I think of this as between scenes. I'm annoyed at myself - this is the barrier around the garden, I shouldn't have had to deal with this at all. It was an error in focus, thinking about roses and sharp edges. I try to correct my focus but find myself waking up. (Though it wound up being a false awakening. Visuals returned when I 'woke up.')