Carabas

I'm in a garden, speaking in Russian with a very old human man in a wheelchair. We have an arrangement. I'm to kill him, but as he puts it, without ugliness. That he wants his death to be smooth, I have no problem with, but this ugliness he's referring to isn't about his own death, it's about preserving his image of me, or rather what I represent to him. He says I'm a man who should understand this, unlike that brother of mine - he uses a word that my dream doesn't bother to translate aside from noting that it's uncomplimentary. The old man wants to believe in the existence of a creature that's above all the things he dislikes in humanity, an embodiment of death without ugliness. I'm disgusted and feel illogically betrayed by hearing this from him, a man more intimately acquainted with violence than any human I've ever known - he of all people shouldn't have any illusions about this. It's hypocrisy.

As he talks we move indoors, to a dimly-lit room that's kept very cold. He has a selection of alcohol lined up before a mirror, and I go to pour him a glass; as I do so I see a small portrait of a blonde woman, which I pick up. A woman who works for him, who's been pushing his wheelchair, urgently asks me to be careful with that. I recognize the image as his granddaughter - she's how I met him in the first place, years back. He laughs and corrects me, and he says this in English: "Vivian. Her mother." This startles me, and I examine the portrait again - I would never have guessed they weren't the same person. Her mother had died before I met her.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

While using a spell to pull out some relevant books and scrolls from a collection, one of the books that comes to me is titled "The Unbeauty of Life," by a Japanese author.

I'm running up several flights of stairs, spiraling upward through a ruined building, piles of rubble around; I should have fled the building with the others when I reached the first floor but instead I kept going upward, thinking of the woman I'd originally come here to track down. As I reach the upper levels I find her laboratory, with her books scattered on the floor, sarcophagi in rows. The next level above that is devoted to "the theatrical vampire," complete with red stage curtains hanging on the wall, full of what I think of as romanticized images from stage and screen, and as I look at it I remember the sound of her laughing. There's one more floor above this.

Hellblazer, I/Constantine had been working with this teenage girl in the previous scene; now she's gone alone to a hospital to see her kid brother. He's in a ward with a lot of beds, and he's kneeling up on the end of his bed to talk to her. He's saying, "Is it possible that Grace is only after Constantine?" Grace is a surname - the Grace in question is a middle-aged man. And when the kid says Constantine, 'uncle' is implied. "Because he's not exactly a... us anymore." 'Us' meaning a person, a human being. I'd made one deal too many. Which has made it possible for me to be summoned up and controlled, used as a tool - that's what they suspect Grace is after.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After an unsuccessful night looking for blood, I have to rely on Elsa, a sort of servant. Last resort. We use transfusion tubes to draw out the blood, to avoid any unwanted side effects on her, and I alter her mind to make it pleasant for her. I compliment her on the quality, she's changed her diet since the last time we had to do this. I'm speaking German-accented English.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm climbing up a stairwell, climbing up through years. As I pass the platform that will lead to the 1990s, getting close to home, I hear voices up ahead. I come across a man and a woman leaning against the wall; the woman's saying, "No, it's 203. They changed the calendar - finally. I was starting to lose track."

Further up, another group having a conversation, talking about the cracks in the walls. A woman's saying, "They're glitching so bad a man could get in."

I reach my door, present day. But just beside my door, the cracks in the walls are so severe that they've formed a sort of second door - I think I could walk right through. The black sort of skittering motion that appears in all the cracks is more visible here. But the scene just before I entered the stairwell had involved accidentally intruding in a place where I shouldn't be, disrespectfully, and trying to make up for that. I decide against stepping through the cracks. I take the door to the present day.

I step out into what's meant to be an apartment where I live, distorted in a sort of cartoonish representation of hallucination, like you might see in an old music video; it seems to be underwater. Then my field of vision pulls back - now I'm looking at a screen containing an image of this room. It's labeled as a game preview. I'm aware that if I'd stepped through the cracks, the scene still wouldn't have lasted for much longer, since this is only a preview - but that's where the real storyline would begin.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've taken my clockwork heart out of my chest to work on it. I have a mental association with the Snow Queen. I'm in my workshop, full of various clockwork devices, and I'm carrying on a conversation with my apprentice. The image changes to show the subject of our conversation - a bird whose flight over the desert is taking it over a pair of dark horses at the moment. I'm saying, "It doesn't matter if the bird is clockwork or flesh and blood." Either way, it'll fly the same repetitive pattern every year.

As Hemlock Grove's Roman, me and Peter have just entered this old abandoned tower, and I'm showing off some of the tricks I've picked up since the last time we saw each other. I turn myself into a cloud of bats, thinking of this as something I'd learned from that one previous dream, and I come out of it high on the wall, looking down at Peter watching me, able to hold myself up against the vertical wall just by gripping with my hands - it's not completely effortless, but it's still easy. It's a rush. I'm having so much fun showing off with Peter, I want to laugh. This makes me start thinking something about connections with people, and then there's a memory gap.

The next scene I remember is in a different part of the same building, the memory gap only lasted for about one or two changes of scene. I'd climbed up into the metal rafters and I've been heading up in a spiral, and I've just come across a closed door; but I'm not playing around anymore, I'm in a hurry, either chasing or being chased by something. The door has no handle on this side, so I hammer on it and shout, "Open the door. Open the door, mom!" (I was thinking of someone specific by 'mom', but whoever she was, it wasn't my IRL mother or the mother of the character I'd started the scene as - I'm not sure I'm still playing his role by this point.) Door still doesn't open, and I'm not surprised. I step back and look at it. There's no way to open it from this side, just a keyhole big enough to look through - I can see some light through it, and I have the feeling I'm meant to look through it, and that thought pisses me off. I grip the side of the door, forcing my fingers into the gap between the door and the frame, and I wrench it open.

The other side of the door leads to somewhere else completely, unconnected to the building I was just in. It's incredibly vivid, nothing like the dream I'd been having up until this point - which hadn't seemed un-vivid in any way, but I'm thinking of this as a completely different way of seeing things. I'm in a stone hallway, brownish-yellowish stones, filled with many doors, all of them wooden, arched, narrow, dull red. I still have that sense of being in a hurry, and I immediately go to open the first door to my left. But as I do, I hear a woman's voice - the mother I'd referred to before - shouting this strangled "No!" and I hear the sound of a door closing, and footsteps in a hurry. And then I'm awake.

(Really awake, none of the usual transition, just footsteps and "No!" and suddenly in my bed with my eyes open. Was convinced I'd been woken up by the actual front door and actual footsteps - which is not unusual, I sleep while other people are up - but no, just the dream. Back to sleep.)

As Constantine (rhymes with turpentine), I've been in a police interrogation room for a while now when they let in this elegant older woman to see me, calling her "Mrs. Constantine." She's supposed to be my mother, which is a lie of course, my mother being long dead, but I instantly play along with the act. Memory gap, and then I'm being put in a holding cell, and I try to convince someone I pass along the way to have the police find that woman and pick her up, quick. Not sure I made myself clear, though, I'd been passing out, having a hard time staying conscious. I can see the brown smoke of her spell wrapping around me. Blacked out.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I had a classroom scene, so I went lucid and walked out. I didn't have any particular destination in mind aside from getting out of the school, and the first door that I reached for took me into the kitchens - still meant to be part of the school. The next door I can find is a refrigerator door, and I give that a shot - no good, I open it and find food inside. I think to myself that this is probably too strong an association to bother trying again, so I remove the refrigerator from the wall. There's a white wooden door behind it. This one opens onto a satisfyingly different scene - rolling green hills and a mountain in the distance that I mentally compare to Mt. Fuji from its size and the way it dominates the landscape, though otherwise they don't look alike.

I walk along a paved road leading towards that mountain. At one point I come across a house, and the road divides so that one path leads up a slope to that building and down again to rejoin the main road on the other side, and I'm admiring the organic shape of both the road and the house. It's a white one-story building composed of several rounded rooms, with a reddish-brown shingled roof with little spires over each rounded room. There were quite a few plants that I was admiring, and gardening tools, but I knew this was going to be too much detail for me to remember, and a lot of it didn't have any IRL comparisons I could easily make, to make it easier to remember. I focus on a couple woven baskets lying on a bench, with lids with little spires like the ones on the roof, the last thing I focus on as the path leads me back down to the main road.

The path leads me into a town, or a small city maybe, starting in a little square with two clocks standing on black iron poles. Both of them show the same time, 3:00, with the second hand pointing down at the 6; a bell tolls, and then they both run backwards, until every hand points to the top, midnight exactly.

The path leads on to another square, this one with a big brass bell. There are a fair number of people in the streets around me now, but I'm only paying attention to one - a man standing beneath that bell. He calls me over. He's this older man, and I mentally compare him to Mister Rogers, that sort of friendly and wise and harmless impression. His speech is slurred and very deliberate, as if he has a hard time forming English words. He says quite a few things about me heading for the mountain, and preparing for that, and he mentions K., an old IRL friend who I haven't gotten in touch with for a long time. I'm a little frustrated by knowing I'm not going to be able to remember all these details when I wake up, and I'm having a hard time picking and choosing which parts to focus on, but I hold up a hand to stop him and ask about K., ask him to clarify - is he saying I need K. with me at the mountain, that I can't do it alone? He's surprised by the question. He says, no, you can go on alone. And he compares me to "a dry martini: high in the hand, but hard to keep it." Okay, that's suitably convoluted phrasing that I'm definitely not going to remember that unless I wake up now. I choose to wake up so I can remember at least some of what he's said. I regret this decision almost instantly.

I've been following something in the form of a child through a place that reminds me of the Flavian Amphitheatre, though I'm aware this isn't Rome or any other physical place; I'm climbing a spiraling staircase along the outer wall, with the arena far below to my left, and arches to my right looking out onto water, and I've just gone lucid in order to focus on remembering what I'm seeing through those arches. The sky is dazzlingly bright.

As I climb higher, the water is replaced by images of another place. I'm seeing an opera house sometime in the early 20th century, but at impossible angles - I see the audience in their boxes, a row of tables outside the theatre proper, a strip of grass and hedges from the little garden outside the building, all at the same time. The effect is something like looking through a faceted gem or a kaleidoscope, with images from different angles jammed right next to each other. Instead of seeing the walls, I see mirrors reflecting nothing, just bright, shining glass. I spot a man I think of as me, though he looks nothing like me - a young man with white hair, sitting at one of the tables outside the theatre proper and smoking. And as I continue climbing, my perspective moving along the audience, there's a woman in one of the boxes who catches my attention - a young black woman with her hair pulled back tight into a bun, in a pale purple gown. It strikes me as very important that I'm seeing her here in the audience, not on the stage.

I looked around for text in order to get some context, but while I found plenty of writing, it refused to cooperate, even swirling into spiraling shapes before my eyes. I don't normally have trouble reading while dreaming, lucid or not, so I thought of this as being deliberately evasive.