Carabas

I'm visiting someone, arriving in the yard behind her house, and I find two men doing yard work. I'm surprised, and when I talk to them, one of them complains about being summoned like this - straight out of bed, early on a Sunday morning. (Summoned in the magical sense of the word - he was asleep in bed, and then he was here being put to work.) I go into the house, calling out, "Babe?" There are a few other workers around, and they give me odd looks for the term babe. It occurs to me that the word may be outdated. Or it may be that the woman I'm meeting looks much older than me now, since her hair's white. You have to keep adjusting the way you address humans as they age - it's a headache to keep track of all this stuff.

I find her and ask her about all this work she's having done around the house, and when we step aside from the workers for a moment I point out to her that summoning people on a weekend is rude, and besides, we're supposed to be demonstrating that we're not cartoonish villains here. What does she think she's doing, summoning up people like this? We are supposed to be reformed, we don't get to keep minions anymore. She protests that her helpers aren't 'minions,' but they most certainly are.

I'm taking a little kid home to her family. Initially I'd tried to just send her home with the click-your-heels-three-times bit, but while we wound up somewhere familiar to her, it wasn't actually her family's house. So I'm flying her back the rest of the way - but the kid was so excited about flying, I gave in and kept flying around instead of just taking her straight home. It's a pleasant night flight - lasted a long time and there were so many beautiful views, I deliberately made an effort to remember all of what I was seeing so I wouldn't forget it when I woke up. But despite that, there's not much to describe - a lot of scenes of beautiful city lights seen from far above, and occasionally diving down low over traffic to amuse the kid. The lucid observer part of me wondered why the dream character part of me stuck to following the roads - I supposed it helped with navigation. At one point while we were diving low, we wound up passing underneath this large overhang at a trolley station, and I found it difficult to gain altitude again when shut in from above, so we landed in the trolley car.

I'm someone who's investigating a woman, and my partner and I are searching her apartment. I'm going through old chat logs on her computer. As we leave, walking down the stairwell, we talk about something I found in those logs. I'm saying to her something about "the desire to feel someone else can understand your experience, your point of view. The internet can be great for that." I'm thinking that I'm starting to understand this woman we're investigating, to know how she thinks; I can relate to her. I'm also thinking that the internet's never worked out that way for me - but then I think, feeling alone in something is a universal human experience in itself.

Connecting directly to that feeling-alone-in-something thought - we get to the bottom of the stairwell and walk out the door, and outside, we're in the ruins of an apartment building where I used to live. Everything I can see is covered in debris. We're standing in front of what used to be the indoor pool on the first floor - there's no water, there's a layer of debris at the bottom, and there's no wall or ceiling, the pool is the only recognizable part of the building left. This is a memory of where I was when my wife and daughter died. I climb down to the pool ladder, trying to recreate the moment. But I'm shorter now than I was then, the perspective's wrong. Getting the right eye level means putting my feet on a different rung of the ladder than before. It's not quite right.

Looking around, I find something in the debris. It looks like a cartridge for an old video game console; from the pictures and words on it, I get the impression it's not a game itself, but a soundtrack. My partner takes it from me and looks it over and says, yeah, if you don't know what you're doing it'll just be a soundtrack - but this contains a hidden emulator.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fantasy setting loosely based on ancient China. As a disembodied observer, I'm watching a man teleport into a large tunnel or cave, only to immediately crumble into dust. I'm thinking, whoops. Let's retry that.

Earlier, a woman showed that man a dark green and glittering substance kept in a small, rectangular, light green bottle, and explained that to use it you simply rub it over the palms of your hands and clap them together. Having seen him crumble into dust, I can tell she was tricking him, deliberately leading him to his death, but I'm also aware that this substance really is something of value - this man only asked her about it because he's seen her use it before. There's an old man listening to their conversation, and when she's left that old man catches the younger man's eye and takes the bottle himself, tucking it into his sleeve. The scene skips ahead to a moment when those two men are surrounded and need to escape in a hurry; the old man produces that bottle, rubs the contents over his hands - which causes them to look claw-like - and claps his hands together. Both men are teleported to that tunnel - this time around, the original teleporter lives, and the old man crumbles into dust.

I'm about to open a portal for someone, and I'm trying to explain the difficulties of this type of teleportation to them. I'm saying, no, it doesn't have to be a place I've been to before, but I have to be able to keep the precise location I 'feel' in mind. Things like direction or distance from here to there, those matter - what the place looks like doesn't.

As Rumpelstiltskin, I'm using magic to sort of scan someone for some information, together with Belle, and Belle is able to feel it - she's surprised by the feel of it. It seems like it's happy; she didn't expect it to have a mind of its own. And it worries her that it seems happy, when the person we're scanning is sick. I'm thinking, the magic doesn't care about the person being sick one way or the other, it doesn't really understand what people or sickness are, it's just happy about the way it's being used - it's got a life of its own to a degree but it's not that sentient.

I'm outside my IRL home at dawn, and there are all these beautiful birds. A great horned owl on a tree stump, a snowy egret walking across the lawn, a variety of smaller birds that I don't recognize in the trees, and four peacocks that show absolutely no fear of humans, I'm standing right next to one and it's not bothered, I'm thinking the peacocks must have been tame.

There are two guys climbing up a rock - they think of it as a mountain, but it's barely a hill - carrying a radio and a guitar. A musician they like died here, and one of them has insisted on making a sort of pilgrimage, to play his music at the place he "breathed his last breath." At the top of the rock they turn on the radio. A female vocalist sings "At last the time fell-" The guys brought their own instruments and are joining in. One of them is on the guitar, but the one who insisted on this trip has some small metal instrument that looks vaguely like a comb, played with the thumb.

There's a set of boxes which, when arranged properly, will display a poem by Rumi; it's a game, a puzzle. Each box is engraved with a few lines, the trick is in figuring out the proper order, and there are hints, such as do not separate the loved ones, send the child to school, don't leave him to wander the shore with the mermaid and her knife. The last part is easy enough - one box ends with a line about water spirits, another box starts with a line about a child, I'll just be sure not to connect those two; but there are quite a few different lines that could be interpreted as 'loved ones.'

A woman is sending a message to her employers, as a result of which the building she's in will be locked down and everyone inside will be killed, including herself and her two assistants. Her assistants are artificially-created humans, and display no emotion, but I'm thinking that the loss of their lives is just as important as any other life.

A woman has just been teleported into a castle, somewhere very dangerous, by someone named Anna, and she's very annoyed about this. Although Anna isn't here, the woman yells about it anyway, on the assumption that Anna will be watching her with magic. It's not just the danger that's upset her; at any other time she would have killed to be able to get into this castle, but right now, she'd been in the middle of something urgent, and she really needs to get back to it, so she looks for the way out. A hooded figure appears and reveals a passage to her, a passage that seems to violate the laws of physics and which is filled with a seemingly endless line of graves, and he tries to speak to her, to guide her into that passage, but she ignores him - she's spotted the main doors. As she walks away from the graves and towards the exit, she passes a box with some marking on it that makes her think about dragons, thinking of them as the product of elemental spirits that gathered together and festered.

There's a crowd of people leaving a castle - although the castle looks historical/fantasy-ish, the clothes the people are wearing are futuristic, as is the glass-enclosed walkway they're leaving through. A woman who works for the castle as a kind of hostess is escorting a small group of people at the head of the crowd, congratulating them for winning a spot on some vessel, and then she says to the rest of the people following them, "Good luck in the race!" By which she means - these people are following the winners because they intend to take their spots by force, and the moment they're beyond the castle's protection it'll be every man for himself.

At the end of the glass walkway, the hostess leaves them, and the people pass through some barrier. The people in the walkway had seemed, not necessarily good-looking, but like people who put a lot of effort into their appearance: well-dressed, well-groomed. Once they pass through the barrier, this changes: they're naked, they look like they haven't bathed or shaved in months, more fat, less muscle. The castle was a kind of retreat, but everything it provided was an illusion; now that they've left, the illusions disappear. The people's reactions vary - most of them are shocked, but there's an old man who seems to have expected this with a sort of I-told-you-so attitude about it. There's a teenage boy with a bad knee who's particularly horrified, as he'd believed his knee had been fixed by the castle; he's complaining to his parents that they might as well have stayed home, at least at home they had servants. The castle had its guests doing a variety of chores, citing the spiritual benefits; now it's clear that was a scam.

A woman's saying, "It must not have been a good reality for Vanessa and Vilya." 'Vanessa' is an alternate version of herself. As she's speaking, I see the two people she's talking about, sitting before a very large fireplace. Vilya suddenly leaps up, as if he's just been hit by some stroke of inspiration, and he rushes to a table set up with a variety of alchemical instruments.

Three people in an underground room, grey stone walls lined with bookshelves. A woman and an old man who she's close to, and a young-looking man who made some kind of deal with them - I'm a disembodied observer, but I recognize him from my most recent lucid dream, as the 'future version of myself' who doesn't actually resemble me at all and who looks more like he's from the past. They've barred the doors in the hopes of giving themselves a little more time before someone arrives to stop them - guards or police or military, something along those lines, they're expecting some specific group and they know it's just a matter of time. But they've come to this room to find something specific, and there are hundreds or thousands of books here and no obvious organization to them. The woman's saying "Wherever (something) it'll take us forever to find it." The young-looking man had been sitting down with his eyes closed; now he opens them. They're glowing yellow, which startles the woman. He says, "I have found it. He has used the Britannica articles-" He continues talking, but I've become distracted by curiosity about that locating technique he just used; I associate it with a search technique I'd used in yesterday's dream.

I'm inside a mental simulation of a memory from my past, allowing two people to go through the contents of my memory, a man and a woman. I'm lying down on the bed while the woman goes into the next room to look around.

Will Graham standing in a room, alone, but with mental images of many people moving around, he's piecing together what happened here in the past. He's watching the phantom images move, but he's mostly thinking about Hannibal and the increasing inevitability of consulting him on this case. This whole image is replaced by written words in white: "The Kingdom".

I'm a man who's been doing research into my own unknown ancestry, and turned up some info that my father was a cult leader. And while my mother's still a mystery, I'm complaining to someone that at this rate she'll probably turn out to be a goat. It's a reference to an image of goat-headed Baphomet that was connected to the cult.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm watching three women try to recreate images from old photos of other people, dressing up like them and trying to copy their poses exactly, in order to figure out something that happened in the past, something about a girl with some sense of guilt towards another woman. Copying the photos requires one of the women to adopt some really uncomfortable looking poses, she's dressed up in a wedding gown and the angle she's holding her neck at looks like it should be fatal.

There's this guy who killed someone, and I told him over the phone 'I'm not going to come for you' unless he does something about the body himself. When I get there, I look out the back window into his yard, and see a few of those big black trash bags full of fallen leaves, and I note that there are a couple more bags now than were there when I left. I note that he split it up into several bags instead of just one.

I'm in the yard of some huge mansion with a few white tables and chairs set up for a party, abandoned now; I'm out at the very edge of the yard, near a river, standing over someone who's been shot, and I'm saying to Hannibal, "One person, you could have saved one person!" He says something disagreeing with me. I'm thinking about Abigail.

I'm standing in my IRL shower, and there's a spider in here, well out of the way of the water; but I accidentally drip some on it and it slips down into the tub, gets caught in the water and washed down the drain before I can catch it. I feel guilt about that. I didn't want to drown it. But then an insect crawls up out of the drain - a huge winged ant, and then another one - and I feel sure the spider will be able to make it back up too.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm meeting some people in a dream. A woman and I have just arrived on a beach, bright sunny day, clear blue-green water, and we've got these dark fragments of void-stuff hanging around us from our arrival, dissipating like smoke. She's telling me about the guy she's going to introduce me to, who's supposed to guide me through something specific. He appears in a puff of darkness like we did, but standing on the water a little bit away, dark-haired guy wearing a suit, and he jogs across the water to meet us on the sand. He apologizes for taking so long to get here, and I'm thinking to myself that it only took him so long because he's accepting limitations that are unnecessary in a dream, not really a promising start. I expect him to say something else but he doesn't, they've both gone silent and stopped moving, and I realize that we've lost the connection and I'm waking up.