Carabas

I'm standing by a light switch in pitch black darkness, and the lights won't turn on. I question whether this is a dream, doubt it at first, but then realize yes, it is. I have a sort of false awakening in which I still realize I'm dreaming, but now I become aware that I'm lying on my back in a bed in the guest room of my father's house (no resemblance to anywhere he's lived IRL), with his cat curled up against my legs - nothing's changed visually, it's still pitch black. I look up at where the ceiling would be and think about stars, and about a previous lucid dream where I removed the roof and floated up into the sky, and debate whether to do that again. I feel like there's something else I want to do here first. I can hear my father and his girlfriend watching TV in the next room and talking to each other. As I listen to them I forget that this is a dream.

Memory gap - some time later I'm standing in a different room, again trying and failing to get the light switch to work. I hear the sound of my stepbrother coming home and going straight to his own room. This light switch has several different switches and dials that I can't see in the dark, and this time I wind up taking out my ipod and holding it up as a flashlight. I can see the switches and dials now, but I still can't get them to work, and then I remember that this is a dream.

(Woke up at 5:30, half an hour after getting to bed. Back to sleep.)

I'm going to visit someone I owe thanks, bringing a guitar to play for them. One of the strings snaps.

At my father's house, some guy is trying to talk to my sister S., he's angry and seems obsessed, and while they're arguing he picks up a knife - not to threaten with, but it's the last straw, me and my father kick him out.

At my mother's house, one of her former students is at the door with some friends, and he's talking to her about some technique that's recently become a fad. Everyone's very impressed by his expertise, and it's driving me nuts because this technique is just a cheap knockoff version of something I've been doing for years that no one's ever taken seriously, and this popular version is much less effective. We get into a really idiotic argument which leaves me feeling frustrated even after I woke up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm lying in bed in the wrong house, and some boy shakes me awake to tell me I have to go. I apologize and try to explain that I'm not there to do anything bad, I just got the wrong place, but I can't remember the word for 'place' in Japanese and have to fumble around trying to find a different way to say it. He gets the point but doesn't really care, he didn't seem particularly threatened by a stranger in his house to begin with, he just wants me gone before his mother wakes up. I walk out a back door that, aside from a little ledge, opens directly onto the river. The kid tries to correct me, pull me back inside so I can use the front door and actually leave, but I just step out onto the river and stand on top of the water, which is a normal thing for a witch like me to do. The kid's surprised, the water and the light are really vivid, it's all very pleasant. As I'm appreciating the vividness, I become aware that I'm thinking of this as a dream.

I walk a few steps into the sky and start floating, heading somewhere specific. As I float above the river, I pass various people, and I start to hear a song, people are singing it. I pass two brothers sitting in chairs having some fashionable procedure done, a row of string sewn above their lip, to me it looks like they're having their mouths sewn closed. It strikes me as odd, but I remind myself that this isn't my time period so I don't have the full context, not for me to judge.

I reach a roller coaster, and there's a man and a woman riding it, the people I've been looking for. They're also singing that song that's been going on, and the lyrics tell me a little about their history. She has (or possibly had, up until very recently) a life-threatening heart condition. Their song is about the possibility of fixing a heart only to get hit by a bus or something similar, and the way people think they have time. The guy, singing in English with an Irish accent, sings a verse about how if (some name, some guy he knows) died he'd be singing a toast to him.

Song's over. Now that we've all met up in a dream, as planned, the guy asks whether we should wake up now. I'm inclined to agree, mission complete, but I think it's a little ridiculous to waste a lucid dream, there ought to be some fun we could have before we go. The guy leaves anyway, the girl stays. She says to me, "I have questions." I say to her, "I... probably don't have answers." She starts to say something else, but I become aware that I'm consciously thinking up her next dialogue for her, and that I'm waking up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Forever Knight-based setting, I'm Nicholas, and I'm being posed a question: between Janette, LaCroix, and an apple which represents my hope for humanity, I can only save one. What's my first instinct? I dismiss the apple completely but can't decide between the other two, which is annoying since the entire point of this exercise was only to see which came to mind first, without overthinking it.

Scene changes to an Umineko setting - Beatrice, who'd posed the question, is annoyed with the way I've spoiled it, and she retreats into the other room with aunt Eva. She says something to Eva that I can hear through the door, something about how the only hope is the "good key (name of key)."

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.