Carabas

I'm reading a book. There had been a series I'd loved that ended some years ago, and now the authors have put out a new prequel series featuring some of the side characters - one of them is the Magician.

Scene changes slightly - instead of just seeing words on a page, I'm now seeing the scene described in the book. The Magician and Julie are having a standoff, just arguing with words at the moment but willing to cause damage if it gets to that point. I'd been looking forward to seeing a scene with Julie. In the main series, it's established that she and the Magician had a long and complicated history, but we only actually see her once - learning more about her is the main reason I'm interested in this new series.

But Julie's personality here is drastically different than it had seemed in the main series - I actually hadn't realized this was meant to be her until just now when I heard her name (she's using two of Julia's usual aliases). Her portrayal's so different that it just seems like bad writing, like she's been reduced to a caricature. And that complicated history she had with the Magician seems to have become a standard characters-who-irritate-each-other-wind-up-getting-together plot. In the years since that first series ended, the writers have really gone downhill. So I decide I'm just going to ignore this characterization, this new series in general, and focus on the main series instead.

For (supposedly) unrelated reasons, a character on the Magician's side puts his hands over his ears and starts singing to avoid hearing what the Magician and Julie are saying.

A woman's looking over a small art collection - sketches of the building she's in from various earlier eras, collected in a large book. On the wall directly over the book is a recent painting of this same building, but showing it thousands of years earlier when there was a lake here, with the door opening directly onto the water. She finds this painting a little funny - unlike the historical sketches, she believes this one's a sort of what-if image. The building's old but it's not that old. But the man who commissioned the painting, the owner of this place, she's thinking of him as being oddly precise about where the lake should be in relation to the building; as far as she's aware there's no evidence that there was ever really a lake here at all. The title of the painting is Lake Hae or Hayle or something along those lines. Although the building in the painting and the building in modern times are identical, somehow in the painting it gives the impression of being someplace sacred.

She turns the pages of the book - she's careful with it, it's very valuable. After the sketches of the building there are a series of anatomical sketches and portraits. She's on a page showing several sketches of an old man, mostly bald and with a sort of rounded profile. As a disembodied observer, I'm fond of the sketch, sort of nostalgic about it - both about the subject and about the sketch itself. She keeps turning the pages, and there's a sketch of a young man with a very square jaw; looking at him changes the scene.

Still in the same room, but a couple centuries earlier; the walls are lined with bookshelves. There's a woman sketching, holding a conversation with a man sitting in a chair. A servant comes into the room - he's that young man from the sketch - and the man in the chair stands up to speak with him. A man all in black and with very long black hair, he's the same man who owned this building and that art collection in modern times.

There's a group of people camped out in a field. One of them's a veteran of multiple wars, very old now, and she's berating a young man who wants to leave. He's frightened; he's heard of traps, innocuous-looking pieces of paper which will curse the reader to be killed, or else to kill others until you die.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A mother and daughter in the center of a crowded throne room, with a royal baby (not either of theirs) in a basket. The daughter quickly steps to the basket and announces that like a sister she'll tend to the child with loving care. This is a calculated move. She wants it to appear to the crowd as if she's being a good loyal subject, and to appear to her mother as if it's part of their secret political power grab. The truth is closer to the former - the daughter has no interest in ruling and is trying to spare the child's life without making her mother suspicious of her.

Fragment - I'm someone describing the differences between those who fell more recently, the Grigori, and the first fall "for pride or love or whatever we're calling it now."

False awakening. I'm writing down a previous scene. In it, I'm someone in the lobby of a place where I work, and Satan's just walked in to see me. There were a number of things I wrote down as being off about his appearance - the last thing I wrote was that there was snow still on his shoes - he'd become human. I'm kind of torn about how to react to this. On the one hand, this is bad news for me - whatever happens to him affects me too. But on the other hand, this is hilarious.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm someone in an abandoned warehouse, talking with a fallen angel about his plans. We don't get along. As he's talking, a portion of the roof caves in, and through the hole I can see a human woman up there who's been listening to us. He knows her; she's part of his plan, but she's been opposing him. They have a brief shouted conversation; he says, "You won't hurt me, Jane."

A flood warning in Boston - they expect the buildings around the harbor to be under three feet of water. Evacuation is recommended.

Post-apocalyptic setting, there's a human doctor taking care of a human-looking robot going by the code name Rabbit. It has black stitches in a ring around its throat. It put them there itself - they're decorative.

Late 19th century England, two immortals dressed all in white are talking. "Just defend (this place)." "Domi, this is a terrible plan."

England in the 1940s or so, I'm disembodied and watching a man and a woman singing a duet in a garden. Both of them are thinking about a man named Dyson. They were friends when they were younger, but he left the country years ago and they haven't heard from him since; in their memories, he's a sort of ideal. I'm thinking how disappointed they would be if they were to see him now.

When their song's over, they talk with the people who'd been listening. The woman who'd been singing is speaking to a particular man, very wealthy, and hinting that she's expecting him to invite her along to a particular event. But although they clearly have some kind of history, he finds this suggestion laughable - he hardly even thinks of her as a woman. I'm surprised, since I'd just been thinking about how beautiful she is - the dream image had zoomed in on her profile as she was talking to him, and I'd been admiring the curve of her nose, the softness of her hair. Very beautiful. But the man walks off with most of the others - they're heading back toward the house. The man she'd been singing with comes up to her and says he saw her talking to that wealthy guy, and how they seem to get along well. She says, "Sure do."

My POV turns around, not following them - I'm focusing on the opposite direction. On a hill overlooking the garden, there's a man who'd been hiding among the trees and bushes, watching them. This is Dyson.

I've spent the past few scenes in this huge house, and I'm currently walking through a door that I expect to take me back to a place I'd been in earlier in the dream - there's a character I'd intended to meet up with again. Instead, I find myself in a room I think of as resembling a sanatorium - there are long rows of beds on each side of the room, with a few curtains here and there for privacy. On each bed there's a woman in a hospital gown, writhing like she's in a bad demon possession horror flick.

I go lucid and try to remember if there are any lucid tasks I'd wanted to perform of the ask-a-DC variety - no, there aren't any. But I believe dialogue is the only lucid trick I can do right now. So I ask something of the various women and get short, boring answers - I don't remember what I asked or what those boring answers were. The last one I asked gave me a longer answer involving a reference to an earthworm - I noted her response as nonsensical but phrased poetically, which I thought of as a step up from the straightforward and boring responses from the others. I'm now mentally comparing them less to demon possession horror flicks and more to Greek spirits - Furies or such.

Towards the end of the row of hospital beds, there's a woman who's much older than the others. She objects to me - calls my behavior intrusive. She takes my hand in hers, saying this will help her see me - representing that this should be a two-way conversation, rather than just me one-sidedly questioning them. Closing her eyes for a moment, she asks what's blocking me. My first instinct is that she's referring to meditation, mysticism, that sort of thing. But since she didn't say so specifically, I go with a safe response: I talk about general life concerns. She cuts me off and clarifies that she was indeed asking about meditation and mysticism and such. I, sounding annoyed, say I was getting to that - which is a lie.

But we continued talking about general life concerns anyway - specifically career things. Everything we said on the subject sounded sensible (even after I woke up), and she pointed out a good solution that I disliked - I thought it sounded like more effort than it was worth. She quite reasonably laughed at me for that - for wanting a perfect solution to just come along without any effort.

There's this machine. I fed it a small living thing to activate it. Now the screen's showing me several options to choose from, words that don't mean anything to me. The one on the screen at the moment is JEON. Swiping between options, I settle on a word that resembles AERIE written partially with Greek letters. The screen changes to show an image of four clocks. I'm aware I must memorize their appearances quickly, because I won't have another chance.

They're very elaborately designed, beautiful things - solid organic lines mixed with jagged exposed machinery; black wood, black clockwork, gold accents. The first is the simplest - a curving tapered pillar with the word MONUMENT in gold at the base. The others have human faces as ornamentation - the third has a woman's face with eyes closed like a mask and a single arm, arranged in such a way that it gives the impression that she's cradling something.

To the left of the screen, a case appears. It has spaces to fit each of the clocks. At the base of the machine, a slot produces several road maps. Without unfolding them, I can see that several places have been circled.

There's this vampire who went through a bit of a rock star phase in the 60s. During that time he had this assistant who would occasionally arrange for the vampire to wake up with one of his groupies locked in the same room. The vampire resents this. He compares it to throwing a live, venomous snake at someone - neither the snake nor the victim has any choice in the matter, the snake is used as a tool.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

This woman, thoroughly soaked by the rain, just completely drenched, has just been put into the back seat of a car. The man who's just gotten out of the car and insisted she take it is now standing in the rain. After just a moment the woman gets out of the car again, makes this sort of exasperated sound, drapes her coat over his head to keep the rain off, and gets back in the car. The coat is thoroughly drenched so this does absolutely nothing to keep him dry, but he gets this big lopsided grin.

There's another guy standing in the rain with him, and my first impression - before the woman had gotten back out of the car - had been that the two men were enemies of some kind, but that the first guy was obliged to go along with him for something. But looking at the second guy again now, on second thought I'm thinking of him as a friend.

The scene changes to show the woman and that first guy again, parting at a rural train station sometime in the 1800s. I'm thinking about how during the scene in the rain, they hadn't remembered each other from this time. Part of immortality - it's important for them to forget every so often.

False awakening. I try to write down this past scene, and write that there were three different ways things could go for that pair in the rain. The best route for them is associated with fire.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm a man passing a large arched opening in a stone wall, and as I look at it I remember that someone had asked me to fetch something for him from down here. I hadn't intended to, but since I'm here anyway I might as well. I go inside, into an immense underground stone dome with a dirt floor. It's empty, and large enough that it's difficult to see the other walls, but I'm aware there will be a door off to the right leading to a place where things are stored. As I'm walking, I hear a voice accusing me of enjoying blood. I don't see a physical source of the voice, but I expect he'll show himself eventually. I sort of laugh at the accusation but otherwise ignore him and keep walking. The voice continues: "If you are one of the evil dogs, care to know as much as I do?"

A dream ends with my mother's death by self-inflicted head wound, in a scene comparing her to a woman who'd shot others in order to protect the family; this is followed by several false awakenings in which my IRL sisters and I realize we've all had that same dream and argue over whether to go check on her - S. was against waking her. (There was also a room behind S. that I recognized as out of place, though I rationalized it away.) In the last false awakening we finally do check on her, and the head wound turns out to have been a metaphor for a stroke she experienced in the night; I go to call 911, only to have her stop me and explain that the stroke is also a metaphor - she removed something from her mouth which had been distorting her speech and features.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm in a field looking at scarecrows tied in place with gold that shines in the sunlight. I've just been hearing a story about how they got here - they were people once. Dead now. There's a mist starting to come down from between the mountains at the far end of the field, as it always does at this time of day though I've never been here to see it before, and I'm watching it make spiraling patterns in the sky. It's very beautiful.

As Spike, I'm sitting in a classroom that Buffy's gang is using to talk about an apocalyptic threat - something involving a demon from another dimension - I'm annoyed at how blasé they are about it. I'm aware this is normal for them, but it's something that shouldn't be normal for anyone. It's as if they're not taking a warning seriously.

I'm looking after a little girl and a little boy. My IRL father's recently married their mother. At the moment we're heading for the car, and the little girl asks to stop by our parents' new house. I say sure, we can swing by and take a look if you want - it has pretty steps, doesn't it? She says that's not it, she wants to go inside. I tell them we can't do that yet. The little girl doesn't understand why not - she says the divination's already been done. I hadn't been aware of that. The results of the divination must have been bad. I see an image of something being driven into the ground outside the house with a hammer - if it's blocked by anything, if it doesn't sink completely into the ground in one blow, then it's a sign of misfortune and they'll have to clear the misfortune before anyone can enter. I see my IRL father walking away from that divination and getting into a car, and I think about the traditions associated with the place our families come from.

Transition to that place - it's a small New England town. I'm walking down main street - well, 'walking'; I think I was disembodied at this point - and I overhear snatches of conversations with words like "dreams" (a girl pointing to a phrase in her friend's book) and "luck" (a goth girl talking on her cell phone about her boss). I pass by a church where the window is covered by cardboard. People are milling around outside, just left a service, and someone's commenting on how the priest here never gives any blessings and never reads from the Bible. Someone who works for the church is insisting, offended, that the priest is not a vampire - he's just unwell.

Transition to see that priest - he's giving a speech to a group of graduating students on an overcast day. He's making a point to appear in public during the daytime, to prove that he can. It's a small graduating class, maybe thirty or so people, and they're standing around him in a circle, very casual. The priest looks like he's in his 80s or 90s, slightly hunched, and he's got Nosferatu teeth. As he's speaking, the clouds are beginning to thin - the sun will be out soon. I'm mentally trying to get the priest to notice this, but he doesn't. Eventually one of the students comments on it, and the priest finally looks up. He finishes his speech and leaves in a hurry.

Setting loosely based on China some centuries ago. There's two men standing on either side of a gateway; they used to know each other a long time ago, but not anymore. The one inside's a soldier; the one outside used to be. Currently he's drunk and being held up by two soldiers who work under the one inside. The one inside is deciding whether or not to have the other one executed. In the end he decides against it and says something along the lines of "Get this drunkard out of my sight."

As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking that he's going to regret that decision. In a few years they'll be rivals who both want something or someone, and the other man will win. I see an image of that future, where the man currently standing inside that gate is now watching the other man from a distance. He's thinking back to this moment and wondering what would have happened if he'd executed him then.

I started questioning the dream in a fairly dull IRL-based scene, and then questioned why I was questioning it - but I did eventually become lucid. Once becoming lucid, however, I as Jaime immediately started looking for Cersei.

(Side note: this was an interesting level of lucidity. Fully lucid in most respects - lucid about the fact that I was dreaming, lucid about my ability to control the dream, no desire to stick to the previous dream storyline - but I wasn't lucid about my own identity. On top of that, I only started playing Jaime's role when I became lucid - up until that point I'd been my IRL self. It's standard for me to play the role of other people when I'm non-lucid, but I'd thought that conflicted with lucidity - apparently not.)

I was still in a room that was meant to represent my IRL home, but it had no doors, which I understood signified a resistance against me taking control and changing the scene. I had the feeling I had to get out in a hurry if I wanted to maintain lucidity. So I turned around in a full circle in order to create a door that would be there when I turned around again. It was a wooden door, rounded at the top, and when I opened it I saw a scene that was meant to represent my IRL neighborhood.

I closed the door, called out to Cersei, and opened it again, understanding that this will have changed the location it links to. Now on the other side of the door there's a dark stone enclosed walkway with large windows overlooking a castle courtyard. Better, but this isn't the place I was looking for. I have a mental image of a glittering gold-and-white castle that I want to get to, where I expect Cersei to be. I try again - I close the door, call to Cersei, and open it again. The scene on the other side of the door hasn't changed this time - it's still the dark stone walkway. I decide that this means Cersei must be in this scene somewhere, so I walk through the door.

Recall gets increasingly shaky after this. After walking through the castle a bit I found Cersei in the courtyard, and after a short conversation she took me to a rowboat that we'd both have to row - she gave me some explanation involving the word 'knowledge,' and I made an (apparently less than successful) effort to remember her phrasing so I'd recall it after I woke up, it seemed symbolically important. The boat carried us briefly along a waterway running through the castle, and I think I began losing lucidity at this point. There's a memory gap, and very little recall after that - before I woke up I'd wound up back in an IRL-based scene, and I'm unsure how much lucidity I had by then.

There's this pair of vampires in an apartment, a young white girl and a tall black man, and today slavery has officially ended. There's celebrations in the street, fireworks. But the sense of time's a bit off - although the vampires and the apartment look like the 1800s, at some point in the conversation it's mentioned that this is 1933, and the view outside the window looks it. The girl turned him a long time ago and they've been traveling together since. It's been a good deal for both of them - since she looks like a kid, she needed someone who looks like an adult to get by in the world; and under slavery, he needed someone to pretend to belong to. Now that's over, he intends to leave. The kid was surprised by this, hadn't expected it at all - they're close, it's not just a convenient arrangement for survival, so it hadn't occurred to her that he'd want to be on his own if he could. They went straight from celebrating to fighting.

He's saying, "You don't think I prefer another kind of life for-" I'm not certain which pronoun he used then - I wrote it down as 'you', and I think he'd been talking about his concern for her at this point, but she responds as if he'd said 'myself.' She went cold and distant before answering. By another kind of life, he'd meant as opposed to vampirism, and she doesn't take that well. So after a long pause, she says, "But you've got mine."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm Howl, a version with black feathers cropping up - a patch of it at my throat at all times, and mixed in with my hair - speaking English throughout the scene, but no Welsh accent. I speak very mildly and seem distant - it's an affectation, particularly when I'm annoyed, and at the moment I'm very annoyed.

Sophie got fed up with me and left after a day or so in the castle. But now my spells have alerted me that she's back in town - just sitting there, inexplicably, not coming home. I'm seeing an image of her sitting down on a low stone wall somewhere, grumbling to herself. Since she's gone to the trouble of coming back to town, we both know she'll be back at my door eventually, she's got nowhere else to go - I'm convinced she's just refusing to come back now out of sheer stubbornness. So I spell her back, have the winds scoop her up and carry her through town, into the house, and drop her in a chair at the table. She complains about this of course, but now that I see her up close, it occurs to me that possibly she couldn't physically walk back to the house - she looks tired and sore.

I'd been in the middle of making dinner when she turned up, and I bring her a plate while she complains at me. Talking about dinner and ridiculous stubbornness, at some point I compare her to my brothers, and she looks aghast at the thought of me having brothers. Did she think I sprang from the ether? "Monstrous. How many of you are there?" I have quite a few brothers actually. Our mother's immortal, like myself - I've visited her just recently as a matter of fact. Sophie says, "You're like rats in a field."

When someone characterizes me as a monster, my habitual response is to prove them right, so I'm leaning into her from across the table in a way that's not physically humanly possible. "Our father's place is human," I say, very mildly. And in response to something else I know she'd been wondering about, I add, "And I'm a married man." I retract back to my side of the table. The point there was less a reference to my wife, who's out of the picture, and more a reference to the existence of my son, confirming that the boy whose pictures she'd been looking at earlier is my son.

(Woke up. Side note: It's been ages since I've had a Howl dream, so when I saw the HMC task of the month I'd hoped it would spark something like this. Success! Not a success at the TOTM of course - this wasn't the task, or lucid at all - but a non-lucid dream with the plot I wanted is even better.)

And a quick dream from yesterday: As Rumpelstiltskin, I'd been following someone who'd stolen something from me. I used a spell to keep the light from falling on me, and then another for shadows to hide me. Then I'd walked myself off the road and left my body hidden among the fallen leaves while the rest of me went on. Finally I tried some spell that failed - I lit up with golden light from within with the effort of it, shining through the lines in my skin, but I was unable to succeed. Giving up for now, I call Belle. She asks, "What has (some name) got on you that-" I interrupt her. "My dagger." She goes silent. It's not the thing they stole at this moment, and they don't know how to use it, but they have it; they're a threat to be taken seriously.

Visiting the McKittrick, I've been following the taxidermist - a bald man with sunken eyes, looks starved and intense - as he talks to a young blonde man with a heavy jaw who works for the hotel, very earnest type. When it's time for the final banquet, they meet up with two women in clothes from the Victorian era and accompany them down the stairs - but I come to realize their final scene won't be with everyone else at the banquet at all. The women dance down the stairs, floating from one bannister to the other. Standing with them on the bannisters, so close to the ceiling, I'm very aware of Hecate's influence on the floor just above us.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've just walked away from a room where I'd been talking to a woman. Now I'm standing in the ruins of a building, on a street where a lot of buildings have been destroyed. Nearby there's a large brown rat on top of a pile of rubble, and I have a sense of fellow feeling as I watch it. I don't really want to go out into the street - it's much too exposed - but I don't see any way around it. Once in the street, I catch sight of a woman in a white dress two or three buildings down, behind a wall of iron bars. She sees me and jumps up and down to get my attention. "Nick! It is Nicky, isn't it?" I recognize her, we're close. I (or rather my POV character here) use several different names - 'Nick' is for all intents and purposes my (POV character's) real name, but I haven't heard it for a long time, so this is something of a reunion. But I'm debating whether I want to take the time to rescue her from behind those iron bars.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've been walking around backstage at a sort of club in the 1930s or so after leaving the audience of a show on stage in the main room. Talking to various people, overhearing conversations by dancers. I'm just now leaving a smokey room where two men have fallen asleep. I've been looking for someone, a specific woman. There's a disaster or a tragedy that's about to occur here, and I have to find her first.

The show in the main room ended while I was backstage, and everyone's straggling out. In the lobby, I come across a large man I remember meeting earlier. He's putting on his coat. Near the doors, his wife and daughter are waiting for him, and he introduces them to me. I recognize the daughter as the woman I was looking for - she's just a kid. I hadn't been expecting that she'd be a kid in this era. I kneel down to introduce myself to her eye to eye, using the name "Deacon Willfire" - it's the fake name I've been using here in the past, but Deacon is similar to the name I'll be using when she meets me as an adult in the future. She's very shy here, can barely look at me, but I'm aware that meeting me here will make an impression on her, and the similar names will help that memory along when we meet in the future.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm in that kid's room, standing by an empty fireplace that's so large I could easily fit in it just by ducking a little - it's grabbing my attention. But I'm also talking to the kid, saying to her, "A 300-year-old vampire for an imaginary friend?" (I'm referring to myself. She thinks I'm imaginary.) "You're trouble for sure." I'm thinking about the way I'm meeting her at various times in her life out of sequence. From her perspective, proceeding through time in the usual linear fashion, I've wound up being someone she grows up knowing, someone who's been around for most of her life.

A nightmare involving a creature called the Sandman whose facial features are fluid, constantly slowly changing; and then a false awakening in which the Sandman creature is approaching my POV character's bed.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm walking around the grounds of a mansion where I've been staying. Talking to someone, he's looking at something behind me and says, "Look at that, straight out of a painting." I turn around to look. The sky in the distance is yellow-tinged and nearly completely covered by these two dark slabs of storm clouds, like solid walls. The opening between them makes me think of the parting of the seas. The water beneath those clouds is being tossed up in such a way that it's revealed an old and famous shipwreck, it's been pulled out of the depths. Another ship, a modern one, is thrown out of the sea by the winds, and it crashes straight through one of the massive floor-to-ceiling windows of the mansion.

(A false awakening mostly about trying to describe that last scene, then actually woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm looking after an enormous, shaggy black 'dog' - more like an enormous wolf - that belongs to my neighbor. Most of the dream revolves around playing with him and petting him. When I go to feed him, his water is kept in a intricately curved copper tube, almost like a French horn.