Recent DJ Posts

I'm flying over a river, and although I don't remember what I was flying on, in effect it's essentially a flying carpet - a small, flat surface carrying several people. Someone else is 'driving' it, I'm just along for the ride. We're taken over a waterfall, with several clouds beneath us, and among the clouds I see a huge gate hanging in the air, supported by pillars on either end. It turns out to be the first in a series of three gates, the entrance to a country - the first is very modern, with images like a billboard; the second somewhat less modern; and the third is very old and very beautiful, more like a decorative lattice made of stone and covered in moss, as tall as maybe a three-story building. I turn back to look at it as we pass overhead. On the other side, we land. I find that I'm excited, much more so than I'd expected to be, about traveling somewhere new. Less jaded than I thought apparently.

I'm surprised - although we've just entered a new country, there don't seem to be any customs to pass through, no guards. We've landed outside of a building, and I understand there are some procedures to be gone through inside; but there isn't anyone around out here, no one to stop us from just wandering off into the country. I intend to go inside, I just took note of it as something odd. There's what seems to be a giant bell planted in the ground, although it's so covered with moss it's hard to tell what's underneath. As I and the other people from the 'carpet' walk around outside, I notice several stone statues. There's a plaque underneath one of them that I read - this is part of the entrance procedure. We're meant to pay our respects by bowing before each of these statues. I do so, pointing this out to one of the other people from the 'carpet' to give them a heads up. The first three statues I come to are divine figures and legendary heroes, I bow before each of them; but then the fourth statue I find is an odd creature in a mask, labeled as a nightmare called Home Eater. I don't see why I should have to bow before my own kind.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There was a scene in which someone was causing plants to grow rapidly among some stone ruins in a cave, and someone else saying to them, horrified, "What have you done?"

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Lost Boys, as David I'm watching Michael drop out of the tree and run away from the killing. This was not the plan. He was supposed to kill someone, not run away. I don't like giving the new ones too much time to think - just do it, make a clean break, then explain what's happened to them. It's easier that way.

Back in the cave with Star, I'm standing off to one side and watching her. She's standing in front of a bunch of pots for plants covering a table. Most of them look empty, although I know she's planted seeds in each of them, and she's been trying to do something with them. But the one she's holding her hands over now is growing right before our eyes, responding to her somehow, like magic. Whatever she's been trying to do, it's working on this one. The other boys come back then, they all exclaim over what Star's doing, gathering around the plant and looking as excited about this as she is - except Michael. He's hanging back and looking at Star with this expression - not exactly betrayal, but close; like he'd thought she was someone he could trust, and now he believes he was wrong about that.

I'm reading a book. In it, the main character is looking at a river and thinking "The mare of time." The river surface usually looks calm, but it's been disturbed due to the ongoing combat. There's a thought that it's only humanocentrism that makes him see the 'calm' river as better/more natural than the 'disturbed' river. There's a reference to a distant place he's been searching for, or came from, or that otherwise has been referenced frequently in the story before now; from this point in the story onward, that place will no longer be a major part of the story. There will be a few minor finds, items from that place, fruits, henna - accompanied by the line "It was a good henna, but not enough to sit in front of the Skillet-mirror" - but the place itself will never appear in the story again, which gives the story as a whole a sort of surreal feeling, with storylines that go nowhere and scenes that don't quite match up, aside from always containing the same main character; a focus on imagery rather than plot. It reminds me of a less surreal Maldoror, or a more surreal Gormenghast, and I start thinking about the surreal in my own writing.

There's a Lost Boys tv show, currently showing the Boys versus some vampire skinheads.

A doctor who is giving up his practice and moving to an isolated island, moving in with the couple he loves. He's talking to his mother (a relatively young woman who insists he refers to her as his sister in public) about his intent to stop practicing medicine. They're standing on a small wooden hanging bridge high over a river, surrounded by tropical plants with broad leaves and looking out over the sea; it's very beautiful.

I'm in a marketplace filled with angry people. They don't like being guarded by off-worlders like us, and we're trying to arrange things so we can get at least half the guard duty covered by their own people. One of our guys in uniform is saying something about how surveys indicate the majority of locals don't mind having some off-worlder presence, and we're trying to find the best solution for everyone here, and more research is going to have to be done. I'm not joining in the discussion, I'm sitting in the dirt at the edge of the marketplace, out of uniform, just listening and watching. There'd been a chance of a riot here, but the danger seems to have passed. Now that things seem to have calmed down, the kid who alerted me to the situation and led me here reaches out and picks up the chips - money - that I left beside me on the ground. I put it there for him, but he seemed unsure if it was really okay for him to take it. When he sees me looking at him, he looks scared and smiles at me; I nod, and he grabs the money and runs off.

Someone with a different face than usual is explaining to a horrified listener that he's learned to shapeshift. The listener asks who he can shapeshift into; the answer is something along the lines of "oh, people I've eaten, people I've physically bonded with, anyone really." The listener wonders, but doesn't ask out loud, what physically bonded means exactly; he's wondering if just seeing someone is enough. "Objects, even." The listener, horrified by all this, asks, "What happens to your personhood?" The shapeshifter says he's removed a piece of himself and keeps it separate in this box, which he's now asking the listener to deliver to his aunt for him for safekeeping. It looks ordinary, and the listener asks if this shouldn't be labeled in some way. The shifter mocks the idea. It's not necessary to know something's significance to keep it safe; often it's the opposite, it's simpler and safer if they don't know.

A pair of time-travelers who've recently reunited are stopping by a football game they've been to before. They kept meaning to get around to changing this one little moment in time, and now they've got the chance. There's a guy who's been meaning to propose to his girlfriend, and they're about to be featured on the big screen; the first time around, neither of them had noticed they were on camera, and something unfortunate happened afterward. This time around, the time-travelers are sitting just behind the couple, and they poke them and draw their attention to the camera. The guy takes the moment to propose, the girl accepts - but they both seem rather awkward and uncomfortable with all the attention.

I've been living in a foreign country, working as a live-in tutor, but this is the end of my last day and I'm about to leave. I'm packing up the last of my things and then head downstairs. Downstairs appears to be the house I grew up in, but I'm thinking to myself that this stuff isn't really here, I'm dreaming, and this is only being used as a convenient background, so there's no need to pack it all. Despite this thought, I don't become very lucid; I just focus on sorting out which things only seem to be here because it's a dream, and which things I actually need to pack.

Julie's patting a big, shaggy old dog, in a room with four guys behind her, talking to her, though I can't make out what's being said. I'm using magic to check in on her from a distance and I don't have a very good connection in this room. She gets up and goes into the corridor, where I can't see her at all, but I recognize the sound of her sister's voice. I realize they're heading outside, which is convenient, there's tons of running water out there I can use. I switch the spell to a bit of water running down the side of the wall, and see that they've gone out into the courtyard and are sitting down on the benches around the fountain - even better. As I move the spell, I remember seeing a post here on DV with a title about learning to control the elements in dreams, which I hadn't read, since thinking of the elements as something you have to learn to use sounded counterproductive. I'm thinking about how helpful water spirits have always been. Again, I don't go lucid; the spell's POV has been moved, and I go back to focusing on the view. They're in the courtyard of a building made of large sand-colored stones, surrounded by potted and hanging plants, and from the fountain I'm looking up at Julie's sister, a woman with long black hair, wearing a black dress. She's saying something about "outlanders."

I'm with a group of people crossing a desert, when a girl - Julia - arrives in our camp on foot. She'd been following us after we left town, refusing to take her with us. She's an English woman, dressed in Victorian clothing; she looks as if she must be very hot in those clothes, but she's kept struggling along. Then a scene change, just a quick image: Julia walking in the desert on foot, while I and a woman sitting behind me are riding a horse, far ahead of her.

A fragment: an image of cities and towers in domes surrounded by wilderness, one of which has been heavily decayed, but which appears to rebuild itself as I'm watching; it's related to the breaking of a Sleeping Beauty-style curse.

I become fully lucid while doing my Apollo trick, and lose all visuals in the process - I have a sense of having a body, but there's no setting. (The Apollo trick is meant to get me out of nightmares, but I have no memory of any dream scene before this, except the thought that I 'lost' visuals.) I start floating close to the 'ground', although there's no ground, and a setting starts to form: the road outside my IRL home.

Memory gap. Next thing I remember is a non-lucid dream in a different setting, involving accidentally upsetting my IRL sister (my recall for this was quite long and detailed). Woke up at 5:37 AM, less than an hour after getting to bed.

Recall for the rest of the day was terrible. Vague fragments of dreams set in Being Human and Lost Boys, with a possible false awakening after the Being Human one - I don't remember 'waking', but I spent a dream scene trying to describe that previous dream. The only details I managed to remember: as Mitchell, needing a werewolf to briefly hold me down under the surface of a river, and the one I've got on hand doesn't live up to George in any way.