Carabas

I enter a lecture hall and speak to the man who I believed summoned me, dressed in black with a small white owl on his shoulder, but it turns out the owl is the one that called me; this is news to the man in black, and he's not pleased about it. The owl speaks in a pleasant woman's voice and changes into the shape of a four-sided mask, one face for each direction; three of them are simple stylized masks made of wood or similar, but the fourth is an actual face - it moves, it has eyes - just in cartoonishly distorted proportions. She's been sealed/trapped/stuck/reduced to this. She introduces herself as Loki Laufeyjarson, which is not the name I was expecting her to say but I roll with it.

She talks about each of her masks - in the one that resembles an actual face, she says she'd taken this form and scorned high heels (meaning an artificial way of gaining the height she feels she should have had anyway - 'height' is not really the issue she's talking about). In one of the wooden masks, she talks about using this form for dealings with a magician, and she suspects that magician of having a hand in her current unfortunate circumstances.

She returns to the form of the owl sitting on the man in black's shoulder, and we're now in a yard behind an estate, surrounded by partygoers. The man speaks of my payment and I dismiss the small amount of money he offers; I tell him I expect him to provide me with food and lodgings, pea soup and three packs of smokes a day. (Neither of those are things I'd want IRL, but I wasn't being my IRL self here.) I'm already leaving, stepping over an ornamental pond; it's a demand, not a negotiation. He's irritated, but she accepts immediately. I walk off into the trees along the border of the property.

In earlier scenes, symbols of eyes and blue lotuses above the entrance to a cave, and drinking a polar bear's blood from a glass while wondering about parasites.

From a disembodied perspective, I'm watching my IRL self. He's looking for something in this room, currently looking at an illustration of Loki hanging on a wall. The disembodied version of me is curious about the IRL version of me, and I've set up this space in order to observe his reactions. There'd been some previous incident where he'd taken on a sort of ritualized trickster role and unintentionally drawn my interest; he's not aware of me. (Though trickster's not the word I would have used in the dream and it kind of irritates me to use it now, but it's the best way to put it - a sense of something in common between the Loki illustration, the devil statue, my disembodied perspective, and the role my IRL self had played.) I've just now come to the conclusion that the thing that originally grabbed my interest had to do with taking on different roles rather than something inherent to him. This doesn't make me any less curious, but it alters the situation. He's now looking at a small black and white sculpture of the devil, and I switch to his perspective while he's holding it.

As my IRL self, I'm interrupted by the arrival of several IRL people. Eventually I wind up standing over a large pot with one of the women, and she's stirring whatever's in it. She calls me by the wrong name, and I correct her, annoyed. She repeats my real name, and makes a promise involving it, talking about dire consequences for anyone who violates this promise. Afterwards she describes the pot as holding the curse she's just spoken.

In a cave, a young modern couple were confronted by two women, guards of something sacred who'd been hunting this man down. They fought, and now those two sacred guards are lying on the ground, one unconscious.

The man rises to float slightly in the air, and the guard who's still conscious believes this is a sign he's about to kill her - but he just scoops up the woman he's with, carrying her in his arms, floats over where that guard is lying, and keeps going. He says to the guard, "Seriously, go away."

Then he phases through the cave wall, where a mural is painted in gold. As he passes through the wall, the guard momentarily sees a different face overlaying his, someone she recognizes and greatly respects - either a religious authority who's recently died, or a god, or both.

I'm standing in a cave with a group of people, discussing a man who came through here just ahead of us, someone we need to seal away - this is something he'd requested but now he's running. Our time is limited. A woman is suggesting that we use a certain box - it fits in the palm of your hand - that her husband had originally designed to seal himself in case of an emergency. She believes that her husband is no longer a threat so the box can be turned to a different purpose, and I can see her joy in that. But I refuse. No matter how safe her husband seems now, we need to save that option for him.

Following the man we need to seal, we come out of the cave into the open. There's a group of people living here who view him as a god; we avoid encountering them directly. Two of us get into a discussion on the nature of worship, talking about projecting the way your own perspective works onto a macro level, with a powerful leader to control things and a drastically overvalued role of consciousness. I make a comparison to a machine that can feel every impact of cogs and gears.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragmentary scenes with that woman who led the pilgrimage through the mountains earlier:

I'm sitting at a large round wooden table, eating a snack, while she's saying to me something about "would you bear hope" or would I be "a bearer of hope." I'm a little taken off-guard by this conversation, and I'm annoying her by not giving what she's saying serious consideration.

I'm surrounded by wolves, or something like wolves - they've got faces that seem built for snarling, I think of them as someone's nightmare of wolves. I can feel them as they each brush against me, rubbing closely against my legs. They're mine now apparently. I can't believe that worked, this is wonderful. I look over to that woman, standing a short distance away - I want to see her reaction. She has this sort of "you have got to be kidding me" expression. The wolves had started out attacking us, and she seems more exasperated by this turn of events than anything else.

We're standing on a snow-covered mountain, the ground here at a steep angle, with some threat above us, and I'm saying to her, "-here. I would rather stand and fight being a single person. And you, we'll-"

Somewhere in South Asia some centuries ago where I'm visibly a foreigner, I'm leaving the docks after making some arrangements for my departure. Thinking about how to dispose of the belongings that I don't want to bring with me, I've just offered to give some rare type of food to the man who's walking with me, a human who works for me. He's shocked - he completely refuses. It's important that he and I don't share meals, and apparently this is close enough to count. I apologize, but point out to him that we've shared more than that. He asks me not to talk about this in public.

Talking about differing customs as we walk, we get onto the subject of my own homeland. I describe it as very far to the north, very isolated from the rest of the world, not a place he's likely to have heard of. I'm being deliberately evasive, obscuring how long ago it was that I left, among other things. I have a mental image of a place that's always covered in snow, and a need to retreat.

Thinking of my people causes me to mentally tune in to two of them who are relatively nearby, a man and a woman who I think of as something like a brother and sister to me. Her, I keep in close contact with through letters on a regular basis. Mentally brushing against her now feels sort of like a friendly wave from a distance. Him, on the other hand - last I heard from him, he'd been doing his best to ignore my existence entirely. By accidentally tuning in to him now, I'm surprised to find he was already aware of my presence in this region and has secretly been keeping tabs on me. I'm amused, particularly since he's now pretending not to notice this mental contact.

I get lost in thought for a bit about connections and different eras, and the scene changes. I'm in Europe, speaking Spanish with a woman in the 1700s or so - I think of her as being in a sort of religious seclusion, though my speaking with her now isn't a problem. She's telling me how much she enjoyed the piece Dieter published recently about winemaking techniques, and I tell her I'll pass that along. The observer side of me considers whether or not this short scene is something to bother recording for when I wake up.

In my IRL home, a demon's joined me in the shower. She's in the form of a beautiful naked woman and she's talking to me like we're old friends, but the scene has the feel of a nightmare. She's talking about working together in a way that I'd probably be interested in discussing under other circumstances. But with that nightmare feel, I'm only thinking about avoiding being controlled by others.

I give her the fuck-off-out-of-my-dream variety of exorcism. This doesn't work; if anything, the feel of a nightmare intensifies with the sense of a contest of wills. She's still trying to convince me to come work with her.

Second try: I take a look at the demon's name. It begins and ends with A, so I cover up the middle portion, rewrite it as Athena, and chant an invocation, intending to remove the nightmare by transforming the demon into a goddess. Her features shift, but then shift back. We go back and forth a little bit, but eventually I give up on this method too. She's stopped trying to convince me to come work with her and is now just enjoying this contest for its own sake.

Being as we're in the shower, I take a look at the soap and think of cleansing/purification methods of exorcism. Worth a shot. I start washing her, starting at the top and working my way down. She's intrigued - she clearly doesn't consider this a threat, and the contact is pleasant and similar enough to sexual that she considers this a form of me giving in to her. I'm curious myself whether this scene will end up following her sexual expectations or my cleansing intention. When I kneel down before her, I kiss her just below her navel, and she makes it clear how she expects this to play out from there; but I just move on to washing her legs. When I've finished her second foot, kissing the top of it before putting it down, the sense of nightmare is completely gone. I'm able to cause the scene to transition, continuing with a series of IRL-based scenes.

Recent dreams included an appearance from Inanna and Dumuzi.

Today's:

Avoiding direct sunlight, I made my way into a bar where I'm surprised to find a certain man - I'll refer to him as my friend. That's a lie, but it entertains me and disturbs him when I adopt a friendly attitude. I sit down and address him by name, and say, "I thought you were going back to Australia."

"This is Australia," he says.

That explains a lot. My aim is terrible, but at least I've got him to serve as a guide now. But to my surprise, he's not at all impressed by seeing me here. I'd really expected more of a reaction. We talk at cross purposes for a while, until he says that he'd thought I'd disappeared with yadda yadda event - I realize he believes he's talking with the hallucinatory version of me who'd been with him for a while. I'm surprised that lasted so long, it wasn't intended to. I explain to my friend that I'm not his hallucination, I'm the real thing. He doesn't seem to believe me.

I sit down at the bar and wait for him to come around, and watch the sun go down through the window. A woman comes over and sits down next to me - on the bar itself, not a stool. We explain pleasantries, and she says a few things that don't make much sense to me until I recognize this as the opening moves of a mating ritual. I start to tell her that I appreciate the intention but our species aren't compatible in that way - and now my friend's hurrying me out the door. Oh good, it seems he's accepted that other people can see me.

In the parking lot outside the bar, I stop and stare at the stars. I'm absolutely in awe of them. I call my friend by name, and ask him, "What am I looking at?" Seeing them in this unfamiliar arrangement is astonishing. He doesn't seem impressed by them, and I can't figure out why - this arrangement must be the one he grew up with, the one he spent so much time trying to get back to, so he should appreciate it. Seeing them through an atmosphere creates such an amazing effect. There are a few wisps of cloud adding to the view - and for a moment a patch of stars appears to be moving, but then I realize there's a children's toy floating above our heads in the shape of a translucent butterfly, distorting the view. I look down at the kids - they're looking at the toy, not the stars. My friend is trying to hurry me along through the parking lot, and I try to impress upon him how moving this is. "Do you know how long it's been since I've been down to earth? Any earth?" He remembers, he was there, and he is not interested in reminiscing.

Short note from an earlier dream today: reading a description of "laurel leaves, called apollon," in which the author acknowledges that they cause strife but states that it's merely like the rebelliousness of an adolescent, and that they are indisputably sacred to Apollo.

A young woman's confronting this guy, a friend of hers, though she's annoyed at him at the moment. He's arranged things so as to create this sort of antichrist kid - it doesn't really have anything to do with her, but she's angry about it anyway, and is feeling tricked and betrayed by him in general. She asks him if he's Lucifer, expecting the answer to be yes.

"Nope. One of the major demons." He says it casually, he's smiling easily through this whole conversation. He's doing some kind of work in a manhole, and she's standing up on the surface with her arms crossed.

"What did you (word that means both infect and possess) my boyfriend with?"

"La'ulb. But it's clean, and I can take it off."


There's this young musician trying to get permission to leave a royal court - he wants to travel to a different country. He has to make a plea before the king, and he's deliberately trying to emulate the speech of an older man, a traveler passing through, who'd impressed him - as a disembodied observer, I'm amused, but I think it's a bad idea; it'll just make him sound artificial. He makes a comparison to a young bird having its wings clipped.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After a short scene in which I'm reminded that cheating on a god out of boredom is not the best of ideas, followed by a shapeshifting fox turning up at my IRL door, I've wound up in a bit of trouble.

I'm now heading for the rear exit of a theatre, trying to avoid being seen by the group of women - not humans - who are coming up behind me; but through the glass door, I can see a pair of fox demons approaching - a pair of women all in white, dripping in silver jewelry. After hesitating, I decide I'd rather take my chances with the fox demons. There's a crowd of people, mostly girls who work here, coming in through that door, but I don't feel very optimistic about my chances of getting lost in the crowd - until one of the girls quickly slips off the blue robe she'd been wearing over her clothes and wraps it around me, and someone else puts an arm around my shoulders, pushing my head down so my face can't be easily seen.

He pulls me over to a side hallway and gives instructions to one of the showgirls to fetch the change of clothing he'd arranged for with her earlier. I know him - he's vaguely sinister but not in a way that I consider a threat to me personally, and I generally admire his skill at getting things done. It's a bit like having Hannibal Lecter on your side.

There's a girl dancing at my shrine, a little marker in the woods that's rarely visited. I'm paying attention but I have a hard time understanding what she's communicating with some of the moves of the dance. I'm wondering why she keeps changing the form of it when she comes here; it would be much easier to understand her if she'd stop changing it.

I shift to 3rd person (although the pov character was also disembodied, so there's not that much of a change) and realize that it wasn't actually one girl who comes to dance, it's actually different girls who came over many generations; the god/spirit of the shrine didn't really understand the difference, or didn't see the difference as important. On top of that, the moves of the ritual they perform weren't always passed down directly; some of them learned at least parts of it from writings and illustrations, without anyone to correct them.

A fragment where a character was referred to first as Silverhand, and then specifically as Airgetlám.

An army and civilian followers are camped around a castle they're allied with, south of their home. Their next ruler is with them, but he hadn't officially taken the throne yet. Now, someone still in their home country is making his own move for the throne; in response to that, the one with the army is standing up in front of his people and officially declaring himself king. This gets a mixed response - some people ask, by what right? Even though they were already following him, you still can't just crown yourself.

A woman's sitting on the outskirts of that crowd listening to his speech, by the top of a cliff, with three gnome-like creatures. She seems amused by the speech. One of the gnome-things distracts her from it by making too much noise - she casually kicks it off the cliff. One of the other gnome-things then grabs her by the foot and does the same to her, much to her surprise.

After few non-lucid fragments (one interesting one involving a woman and a mythical being something like a bird and something like a qilin, and his 'missing part', which is in the form of another person this woman knows; otherwise dull), my memory picks up in a scene where I'm already semi-lucid (I'm controlling my surroundings and aware that this control is due to it being a dream, but otherwise have fairly low awareness and mostly go along with the dream storyline). I'm walking through a park with another man, while watching someone I think of as a killer, and I mentally push him toward his next target. However, at the moment I expect him to take out a knife, instead he puts his arm around his target's shoulders and hands him a cigarette.

The killer, the target, and the man I'm walking with are all smoking. I take the cigarette from the man I'm walking with, intending to smoke it myself, but I find the dream won't allow it: first I'm holding nothing, it's back in that man's hand; then when I focus I find I can put it to my mouth and feel the physical pressure of it, but it doesn't resemble smoking. I've had similar problems before, when I deliberately focus on improving the realism of some complex physical sensation, and instead only wind up feeling the sense of pressure accurately, nothing else. I then focus on breath instead of on the cigarette itself, and something interesting happens. I have the impression I can control my surroundings far more easily by working in rhythm with my breathing.

My memory's vague for the next two scenes, while I was focusing on breath - I saw this as a great development. (Dream logic inspired by meditation, maybe. There's no reason I should be breathing in a dream at all. I wonder whether I was actually in the same rhythm as my sleeping body's breath or not.) First I saw something like a shadow play, where the figures moved in rhythm with my breathing, under my control. Then I was walking through halls and passing people who appear to be from America of about 200 years ago, all of whom I find vaguely unpleasant; I still had the impression that I was successfully controlling something through breath in this scene.

I wound up in a room where several people are sitting around a round table, and they call me and someone with me to join them. I start to sit down and an old woman stops me, points me to a different chair. To my left is a man holding what I think at first is a young boy. When I get another look at it, it has the face of an old man, and one of his eyes is that of a cat. This is all very unpleasant. I recognize him as my own cat, S., and I believe he's somehow sick. (S. died a long time ago, but I didn't remember this at the time.) We put him on the table, now in the form of a human-sized cat, and I chant a healing spell over him, mentioning a goddess, exerting dream control. Objects rise off the table and hover in the air, and the other people around the table join in, though by just chanting 'heal!' over and over again. I woke up while listening to them chant.

An elephant is making a request of a king or a god, and saying "I am only a lowly guardsman." As he says this, I see him kneeling on a battlefield, wearing armor.

Next to the elephant, there's a man speaking with a woman from the opposing army, each with their own soldiers behind them. The woman goes by the name or title Amah. She's very beautiful and very prideful, smiling and casually resting her elbow on the shoulder of the man next to her, her servant. This is the second time they're meeting like this. The first time, she made some demand or threat which was fulfilled. This time, her servant announces that she's come to 'kill your wives' or something similar, something about causing the deaths of women at least. He says something flowery about those she's killed in the past, and how the great sympathy she has for these women is the reason she does not permit them to speak her real name. Amah says, "It would murder me. I could not stand it." She's still smiling as she says it.

She suddenly slumps forward and falls to the ground. The man she'd been speaking to has simply whispered her name.

There's a human boy who grew up with something not human and eventually fell in love, and now the nonhuman one is gradually becoming human. This is something he always wanted, but he's surprised because he expected it to be like flipping a switch, all or nothing; instead, human traits will appear for a while and gradually fade away again. Right now, the two of them are having a conversation about a friend of the human, named Michael, who the human's considering approaching - they have an open relationship, since they both believe it's important for the human to be close with other humans.

Two men, at least one a detective, are on the rooftop of a building in a city, talking about that Michael. They have some kind of personal grudge against that couple, and they have some plan to use Michael against them. One of them is assuring the other that the plan will work, they can trust Michael and he'll come through for them; they mention something about 11 o'clock. The human boy appears on top of the wall at the edge of the rooftop, looking a few years older than in the previous scene, and he tells them that he's "already taken the precaution of" killing Michael, in order to prevent Michael from killing him. Someone (I can't remember whether it was the boy or the detective; both sides agree on this point) makes a comment about how "before all of this," before Michael got involved with them, Michael would have been peacefully studying at this time of night.

As a disembodied observer, I get lost in a train of thought starting with that comment about studying and ending up thinking about disappearing cultural institutions, and then thinking about divination by lottery. With that last thought, I find myself at a shrine in the POV of the human boy from the previous scene. I intend to take a long trip, alone, but I needed to stop here first. There's a woman who works at the shrine performing divination by lottery, where there are small white balls containing messages from the deity of the shrine. The message she produces for me is "please do not go." I'm not surprised by this, and intend to leave anyway, regretfully; I only came here to say goodbye, though I intend to return someday. As the part of me in the mindset of the character is thinking all this, the observer side of me realizes that the deity of the shrine is the same nonhuman character from the earlier scenes.

A scene ended with me getting into a car and driving away. While I'm driving, however, something goes wrong, I keep weaving into the other lane, and I wind up getting pulled over by a cop. I'm thinking, good thing this is just a dream. And I'd rather not stick around for this, so I go incorporeal and float through the roof, invisible. I look down at the cop being surprised by the car without a driver, and then I decide to bring the car with me: I turn it into water droplets, which collect in the palm of my hand.

There's a memory gap, but I doubt the semi-lucidity lasted long after that. Next scene I remember clearly is non-lucid: a woman is consulting a witch, asking her to do a spell or divination for her. When it's over, the witch asks the woman what that looked like from her end - meaning that during the course of the spell, the witch realized this woman's got some magic of her own. And the god this witch works for may or may not have an interest in this woman. The witch asks her a question, about why she's trying to (do something) when she's got too much on her plate already. The woman explains: there's a guy who loves her "pretty bad" - no mention of whether it's reciprocated - and she "can't hear him anymore," by which she means hear him in her head - it's a vampire thing - and she's worried about him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm temporarily working for a doctor with a small private practice, I'm in training. The doctor's showing me a patient's chart and is asking me if anything jumps out at me - I say the patient's lost 10 pounds, but I'm thinking, that could just be a diet. The doctor points out what she wanted me to see: this patient's been suffering from hallucinations, describing strange sights and sounds. But she lives in the city, and there are all sorts of strange things there; and on the date that she experienced these 'strange sights and sounds,' there was a parade. I'm doubtful. I say, "I don't know, it's pretty difficult to confuse a parade with a hallucination." The doctor admits this is true.

There was a scene where I went to talk with that patient, and by the end of that scene we've wound up talking casually in the waiting room, she's very pretty and very easy to talk to. Then a baby belonging to one of the other patients crawls up into her lap. It's got a dripping diaper. This eventually leads to an unpleasant confrontation with the mother, who denied that the baby was the cause of the mess; the mother becomes so outraged that she takes out a gun, points it at the ceiling and shoots.

I grab the woman's arm holding the gun. The other patients in the waiting room all run out the door, except the one I'd been talking to. I get the gun away from her before she can fire the other bullet - it's a two shot derringer - and I hand it to the other patient. As I do so I say something along the lines of "Hold this for me, honey." Then I think, wait a minute, she was my patient a minute ago, that's very unprofessional, I can't go around changing a DC's relationship to me mid-storyline just because we shared a nice conversation and a life-or-death situation. The woman has pulled out another gun, and I take it away from her and hand it to the patient again - there wind up being 4 guns total.

I'm looking at some kind of travel ad with a picture of a bridge and a quote calling it magical. A woman's complaining about the misuse of the quote - apparently it's a line from the end of a long poem about a more literal variety of magic, and the way the ad is using it is going completely against the spirit of the poem. She summarizes the poem, saying something along the lines of 'magic's one and only purpose: getting us outta here.'

As I think about what that means, I become lucid. I'm floating above the bridge from the image in that ad, high over a river, surrounded by trees; I fly along the road, over the trees, flying higher until I can see that this is an island, and I fly out over the water. It's all very beautiful, but I'm still thinking about what that woman had said, and I associate it with a quote from Tolkien in defense of escapism. (The quote: Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?) Thinking about Tolkien, I think that while I'm lucid, I'll go find some elves. But suddenly I feel a desperate need to, as the woman said, get outta here - rather than flying peacefully over the water, now I'm thinking of the sky as a barrier I have to break through; I'm very worked up about it. I fail completely.

When I stop trying to break through the sky, I find I'm now flying outside my IRL home. I land in a tree. My IRL neighbor's on the steps outside with some people I think of as her cousins, and she sees me. I feel embarrassed, a grown man climbing trees. The branch I'm sitting on breaks with a very loud crack, and although I don't fall very far at all, they run over to me. She scolds me for climbing trees when people are trying to sleep. We go inside. I'm still vaguely aware that I'm dreaming, but I'm thinking that I'll have to wait for these people to leave before I can do anything very interesting.

I 'wake up' on a bus. I think about the lucid dream I just had, but am distracted when Danica Patrick starts making out with the woman sitting next to me. (And yet it doesn't occur to me that I might still be dreaming...)

I'm in an office, talking to someone about the android I've been monitoring. The guy I'm talking to is the same model, and I'm asking him about some of the skills he was programmed with; I think there might be something wrong with the one I've been observing, she seems to have let some of her skills decay. He hints that maybe I've got an ulterior motive here, and he's right, but I insist I'm only concerned about my employer (their manufacturer)'s reputation. I'm thinking I'm going to have to download a training program so I can pose as a servant and infiltrate her owner's household.

(Woke up. Had an unusually difficult time getting back to sleep, I was up for at least an hour.)

There's two men sitting in front of a fireplace, a young man and an old one. The young man's saying, "Don't you want to help me?" There's a long pause. The young man isn't aware of it, but the person he's speaking to is his father-in-law; his wife, the old man's daughter, has recently passed away, and for some reason the old man thinks it's to his benefit to keep that connection secret. Now the old man says, "Your wife... Very sweet creature."

(Woke up. Back to sleep without difficulty this time.)

I'm on a train named after a greek goddess; I've just changed from a train called Autehna (which is meant to be Athena - my dreams have mixed up that name in a similar way before, again pronouncing it with a 't' instead of 'th'), and I'm thinking of the naming of the two trains as pleasantly symbolically appropriate. I'm writing in a journal. As I write, I see an image of what I'm writing about: a very powerful and morally dubious man offered me a position, and I turned him down, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. In the journal, I write that I must have learned in another life to refuse to get tangled up with the wicked and powerful.

Continuing as the same character from the train, I find my wife and children asleep around/under the Christmas tree.

Still the same character, I'm standing on a dock next to a rowboat full of men in red uniforms, casting off. I'm in the same uniform, as is the man beside me, but the two of us aren't going back to the ship with the rest. I'm thinking about that position I'd turned down, and the possible ill will resulting from that refusal, and I start to feel suspicious about the guy next to me. When I look at him, he takes off running down the dock, reaching for a rope. I reach for the weapon I've concealed in my false leg, and as I remove it I hear someone say "mon dieu!" I'm thinking about the various bits and pieces of myself that I've left behind.

(Woke up, once again couldn't get back to sleep and eventually gave up on it, even though I'd gotten only about 5 hours of sleep. Unusual.)

There's a vampire who looks like a kid, who'd been having some kind of serious problems, but is assuring a friend of his that he's past them now. He's also discovered that, as a result of those problems, he can eat solid food now, and he's trying to stay off blood. He's optimistic about it. "I've been having some sickness, but-" His friend laughs, patronizingly. As a 3rd person observer, I side with the friend - this is a bad idea.

There's a woman working at some kind of community center, and a man who seems to be drunk outside, holding a knife. She's saying to him through the door, "Go home, Ray! You're sick! You need help!" Afterwards she starts thinking about fated events, and timing.

I'm working with a team of bounty hunters to catch two people, allowing one of them to lead us to the other without letting him realize he's being followed. We catch up to them in the woods, and they're both here, but they're unconscious, and surrounded by two "Wraths" - some semi-divine role, working for Ares. They're waiting for their master, who arrives just after we do.

Three people discussing a conversation they just had with a police captain who hired them. One of them uses the slang term "NeuTrooL", a pun on "new" and "true" and "neutral", which means information given by someone who mistakenly believes their view is an objective truth, completely neutral, when in fact it's influenced by their own bias.

A woman's telling me about her dreams, with a large cast of recurring characters and ongoing storylines. She's telling me her most recent one, about "the Prince and the Magician", and says that the Prince is captive but still playing an active role in events. As she talks, I see the prince sitting in a room that has something crystalline about it; he's a fae-looking thing, and he's sitting in front of a mirror with a spell on it, talking to someone at a distance. The creature in the mirror is very large, and has fur. The woman telling the story mentions the name Ba'alrael.