Verre

NLD, first sleep: Several of us are downstairs in a house at night. The front door is wide open. Through an adjacent window, I see a man sitting on a bench next to the road outside, waiting for the bus. Perhaps he tires of waiting, because after a while he gets up and walks right in the front door. I recognize him as "The Vagrant," a character played by Johnny Depp. He wears white face make-up and an old fashioned suit and hat, resembling a mime from the Charlie Chaplin era. I feel hospitable toward him and offer to let him sleep in the wife's room, as she is not home. (I have no sense of who "the wife" might be; there's something impersonal about all the DCs; they are more like roles than individuals.) Someone standing nearby ("the husband"?) gives me a dirty look for leaving the door open and then telling the vagrant he can stay. I don't openly acknowledge the glance, but gives me a sense of foreboding: I don't know anything about this guy, and I've just offered to let him sleep in one of the upstairs rooms. If he turns out to have ill intent, we'll be leaving ourselves vulnerable when we go to sleep.

Scene change. There are about three of us upstairs now on a sort of balcony, in addition to the vagrant, who is swinging on a rope. He has not said a word since entering the house, and I start to wonder if we should be worried about his intentions. I consult the DM, who is not physically present in the scene: "If I do 'sense alignment', is it blatant?" It feels as though I ask the question aloud, but in a way that does not manifest audibly in the dream scene -- I'm asking OOCly (out of character). The DM confirms that, yes, the effect would be blatant, meaning that I can't cast the spell on the vagrant without him noticing, either because I have to make distinctive invocations and gestures, or because he would be able to subjectively feel the mental intrusion. I don't want to cast the spell if the vagrant will be aware of it, because at this point I already strongly suspect that his alignment is not on the "good" spectrum, and I don't want to alert him to my suspicions. After the vagrant leaves off swinging, one of the other players on the balcony asks the DM if she can use the same effect on the rope that he has just let go of. She's trying to be clever: a rope, obviously, won't notice anything amiss or feel itself being scryed on. However, she seems to be missing the obvious, so before the DM has a chance to respond, I scoff jokingly, "You can't 'sense alignment' on a rope!"

Note: I'm interested in the way dreams can take on aspects of other forms of representation. Mine are often heavily influenced by structural elements from films, video games, and even tabletop gaming, the first and last of which were strongly present here.

NLD, second sleep: The fabric of the dream was very thin and immediately frayed upon waking because I did not keep still enough. There was an elaborate plot that I wasn't able to piece back together. However, I was with a group of people that were playing costumed characters, acting out scenes that were somewhere between a play and a LARP.

Afterwards, an actor who is a dwarf (of the genetic, not the fantasy variety), comments to me about his disinterest in playing out live-action versions of stories he has already filmed or done on stage. "Kid, we want to see it, or we want to hear about it. We don't want to live it. We've already done that."

Note: This dream appears to have been incubated by the thoughts I wrote down after the last dream about the various representational formats that have been an influence on my dreaming. Dream would like to remind me that I left out plays and LARPs. Thanks, Dream, I guess my dreaming is also influenced by plays and LARPs (even if I haven't engaged in either since the '90s). Anything else?