Carabas

3rd person, I'm looking down at a wide stone staircase in a castle, and descending the stairs there's this woman wearing buckskin who I think of as some kind of hunter, she's talking with the king. She's saying the words "-get our answers."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm taking my IRL youngest sister, L., to the sands to get her first dragon. (Relevant to upcoming IRL event today, sans dragons.) (Edit: Nevermind, the IRL event actually did wind up involving dragons. Or the word 'dragon', anyway.) I was talking with a few older relatives about the dragons, and L. kept trying to hurry us up, anxious about getting there in time to see the dragons hatch; but for the rest of us this is all old hat, so we wasted time talking, and now we're running late. We keep telling L. that it's fine, we'll make it on time, and even if we miss the hatching you've still got a window of a few hours after the dragons hatch to bond with them. But when we get down to the sand, the eggs are already gone. We have to catch up with the hatchlings in the barn instead.

Before we leave for the barn, I see what I think of as a king cobra in the sand - it's huge, as wide as a person, which I think of as normal for king cobras. I pick L. up and there's a chase sequence that ends with me tossing the snake over a wall, but then I notice a scratch on my finger. It must have bit me.

I can tell I'm starting to pass out. I go inside a house and find my IRL sister S. with a friend of hers, and I tell them about the snake bite and ask them to call the hospital or treat it somehow. The friend takes my hand with the bite and looks at the veins, which look broad and red and cloudy, like they've swollen or burst under the skin, and she gets me some cream to put on my skin. I recognize it as some ordinary skin cream that's not going to help, and I try to convince S. to take me to the hospital before I pass out.

(Woke up with my hand hurting where the snake bit it - turns out I really do have a tiny scratch there IRL, might be a papercut. Just after I finished writing this down, I got a phone call from S, letting me know she'd been taken to the hospital on account of almost passing out from unknown causes. A few hours and a not-too-serious diagnosis later, I tried to get a little more sleep.)

I'm lying in bed in some mansion, with a few of S's friends around bothering me until I get up and go somewhere with them. As I walk through a doorway into the hall, I realize this is a dream. It's not as vivid as I'd like - I can see everything fine, but it doesn't feel quite real, more like watching something on a screen - so I try a mantra to make it more vivid. Instead, everything disappears. (In retrospect, that seems obvious. I was focusing on the words instead of the surroundings.)

Next scene I remember is a woman using the family name Gale, returning to a Spanish-style house on the west coast, overlooking the sea. She's lived here a few times over the years, and for a moment I see it in sepia tones and with flowers in the windows, as she's remembering an old photograph from when she'd first lived here with her two daughters, before she became immortal. She's thinking that even though she's coming back earlier than expected this time - something on her mind about trouble on the east coast - she was still gone long enough that she can pass herself off as her own cousin.

Fragment of a previous scene involved a boy covered in words and strange designs related to a demon (or demons). Now, elsewhere, his father's poured something over himself which causes his flesh to melt and transform him into the image of a demon. Another man speaking to him says "Why did you do it?" "Because! I wanted to know his pain!" 'Him' referring to his son. The other man says something to the effect that this was a very foolish thing to do.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

The words "If you could know, wouldn't you?" and a paramedic getting annoyed at a woman who keeps trying to kill herself.

I'm standing in front of a checkout counter, looking at the rows of rock candy, picking one out and talking about nostalgia with the woman behind the cash register, the vampire who made me. I ask her how far back her memory goes, and she says she still remembers her mother. Talking about some other vampires, we agree that their method is much more sensible than ours, them being able to make more than one vampire, which is something we can't do unless the previous one dies; we can't support more than one at a time.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Something about a 'Lazarus Door' for resurrection, and fog and some kind of danger.

A car that won't turn off. The owner's already taken the key out of the ignition, and for a moment I wonder how it's still running, but then I wonder why I thought keys in the ignition have anything to do with turning a car on or off. We take the car into the woods.

A fragment involving two teenage kids in the woods transitions into a sort of flashback showing the parents of one of those kids, back when they were still alive. They're both some kind of doctors or scientists, the wife has this mass of curly hair, and they're sitting at a table in some kind of office or lab and going over a file acquired by the husband's brother, while he stands across the table from them. The brother is "not like others," which is related to whatever the husband and wife are working on, and he's frustrated by working together with them, he's used to his freedom.

On the file they're looking at, there's a stylized drawing of two humanoid figures, one with the head of a bird, the other the head of a wolf, and although the husband and wife don't realize this, I'm aware that image represents the two teenagers from the previous scene, who are "not like others" in the same way as the brother. The wife is saying, "But what's really (some word meaning something like 'strange' or 'unusual' or 'notable' or 'attention-grabbing') here is that the bird has a Double Hartford rank, ten pages in. I can't open it up."

Someone who's just finished drawing a picture of 10 priests, then a picture of me, offers to draw a picture of Andromache; in the dream I believed that was the name of a goetic demon.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a witch I put under an enchanted sleep a long time ago, but a girl's come to warn me that she's started to wake up. There are rhymes and charms meant to keep her asleep, but when I see they're not going to work I run for the nearest doorway, to put a few realities between us. The doors I pass through repeatedly change the scene until I wind up in a tiny square room, just large enough for me, with only the one entrance; I get rid of the roof and start flying.

I'm with a group of people in what looks like some underground stone temple, talking to a guy who emerged from a tunnel in the floor, and I'm noting that he looks just like his ancestor. We're returning his ancestor's sword to him, although now it's just a sword - there had been something else attached to it, something we used. As I'm thinking about this I notice that the tunnel has a carving of the Monkey King's head set above it.

A cardinal arrives at the top of the stairs leading down to the temple, followed by attendants in red and gold brocade. He's been our enemy before, hunting us down, although that's been resolved; still, we're not exactly pleased to see him, and his attendants start to run forward to put themselves between him and us. But he holds up a hand to tell them to stay back. He's brought us a satchel full of papers granting us certain privileges in recognition of our service to (something or other) - none of the privileges granted are actually very useful, this is just a symbolic gesture. I mention to one of the guys with me that I'd rather have another of those papers claiming we were acting with his permission and authority.

In what looks like a morgue, there's a live man lying down on a slab being examined by a guy in a wheelchair, along with a goon in a suit standing behind the chair, and a man in a white coat standing over the slab. The guy in the chair is looking for someone who's had plastic surgery, and he's thinking the guy on the slab might be him. He's wrong. He's also thinking about peeling back the skin of the face to get a look at the underlying bone structure. The guy on the slab has got the wrong idea about what's going on, he was brought here by the man in the white coat under false pretenses, and he's saying, "So you recognized me on account of my face?" The man in the wheelchair had been gripping him by the chin. Now he starts to reach toward the guy's bare chest, thinking about the heart, and the guy says "Hey, I thought you weren't gonna take anything too-" He looks at the guy in the white coat, who is looking up at the ceiling and moving his lips silently, maybe praying.

A nightmare from over the weekend:

I'm watching a TV show involving something supernatural, and the character in the show is looking at a TV screen with some monster/demon/spirit/etc on the other side of the screen, coming closer, intending to break through. It looks like a white-skinned (literal colorless white) woman with brilliantly red hair and this blazing sparking moving light where its eyes should be. I notice that I can see it not just on my TV but on all the reflective surfaces in the room, and I know it's really trying to break through into the real world. I try holding it back with various protective symbols and calling on various things (not Apollo, curiously, as that's been my go-to nightmare cure recently; possibly it's because this one's not on the theme of darkness like all the others were) but they're not very effective, I have the feeling it's only a matter of time. At the same time, the door at the far end of the hall is open - I came through it earlier - and through it I can see a woman laughing, different from the woman in the screen but I have the feeling they're related. Feeling like I don't have much time, I sprint across the hall, slam the door and lock it. The dream 'camera' zooms in on that image of the lock turning, and closely focuses on the feel of it - and then the scene isn't a nightmare anymore. The thing on the screen is gone, now it's showing the main character saying to his sister, "It's you and me, we're all we've got now."

At some point while I was watching the show (I can't remember whether it was before or after the nightmare part), I thought to myself that watching creepy things every week might impact your dreams.

(Woke up around 5:30, an hour after bed, with a high-pitched ringing in my ears that reminds me a little of TV static, so that was presumably the cause of this. Recall for the rest of the day was terrible.)

Tonight's dreams:

People living in tunnels who have to move due to some imminent danger.

I'm walking through this vast room, mostly filled with a pool of water, cranes are standing in it, and one of the people I'm with comments on the way one of the birds is holding its leg up out of the water, she says she bets it's pointing to something, we should investigate. I disagree, but investigate anyway just to prove the point. I float above the water, and pass various cranes pointing in different directions, meaningless. But at the far side of the room I meet a man, a traveler, who I start talking to and who decides to come with us; he's standing beside this curtained alcove, and through the white curtains I get a glimpse of this beautiful woman sitting on the stone floor in white robes, hair down to the floor, and at first I think she's wearing a mask, something representing the moon, and I think she must be a princess or a priestess. Then I realize that's not a mask, it's her face, beautiful and strange.

3rd person, that traveler and the man who I was in the previous scene are walking down a flight of stairs with a little boy running ahead of them. There's a festival, a sending on of spirits, which are these floating pale lights filling the room, sending them on involves covering them with cloth, and the boy reaches for one of them, but it's acting differently than the others. The traveler says that because this one had been killed, it would be wrong to send her on in that form. The light takes on the image of the little girl it had been, and starts talking to the little boy, calling him Koya, saying he's gotten older. He tells her he's not Koya, sounding frustrated, but one of the older men says quietly to him that she needs him to be the person she's waiting for.

A newly-made vampire is sitting in a car parked in a garage early in the morning, and is refusing to get out of the car because he's afraid of the patches of sunlight in the garage, he's sure he won't be able to avoid touching them. He's a full-grown man, blonde, bearded, looks Scandinavian in ancestry. The driver, his maker, a dark-haired woman, is calling him a big baby and telling him he'll just have to take his chances.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

IRL friend S. is working with a theater company connected to a shop, which stocks videos of their shows although those videos are out of the way and most customers don't realize the shop and the theater company are connected. They're talking about having to close down (not sure if this refers to the theater company or the shop or both).

A traveling woman reporter is commenting on some serial killer with an MO related to books, and observing that his trail coincidentally matches up with her travel patterns, she's joking about being suspected herself.

A man and his daughter in a forest, the man had some oath with a bird, representative of the forest, and now there's a deer leg wrapped in parcel paper lying on the ground by their camp, violating that oath. He didn't kill or butcher the deer, that was someone else, but the parcel paper was his, borrowed, and this is going to lead to misunderstanding and enmity between him and the bird. The man and his daughter are leaving, she's objecting because it's not their fault but he insists that they don't argue, just go.

I'm in my IRL mother's home, and ranting to her about that previous scene, which is now thought of as a Bible story. I'm opposed to its message - the final moral and point of the story is different, but this scene here, designating man as something separate from nature, is something I'm deeply frustrated by and I don't care that it's not the focus, I consider it irresponsible storytelling.

My mother's deeply religious Christian IRL neighbor is visiting her with his two sons (the neighbor does have two sons IRL, but these two DCs bear no resemblance to them). Although he's not offended, he says that I should focus on the main message of the story instead. I had no intention of starting a religious debate and am happy to let the subject drop. His youngest son, on the other hand, has gotten angry and wants to prove the point to me. I find fanaticism attractive on him. I'm aware he's both attracted to and deeply uncomfortable with me, thoughts about queer issues and gender issues on my mind. He comes to the window where I've been standing and lifts a rock outside and throws it into a tree. (With his mind, apparently - there was some awareness that this was dream logic, and that if we'd been outside he would have just used his hands.)

The conversation moves on to safer topics but I pull him aside, ask him what that was meant to prove. We go outside so he can finish making his point. He leads me over to his father's yard and shows me a hedge covered in red berries concealing a small tunnel leading underground. He seems afraid, but he says he's determined to make me a believer. He's so worked up about this I don't have the heart to tell him I'm already a believer, just not his variety of believer - this isn't the atheism-vs-theism debate he thinks it is - but that's all right. I'm still thinking about queer/gender issues when I get into the tunnel ahead of him.

In the tunnel, I'm a girl (who, in the dream, I thought of as resembling the oldest Narnia girl - she doesn't particularly, but this scene reminds me of 80's fantasy movies in general) crawling on my hands and knees, while the boy with me is sitting on the grass outside, worrying. The dream 'camera' briefly switches to 3rd person, allowing me to see the boy, myself, and just around a bend in the tunnel, a door, open just a crack, showing a dimly lit room with a woman dancing inside, the Queen, and it's the inhumanly beautiful Queen I want to get a glimpse of, although the boy is convinced this is a bad idea. Back to 1st person, I reach the door, peer through and see an image as if the dream 'camera' has zoomed in, focused on the Queen's lips painted so dark they're nearly black, her throat, her decolletage, and an awareness of ornaments of frozen drops of water or tears, telling myself I must remember every detail of this.

There's either a false awakening or a partial-awakening where I'm lying in bed 'recording' this dream, only to realize that I'm not physically writing anything, after which I actually did wake up and 'continue' writing right where I'd 'left off', the part where the boy threw the rock.

The lights in my IRL home won't turn on. None of them will, and I think of the darkness as a danger, which makes me wonder if this is a nightmare. I start to head down the stairs, by floating, head first. Yes, this is definitely a dream. I start to do my light-of-Apollo anti-nightmare trick, which after 2 uses appears to be my go-to way of avoiding nightmares now, but then it occurs to me that while I'm here, I could enjoy some lucid dreaming instead. I decide that there is no ceiling, so that when I look up, I'll see the night sky and be able to float up into it - and then I turn over and am pleased to see that this is so. After I've floated up into the stars, I look down to the house again to put the roof back on, and then, as if it was just a task I'd briefly delayed and had to get to now, I start up the anti-nightmare trick, and wake myself up in the process.

(5:08 am, just half an hour after bed. As I was trying to get back to sleep, it occurred to me - this has happened a few times now, nightmares with this timing and on the theme of darkness - I'm starting to suspect this is the result of trying to sleep before dawn. Possibly on some level I'm aware that it's much darker than when I usually sleep, and my dream interprets that as something wrong. Reliable way of getting lucid, though, so that's not really a problem. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: "Ancient papers, and an age a fraction of that."

I'm discussing an upcoming ball with a young woman I'm acquainted with, leaning against her desk while she goes over the invitation, pointing out the bit where they encourage everyone to dress colorfully, and she, thinking herself quite clever and looking for me to praise her, tells me about the black outfit she's planning, so that she'll stand out in a sea of bright colors, and she asks what I think. I tell her I expect that's exactly what the people throwing the ball are planning themselves, so perhaps take that into account. She reconsiders, and asks what I'll be going with, as she can't picture me in anything but black. I say not at all, my basilisk coat is blue, isn't it? - it's entirely black except for the basilisk design but that's enough, and I think about the feel of that dark blue color, the warmth of that creature's image on my back. As I think about that coat I either am or am referencing The Etched City's Gwynn.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

OUAT's Belle is binding Rumpelstiltskin in a contract without realizing it. She was speaking in metaphors and he's got to abide by them literally. While the two of them were attempting to patch things up between them after a fight, she asked him to pretend she's the mistress and he the servant in their deal. He, sitting on the side of her bed, is thinking that they've done this before, thinking of a particular scene in which Julia was a princess and I was her servant, and how utterly beyond my reach she'd been then. (A scene from a dream I had years ago, accurately remembered as far as it goes, though he left out the unflattering parts.) He's been silent too long, and when Belle says something, he jumps up and makes a game out of it, addressing her as milady, going to her window and throwing the curtains open, asking what she'd like for her meal. And although she didn't at all mean that he should literally treat her as his mistress, only that she wanted him to think about things from her perspective for a moment, she's not surprised by the game and she takes it as a sign that all's well between them again, so she gets up to make breakfast herself.

As she leaves the room, she finds a strange object in a corner of the hall - a statue of a unicorn that she hadn't noticed before, with what looks like a real horn. She knows Rumpelstiltskin's been after such horns, so she's wondering why he leaves one just lying around here - unless this is what he makes out of them. She thinks it's odd, and goes on about her chores, when she finds another one, smaller, in a window sill. She knows that wasn't there before, and she calls to Rumpelstiltskin, and turns to see that he's already found the first one, and is looking at it with obvious displeasure. This is something that shouldn't be in the castle.

(Woke up. That last one was almost certainly influenced by watching Legend the other day.)

I'm evacuating a place where True Blood's Eric and Bill had been staying; Bill's already gone, but Eric's chained to a chair, and I have no intention of freeing him. I'm going to carry him out in the chair. Despite this, I have nothing against him, and I'm asking him if he wants me to bring any of the belongings he's kept in these rooms. I'm kneeling in front of the chair as I speak to him, and I say that I may need him to carry something of Bill's in exchange, to which he consents. Aside from 2 belongings which needed no discussion, he says he doesn't need anything else. It seems a shame, the rooms are full of things he's collected over his lifetime. I pick up a sword he has on display with a hilt that looks like carved ivory or bone, and I say sure, you may not need anything else, but it's better if it can come, isn't it? I put it on the chair with him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: a mention of Louis, a king.

I've heard about a gathering of people I'm thinking of as 'the British' tonight - there's a connotation of a specific politically subversive group in my mind - and I intend to arrange a meeting with the queen, although I'm not as close to her in this reality as I have been in past iterations; I've spent too much time focusing on other contacts this time through. I sit down beside the queen at her mirror. Her daughter, Antoinette, is here as well, standing by the window; she's beautiful but spoiled, self-centered. That's largely my fault - in other versions of this reality I'd devoted more time to her and she'd developed into a very sweet girl. This time around, we're not particularly close, and she notes only that she owes her name to me. In French, I ask the queen her plans for this evening after the party. I don't speak to her in a particularly deferential manner. She seems wary, suspicious, but I think I have enough influence with her to pull this off.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I need to kill a giant snake, but I can't find a weapon. Finally, a woman produces a long knife and beheads the snake herself. But I tell her that it's still alive, you need to destroy the brain, otherwise beheading it is just slow death by suffocation, it's cruel. I point to its eyes, which are still moving; I tell her it's suffering. She doesn't care. It's harmless now, that's all she cared about. I can't believe this. But I do my best to put it out of its misery without a weapon, until finally its eyes stop moving and its skull is crushed. I pick up head and body and carry them outside.

When I reach the door, the storyline changes - at first I was still aware I was carrying something and needed to get rid of it, but I forgot about it quickly and so the snake disappeared. I was distracted by the sight of colorful glowing orbs floating down the river, just through the trees. There's a festival going on all this week, and tonight is the children's celebration. I walk past the women handing out colored orbs for the children to light candles inside and carry down to the water, and as I walk I see a couple kids carrying their lights the wrong way, down to the sea instead of the launching place at the river. Some adults are trying to point them the right way, but the oldest kid says something about their father's ship out at sea.

I'm in a maze full of doors that lead to other worlds. The people with me have decided to take a door that leads out onto a snow-covered wasteland, they think this is going to lead them to our ultimate destination, but I have my doubts. I'm sure they're just going to wind up back here with a lot of wasted effort. So I let them go while I stay in the maze. After the door's shut behind them, I open it again, just to get another look, and while I can see them, the dream briefly switches to their perspective, showing that they can't see me or the doorway; our realities are out of sync.

In the maze, I try to take a path roughly in line with the path they're taking through the wasteland, so that we can meet up again when they inevitably wind up back here. I check through doors once in a while to make sure we're still going the same way. But eventually I run across other people in the maze, and I discover people are gravitating towards a set of locked double doors with two keyholes to either side. This is the door my group's been looking for. But we don't have a key, and neither do any of the people clustered around. Hera approaches me in the form of an incredibly tall and slightly muscular woman, with long red hair and a peacock blue dress that clings to her body. She's looking for something too, but not a key, and she asks me why I'm looking for one. I explain to her that like the others I'd joined up with, I'd simply woken up alone in a vast, seemingly empty room, so big I couldn't see the walls or the ceiling, and eventually I'd worked my way here. As we're talking I realize that she's Roman, not Greek. She tells me she can get me through the door.

As we go through the door I'm starting to focus on how attractive she is, and I hear a warning, something I think of as a quote, about the risk for dealing with gods "to become not ascension but craving." I acknowledge this but decide to go with craving anyway, she's very attractive. On the other side of the door we're in my IRL home. However, although I didn't notice anything odd at the time, once I took her out of the maze setting the DC stopped showing any personality; I carried her to the couch, but when we sat down she disappeared entirely. The dream storyline switched to a visit from my IRL father who starts 'getting the trees ready for winter' which involves ropes and makes me feel lazy for not doing it myself, and a sitcom involving two elderly men teasing their sullen young relative about just ignoring what you don't want to hear.

(Woke up. Felt like those last scenes, my father and the sitcom, were both about me making the wrong decision with Hera. Back to sleep.)

I'm Roman from Hemlock Grove. Olivia's lying on the stairs and I've had a taste of her blood, and it's put me in something of a trance. I'm thinking about the difference between love and lust. Peter knocking at the door snaps me out of it, but I watch Olivia stand up and walk up the stairs before I answer the door. I make tea, though he doesn't want any. He's picked up one of Olivia's shoes off the rack by the door and is fiddling with it, pacing around the kitchen.

Fragments:

I'm a teenage boy who gets into fights too often, trying to explain to a girl the reason why.

I'm in a setting that looks based on the 1800's, getting into my uncle's carriage, although my uncle's surprised I want to come and warns me against it - I lie about the reason I want a ride, saying something about the walking path along the way. He accepts the lie and offers me a bulb of garlic.

Napping on the couch during the night: A nightmare of the vague, unseen, menacing, I'd-call-it-demonic-except-the-demons-in-this-dream-are-on-my-side variety starts to take hold. Since I think of this as associated with darkness, I summon 'the golden light of Apollo' which lights me up from inside for a moment and this does the trick, but Amon and the other demons around me look rather hurt/betrayed that I would do such a thing, calling on some light god instead of relying on them.

Fragments from 8 and 10:19 wakeups, having gone to bed at 7 am:

A man with a phobia of the upper class he's trying to join; the name Benjamin.

An immortal man offering another a light for his cigarette and saying "Here. Rachel's mother couldn't stand (this brand), could she? Now it's the scent of (a three-syllable name of a town in China, a place associated with another woman)."

My new wife, Julia, has drawn me away from my potion-brewing for the night, and as I carry her up the tower steps to her bedroom, she quotes, "And it was better that the beloved behold the tainted cities of Mephisto dreaming."

(Woke up at 10:19, and shortly afterward my neighbor started to play the drums. After half an hour I called him. Back to bed at 11, though I didn't get back to sleep for at least another 20 minutes.)

I'm riding in a car with my IRL sisters, and I notice that I can see the grand houses we're driving past even though my eyes are closed. I keep them closed for a while to be sure of it. I suspect I'm dreaming. I take out my sketchpad and start drawing what I see with my eyes closed - the inside of the car, I considered drawing the scenery but better to go with something that isn't passing so fast - but I find that although I can see both car interior and sketchpad, my drawing isn't enough to prove anything. We stop at a hotel and I've run out of drawing paper, and I go through an old sketchbook and find it's full of paintings from Shadow Hearts.

Dream briefly switches to Shadow Hearts scenes featuring two Alices, one 'real', the other either dead or the result of time travel shenanigans or a figment of Yuri's mind or some combination of the above. It's this potentially imaginary Alice who more closely resembles the version from the game.

Back to the hotel - my father's current IRL girlfriend comes to the hotel room to tell me to hurry up, Dad's in the car and waiting. I'm surprised since I thought I was the one waiting, all I have to do is stick my sketchpad back in my backpack and I'm good to go - but no, I see my sisters are already at the door too. My bad. I grab my things and go after them -

After I walk through that door there's a memory gap, but I wind up lucid, floating up and down through the levels of the hotel through a convenient octagonal hole in the floors leading up to a skylight. I stop floating around and look for a door to go through to change to a more interesting scene, but as I pass through the door I get a sense of danger, and immediately look for another door. I pass through a series of rooms this way, most of them halls filled with marble statues and skylights or balconies opening onto clear blue skies, but still with that sense of something wrong, until finally I open a door to a public bath filled with attractive people making out with each other. I have no particular desire to join in but it makes for pleasant scenery and the sense of danger is gone, so I strip and get into the water.

I seem to have gotten my timing wrong, most people are getting out of the water and getting dressed, but I'm not bothered by this. The doors on the far side of the baths are so large the view is almost entirely brilliant blue sky. Someone offers me a tab of acid, and I take one and offer one to another before handing the rest back to him, which he's surprised by. I wonder if it'll have any effect in a dream, and as I wonder this I decide to find a robe to put on. I remember the summoning-by-putting-your-hand-behind-you trick and decide to try summoning a robe - which doesn't work, but I walk past a stack of towels, and then a stack of clothes, and this seems to be the dream's response to my request. The clothes are slightly too large for me but I put them on anyway, listening to the conversations around me.

(Woke up just before 12:30. Resigned myself to a bit of sleep deprivation.)

3rd person following a woman, and I'm aware this scene is about to become a nightmare, something involving a husband who came back from outer space wrong, carrying something inside him that will manifest in the house in strange ways, killing him and trapping her here. It's already starting to feel like a nightmare, so I take over and steer her toward the front door to change the scene. It takes two doors to leave the nightmare/house.

Outside, I'm my IRL self, and I'm walking out of the mansion I'm temporarily staying at, walking down to the road to see if my IRL sisters have arrived yet. I follow the road toward town, and I pass Tilda Swinton walking the other way and rubberneck shamelessly, walking backwards until she's out of sight. Eventually I come to a fair, where a few people are in costume, including myself, something patriotic-themed. I spot my sisters in the crowd but don't want them to recognize me while I'm in costume. The crowds push me into one of the tents showing various curiosities, and one of them, something about a man who fell from the skies, switches the scene to something more stable.

3rd person following a man who observed that if you trace every human interaction you've had throughout your life, and all the interactions those people had and so on, it creates a fractal pattern which he used to warp time and space around himself, condensing it all into a single point with himself at the center, the God of this world. The ground loops over his head to meet itself in a single vividly-colored sphere. Although he's the only creature that can exist in this sphere, there's a door through which he can watch or enter the old world at any point in time or space. The world's been completely transformed by his actions, all throughout its timeline. At the moment he's observing the writing systems that are developing. He's been translating the various markings that he's seen through the door, images made by different cultures throughout time and space, but as far as he can tell, none of them are using a written alphabet. All the markings translate into numbers.

He walks through the door into the same point in time/space that he'd originally lived, modern times. The place has been through something like an apocalypse as a result of his actions, but it's mostly recovered now. He seeks out a friend who'd tried to stop him, and they talk about the changes in the world, and about what's happened to his older brother's estate since the funeral. 'For a madman, he was alright,' the other man says.