Carabas

A woman has another woman tied to a tree, and is spreading caviar on her face to attract animals to eat her. She's interrupted by some panic among the people she's working with. People are transforming into creatures - from what they're shouting, I have the impression that it's mostly insects, but when I switch to first person, the only transformation I actually see is a bird emerging from a woman's shoulder and flying away. Mostly I just see panicked people running away.

I'm leaving too, with several others, at a calmer pace. I look down at my bare feet, and notice that the girl whose body I'm possessing has decorated her toenails in Satanic symbols - not just painting them, but actually growing them into horn-like shapes. I comment on this to one of the people I'm walking with, although I'm careful to phrase it as if I'm the real owner of this body, not something possessing her.

Still in that body, I'm at a club with a woman named Pepper. I'm wearing sunglasses - it's night, but I need them to protect myself from the electric lights. I'll take them off when we're outside. We're leaving, waiting by a coat check or something similar, when we're approached by two men, one of them hitting on Pepper, the other hanging back. At first I'm irritated, but then I remember that I'm using a female body at the moment, and I realize the other guy is playing wingman. I'm amused. Since Pepper seems interested enough, we all leave together.

We briefly stop by my IRL house, and when I look in a mirror, I see my IRL self, although my reflection isn't mirroring my actions. Pepper calls for me to hurry up, calling the name of the girl whose body I'm possessing for the first time - Julie. Outside, it's dawn, the clouds are starting to change colors, so I put my sunglasses back on. There's a large car parked outside - wingman's in the driver's seat, Pepper and the other guy are in the back. I get into the passenger seat.

We drive past several rundown-looking houses, and the guy in the back seat asks me if they're haunted, this being my neighborhood. I say sure, a house that looks like that has to have a few ghosts around. I'm not being serious, just humoring him. He goes on and on about the dead, and he's beginning to irritate me - he's attempting to show off his knowledge, but it's not particularly impressive. He says that he can speak to the dead more easily than others because he still has all his canine teeth - I have an image of one tooth behind another, like adult teeth behind baby teeth, though he's an adult. He says they make a point of telling you that they're dead. And he asks me something about dead and dreams - I didn't catch most of the question, too much background noise, but I assumed he was asking me if I'd ever been visited by the dead in my dreams. I say, sure - I may not know much about talking to dead people, but dreams I can do.

Wingman calls my attention away, asking for directions - left or right here? It's not even really a fork in the road, the road we're on just curves right and another road splits away, but I guess it might look confusing if you're not used to it; I tell him to bear right. The guy in the backseat offers me and Pepper beers from a cooler, and asks if we find him creepy, with all that talk about dead people. I say no, the talk about dead people's fine, it's the way you talk about getting me and Pepper to drink that's creepy. Pepper agrees, but she's laughing about it. I was only half joking. Even the wingman agrees - the guy's phrasing is odd, as if he's trying to get us incapacitated. We hit a bump in the road and he spills some of his own beer on the upholstery; I tell him he better clean that up, although I'm not at all sure who owns this car. I'm certain it's not him.

I'm aware T. is going to rob my home and kill me tonight, as if I'd seen the future. I took some steps in preparation for that, but I believed that what is going to happen can't be averted. However, it turns out I'd misinterpreted something: while T. really was robbing the place, the killer turns out to be someone else, a stranger who broke in with a knife. T. and some other people who live here help fight him off. We get to the scene I knew was coming, when the knife's supposed to cut deeply into my shoulder and stop just above my heart, and I wonder if I'll be able to feel pain in a dream. I decide to have the scene go a different way instead, I close my eyes and imagine that T. and the others hold him back enough that the knife turns aside. When I open my eyes again, the stranger is on the floor, dead.

I decide to perform "Deedlit's healing spell." (It's been years since I watched Lodoss - did Deedlit even have a healing spell? - I think this was mostly some generic mental association between elves and healing.) I say something I no longer remember, a phrase in English something like a prayer, and there's a warm gold glowing light around my hands, which I hold over the dead man until he revives, though he remains quietly on the floor. I then repeat the spell with the others in the room, although they don't seem to have any wounds, and they're surprised but appreciate it. I leave the room and go to heal my IRL sister L., who in the dream lives next door, waking her up in the process. I then go down the hall to find T. again and heal him too.

Me and T. talk for a while, and as he talks his appearance changes. He walks into the kitchen briefly and when he comes back, he's become a different person entirely, and he's joined by another man. They both claim to know me and to have been looking for me for a long time, although they call me by two different names. The one who wasn't T. speaks with a heavy Scottish accent and calls me Jack. As I'm speaking to them, I remember that while I'm lucid, I had some things I wanted to get done, and I try to remember what those were. I decide it was the Task of the Month. (Apparently reading the TOTM thread last night was enough to overrule my personal lucid goals.) I remember that the Task was to ask a DC who your true love or soulmate is, so I ask these guys, who's my true love? They both go silent and look extremely uncomfortable, like that's a question I shouldn't ask. I tell them any answer is fine, it's just a task, and I try phrasing it with 'soulmate' instead, but that doesn't get a better response. I feel like their belief that they knew me a long time ago is affecting this, that it's part of what makes this a question they don't want to answer, so I decide to go outside and find someone else to ask.

Outside my IRL home, I'm appreciating how vivid it is. There's a chill in the air, a nicely realistic touch, and there's no snow on the ground, which is a great change. I walk off the driveway and onto the main road, and for some reason I feel like that's an important dividing line, particularly when lucid. My attention is caught by a squirrel across the road standing on its front legs, craning its neck to look up at the sky; and then by the body of a dead deer at the 3-way crossroads. I believe (incorrectly) that this dead deer is always here at the crossroads when I dream, and I think about going over to talk to it, but on second thought the idea makes me a little uncomfortable - I think it'll follow me home. Better not. There's a rock just beside my driveway with some words carved into it, and I start to go over to read it, but a car drives by. I stop it and walk over to the driver, ask her who my true love is. Again, she goes silent and gives me the impression that this is a question I shouldn't ask. I decide to go for a ride, and I climb into the car through the window.

Inside the car, the woman I spoke to isn't the driver at all, she's a passenger. There's six women in the car, all of them working in the fashion industry or as models, and with the exception of the woman I'd spoken to and the driver, the rest of them resent someone who's not part of the industry hitching a ride. No one except the driver knows where they're going - it's a surprise. The driver's name is Audrey, she's someone big in the fashion industry, wearing large dark sunglasses. I ask Audrey who my true love is, and as an answer, she produces a piece of lined paper with something written on it, crumples it up, and throws it out the window. She's not throwing it away - she means for me to reach out my window and catch it. I'm too slow, I just miss it. But I decide - no, I didn't miss it. I caught it. I announce out loud, "Got it!" I 'remember' the feel of catching it, and then I draw my hand back inside the car. No good, my hand's empty. The women in the car look at me oddly for claiming to have caught the paper when I hadn't. I try the hand-behind-the-back summoning trick, but still nothing.

Since I keep failing to get an answer to this question, I decide I'll switch to a different Task of the Month. For some reason I believe that the other basic task is to kiss a DC. I stop to think about that for a minute, since I'm sure that can't be right, that's too basic, but then I decide it's meant as something simple to stick with a Valentine's Day theme. (Was I mixing it up with the kiss-a-zombie one? I had just raised someone from the dead, shame I didn't follow up on that. ) Although I'm not sure how I got here, I'm now following Audrey into an elevator with one of the other women from the car. I ask Audrey if I can kiss her, and she says sure. I can't remember what happened after that, but next thing I remember we're leaving the elevator and I'm thinking that didn't work. We're now standing in a large room with a mirror and a couch, and I ask the other woman, a slightly chubby, very beautiful blonde, if I can kiss her. She says okay. We're standing in front of the mirror, and I'm surprised to see the mirror's actually reflecting her and the room we're in (though not me, as usual), and her reflection looks exactly like her, although it's watching us instead of mirroring her actions. I lean in to kiss her and close my eyes, but perhaps because I was distracted by the mirror, I find I've wound up kissing her reflection instead, through the glass. I move us away from the mirror, focus on the feeling of her shoulder under my hand, and try again. I'm too focused on comparing this to real life and trying to improve the realism to enjoy it much - the feeling of her lips themselves is accurate, but that's about it. I'm thinking that this sort of thing really doesn't translate to dreams well, and I should focus on doing things that aren't possible IRL. So I remember the 'other' (actual) task of the month: I step back and ask her if she knows who my true love is. Again, she seems uncomfortable with the question and doesn't answer. Then I think that asking someone you've just kissed to tell you about your true love may be a little tactless.

There's a cat by the mirror now, yowling. Two people who work here rush over to it to try to get it to be quiet. On the other side of the room, there's a whole row of mirrors and a hairdresser standing in front of them, talking about originality or lack thereof in fashion shows. I lose lucidity and follow him, listening to him for a few moments before I wake up.

I'm in a house which contains a dollhouse which is an exact model of the house, even containing a miniature version of the dollhouse itself, which in turn is a perfect model with its own miniature dollhouse inside, and so on; the dream camera zooms in through what seems to be an infinite series of nested houses, and I say "It's recursive."

Inside one of these levels of houses, I can hear a woman's voice singing, not a recording or anything professional, it's the way someone might sing to themselves around the house, going "la la la" instead of words. I'm in a hall, passing by a woman's bedroom where there are a few cardboard boxes open on the floor, one with old Victorian clothes spilling out, and a mirror in a gold frame. The mirror catches my attention and I go lucid. I'd been thinking earlier (while awake) that mirrors are often linked with magic and summoning in my dreams and I'd intended to try using that deliberately the next time I had a lucid dream, so I look at this one now and try to summon Julia, who I'd expect to be the easiest character for my mind to summon. After a moment I see a woman moving in the mirror in the distance, too far away to see much, but it's not Julia. I start to try again with a slightly different approach, but then think that I'm a little too close to waking up for this. I lose visuals.

I 'wake up' in bed and reach for a pen to jot this down, but I drop it and have to get out of bed to look for it. I'm irritated by this, thinking I'm going to forget the dream - then I wake up again.

Several fragments based on Tolkien, involving hooded figures, the statement that "No (name of hooded figures) will survive Aragorn" which has some vague association with atheism, and a few scenes in which Aragorn is either fighting the hooded figures alongside one or two other humans, or calmly talking to them, and either way shown to be in complete control.

As Rumpelstiltskin, I'm stopping by the door of one of the storerooms. Belle's inside, talking. The room's mostly filled with straw, but it also holds a mirror, and she's using it to speak with the image of an old woman sitting in a chair and knitting, a woman I know. The woman's giving her advice. I'm pleased - partially at seeing the two of them get along well, but mostly at seeing Belle making use of my magic. They stop talking and Belle turns around and sees me watching them, and I feign disinterest.

As FK's Nick, I'm stretched out on the floor of my apartment, talking to someone and using a laptop on a low table to search for something; the side of me that's a disembodied observer associates this with the semi-lucid search techniques used in other recent dreams.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A vampire watching a woman turn, which at this stage mostly consists of becoming more physical, much like the old movies - not sexual specifically, just more aware of the senses. He's saying something about how there's no need to believe in a divine plan to explain the way they find each other again and again.

Mina and Grayson are talking in a train car; she says she loves him, and the moment she does, he's flung by some invisible force out of the car, into the next, which is filling rapidly with water, up to the ceiling. He's thinking something regretful about Lucy.

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.

I'm standing in front of a row of elevators with reflective gold-colored doors, and in a sort of voiceover I'm hearing what sounds like an article about a scientific study of reflections. There's a lot of information that sounded reasonable at the time but didn't actually translate to waking life - for example, your eyes perceive this angle of motion and expect an impact that never comes, causing tension, and resulting in your attention focusing on this or that minor detail. As I get into the elevator, the article is saying something about there being two different ways to think of reflections which both carry different benefits, and it goes on to explain the two ways. I find this interesting and decide to experiment with switching to the other way of thinking, which is viewing your reflection as a separate person, even expecting it to talk. Acting on the article's advice, I address my reflection on the mirrored elevator wall. My reflection's a great deal taller than me, and completely covered by a hooded cloak. I find I like him - or it - a great deal.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Some vague fragment involving briefly passing through an exhibit to do with planets, and something about Artemis.

There's a woman who's determined to hold onto the hand of some monstrously deformed figure who keeps trying to shy away. She's thinking about how she's been through some kinds of transformations in the past herself, so it takes more than some monstrous appearance to frighten her off. The monstrous one's thinking something about Cain, and something about two angels, one in favor of allowing the other's creations - humans - to develop variations of themselves (which is to say, to have children); the one who created them was opposed; and now he's found his downfall in a relationship with a human, which wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for that decision, allowing the humans to develop into new variations.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man who's been running through the halls of a house and now reaches a dead end, a study with a portrait, which I briefly thought was a mirror. A man who's been following him at a walking pace comes into the room and starts talking about the portrait, and about the history of the man in the painting, who was - is? - a vampire. He says, "They forgive him the very thing he (something)," and then something about "fell." Meanwhile the man who'd been running is stumbling around the room with his hand over his stomach like he's been injured, saying "Please!" There's a resemblance between him and the portrait.

Fragments: Something composed of metal loops that I take for an art piece, believing it's something to do with male and female; instead I'm told it's a spell for godhood. A scene with a teacher and student. A reference to 'maenad.'

Classic movie monsters. The dream was in black and white, and featured Bela Lugosi's Dracula and Lon Chaney Jr's Wolfman. Through some plan of Dracula's, Talbot winds up becoming a vampire, while Drac becomes the wolfman instead, and essentially human when it's not a full moon. Talbot's not thrilled with any of this. There's a scene in which Dracula springs Talbot from an asylum through the window, before the monster-type switch; and afterward, a confrontation in a swamp in which Dracula is talking about world domination, and how the ability to appear human was required.

I'd been talking to someone about a career change I was considering, when I realize I'm still wearing a change of clothes I acquired earlier in a dream. At first, I think it a marvel, a thing in a dream that carried over into real life - but later on, as I'm sitting around a dinner table having a boring conversation, I realize that actually it must be an indication that I'm still dreaming. I become lucid and immediately start floating in the air; I stopped paying attention to the other characters in the room and didn't see them after this point. Initially I intended to go outside and continue flying, but then I decide to try something new this time. I decide to summon a god - Apollo, since summoning his light for an anti-nightmare technique has been very effective, but he's yet to show up in person. I'm also thinking his association with trance states might carry over into lucid dreaming. I close my eyes so that I can't see the room, and I focus on him, call him. Nothing happens. I eventually give up, open my eyes again. I think a little more structure may be helpful, and I should probably keep my eyes open; I remember a time when a dream fell apart completely after I stopped focusing on visuals.

I go to a mirror, but instead of calling Apollo again, this time I decide to call up an image of my ideal future self (possibly related to the non-lucid talk of career changes earlier). Several options appear one at a time, and I reject each of them. Many of them bear very little physical resemblance to me, and most are wearing glasses (which I don't need). Eventually I settle on one that I approve of (though why I approved of this particular one, I don't know); he looks like something out of the 1700s. When I turn away from the mirror, he's standing next to me. He seems a little confused by this, but he's just here for me to get a more detailed look at him. But while he's here anyway, we decide to fuck. Eventually I remember my original intention to summon a god and I decide that's more interesting than what is essentially dream masturbation, so I leave him on the floor by the mirror and go back to the table. I sit down, then remember I didn't bother to get dressed again; I decide I'd rather have clothes on for this. I try to summon clothing by just deciding I am wearing clothes, but this doesn't work; I think perhaps it doesn't work only because I can clearly see and feel myself not wearing clothes, so I'm trying to overrule the evidence of my senses. My shirt's by the table, but my pants are all the way across the room, so I just pick up the shirt and try to extend it, to use it as a source of materials to create something new. This seems to be working, but very slowly. I don't care to wait; I give up and just walk back across the room for my pants, and start thinking about the 'rules' of dreams - thinking that perhaps it's better to work with what's already in the environment rather than try to create new things from scratch all the time; less wasteful, less effort. I become aware that I'm starting to wake up.

Monday: Forced into playing some game in order to save my father's life, using mandrake led to victory. People raiding a house, breaking things or stripping things from the walls and carrying them away. The words "los soños del amos." A dance performance featuring various actors - Biehn, Paxton, Goldstein (as Diamondback), Henriksen showing up later offstage - arranged by a woman trying to use this performance to prove her worth; an old money type applauds the performance, technically a success, but succeeding here just means she's got the chance to fork over even more money than she already has, she's being used.

Tuesday: A young girl who'd been in some kind of trouble runs into a reporter named Nicholas who promises to help her, but when she sees him in sunlight his eyes resemble a snake's. He tells her that if she succeeds in becoming human, he'll lose interest in her struggles, and then he'd probably kill her. A religion based on Alice 19th. A woman arrives from another world; I've seen this play out before, but in that version of events there was a man with her, this time she's alone; knowing what's coming, I kneel before her, ask her to spare my life, which doesn't seem likely to work until I point out how little she knows about this world, and promise to guide her to the halls of power; she relents and accepts. Elijah speaking to Rebekah, telling her he has plans to meet someone in a dream at sun-up, which amuses him since he's just now become capable of walking in the light and yet is going to spend the time sleeping anyway.

Wednesday: A large wolf in the woods, my cat cuddling up to it. A very small man is sent to pick a fight with a woman at a bar. He fails miserably. She talks to him about his daughter, says she couldn't believe what had happened, when the girl had turned out to be a witch after all and was snatched away by her mother - a 'good witch', who uses a different variety of magic than these two at the bar. It's implied the daughter's been taken to be used as a tool. She offers her help for a rescue mission, but he suspects she'd like to use his daughter as a tool, too.

Thursday: A young woman and a friend, trapped in a maze of rooms cluttered with objects - statues, tapestries, things you'd expect in a museum - searching for one that holds a specific design which is her only means of escape, but it's a needle in a haystack situation. She picks up a statue and reminisces about when her mother used to fill her home with things like this - as she thinks that, she finally spots the design she's looking for, a tile set into the floor. The mirror above it ripples, and she's aware that she'll be leaving her friend behind here, but she doesn't have time to wait for him, she escapes through the mirror, back into the real world. Once on the other side, the mirror breaks. She says to someone on the other side that her friend is still trapped there, but this person tells her "Abby, all your life there's been no one there" - no one else in the real world has any memories of that person she believed to have been her lifelong friend.

Friday: Meeting Olivia Atta Clemens for the first time at a party in Rome. NBC's version of Dracula is having an argument with someone referred to as his master, regarding the use of the phrase "your majesty," and people going missing.

Saturday: Nightmare in which some creature embodying darkness is crouched above me, dispelled with Apollo trick, after which the dream ceased being a nightmare but I become concerned that the creature had simply moved on to the nearest target. I'm chasing someone and run into a cop along the way, and at first ask for his help but then decide there's no point, we're in a country where cops don't carry guns. A guy explaining Kaballah annoys me by making cryptic comments about me and fallen angels.

Today:

I'm stowing some papers in a hiding place on the roof; I'm thinking that Lydia (mental connotations of an odd mentor/student relationship with her) will pass through here later, and I'm positioning the papers where she'll be sure to see them, but trapping them in such a way that she won't be able to retrieve them in the little time she'll have up here. A scene with Lydia and I entering a small room where I've been holding Boone, her husband, captive; I sit down while she talks to him, take off my hat and smooth down my hair - I've got blond hair here. A scene with Lydia in a room crowded with empty picture frames, which used to hold pictures of her - she's aware they belong to (either my character or her husband, I can't remember which).

A setting based on ancient Rome, I've been having a dispute with someone over a slave, one of my charioteers, and I'm thinking about this dispute as I watch the race. Something about one of the chariots or racers catches my eye, seems odd - then there's an 'accident.' Afterwards, I'm standing over a slave who broke several bones in that accident.

A series of underground tunnels, and a group of vampire hunters. I've found a dead-end tunnel directly underneath their current camp, and I'm crouching on the ceiling, listening to them. One, I believe he's the leader, has been threatening one of the others, but the one being threatened has just walked away from the argument, and from the camp, saying he's going off to eat. I'm slightly concerned that he'll come down into this tunnel - since it's a dead end, there would be no way to avoid meeting him - but I don't think it's very likely. The ones who stayed are still talking about him, and from what they're saying I realize that he also eats people, but that he's in some sense still human. The others are concerned that they may have to kill him one day.

A woman's talking to some kind of spirit in a mirror, something that's teaching her magic. Watching this, it strikes me that the stories about vampires and mirrors come from the same place as this creature.

Based on AHS, 3 witches (including the supreme and her daughter), the daughter's blind, the other two are each missing one eye. Someone makes a blind-leading-the-blind joke. I'm thinking about the Graeae passing an eye between them.

Partners looking for a serial killer had three suspects in mind, but tracking them down has ruled each of them out. One of detectives is approached by a woman who believes her husband, Darryl, may be the killer. The detective ignores her, having heard many claims like this; but ignoring this one is a mistake, the woman's claim is true.

Four teenage girls have barricaded themselves in a room, two of them trying to protect the other two. There's some form of cult that's taken root in the town, there's an image of a girl in a bathtub covered in blood related to this; and the cult's summoning these two girls now, but they need the girls to come to them, they can't enter the room themselves. A girl from the cult appears outside the door as a sort of delegate, to talk.

Dorian Gray is talking to someone about the house he wants to leave, and the way memories seem have ingrained themselves in the very walls: the scent of a decomposing body even though he's long since disposed of it, the sound of music on the stairs although the musician's gone.

Fragments: A guy preparing to move on, saying "Can I borrow this map?"; a gallery/cafe belonging to an art group called The Future People or something similar; a runway show based on Sleep No More; a newly-made vampire using mantras to learn dreamwalking, using it to watch over a friend, another vampire, who's being held hostage.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm with a group of people stealing some huge metal sphere, but as we're driving off with it, we lose it, and we circle back and argue over where it could be. I catch sight of myself in the rear view mirror and realize one of my front teeth is loose, to the point of falling out. I'm thinking I'm going to have to see a dentist, which annoys me. I notice all the teeth on that side are loose.

I 'wake up' in my IRL home and go to the bathroom mirror to check my teeth after that dream. I spit out long strings of gritty, bloody material, textured like sand. I'm thinking it's good to get that out.

This werewolf kid in human form is sitting in a car, tied up, with blood covering his face. There's a blond girl in the seat behind him who didn't believe his stories about werewolves until just now, as a werewolf in wolf form leans in through the door, right into the kid's face. The girl starts screaming.

I'm dropping off that same werewolf kid at this mansion, and there are three men standing on the steps out front to meet us. I'm saying to them, "Are you all Adrian's?" Adrian's the wolf kid's name, I'm asking if he turned them, which I'm hoping is not the case. And it isn't; they introduce themselves to me, and it turns out the house holds some organization of witches or magicians or something of that variety. They're all very friendly. One of them, this heavyset old queen, mentions that he's single, and I'm amused. When I introduce myself, I add, "And I'd have to be invited in," just so we're all clear.

I'm walking home after a storm, a few trees and power lines have been knocked down. But there are also a lot of trees that look as if they were cut down, and I'm thinking it's as if the town tried to get into the woods to clean up something after the storm, and they simply cut down anything in their way.

I have to walk over a downed power line to get to my property, I stop at the mailbox, and as I pick up the newspaper I/Quincey think about Mina and how calm and still she's been, and I think - in words, as if this were something I was writing out - "that's when you really have to stay with people. But I couldn't."

Mina's sitting on the sofa, perfectly straight and upright and with her hands folded in her lap, and when I drop the newspaper beside her she doesn't move, only smiles a little. I'm reluctant to disturb her further but there's something I have to show her, something I've learned about the way we think, her and I and anyone else caught in this transition; it will upset her, but all information we can gain from our condition is something that can be used as a weapon. I fetch a white sheet and silver hand mirror and I shove them at her, apologizing as I do so; I hold the sheet up behind her and ask her to take up the mirror. I/the dreamer as disembodied observer wonder what I/Quincey am planning to show her with those - surely not just our lack of reflection, that can't be new information. No, I/Quincey am thinking something about pattern or texture.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A man who's risen to political or religious power - either way, a man who's gained sway over a small community, virtually overnight. His collaborator is disgusted with him.

A girl yells after Freddy Krueger as he's forced by something else to retreat into the woods, "You're a real (some insult)!"

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I wake up sitting in a chair in a hospital waiting room, I note the time as "sometime between 2300 and 0800." I had a friend do an autopsy on a case I'm working, off the record. The victim had a demon eye transplant in his forehead, and sometimes those things go bad. But my friend at the hospital found no more than the usual amount of decay around the eye. I'm looking out the window at the billboards you can see around the city, there's one with an image of a guy with a demon eye, another one directly across from the hospital with a picture of a woman on it, and I'm wondering exactly how large these things are in terms of a percentage of your field of vision; most of the time I hardly consciously notice them, but how much of an impact are they really having on people? I'm remembering a line from a book, about a woman who'd just arrived in the modern age and was pleased by the sense of desire everywhere. (Accurately remembered line, the book was Clive Barker's Weaveworld.)

The zombie boy from the American Horror Story series is sitting on the floor, focusing on the burnt, hollowed-out eye sockets of his rapist's body. He fits the head back into place, then looks up at the witch girl who brought him back to life, who looks sickened, and he says, cheerfully, "Doctor!", like he's calling her to go to work and pull off another resurrection.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A young woman sitting with a book is talking to another woman sitting in a curtained bed, saying "Gonna wave you in. Stop me if (something)." The one in bed acknowledges this, and the one with the book passes her hand over the other woman's face, then starts reading a series of words from the book that sound random to me - "If, old, some..." As she speaks, the one in bed gets purple-tinted flashes of another person/place, too brief to make out anything but getting longer and more stable with every word spoken from the book.

I'm standing at a crossroads of a low-income neighborhood out on the edge of the city, reading a sign that says Cheese Road (or Lane or Street or something), and pleased to have found the place from that vision in the last scene. A car drives up to the stop sign very slowly, I find it suspicious, but it drives off in the other direction.

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.