Carabas

Two middle-aged spinsters are visiting Rumpelstiltskin/Gold just before attending some event, but he's busy with a delivery of some sort. The room where they wait for him holds a collection of various objects behind glass, and as they look around, one of them says, "Richer than the (some family name beginning with A) brothers!" The objects behind the glass are personal mementos from over the centuries, arranged and displayed in such a way as to look like a collection of history - playbills and tickets, a photo from a political protest that changed history, old forms of currency, all neatly labeled with places and dates and short descriptions. But I'm looking at the objects as a disembodied observer with Rumpelstiltskin's mindset, with fond memories of the actress depicted on that playbill, and a woman at that protest, and the profit I made when that country changed currencies. (Although I'm thinking of it as a collection of memories that stretches back centuries, the oldest items I actually see are only from the 1800s.) I think to myself, 'and I could sell it, if I chose.' As if convincing myself that I could part with it all, if I had to.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragments - someone involved in some industry that's often glamorized in movies, intelligence or organized crime, mentally contrasting his actual day to day life with the ridiculous movies. A rich and powerful woman who's sleeping with the hired killer who works for her. Overdue library books, a trilogy by an author who's written 156 books, these ones with covers showing caves with stalactites that remind me of fangs. Rumpelstiltskin again, spending a summer at a country estate belonging to a brother and sister he knows, looking out the window and feeling someone's suffering, the potential for a deal; following it, and finding someone in the garden, reading a journal that had belonged to Belle.

Someone's telling me that two serpents, one that spits fire and the other water, have gone missing from their shrine. I say they're taking a trip, "naught to worry."

Rumpelstiltskin's hit upon a new-to-him form of magic, something that appears as a white light when he's working on it, and it's some major revelation - but he can't pursue it unless he cuts himself off from distractions like 'the boy.'

Grayson's come across Mina and Harker in some danger and got them out of it by offering them a ride home in his carriage. Now they're discussing a message he's sent someone to deliver, and Mina's objecting to sending this messenger into danger on their behalf. Grayson asks what danger she's referring to. Why, the war, of course. They're not far from the battlefield; that's part of why they were so grateful for his rescue. Throughout this conversation, Harker has become increasingly uncomfortable and is beginning to regret accepting the ride. Mina, sitting across from the other two, is noting that Grayson's in shadows so dark he can't be seen.

Lucy in a different carriage, with Lady Jayne riding outside. Jayne says to her, "Don't you think you had better go?" "No. My choice is to stay." "Atta girl."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A species of small creatures which, as they grow up, take on masters and will instinctively fight the servants of other masters if left alone together - which often results in fighting their own siblings, sometimes to the death. Later, when they grow into masters themselves, they see the other side of that, with the responsibility and grief of killing. (The dream logic was inconsistent about who was actually the one doing the killing, the servant or the master. The main point was violence without thought of consequences in the young, servant version, contrasted with the grief, guilt, and sense of responsibility in the older, master version, and a sense of circular time or mythic time, coming back around to the same event but from a different perspective.)

I'm breaking into the ruins of an old and isolated church, with a cat, carrying a candle; I climb up the stone wall and up onto the second floor, which is mostly open to the sky. However, just as I get there, I see the property owner returning home across the fields in the distance, in a dogsled. I extinguish the candle I was carrying, but it's too late, he's already spotted the light and is turning this way. I climb back down the wall and run for it. However, I'm on foot and he's got dogs; my odds of outrunning him aren't good.

We cross a river, and the scene changes to 3rd person; now it's a group of children who are running from him, and they dive beneath the water and stay there. As a 3rd person observer, I'm thinking about legends of creatures that can't cross running water, and about the way the scene changed when I hit the water, the river acting as an event boundary.

A party where I've been looking for a woman, a dressmaker, known for a dress that resembles the sea. I find her, an elderly woman, and I ask her about that dress, which pleases her, but which isn't the subject I really want to talk to her about. We're interrupted by another woman, someone I know, and the two of them go off to talk in another room, behind a closed door. I eavesdrop from just outside. I hear them mention a Joanna - a dead woman who I keep hearing about, someone who left a widower behind, someone powerful. I'm caught listening, and so go away without hearing the rest of the conversation.

Rumpelstiltskin. I have some guests, people here to do business, but I've just turned away from them and am talking to Belle, showing her the potion I'm preparing and saying "It's designed to attract." The scene switches to 3rd person, and I note that Rumpelstiltskin loses the showman routine he uses with the others when he talks to Belle; I'm thinking something abut the length of time Belle's been around and how they interact, which is something that Rumpelstiltskin is feeling a little bewildered about. He heads up to the tower to get in touch with someone through some magical means. "Don't go listening," he says to Belle. She's indignant - of course she wouldn't!

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Based on Carmen - she's dancing, I'm sitting in a chair watching her and thinking about the past, about killing for her, feeling sober. (This felt like it was a variation on the servant creatures from before - as if there was something I was trying to work out but wasn't quite getting, so the dream was rephrasing.)

Fragments - song lyrics misusing the word indigent ("all the charm indigent in you" - I assume it was aiming for 'inherent'); and later, a fragment involving a tribe called Indogen, immortal creatures that were 'judged unworthy by god' and sentenced to stay in this land (wherever the dream was currently set) instead of continuing on their 'journey to the sun.'

An apocalypse scenario; I've run through this scenario two times already and failed both times. First, I have to leave this building quickly, and avoid getting involved with this group of people; that was the mistake I made last time. Second, I can't forget to (something to do with a virus and immunity or a vaccine or similar); that was the mistake I made the first time around. Third, I have to track down three men: one's a scientist whose theories are closely related to the events that are about to happen; the second is a specific doctor.

When I leave the building through the back door, the storyline changes; I'm caught up in some kind of street performance going on just outside, and a woman in the crowd sees me and recognizes me, and comes up to thank me for something I'd done for her in the past involving her ring.

Another apocalypse scene then: a woman who's carrying her son, looks around 3, is begging me to take him with me.

Rumpelstiltskin. There's a horrible smell coming from somewhere in the castle, and finally I've found the source: there's a dead body, someone who broke into the castle and got himself caught in one of the traps designed to stop such intruders from stealing my things. Belle and I have been calling back and forth as we were trying to figure out where that smell was coming from, and I'm pleased I found it before she did. I call to her now, telling her that I've found it and am taking care of it, without letting her know what it was. I magic it away.

Julia's ranting to me about something to do with the news, full of righteous anger. There's some important event going on in the world, some tragedy or disaster or outrage, and she doesn't feel they're covering it well; she's specifically talking about CNN's failure to report on real issues. I'm happy about all this - happy about her righteous anger, that is, not the tragedy or whatever it was - I love how she cares so deeply about these events that I've come to see as commonplace.

There's a girl, a witch, stopping in a school hallway to stand before the memorial to a recently-dead classmate, covered in flowers and candles. The dead girl was also a witch, although this isn't common knowledge, so although she didn't know the dead girl well, she takes this very personally. She's thinking about how she has something that belongs to the girl's killer, and about the girl's mother, and about poison. The candles burn down to stubs as she looks at them, and various other things around her start to catch fire; a boy who was close with the dead girl had been watching nearby, and when he sees this, he starts to run away. She stops him, corners him. He asks what she is; she says he'll never know, but that since he failed his friend, now there's someone else he has to protect - her.

A woman is introducing two of her friends to each other outside a mausoleum, introducing one of them by the nickname she calls her, "Little N." It's N's family mausoleum they're standing in front of. N introduces herself as "Anekhet (last name sounds something like Sastemony) - or Little N." From her tone, which is pleasant, it's still clear that the Little N nickname is a name for only this particular friend to use, not the man she's being introduced to. The man introduces himself with a bow as her ancestor and the founder of this town, and a "comocido" - which in the dream seemed to be a word related to suicide or homicide, a word that indicated the specific way in which he was killed, hundreds of years ago. Anekhet is surprised but not particularly thrown by this.

Integra is watching a map showing enemy vessels approaching England, trying to calculate how much time she has left, torn between two objectives, and finally she dispatches Alucard to a certain ship, to destroy it if he doesn't hear otherwise after a certain amount of time. Alucard drops out of the sky onto that ship, and in his head he's intensely focused on the form he needs to take at any given time, it's almost like psyching himself up, or like playing a role.

Wednesday:

Fragments involving a man with a hook for a hand, giving him a hand and taking his hook myself; a witch who was trying to force the hook-man to sleep so that she could somehow influence him in a dream; a prince and his army who arrived on this scene, with no knowledge of anything going on between the witch and the hook-man; and a man with some form of mental connection to the witch, his sister.

A man visiting his wife's family with her, the first time since they were married. The father-in-law's distant and judgmental. He's saying, "You'll have to understand, we only drink old French wines here - Bordeaux," that being where the mother-in-law's from. Inside, the mother-in-law is a tiny woman with long, thick grey hair, very warm and expressive. She asks her son-in-law how his meditation practice is going, and asks if he's getting by okay in New York - which he loves, but she doesn't understand how anyone could enjoy living in cities. She says, "You've been in that city for about a hundred years, but you seem to have left in a good mood." He finds her energy overwhelming.

In a small restaurant, the baker's brought out samples of new doughnuts for everyone to try, I had two, one with a peach filling, the other blueberry, and I was surprised by the taste of the 'blueberry' - it reminds me of pixie stix and sweet tarts and similar childhood candies, not in the sense of being sugary, it's more the type of flavoring those candies use. I comment on it, and someone at the next table asks what this lump in theirs is. I look and point out to them that it's a blueberry. They've never seen a blueberry before?

While walking across a field, I'm explaining to someone what juice is. I wind up having to describe it as crushing something until its external protection breaks down and its liquid insides run out, and I'm trying to figure out how to make it very, very clear to the creature I'm talking to that this is something that should be done only to plants.

As Rumpelstiltskin, I'm in a dream world, talking to an image of Regina that is breaking down and melting after being attacked by someone else, and I'm saying, "This isn't you." Allowing herself to show weakness, I mean. I say it again, then reconsider - it's possible this is one side of her, or even how I think of her. There had been a young girl with her, and now I take the girl by the hand and lead her away, ignoring the image of Regina that's still falling apart.

Someone's telling me they need me to act as a detective. I cut them off, saying, "What, I'm supposed to magically figure out where the dying guy came from?" But I do find some form of trail, scratches on the floor, leading to what seemed like a wall but which must have some kind of opening.

Vampires. I brought two humans to see a friend of mine, I wasn't intending to kill them, and I'm a little annoyed at my friend, but I'm not making any effort to stop him either. He's saying to the humans that he hasn't decided yet whether to kill them or turn them. His fangs dig into his own lip, and he spits blood on the human he's got pinned down, which has a sort of acidic effect. I, the dreamer rather than the character, observe that it's much like the way flies break down their food.

I've been working on a system of cables to allow transportation around an island. It's something two guys had been using on a very small scale on their own property, and I've been working with them to expand it to cover the entire island. I'm mostly doing this to help out a woman I'm in love with who lives in a very remote area, but it's going to benefit everyone on the island. Now I'm looking at the initial stage that's about ready for a test run, and feeling proud, when a troop of soldiers with wings descends out of the sky. Their leader - who I've met before, in a friendlier setting - arrests me on suspicion of killing the king, among others. This is a setup - I know who the actual killer is, and I came to this island in the first place to hunt that person. I'm blaming myself for getting distracted with this side project; if I'd focused solely on my mission, maybe he wouldn't have had time to frame me.

Thursday:

There's a room on a spaceship that's being converted into a sort of swamp. This alien species needed this certain type of room for some cultural reason to do with the sharing of emotions, and so we set it up for him. One of the other aliens, from a different species, says that if humans turn out to be understanding and reasonable, s/he's going to be very disappointed. I say nah, don't worry, no matter how many understanding and reasonable humans you meet, you can always count on a few of us to mess things up, every time.

A group of vampire hunters. A man leading things over the phone; someone who is either a doctor, a former doctor, or simply someone who steals meds from hospitals, refusing to be hurried by the hunters around him; a recording of a man interacting with someone who doesn't show up on video, with viewers arguing that it's definitely faked.

A cop who'd reported various odd cases passes a strange, monstrous-looking guy driving in the other direction.

There's a car crash. This werewolf kid had been running along the road, with a couple guys from school following behind him in a car, shouting at him and trying to catch up. This happens a lot - usually the guys in the car give up, he can run a lot faster than they can drive; and usually when they give up one of them sends him some insulting text message instead. But this time, as he was running, he passed that monstrous-looking guy the cop saw, this is someone he knows and someone who shouldn't be in town; and although he's lost sight of the guys from school, there's no insulting text message this time. He's worried. He turns around and heads back, and finds the car that the guys from school were driving has been run off the road into a field, flipped upside down.

A witch, the werewolf kid's mother, walks up to the car. One of the boys who'd been driving it is dead. The other one's been transformed into a fox. She picks up the fox and talks to him a bit, and tells him she isn't going to restore him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm setting dreams out on a stall in two rows, they're things that look like something between a bubble and a crystal ball. I call to this guy I recognize, I call them unregulated dreams, or unprocessed, unauthorized, some word like that - the point is there's some official approval process dreams are supposed to go through before they can be sold legally, and these ones haven't been through that process. I say to him that I know he wants them for his store. He says something positive but looks conflicted, and he looks over to Rumpelstiltskin, the guy who brought me here and helped me set up the stall.

3rd person, Rumpelstiltskin visiting Belle in a dream, he's smiling and she's saying, "I know you, don't I?" She doesn't remember him, and when she wakes up from these dreams she usually doesn't remember dreaming them; even when she does, she believes he's just an imaginary character in her dream.

She wakes up, and for him that dream had been like taking a break; now it's back to business. He's creating a dream to send to someone else, a red-haired man; he creates it by narrating it out loud as he walks through the woods, following an image of Bae which is part of his own dream. Rumpelstiltskin can't enter the waking world himself right now, so he needs this man to act as a go-between for him; he doesn't bother meeting the man in his dreams directly, he just creates dreams in advance and leaves them behind as messages. Right now, Rumpelstiltskin's not happy with the go-between, he's screwed up one of the previous instructions, so he's making sure this dream will make him wake up crying. As he's narrating the dream and following Bae through the trees, I start hearing music, with the lyrics "After you forget."

I'm floating in the sea with a small oxygen tank and no other equipment. The water's clear and empty - I'm wishing I could be snorkeling on a reef (unusually, there's no visual image to go with this thought; it was blatantly inspired by this site, though) and thinking about freediving (this thought did have images to go with it). Back on the shore, I get into a hot spring with some IRL acquaintances who are talking about drinking, and about a storm coming.

'Julia' has reshaped herself into 'Jules' and I'm meeting him at a university cafe. He tells me he led a rebellion. They all died. Now he's lost his taste for bloodshed, except in the comfort of our own bed. I tell him he's much better at this than I am - whenever I've tried being female I've wound up overcompensating with strange obsessions for guns or fast cars.

OUAT's Rumpelstiltskin, Belle, and three fairies are sitting around a cramped table discussing storming-the-castle plans, theoretically - but the conversation defaults to the fairies badmouthing him for screwing things up in their absence. Belle leaves to go speak to two people locked up in a dungeon, at least one of whom she'd put there herself after he tried to attack her, and her attitude towards him has an odd lack of awareness of being locked up as a bad thing; she's spent so much time locked up in one way or another herself she sees it as normal.

Setsuna/Alexiel speaking to Sara/Belle, saying that after freeing her from 'beyond the end of time,' why do you think of death.

A vague fragment about the three main characters of Zelda leads into me being told by a girl (presumably representing C., this dream is blatantly inspired by her, I've never played this series) that normally she'd recommend someone start with a different game, but for me, the characters and storyline in this one are perfect. On screen, the villain closely resembles Rothbart. The game so far has been one long cutscene, to the point that my IRL sister watching with us (who presumably appeared because of Rothbart - I associate that movie with both her and C.) is surprised to be told it's a game and not a movie. When I look back to the screen again, it looks like a Disney movie.

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.)

There's some flyers warning about the invisible people from the community just outside of town, causing trouble. I'm annoyed at the whole us vs. them attitude people always have when they talk about those guys, just going to make things worse between us. But as I walk down towards main street, where a parade is going on, I see a few people from that community outside of town, except they're painted with this strange dark camouflage, makes them look like an oil slick. They're trashing the cars parked along the street. No one else notices. My perspective switches to third person - they're invisible. No one else can see them, the cars seem to just break on their own. Back to my perspective - in the parade, two horses are walking past us, and a camouflaged guy jumps onto one of them and digs his hands into its skull until it cracks and blood runs down. The dream switches to third person, so the guy is invisible, and the dream's focus follows the horse as it rears and falls, and the panicking people around it.

Memory gap, but with the impression that things got increasingly nightmarish from there, a fragment about a cabin with a door leading out onto darkness, until at some point I do the light-of-Apollo trick, thinking that it worked last time I had a nightmare so might as well try it again, and that clears things up, but also wakes me up.

(It had only been half an hour since I went to bed. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: OUAT's Mad Hatter chatting with "Joker," a similar Mad Hatter type character but with a playing card style red-and-black costume.

A man riding in the back of a limo is yelling at his driver to turn around. The driver isn't listening. Finally, the driver does turn the car around, and then stops it - not because of the man's threats, but because they've reached their destination. The man in the back of the limo jumps out of the car, but then realizes he recognizes the place where they've stopped.

He's at the gate to a mansion, a place he's been before. The owner of the mansion is just driving up opposite, and when the owner sees this man standing outside his home, he stops the car and gets out, pissed off. The guy who'd been in the limo has made a few comments in the past about the mansion owner's "perfect wife" which were meant innocently but were taken badly, and also a comment about how he thinks he's going to die in that mansion, which the mansion owner interpreted as an intent to buy/steal that mansion away from him. The owner only recently acquired this mansion, and this wealth.

As he's yelling, I, as a disembodied observer, am noting that he isn't looking good. His eyes are paler, he's looking a little scruffy, and in general, increasingly devil-ish - right on schedule. The rider in the limo certainly thinks of him as the Devil, exactly as we wanted, but the man himself isn't aware of the way he's being manipulated and transformed due to the Faustian bargains he's made, he's completely unaware of any supernatural influence.

A truck driving past crashes into the side of the Devil-figure's car and breaks the mirror. Attention caught, the Devil-in-the-making turns away from the guy with the limo, reaches into the truck and grabs the guy inside - a tall, skinny man with curly red hair, and a strong smell of coal. The cab is littered with cigarette butts and many, many matchbooks from the place where the Devil-figure's wife works.

Fragment: A father paying his daughter to take the boat out at a certain time, the creation of an alibi.