• Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views




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    Carabas

    1. Dead, undead, and the apocalypse

      by , 12-12-2013 at 11:45 PM
      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.
    2. Fma

      by , 10-21-2013 at 08:56 PM
      3rd person, Julia's fighting something from a distance and thinking that at this rate she'll run out of supplies. She's thinking about trying to start a dialogue.

      Loosely FMA-based: I/Mustang am skimming a file Julia/Hawkeye wrote, something private or at least not intended for me to read. The text's very small and I don't bother reading it in detail, but it has to do with problems she saw in the military. There's photos with it, mostly pictures of us and someone else who'd joined up with us when we were younger; the last picture is of our whole unit on a train, out of uniform. Unlike the text, they're all positive images.

      On that train, when that last photo was taken. I'm waking up and realizing me and Winry fell asleep sitting up, she's wound up leaning against me, the table in front of us is covered in papers, diagrams, there's a bowl of something next to me that's gone cold. Switches to 3rd person, showing us and the rest of the unit, some other people who've been working with us, and Julia/Hawkeye sitting a little apart. She's looking around at all of us and feeling fond but conflicted: she's always had to stay a little aloof, because she can't let us find out she's working against us.
    3. Coral reefs, failed rebellions, dungeons, and a dream composed entirely of someone else's tastes

      by , 09-16-2013 at 06:54 PM
      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.
    4. Nightmare resulting in brief lucid, basilisk coat and unicorn horn.

      by , 09-05-2013 at 06:49 PM
      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.)
    5. 'And it was better that the beloved behold the tainted cities of Mephisto dreaming.'

      by , 08-25-2013 at 07:30 PM
      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.)
    6. Egypt, undergrads, True Blood, Julia, and valerian root.

      by , 08-22-2013 at 08:22 PM
      3rd person. Tradition dictates the pharaohs of this dynasty marry on the first day of the new year for symbolic purposes, but his intended bride is tired of waiting. She cuts her leg with a knife and lets the blood run down into the dirt, a ritual attempt to soothe the drought the land is going through with her own life; since she isn't yet royalty, this is all she can do. Her intended husband watches this and decides to break with tradition and hurry the wedding. However, there's an incident where the couple goes on a voyage with their servants and attendants, and a woman is seen waiting outside at night to meet a lover in secret - it may have been one of the servant girls, but a rumor starts that it was the intended queen.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm a student in a small class of maybe 10 undergrads, taught by Mr. G., a favorite IRL high school teacher, in a room based on the chapel building at that high school. We're giving presentations, and as I go back to my seat afterwards, I manage to knock over the display that holds up the TV monitor. I catch it and try to put it back to rights while the next person is talking but fail miserably, I think I broke something. One of the other students comes to help, this short geeky guy who does something very complex with the display, and I just stand back to watch. Turns out he's really, really good with his hands, I'm kind of into it. That was unexpected. I start talking to him and he mentions that he's got some hobby that involves building things, which seems pretty cool to me since I'm pretty much useless at anything practical, but he looks like I'm making him nervous so I back off.

      But when the scene changes to show me back at my apartment (doesn't resemble anywhere I've lived IRL - colorful and cluttered, deep blue walls, hanging plants and vines in every corner), he's come along with me and my friends, or roommates, I don't know who these DCs are meant to be but we're close. As we walk in the door, the short/geeky/unexpectedly hot DC is saying to one of them, this blonde girl with all these little braids in her hair, "You're not on the drain, are you?" which is apparently some kind of drug. "I would never," she says, acting all offended - waking me can't tell if she's serious or not, either way dream me thinks it's funny. We came back here to get high anyway.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'd been flying down through the levels of some mansion and heading outside, planning my night, weighing the appeal of being alone vs being seen, but when I fly out the door, True Blood's Ginger is at the gate. She wants to come back to work at the club. She'd taken maternity leave but lost the kid, and tried to come back to the club pretty much immediately afterward, but the boss told her to take the paid time off anyway - I don't know why she's so desperate to come back, she doesn't work for tips so the money's the same. But she convinces me to let her in, and she tells me where to find the key to the gate. I go get it, but it's got some kind of trap - when I uncover the key, a dart shoots out and hits Ginger.

      Flashback. First time I'd met Ginger, she'd been hysterical, claiming someone, a priest, had been kidnapped by these two guys I knew well and was being held in their barn. The guys tell me the priest was there, but perfectly fine. Giving a sermon, in fact.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      3rd person, following Julia. She's waiting by a statue at the gate to a city park, sometime around the turn of the 19th/20th century, and she works in a country estate as a maid or a nanny or a governess or something - anyway, she's just come into the city for the day. She's meant to be meeting one of the other servants there, but the woman she's meeting is late. Julia doesn't really mind, it's helped her make a decision actually. She's been thinking about how much fun she had on an earlier outing with me, just watching (??? something involving birds, seemed like a very ordinary everyday event for most people but something she hadn't done before), and thinking about the drab grey dress she's wearing, and always wears, covering her ankles, and generally thinking about taking chances and breaking out of her shell and so on. She stops waiting for her friend and, thinking about how much she's got to do and counting up how much money she has with her, she first goes to buy postage and mail a letter she'd already written but hadn't decided whether or not to send until now.

      Her thoughts about money derail the storyline - a guy at the door of a restaurant convinces her to step inside and she finds unexpected fees piling up on her.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      Just a fragment of dialogue (phone call woke me up): "-chance to take hold. Valerian root," in a male voice, possibly mine.
    7. Sliding scale of Supernatural morality

      by , 08-18-2013 at 11:25 PM
      I'm playing the role of Dean, and I'm tired of listening to the way the demon wearing our father's face is talking about Sammy. The Fallen, the man in the white suit - that's really the way you things see him, isn't it. That's not him. That was never him.

      Different time, same character, similar rant about morality and our role in the world. Except this time I seem to have worked myself around to the opposite point, that by trying to destroy monsters we've become monstrous ourselves, and I'm tired and bitter and when I'm done talking Cas says with this look of revelation, "damn, we are evil!" He's laughing, and I agree. "Yeah, Cas. You too." And I shoot him. That's been a long time coming. The guy we'd been hunting down escaped during this, but he's arrested by the cops outside. Julia's tied to the chair where he left her, and I look at her and wonder if we can still separate her from the evil thing possessing her - I think of it as a part of her.

      Earlier dreams and fragments: attempting to get to a Halloween event and running into one problem after another, with a few IRL people and places appearing; and a protest or strike at a memorial service.
    8. Shapeshifters and the zodiac

      by , 08-13-2013 at 07:11 PM
      There's this rich and powerful old woman who sends her goons to fetch me and Julie. One of the guys working for her warned me that she's got a thing against shapeshifters like us, and I'm pretty sure we're in danger but Julie's already gone with them. She's not entirely right in the head, off in her own world most of the time, so I don't know if she can read the atmosphere, realize there's a problem here. When we get to the old woman's place, she's lying on a bed with more goons in black suits around her, but she stands up to greet us. There's a line of tiles in the floor inlaid with zodiac designs leading from the door to her bed, and it's important for ceremonial reasons to step only on that path, like the old woman does; but me and Julie just walk naturally, sometimes on and sometimes off the tiles. The old woman makes casual conversation as we approach, pleasantries, and I worry again whether Julie will be able to recognize this as a dangerous situation, but when I look over at her, Julie's got a knife in her hand. She looks happy.
    9. Witches, vampires, monsters, and divorce.

      by , 08-08-2013 at 08:44 PM
      3rd person. A wealthy household full of various factions is gathered by a very old tree to discuss their leader's potential divorce, and how they can use it to their advantage. But I wind up focusing on a group that's ignoring the family politics and telling a story about this old tree, something like a fairy tale or a ghost story. Two children were transformed by the ashes of a witch's bones. One transformed into the image of the witch herself, the other transformed into something monstrous and deformed, vaguely donkey-like, and this allowed them to 'walk in strange places.' On certain nights a parade of witches (both men and women) passes by this tree, and disguised with the witch's ashes, those children joined the parade.

      1st person. For political reasons, something to do with an organized crime group, I was briefly married to Julia, an extremely influential businesswoman and vampire. Now I've just about gotten things with that crime group settled and there's no real reason for us to keep up the sham marriage, and I'm surprised how conflicted I am about that. I'd gotten used to life as her husband far too easily. I'm thinking about how up until now I've been dealing with a 'tame' vampire, not the real deal. I'm looking over my shares in her businesses and thinking about selling. It'd be enough for me to live on for the rest of my life, if I do leave.
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