Carabas

A setting based on ancient Rome, I'm looking up at several criminals being punished. This is my fault; I encouraged them to break a rule I thought of as minor, without thinking about what the consequences might be for them. One of them is praying, and a man with me, a foreigner, catches a variation on the word 'august' in the prayer, and he asks me in his own language, "'Augustina' - means honored, right?" He's quite enchanted by the lady Augustina, a mutual acquaintance. The man praying is being offered a deal - 30 years of imprisonment, in other words the rest of his life, but this torture will end. As this is being explained to him, I go to the others being tortured and try to convince them of a better option. Let them break your legs, then wander the world for 7 years, and at the end of this time you will be permitted to return and be forgiven.

Fragments: stumbling across a Forever Knight tie-in novel with 'amber' in the title; and a visit from a people-shy cat who IRL died when I was a kid.

A man talking about an opponent: "He had fallen on the might of (something), and he himself had fallen back and disappeared." The 'he' in question is described to me as "one of Fate's creatures," Fate being our enemy, but this guy is on a completely different level from those we've been fighting up until now. The man speaking is trying to get through to me just how serious a threat this guy is. He says this guy participated in "sanguinary" interstellar wars (that's the second time this month I've had dreams emphasize war with blood-related adjectives; seems redundant, but the dream seems to think that changes the meaning significantly), and in "civilized eras" he attached himself to prison transports, weapons transports, and managed to gain influence through this.

(Woke up, back to sleep.)

The queen of this country is always seen accompanied by three men attending her in robes, one red, one blue, one gold, all intricately embroidered in white, and I worked hard to become one of those men, but now that I've gained the position of the blue, I just feel chained down. Once we leave the Queen's presence, we're instructed by an aide to remove the robes, and with them the role we played. Such a role exists only in the Queen's presence, and it seems to me as if she exists in her own bubble, reality shifting with her presence or absence, so that she never touches the real world.

Fragments:

My roommate's watching a surreal horror movie called Repo Man starring Nic Cage and Meg Ryan. I comment that I had a dream about those two starring in a vampire movie the other night. (Which is true, I did.) I wanted to watch something else, though.

Something about David Bowie and outer space.

I'm saying "Where is all this going?" and in response the scene changes to show me and the people I'd been talking to sailing off into the sunset on a yacht.

Trying to read a document with errors in the font. When I go to change the font, I scroll past a font called 'lucid dreaming.'

One guy telling another a story, talking about certain things he'd been taught to believe about people in the city. "Were they right?" "No, it was Inanna." (Meaning a festival.) "Everyone was pretty much partying."

A guy enters an underground medieval fantasy city, and quickly manages to get himself suspected of thievery by the blacksmith's daughter who marches him over to the jail. The jailer takes him off her hands, then tells him confidentially that actually, he's got a job in mind and could use the help of a more experienced burglar, if the stranger's up for it.

The word 'bokor' written backwards as a spell.

An old text adventure game's been converted into a movie, and it starts off with this adventurer falling out of his spaceship - which is an in-joke for the players, about how if you typed the least thing wrong you'd get the character killed in a variety of creative ways, and most people managed to die at least once with their first command, just trying to walk out of the spaceship.

A guy's giving a friend a pair of gold gloves with protective octagonal symbols on the back. He's been concerned for a while - the friend receiving the gloves holds some important, inherited religious rank which requires him to handle a ceremonial weapon on certain occasions, and he's meant to take good care of his hands because of that. But lately he's been getting careless, particularly when sparring with someone, allowing them to go too far.

I've been blamed for a crime I didn't commit, and if I'm going to avoid being staked, I have to find something before dawn. I thought I knew where it was, but I was wrong. Dawn has come -

- but I've managed to buy myself a little extra time. Same setting, new backstory: this is all a game. Someone on the staff by the entrance, without realizing it, let slip the location of my final goal. But in order to reach that goal, I need an intermediate piece of the puzzle, a Bible. I find it - it's not an actual Bible but a book of many different passages, one of which looks like a Bible quote, and a few words are written in red, reminding me of one of St. Germain's codes. It's in Swedish. I head back to my room to translate it, but I lose the passage and can't find it again, and flipping through the pages, I find -

- a family tree representing the Baratheon family with stag symbolism, with a crown for Joffrey. I'm Jaime, sitting in a pit of a jail cell as I turn the pages, with the Starks looking down on me, and one of them suggests in an almost sympathetic tone that I've lived long enough. So many days down, so many more to go.

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

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

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

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