Carabas

This guy's telling me about his cremation plans, saying that in a distant future, they're going to be able to revive people using their ashes - or rather, something about the carbon - on a specific distant planet or star or location in space he refers to as "G" followed by a short series of maybe three numbers. Seeing that place, I'm looking at vast stairs in the air, green, made of some vaguely moss-like material. Examining it, I see that it's made up of small, incredibly thin squares stacked on top of each other. The guy talking about cremation is still talking - he's saying these can be stacked so as to seem thick or thin, and they're used here in the perfect ratio to create a true geometric stairway to heaven. ("Heaven" used here to indicate something like perfection rather than afterlife.)

I'm on a green, grassy hill with two friends and a large crowd of other people waiting for some event, standing near our car. To the right, there's a great view of mountains below us, very green. I'm looking down at a town of mostly red buildings and can make out the steeple of a church; I'm aware this is somewhere in South America. There are a few other people around here enjoying the view, but among them, there's a man beating a young boy, presumably his kid. I jump in and stop him, and as we're fighting I demand what he thinks he's doing. His wife's standing here now, among other people watching, and as an answer, the man produces some letter he'd written. It talks about not being human. The wife sympathizes with him, but I'm outraged by this response, and since I'm not human either, I take personal exception to him using that to justify his behavior. We start fighting again.

Scene transitions during the fight, focusing on the blood on my wings which had come out during the fight. Now I'm in a motel room with a girl who's helping fix the feathers. A guy, a friend, comes in then and says "You two are (something about the fight and something we're looking for). I found the (thing we were looking for)." He holds up something that looks like a map, and I get up to go look at it. The girl with me is seriously upset with this guy, related to the fight, or more specifically the way I was fighting and the way he encourages me. She tells him that the guy I'd been fighting had swallowed my heart, and she'd watched me take it back from his throat with talons - she demands of the guy with the map, "That's better?!" As she says this, I remember how it had felt, though it hadn't been part of the dream before.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Setting's a sort of fantasy version of Korea, 16th century-ish. This guy has been working for an organization that's just had some great victory, completely defeated this opponent that they've been working against for a long time. Now he's just returned to their base and is alone with their leader, a tall foreign woman with this elaborately painted face like a mask and gold ornaments in her hair. But as she's congratulating him on this great success, he becomes suspicious - something's off about her. She sees this suspicion, and attacks him.

In actuality, this isn't his leader at all. 'She' is revealed to be the man who he thought they'd just killed, using an illusion (in addition to the physical costume and makeup - the illusion itself has been dropped now, the rest remains) to impersonate the leader. The enemy complains that he went to the trouble of portraying his own defeat just so the POV character would finally let his guard down, and it still didn't work! How frustrating! It goes unsaid, but they're both aware that since the POV character isn't human, he's impossible to kill unless he lets his guard down.

Two other people burst in there, an old man and a young servant, who tell their 'leader' that the POV character - who has now disappeared from the room, and I've switched to 3rd person - has knocked out two of the guards and used some kind of gas to put everyone else to sleep. One of them says that he had just been starting to like/trust that guy. The enemy in his disguise as the leader keeps one hand raised over his mouth to prevent them from noticing his identity. They move out of the room.

In the hallway, I see the shadow of a hand with long claws reaching down from the ceiling, just above the 'leader'/enemy's head; then it retreats. It's the former POV character on the ceiling. He generally tries to behave like a human being, and killing the enemy in that way would go against that effort, tempting as it is. So he loses the claws, drops down into the now-empty hall and looks around.

I'm lying in my IRL bed, looking out into the hall, and I seem to see movement, as if there are several small creatures on the floor. It's too dark to be sure my eyes aren't playing tricks on me. I reach for the lamp - as I do so, I think I see one of the maybe-creatures-maybe-tricks-of-the-eyes come into the room and look up at me - but the lamp won't turn on. Although I'm aware the bulb could just be out, I suspect this is a dream.

To test it, I will myself to float up into the air, but nothing happens. I close my eyes to test whether I can see through them anyway, and I can't (in fact, after closing my eyes here, there were no more visuals for the rest of the dream). But I'm still convinced this is a dream. As one more test, I reach up and touch the ceiling, sure that it won't be solid. I encounter solid material, but it's spongy, my finger sinks into it, creating a depression, and then reaching some limit - the material breaks, creating a small hole. For a second I consider whether this might not be a dream and I've really poked a hole in the ceiling. But I keep digging at it until I create a larger hole, large enough for me to pass through, and I climb up into it. As I pass through, I find I'm now moving downward, not upward - and this makes me wonder if opening up this hole was really a good idea. I have a vague thought about moving down into a basement which stores unpleasant things. But once on the other side, I become aware that I'm lying in bed, and that I've woken up.

Fragments from later (insomnia's been killing me this past week and my recall's a mess):

A desert in a futuristic setting. I'm talking to my wife about some intrigue going on within an elite group of all-female guards who work for us. They're slaves, and I'm thinking about the tensions created by relying on people while keeping them in slavery.

Different scene, same POV character. I'm in a small spaceship, with the pilot - a good friend who works for me - to my left, and a boy whom I'm kind of mentoring sitting behind us. I'm explaining to the boy about a weapon I'm expecting our enemies to use, something that increases the heat of a star. It's related to the lifespan of the star, and the boy deduces that since the star in this system is very young, the effect will be very great. He sounds horrified, but I'm not feeling particularly concerned; it's just one more thing to take into account.

I'm looking at a man with the head of a dog, carrying something like a whip made out of live snakes, driving a chariot through a large underground hall. He's a good and trusted friend, and I've given him a highly respected position here, something to do with training or teaching. There was an assassination attempt a while ago, and ever since then he's refused to come above ground, except for twice a month, different days every month, and even then only at specific locations.

A flashback to a time shortly after that assassination attempt, from 3rd person now. The dog-headed man was resting up in a garden in an area separate from the rest of the compound, for the intelligence workers only. There's a woman there, and he's wondering if she's the one who took care of him while he was delirious. He doesn't completely trust her. She's told him before that she was designed by her masters to be a partner for "Riker" - although the dog-headed man doesn't realize it, this is a codename referring to the leader of the compound (my pov character in the previous scene. When I hear the name Riker, I associate it with Dune's Paul). While talking about various things, she complains that "my Riker's" role won't come into play until later, so for now all she can do is wait.

I walk into a room where I have to complete some challenge, a kind of game. I have a vague sense of danger, it's not quite a nightmare but it feels similar, as if it has the potential to become one. I'm semi-lucid, in that stage where I'm aware that I'm dreaming and can easily control my surroundings, but still following the dream storyline. Small rings of light form around my wrists - at first I'm not sure what this is, then I think of it as both something that this room provides for the challenge, and something that I summoned myself. I decide that the user has to make the light take a solid form before it can serve its function. Focusing on it, the light condenses into a metal cuff around my right wrist; the left one fails, it remains light. Looking at the right cuff, I decide it represents a kind of shield, a personal force field. I focus on the left one again, without looking at it this time, trying to make it condense into the other cuff, and I decide that it's worked, though I don't want to risk looking down to check; I can now feel the shield working in the air just around me. I move further into the room and start the game, which involves running a course and using the shield to deflect small projectiles. A woman's voice keeps score. At the first curve in the course, everything goes black.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Due to a conflict with someone else, an immortal has been forced to enter another immortal's territory. Although they appear to be different species - the one the territory belongs to is a sphinx, the other one looks like a human man - they're still similar enough to require separate territories, so this has led to a confrontation, although on the surface it looks like a casual conversation. It's night. The one that looks like a man is saying something about how anyway, this isn't the same city he agreed to stay away from - it's partially joking (the city's changed names in the years since that agreement), but it's also partially serious, grasping at straws, looking for an out. The sphinx has no particular ill will towards him, and understands his situation, but nonetheless can't permit him to stay here.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A vampire guy's in a subway car, picking out a meal. There's a small group of others with him, people he'd turned, but he's the only one doing the hunting. One of the others, recently turned, is impatient with him. Finally she says to him, come on, let's just take the whole car, let loose once in a while, please? The other vamps are a little annoyed with her - they're impatient too, but she's being childish - but he's considering it. I'm in first person now, though I'd started out in 3rd and I have no sense of when I switched; as one of the other vamps, I look around at the number of people in this car. There's a lot of them; the car's not full, but there's enough that they outnumber us. I'm thinking about crowd control. I notice a couple of them looking this way, starting to pay attention to the conversation between our leader and the new girl. Without saying anything, I get up and move to stand by the door to the next car, to block the exit. I look through the window into the next car, and consider the number of people in that car, too.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man I think of as a legendary king riding on the back of some enormous reptile through a completely black space. He's not human, at least not anymore, and this isn't a physical space; he's something that is sometimes summoned into the physical world. The creature he's riding is covered in trunks and carpets and cages piled so high that I think of it as a moving mountain; I can't tell how much is luggage and how much is the body of the creature itself, but the whole thing is maybe four times the height of the man riding it, who is sitting cross-legged just behind the creature's head, front and center. At the very back of the creature, the king's servant is opening the top of one of the cages. It contains a small and unhappy creature that they've just captured, something very rare; the top of it opens up like a flower and contains a kind of liquid, which contains some 'essence' that the king is after.

There's three people riding a motorboat through a river in a jungle. They stop when they pass a man standing waist-deep in the river, working at something, and one of the guys in the boat talks with him about a foreign researcher who's made some big discovery that's driving up prices in the area. The guy standing in the river is saying that pretty soon they're all going to be out of a job. The guy in the motorboat says it wouldn't be the first time they've had to live out of tents; they'll survive.

I'm driving through a familiar IRL location, semi-lucid - aware I'm dreaming but still just automatically following the dream storyline. While thinking about this being a dream, I go fully lucid and remember a lucid goal, one that involves traveling to a particular building, so I set out to find it. I'm at a crossroads, and I think to myself, oh look, there's the road that leads to that place! I drive down that road for a while, and the scenery gradually stops resembling IRL.

Eventually the road curves, and rather than turning with it, I drive off the road, directly through a dry yellow bush, although it gives my car no resistance at all. I drive through the forest for a while, without a road, and I pass construction crews - men in hardhats, bulldozers, and a vast number of tree stumps that they've cut down. I begin to have trouble with visuals, things start going black and I worry that I'm waking up, but I'm able to clearly see a tree branch against the sky as I drive up a hill, looking upward, and I keep focusing on that vivid image, wondering why I can see some things and not others.

I exit the forest, away from the construction crews, and am now at the top of some rolling hills covered in green grass. In the distance, I can see a blue building flanked by white pillars, and I decide that must be the place I've been looking for. As I get closer, I see that it seems to be a school - which is not what I'm looking for - but I keep heading for it anyway, figuring it'll work out when I get there. I cross a bridge, and looking down I can see some land covered by a thin layer of water far below, a sort of web-like network of tiny streams. The place I'm looking for has a vague connection with water, so I think of this as promising.

I park in a small parking lot, a good distance away from that building. You have to walk from here, this place is the official entrance. There are a few other people around heading toward that building too. I hear sea birds. Over to my left, the opposite direction from the building, there's a low wall; I walk over to it and look down into a bay. I can smell the sea air. The bay is filled with fish - some of them are on the rocks instead of in the water, but they seem fine with this, and I have the feeling it's a visual trick to allow me to see them clearly. Similarly, there are giant versions of some sea creatures that would normally be much too small to see from this distance. I think of this as something like an aquarium. I can hear triumphant-sounding orchestral music.

I walk back to the entrance that leads to the building. The 'entrance' mostly consists of a large wooden message board with various things posted on it, including a place where people have left written messages about their visit to this place. I look it over briefly and continue on the path towards the building. At the other end of that wooden board, someone's left a backpack behind. As I look at it, I realize I'm waking up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man who's conducted a study of the languages in his country, who's so far cataloged over 300 languages and dialects. He's currently walking down a dirt road with a lot of foot traffic. Ahead of him, some people are setting up a kind of gate. A man who he's meeting here arrives through that gate, accompanied by a small escort of soldiers.

Now that they've met up, the soldiers move on ahead, leaving the researcher and this man a little separate. One of the soldiers says something to the man, and he starts to address him as 'my captain' or something similar, a title involving rank, but he catches himself after the 'my' (or the equivalent rather; this wasn't in english). This man isn't his captain (or whatever the rank was) anymore. Both the soldiers and the man are a little sad about that, though none of them show it, but walking together with the researcher rather than with the soldiers sort of rubs it in. He'd served with this group of soldiers for a long time, and he was just recently forced to resign from his post due to something that was revealed about him. It wasn't any action on his part; it was some inherent quality that he had been unaware of, something he thinks of as something like a taint, although as a disembodied observer, I believe it's not actually a bad thing in itself, whatever 'it' is.

Addressing the researcher, he identifies himself as 'language group 246' - that is, although he doesn't expect the researcher to remember him, they've met before, when he'd participated in that researcher's survey of dialects. He takes some food out of a bag - a corn cob sliced into halves - and he offers one to the researcher, who's surprised but accepts. The man is reflecting on the opportunity for conversation with this researcher now, versus with the soldiers he used to command.

My IRL sisters are visiting me and we've been bickering as we walk to the door of my IRL house. There's a dead girl standing in the driveway, staring at the door, and - sarcastically, it's related to what we were bickering about - I say to her something along the lines of "Well? Are you coming in, too?" This is said more for my sisters' benefit than for the dead girl; she doesn't seem to react.

Inside, I get online and read a news article. The powerful old guard of some country have been giving themselves promotions. One man is referred to by the titles Ulmo (name taken from Tolkien, but at the time I believed it was a reference to some eastern European mythology) and Eleusis, and a rank which translates to Old Knight. The Ulmo of myth is (in this dream) associated with beginnings and the dawn, and that was symbolic for this man's political duties, but as these people have given themselves promotions those myth-derived titles have become more literal - he can now literally control dawn, and other forms of time related to the beginnings of things.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a caterpillar in my IRL house. I pick it up, and although it keeps wriggling away, I eventually manage to take it outside. When I put it down in the grass, it immediately tries to get back inside, and I realize there's a beetle out there it's trying to get away from. The beetle tells me that this is the spirit of a dead girl. It tells me a story about this girl and a hockey player who's also now dead, and about two guys who took a deal not to talk about something that happened between two hockey players and two girls. I see the hockey player and the dead girl on a train, and she's staring blankly into space with these wide, round eyes.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm watching an extended version of Near Dark with various extras. The one I'm watching seems to be an interview, but with the characters themselves, not the cast/crew. The family's standing around a Cadillac convertible, and Caleb's talking to someone about how he first joined the family, a long time ago. He'd been driving with a woman, she'd been drunk, when the family found them she hadn't realized the danger they were in. He talks about Mae, and then he holds up her hand and says "and lucky me - no ring." He laughs. Jesse looks a little disgusted by the way Caleb talks about Mae, but he laughs too. Caleb's wearing a belt buckle shaped like the head of a snake with fangs bared.

I decide to go back to the main menu. This isn't just for Near Dark, but for a wide variety of movies, and one displays a picture of John Constantine with a title that references immortality and love and/or betrayal. The menu images are constantly shifting, and he slips off the screen. There are at least two layers of the image, and I think of those layers as somehow acting as mirrors, both of the viewer and of each other. By changing the angle I'm standing at, I get Constantine back in view.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Someone's telling a story. The listener asks, "Was it the wrath of heaven?" The storyteller shakes her head. "It was the wrath of the humans." Following someone's advice led to some captured human surviving and leaving the fortress where the storyteller lived, an isolated building in the center of a vast field stretching to the horizon, the only landmark I can see. He returned with many soldiers. As a disembodied observer standing on the top of that fortress, I can hear the soldiers shouting to each other. They're speaking Korean, I don't understand them.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A setting based on a fantasy version of ancient China. An elegantly dressed woman is telling a terrified human man to "call me elder sister." He frantically agrees, although he nearly calls her something more along the lines of 'mistress' as he does so; he's thinking about her connection to his master. She releases him and walks off, through a fence, passing through the solid object like it's not there. Looking at this, the man says or thinks "What a way for owls to fly around at night."

A similar fantasy China setting. There's a man leading a human woman around a palace, talking about truth and the inability to lie. "Like this," the woman says, holding up the candle she was given by the woman who rules this place. It has words carved into it, which she believes promises her safe passage in some fashion. He laughs, and says that's a careful bit of phrasing, which causes her to look concerned. He reads it out, and it says something along the lines of "The human will want/feel no hunger." He points out that this statement will be true even if she stays here forever - she won't want food, she won't feel hunger. But actually eating solid food that will sustain her life, or returning to her own world to do so - that's a different subject entirely, and it's not covered by the carefully-phrased promise on the candle.

In a modern setting, I'm staying somewhere for the night with a small group of other people. Other groups are here as well, and there's concerns about space, so when I finally see the room we've been given I'm surprised by how big it is. There aren't many beds, but there's a lot of floor space, there should be no problem. We all sort out spaces for our bedrolls, and some of us go over the movies we have between us. I wonder if I can convince the others to put on Near Dark. The floor's becoming crowded, and I just manage to find a space for my backpack; on top of the backpack I place a stuffed animal shaped like a dog, which I'm aware contains a guardian dog spirit who protected me from the ghost of a dead girl earlier tonight.

Alice (of Wonderland) kneels down and waits. I can see movement behind her, something approaching, but I can't see it clearly from this angle, it's hidden behind Alice, until it gets close enough to be standing right behind her: a man and a woman, something off about their eyes. I'm aware they're here to take her to (Purgatory or the Underworld, something like that). I can hear music, a tune that reminds me of vaudeville.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Three people from a motorcycle gang, driving down an empty highway surrounded by fields of tall dry yellow grass, passing a billboard where the ad's been scraped off. I can only remember vague fragments of the previous scene, but it had been focused on the leader of these three, and he'd been trying to escape something - fate, his role in life, something like that. The transition to this scene means he's failed to escape. He's thinking something about a murder that happened in the past. There are police ahead of them, waiting for them.

POV switches to those 'police', although they look more like military. Weapons are being distributed, grenade launchers, and one of them exclaims over the model, he's very knowledgeable about it and excited to be using it - he says his father or uncle used this same model in a certain war. Another cop, one who'd been in that war himself, says something sarcastic, along the lines of "Did he? That's nice. Did he bring it home for you to play with?" The cop who'd been excited goes quiet, says "Well, no, but..." The cop who'd been in the war doesn't like hearing it talked about by people who weren't there, feels strongly about those memories being something you should keep apart, not bring home to your family. But he starts talking about it now - he says, "Good war, (he says a year). A single man could've turned the tide by pledging his country to one power or another. And even a warrior likes to hear that."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm in the moon kingdom from PGSM. (One of my lucid goals is to travel to the moon - I suspect that inspired this non-lucid.) Chibiusa's here, she grew up here, and I'm thinking, wait, how can Usagi and Mamoru's daughter be living in this time period?

The scene changes with that thought. In the present, on earth, Mamoru's working as some kind of private security, wearing a suit, standing with other security around a limo that's stopped in the middle of the road, having some kind of confrontation. He's in trouble here, and he's aware Usagi's in trouble elsewhere and he won't be able to reach her to help her. He's holding something small and black, and he's remembering when it was given to him by a man who told him some words to memorize in order to use it, to transform. I'm thinking, the fact that he had to memorize the words indicates that he wasn't Endymion at all, he was simply playing Endymion's role, filling in for him; this was also indicated by the uniform that he transformed into, which resembled Endymion's but was much darker, almost black, unlike the real Endymion's much lighter blue. Now that he's trapped, he passes that black object along to one of the other men working security with him. He starts to tell that man the words he must memorize, but as he starts to say them, the man taking the black object finishes the words himself, he already knows them - indicating that, by chance or rather by fate, that black object has finally been passed on to its real owner. Endymion's true, light, uniform appears on him, and he leaves to find Usagi, flying through the air - which I have an incredibly bad feeling about. The real Endymion isn't necessarily a good person for Usagi to know.

The other people Mamoru was with have left the scene, Mamoru's now kneeling in the street, surrounded by cops with a misunderstanding, and a police detective is holding a sword to Mamoru's throat. One of the cops calls the detective away - there's some order over the radio that means both that they're needed elsewhere and that Mamoru isn't guilty of whatever it was they think he did and should be released. The detective is extremely reluctant to follow this order, he doesn't want to let Mamoru go. The cop relaying the orders from the radio phrases those orders in a way that praises the detective's work up until now and stresses how much he's needed, and finally the detective releases Mamoru and he and the cops all get into their cars and drive off, towards a bridge.

Dean and Sam are trapped inside a house they were investigating, something to do with a piano and a song that was being worked on at the time of the composer's death. As Dean, I'd been calling someone on my phone the moment the house trapped us inside, a woman we've worked with before. She'd been having lunch when I called her, and after a while the phone is taken by some guy she was eating with, someone who doesn't understand anything about what's going on and who tells me off for being rude, insists I should "use sir and ma'am" or else he'll hang up. So I call him "sir and ma'am" and piss him off. Thankfully the woman from before takes the phone back. I have the impression that if I hadn't been on the phone already, if I hadn't already had a connection established, the house would have prevented the phones from connecting; if this call ends, we won't be able to contact the outside world at all.

I've got a creature perched on my finger that's something like a crow and something like a bat - it's furry rather than feathered, but it's got a beak. The feeling of its talons around my finger is odd - not exactly discomfort, it reminds me of holding a mouse in your hands. I raise my hand and launch it into the sky.

There are two little girls, elementary school age, who are carrying out some illegal deal, weapons or something similar, something stored in the trunk of a car. They have some mentor who usually does this, he doesn't realize that they're here in his stead, he would have stopped them if he knew about it. This meeting with the customer was supposed to be an initial negotiation, a sample, but one of the girls declares that they're going to do the deal now. The customer reacts badly. The other girl gets shot, the one who'd declared they were doing the deal now takes a gun out of the trunk and shoots the customer, the cops come, they're all put in handcuffs, and the customer is bewildered, he was a good customer and doesn't understand why they tried to change things. The girls escape, go home, and try to cut the chains around their wrists with their father's tools.

I'm using a tea cup to catch rain that contains some kind of power.

There's a very important (possibly sacred) torch that I was meant to do something with (I have a vague impression of something involving the sky) but, while standing at the edge of a cliff, I've managed to drop the torch, and I'm watching it fall into the waves and go out. "Oops."

A group of five people in a car, on a road trip. They stop at a sushi place and one of them goes off to try to pick up a woman he saw outside. Two of the others say something, sheepish, about how they've been hitting the 'family' note a little too much on this trip, it must have freaked him out, and now he's proving to himself how unattached to them he is. They don't mind.

There's a portrait, tall and very narrow, of a woman standing in front of a Buddhist grave marker. The woman who was the subject of the portrait is standing in front of the painting, looking at it. A strange reptile-like creature steps out of the painting of the grave, and I know this is her dead son.

There's a memory gap - next fragment I remember clearly is in a dark space with three exits, an entrance to an afterlife, and the woman's talking with her son, who now looks more or less as he did in life - human - although there are shadows clinging to him in a shape suggesting a tail, and he's standing halfway in one of those three exits, with flames around his feet. They'd been saying something about how that exit's not for her, after she tried to hug him and he stopped her. She says, "Mommas hurt, darling. Men die." Then she vanishes.

A fragment in which I'm waiting for someone in a subway station and meet an android, though they've been banned. She looks human except for her eyes: they're filled with a constantly-moving white light, and her eyelids are covered in jewels.

Utena's dueling someone, and her clothing's changing as she does so. Other duelists are running up the stairs and arrive just in time to see her win, and Touga says something complementing her on her confidence, that she could trust that the changes going on around her would serve her.

He goes on to say something about those changes reflecting past eras, which transitions into images with some vague connections - something about a limousine, and then something about flight patterns with an image of a witch flying on a broom, which leads into the next scene:

A guy who's just now become a witch is looking out the window at the approaching dawn, and he wants to go flying and feel the world wake up around him; but he has responsibilities to attend to, keeping him here.

There's a woman who's turning, and a guy I know is driving her somewhere in a white VW bug, just pulling out of the parking lot. We weren't expecting it to happen this soon; turning happens after a few blood exchanges, and the amount of times it takes varies from person to person, but she's only had two, so this is taking us off guard. I - a guy in a suit, in the parking lot, running alongside the car as they're starting to drive off - am saying to him, "let me in!", but he's in too much of a hurry to stop and tells me to just get in. So I go incorporeal (lost all visuals in the process) and as he drives through me, I resolidify (and visuals came back) in the back seat, where she's curled up on her side. I cradle her head in my lap.

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, one involving finding an old sketchbook with an image of a character I haven't drawn (or thought about) in years; another involving a song called Sleepwalker.

A man and a woman in an old abandoned house, the woman's become possessed by the spirit of her ancestor who'd lived there. She says she's hungry, which I, 3rd person observer, am certain is a lead-in to her doing something unnecessarily creepy. She catches a rat and starts chewing on it. I mentally compare it to evil overlords using skulls as building material, too over-the-top and nonsensical to actually be creepy. The possessing spirit knows this man, and she's saying to him, "I will say, however, this is the first time I've seen you in anything but pain." When she says that, he thinks briefly of a relationship he has with someone, but he says, "Come on, be serious -" He then deliberately misremembers her name, trying to downplay the authority she has over him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

FMA-based, Al is on some huge vehicle, like a train but so large it has a deck like a ship. An old man wearing armor and automail is introducing him to what appears to be a little girl, introducing her as a 'mechanist' who works on the human soul, something that's commonplace here, and which Al's been researching and is excited to finally get a look at. There's a good chance that she's not human but some kind of automaton, that's often the case for mechanists; Al isn't aware of this. She's thinking the same thing about Al, she expects the inside of his armor to be full of bolts and springs.

The old man who'd introduced the two of them gets his automail caught in some piece of machinery, which is dangerous. Al and someone else, a large man, work together to free him, but in the process the machinery pierces a hole through Al's armor, allowing the little girl to see inside and realize it's empty. Al is very self-conscious about this, but the girl's thinking something about how impressed she is that "he'll continue investigating the secrets he was investigating, not the secrets of his body" - the research he's been doing has no bearing on his own problem.

Ed is on a different train. Kimblee, a prisoner, is being transported in the same car, it's a car for military personnel, and Kimblee's saying something about whether (something happens) or (something else happens), he just doesn't care; this annoys Ed. He gets off the train and heads for a stadium where he's supposed to meet Mustang, and he's supposed to make it look like it's a coincidence that they both happen to be there, since they're being watched.

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

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

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

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

There's this strange, vaguely canine creature with a head almost completely covered in bony ridges, giving the impression that it has a skull for a head. It changes shape, sometimes looking insect-like, a vast serpent thing with many legs, and very rarely, it takes the form of a woman. It serves a certain human man who found it on a cliff, and the first time it changes into a woman it freaks him out immensely - he's wondered if maybe the creature is actually a person under a curse, but he's not at all sure which is the true form. At the moment, he's thinking "(creature's name) is the answer" - the moment he thinks that, something else bursts into the room and the creature leaps up to fight it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A narrator of a play saying "Young Romeo spies the young witch Barathia in the woods, but..."

A person I know IRL is annoyed at me over a misunderstanding, and posting passive aggressive messages about it online. I wonder whether I should correct the misunderstanding or just leave it alone.

I'm standing on a street corner with someone, waiting for the light to change, when I see two people walking towards us, including that IRL person from the previous scene. The light changes just then, and I know I should probably wait for her to catch up, but I hurry across the street instead. I follow the guy I'm walking with down onto the railway tracks, and there's something I really enjoy about walking along the tracks at night. A train goes past.

Still walking with that same guy, we've reached the trailer where his mother lives. When he knocks on the door, this guy he dislikes answers, some bigot his mother's dated in the past, but last he knew it was over between them, he wasn't expecting him to be here. They say something to each other I can't hear, I can just tell the guy in the door looks angry, and then the guy I'd been walking with turns around and leaves. He's really upset. I tell him to come back with me, we can go spend the holiday at my mother's place, she'll like having us over. At one point he decides to go back and kick that guy out of his mother's house and I physically hold him back.