Carabas

A teenage girl with long red hair is standing in a field at the foot of a mountain. The image changes to show her standing in this same field when she was younger, standing under a tree while her father spoke to her with his hands on her shoulders, while the rest of the family walked away into the woods and left her there. She was known as something like a witch. She shouts after her family not to leave her, and when she tries to calm herself down some sympathetic man - also present in the scenes where she's a teenager - tells her no, go ahead and shout that if it's what you feel, call what you see, refuse to be quiet, make it your power.

She's older now, and as a disembodied observer I'm watching her walk across that field towards the mountain, watching her from behind and I'm struck by the vivid colors of her now compared to when she was younger - the red hair in a thick braid now and down to her legs, the vivid blue skirts. She's walking past a wooden house with something going on in the woods on her mind, something urgent, possibly dangerous, her thoughts feel very determined and she's intercepting a group of people walking across the field towards that house - I think of them as the Freyhella (name taken from Wraeththu, but the resemblance stops at the name). As she walks towards them she takes a knife and cuts off her hair, right to the scalp. "With shorn hair," she says to them, the first words of a ritualized phrase, citing her right to be heard as one of them, as their neighbor, and as a 'witness' - a reference to whatever it is that's going on in the woods that she was thinking about earlier, and that she needs their recognition for. She ends by saying "Turn, and you can't yield to this," and she gets this hard expression I fall in love with.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Her again, in the woods, walking a path around some people at a distance far enough that she won't be seen, forming a protective symbol around them.

I'm walking along a road and find a dog walking around on its own, separated from its owner. I read the owner's name on the collar, and I bring the dog back into town with me, ask around after the owner and almost immediately find her apartment building. I ring the buzzer and ask her to come down.

When she comes down, she gives me some water to carry. The plotline's changed: there's no dog, we're going somewhere together, two distinct groups traveling together, I'm in one group, she's in the other. I can feel the added weight of the water in my backpack and am annoyed at having to carry more than I'd originally packed. Some of the people in the other group stop to get some water from a stream, and most of the people in my group find this disgusting. My IRL sister L., with my group, says there's nothing wrong with it, running water is clean; the rest of us disagree with her, saying that's not exactly wrong but not exactly true either, and then saying that it's a matter of belief. IRL sister S. says that's why she and her friends have agreed to stop believing in anything, it affects too much.

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.

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.

Someone who's just finished drawing a picture of 10 priests, then a picture of me, offers to draw a picture of Andromache; in the dream I believed that was the name of a goetic demon.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a witch I put under an enchanted sleep a long time ago, but a girl's come to warn me that she's started to wake up. There are rhymes and charms meant to keep her asleep, but when I see they're not going to work I run for the nearest doorway, to put a few realities between us. The doors I pass through repeatedly change the scene until I wind up in a tiny square room, just large enough for me, with only the one entrance; I get rid of the roof and start flying.

I'm with a group of people in what looks like some underground stone temple, talking to a guy who emerged from a tunnel in the floor, and I'm noting that he looks just like his ancestor. We're returning his ancestor's sword to him, although now it's just a sword - there had been something else attached to it, something we used. As I'm thinking about this I notice that the tunnel has a carving of the Monkey King's head set above it.

A cardinal arrives at the top of the stairs leading down to the temple, followed by attendants in red and gold brocade. He's been our enemy before, hunting us down, although that's been resolved; still, we're not exactly pleased to see him, and his attendants start to run forward to put themselves between him and us. But he holds up a hand to tell them to stay back. He's brought us a satchel full of papers granting us certain privileges in recognition of our service to (something or other) - none of the privileges granted are actually very useful, this is just a symbolic gesture. I mention to one of the guys with me that I'd rather have another of those papers claiming we were acting with his permission and authority.

In what looks like a morgue, there's a live man lying down on a slab being examined by a guy in a wheelchair, along with a goon in a suit standing behind the chair, and a man in a white coat standing over the slab. The guy in the chair is looking for someone who's had plastic surgery, and he's thinking the guy on the slab might be him. He's wrong. He's also thinking about peeling back the skin of the face to get a look at the underlying bone structure. The guy on the slab has got the wrong idea about what's going on, he was brought here by the man in the white coat under false pretenses, and he's saying, "So you recognized me on account of my face?" The man in the wheelchair had been gripping him by the chin. Now he starts to reach toward the guy's bare chest, thinking about the heart, and the guy says "Hey, I thought you weren't gonna take anything too-" He looks at the guy in the white coat, who is looking up at the ceiling and moving his lips silently, maybe praying.

A voice saying "The demonic lovers, burnt out in the darkness," and an image of same: a beautiful woman, a witch, in profile, breathing out smoke, cigarette holder in her right hand, and as implied by the voice, she looks burnt out. Her left arm is cradling the severed head of a blond man, her husband. It's still alive, and in pain, and can't die. The things they did out of love led to this.

A man I know has come to my apartment to ask for my help. He looks like he needs it - pale, strung out, in a stained and rumpled suit. He wants me to draw or paint my visions, specifically the one I just saw, the witch with the severed head. He's still in the hall, I'm leaning against the door frame with my arms folded, I'm not letting him in because while I'd like to help, I don't believe I can do anything for him. I'm sure I can't paint/draw well enough to capture that image, not the way he needs.

Wrote a fragment down earlier tonight as "Talent, innate vs. developed" - no memory of that dream anymore but seems like a related theme. Other fragments were all very dull - a woman with tiger-striped hair, a game that summons pieces of different cities, walking in the rain and thinking about someone, the word 'mirror' in my notes with no memory of what that was about.

3rd person. A military camp at night, raining hard, ground's mostly mud, the dogs and eagles used for running messages are having a rough time of it - at which point the dream switches to 1st person. I'm standing outside the dream, watching it, complaining to a woman with me about the use of animal messengers. "These people can create magic doorways linking one place to another, why are they still using messengers? Why do they even have supply lines?" She tries to say it's probably just shorthand, but I'm not impressed by this excuse. It annoys me that magic is only being used for flashy combat techniques and such when it could be put to so much better logistic use, it's a complete waste of manpower.

The next ASOIAF book comes out, and I skim the first few chapters and find a pleasant surprise: another Melisandre POV chapter. I settle in to read.

3rd person, following a woman who works at a newsstand that former president Bush II used to walk past every day as part of his routine, a long time ago. Now he's here with a bandage around his head, blood showing through, looking dazed. This happens twice. Both times he's found and picked up by his own security, but the woman is thinking to herself he 'looks the way he did in 2004,' meaning on the verge of death. The second time this happens he nearly walks into traffic, looking as if this isn't something he wants to do but is unable to stop himself. Unable to think straight, his mind is following an old routine.

A woman took me back to her home and left me to sleep, and now I'm hiding behind a door and watching her tend to a crying man, seeming to comfort him. In actuality, the scarf she wears around her hair is soaked in tears; this is how the witch feeds.

(Woke up with comparisons to Circe on my mind for that last one. Back to sleep.)

3rd person following a couple who meet for lunch every day, sitting at the outdoor tables of a cafe in a major city. He's a writer, and she used to read his stories during her breaks and tell him what she thought at lunch, but with this most recent book she finds she's got less and less time for it and finds herself making excuses: "I had a few moments in class, but..." He dislikes that she seems to feel obligated to read it, and tries to tell her there's no reason she should be spending all her free time on his writing, but when he says this out loud it just sounds like they're drifting apart. He gives her a peck on the cheek as they stand up from the table, and as he leaves he passes two women bending their heads together for a kiss.

I'm running some kind of transdimensional superhero team (though everyone here's wearing suits and ties, thank god, or casual clothes in Banner's case; no spandex in sight), and we've just encountered this reality's version of Superman, a version who grew up not on Earth but as the only living creature on a dead planet, raised by recordings, never understanding what had happened to everybody else.

3rd person, following a blond guy named Colin. He's frustrated with his relationship, and as he's lying in bed, he decides to invade the dream of an ex-boyfriend. The ex, a kind of hippie-looking guy with curly hair, is in another relationship now and doesn't want to cheat, even in a dream, which Colin thinks of as ridiculous but also part of why he's fond of this guy, so he just transforms himself to look like the ex's current boytoy.

But a stray thought about the failed relationships he's had since this guy causes the dream scene to change to show those relationships. (Meaning my dream, not Colin-and-his-ex's dream.) For a while he'd been hooking up with a demon, who was a real sweetheart but they never managed to turn it into anything more serious than occasional hookups. Then for over a year he'd lived with this guy who works at the expat bar, and Colin can't believe he put up with that guy for so long - great lay but massively uncomfortable with witchcraft. He would never even set foot in the basement where Colin worked, and he'd make these 'in the closet' jokes about 'broom closets' and then explain the joke every time, hahah, closet, broom closet, witches, get it - what a douche. Colin thinks he should've done it the other way around - hookups with the bartender, move in with the demon.

3rd person. Some centuries ago this guy's life was ruined by getting mixed up with a demonic creature using the name Elinar, which looks vaguely like a rabbit. (Or possibly Elihar. Can't read my own writing.) Now he's working together with a witch, and when he visits her in her workshop for the first time, he finds Elinar there, serving as her familiar. Up until this moment neither he nor the witch had been aware of the other's connection to Elinar, and now a lot of the 'coincidences' that led them to work together are starting to look suspicious.

Fragments from earlier: A woman pretending to be blind is followed by men in black suits, who aren't aware she can see them. A musician reminisces about the time about a hundred years ago when he'd played for a town that had never heard of alcohol, and found the place surprisingly refreshing.

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.

There's this man I'm hanging around waiting to talk to. He'd said something about an old massacre involving the Minoans, and how events are about to repeat themselves, and asked me to wait around. But I'm getting impatient, and the longer I wait, the more I'm convinced that this is all nonsense anyway. Finally I get up to leave, and ask this other guy, this kind of hanger-on, to give his boss the message that I couldn't wait.

Instead, he tries to convince me to stay. He starts talking about how that Minoan disaster wasn't my fault, that I shouldn't have blamed myself for my inaction, that I couldn't have stopped it even if I'd stuck around, but that if I run from my sense of guilt now, I'm just going to make sure those events repeat themselves. Annoyed by all this, I make fun of him as I try to shake him off and leave, but he follows me out to my car. He talks about the time I married into the family of Lot and found the women practicing strange magic, and in my horror, slaughtered them, including my bride. He talks - and eventually, sings, operatically - about this long litany of disasters caused by running from my guilt. This ends in an operatic pronouncement of doom as I finally drive off.