Carabas

A minor tyrant with some nefarious plan has just provided his elite guard with some new, lethal weapon related to mind control and is staging a private demonstration for two prisoners, people who'd been opposing him. But the guard who's supposed to provide the demonstration, after hearing the tyrant's plans, uses the weapon to kill himself rather than go through with it. The tyrant's reaction to this is mostly just contempt, and he orders one of the other guards to take the dead man's place - but instead, they all kill themselves rather than be involved in this plan. Meanwhile, the two prisoners are set free by the tyrant's heir, a younger brother or nephew, someone who never seemed to take anything very seriously; it turns out that attitude was just an act, allowing him to arrange a rebellion without being suspected. Some seemingly-nonsensical comments he'd made earlier make more sense in light of this.

There's a woman bending over a pool table, two guys - her servants - behind her. A man lounging on a couch opposite her is holding a camera and taking a photo of her, and he's asking her if she's sure she wants to play this way, 2 against 1. The man currently taking his shot tells him to knock it off, the lady knows her own mind. I'm a 3rd person observer, and from where I'm 'standing', I can't see this woman's face clearly, but her hair and her bearing remind me of Janette. I have the feeling I've been looking for Janette for a long time, and I go in for a closer look. There's a resemblance, but it's not her. While I was distracted, the conversation's turned more serious and they've stopped paying attention to the pool game; I get the impression that this is some kind of informal interrogation of this woman, or she's being put on the spot in some way. She's saying, "perhaps we have to suffer, to (justify or maintain or deserve, some word like that) our position." The others don't much care for this theory.

Wednesday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday:

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

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

A psychiatrist talking to another doctor about music and musicians, saying this is the type of personality that in these days uses hypnosis to tell themselves "this is my fanciful, flighty dream, that no one lets die." In other words: treating a wild dream as a practical career path, and being convinced to abandon a dream, are both viewed as mistakes.

There's a group of women in a small village, they all wear black and cover their hair, and a while ago they summoned up the Devil. Now he can't leave until a certain thing happens - he's trying to cause that thing to happen, the women are trying to prevent it. The women are talking about another, younger woman, who's either new in the village or has been away, and so isn't aware that this thing must be prevented.

The scene changes to show that Devil, who's been posing as a human man in that village, and at the moment is trying to get home without being caught by the sun and without being seen by his wife, who believes him to be human. He gets out of the building he'd been in by crawling down the side of the wall head first, and sneaks into his own home through the kitchen window, just before his wife enters the room. She finds him there casually drinking a glass of wine, and he mocks her for some supposed addiction problem of hers.

Someone's playing a waltz, I'm looking at LaCroix dancing with a blonde woman. I don't know him (I'm not playing Nick's role this time, though I'm not myself either), but something about seeing him gives me the sense that I'm seeing a path not taken. As I'm watching him and the woman he's dancing with, I become aware that this is Underhill, and a dream; and possibly those are synonyms. (This wasn't lucid at all - the character I was at the time was thinking of this scene as his own dream, not mine.)

Fragments: A guy preparing to move on, saying "Can I borrow this map?"; a gallery/cafe belonging to an art group called The Future People or something similar; a runway show based on Sleep No More; a newly-made vampire using mantras to learn dreamwalking, using it to watch over a friend, another vampire, who's being held hostage.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm with a group of people stealing some huge metal sphere, but as we're driving off with it, we lose it, and we circle back and argue over where it could be. I catch sight of myself in the rear view mirror and realize one of my front teeth is loose, to the point of falling out. I'm thinking I'm going to have to see a dentist, which annoys me. I notice all the teeth on that side are loose.

I 'wake up' in my IRL home and go to the bathroom mirror to check my teeth after that dream. I spit out long strings of gritty, bloody material, textured like sand. I'm thinking it's good to get that out.

This werewolf kid in human form is sitting in a car, tied up, with blood covering his face. There's a blond girl in the seat behind him who didn't believe his stories about werewolves until just now, as a werewolf in wolf form leans in through the door, right into the kid's face. The girl starts screaming.

I'm dropping off that same werewolf kid at this mansion, and there are three men standing on the steps out front to meet us. I'm saying to them, "Are you all Adrian's?" Adrian's the wolf kid's name, I'm asking if he turned them, which I'm hoping is not the case. And it isn't; they introduce themselves to me, and it turns out the house holds some organization of witches or magicians or something of that variety. They're all very friendly. One of them, this heavyset old queen, mentions that he's single, and I'm amused. When I introduce myself, I add, "And I'd have to be invited in," just so we're all clear.

3rd person following 3 people traveling through time, one woman and two men. One of the men, Billy, winds up being left behind, the other two have to abandon him in a place where he's "condemned by the powers to a life of battles." But they've just now encountered him again, as the 9th "killer" they have to face in a place of challenges, carrying a sword. A great deal of time has passed from his perspective and he's almost unrecognizable, cold and intimidating.

They've returned to their own time, in the hotel rooms they were in before all the time travel started. Due to timeline shenanigans, the woman runs into a 'past' version of Billy in the hall, a version who hasn't done any time traveling at all yet, smiling as usual.

The 'killer' version of Billy is talking about the souls left "there," abandoned by her. The other man who'd traveled with them questions that phrasing, 'souls' - "Are there really any souls in hell now?" Due to timeline shenanigans, is the implication - before Billy'd been abandoned, the two of them had a longstanding debate on what happens to the people in erased timelines, whether they still exist in any form. Billy's smiling, which is not a good thing, and saying they can finally conclude that debate.

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.

Hypnagogia: A man's voice laughing, deeply unpleasant.

A man and a woman in what looks like an interrogation room, although he is technically free to go at any time, and the organization this woman belongs to isn't exactly law enforcement. There's a woman, not human, something else, something dangerous, who's coming for this man - she's not a danger to him, but she is to everyone else - and the people here need to know his story before she gets there. He says to the human woman in the room with him, "And the bounty? P.Big's?" P.Big being the name of the larger of the two bounties he'd recently turned in - these people had confiscated his reward money, along with the rest of his belongings. That's the main reason he's still here. She says, "You can have it back. In exchange for the war story."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A man waiting for a tow truck finally hears a vehicle pull up outside, goes to the window to look. There's a woman in a firefighter's uniform entering the house through the back door, without him noticing, and she watches as the man is killed by a wire around his throat. The two men who killed him pick up his body, standing right next to her but not looking at her or acknowledging her in any way.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a boy with an older woman - possibly his grandmother, though relatively young for it, someone who doesn't live with him but who stopped by today - he's crouching in a corner with a weapon, listening to what he believes is someone with a gun in his home. He's eager to face them. Footsteps approach the door, the door opens - it's the gardener/maid, and she's carrying a leaf blower, not a rifle. She makes the usual small talk and walks on. His grandmother says to him that she is not going to ask what he was thinking, she is not going to dignify this by discussing it, but she wants him to think about what just happened.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Last dream was just fragments, but had similar themes from the earlier dreams: something about a boy, an older woman who knows better than him, and a war.

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.'

A fragment of dialogue: "And you will be trusted with it. Again."

(Woke up at 7:50 am, after getting to bed at 4:30 am. Back to sleep.)

I'm reading a multi-volume autobiography. This particular chapter is describing a vision the author had at a young age, and what he thought about that - not about the content of the vision, but the act of having one.

A man is being held captive by a coyote god, or rather a coyote spirit which has temporarily become a god, taking on a human but coyote-headed physical form. They're surrounded by baby spiders acting as helpful servants. This man had been searching for his wife, refusing to believe the reports of her death, and his search led him here.

As Haruka/Onikui, I'm chained in a cell, with Minamoto Raikou standing over me with the keys.

(Woke at 9:04. Back to sleep.)

"They had more passion, ordinary things; and it didn't do to tempt the passions of ordinary things in passing." The thoughts of a woman who had a man over to eat together with her mother and her daughter, flirting and enjoying it, but with this thought in her head.

(Woke at 10:28. Back to sleep - but I woke up roughly every half hour after that, and I kept running into that problem where, half-awake, I think about writing a dream down and mistake that thought for having actually done it, and so forget the dream. Nonetheless I wound up with two more pages of notes, mostly too dull to bother writing out in detail.)

Very dull dreams from the rest of the night included discussions of my control issues, a man taking the shape of a three-eyed bat with a green-and-gold mask, watching the sunset, farm work, bear hunting, anatomy studies, a vampire movie starring Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan, the death of Mickey Mouse while he was nobly saving Donald Duck, my IRL civilian sister as a military police officer in training, a werewolf-hunting father and daughter giving a werewolf shelter in their home, and a sitcom about hobbits with fangs.

A classic black and white movie called Death in the Rain, with Ingrid Bergman, and a reference to Rappaccini's Daughter.

Labyrinth's Sarah falls into an oubliette, but it's a fairly large and well-lit spherical room built of pale brown stones, a few fallen leaves drifting around, and with a pale gold stylized metal sculpture in the form of a double helix rising in the center. She's just walked all the way around the circular room with one hand on the wall searching for openings, when Hoggle appears and she asks where he came from.

Playing the role of a man who lives in a major city. Two detectives have just left my home after questioning my family and everyone else on the estate, and stressed out, I go to the park for a run. The tree branches are all bare.

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.

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.

I'm traveling, spending the night in an old stone tower. Thranduil's standing watch out in the woods, I can see him through the window. The rain's coming down pretty hard, much harder than it was during my watch and I'm still trying to warm up, sitting up brewing something hot to drink. I'd like to call him back inside, let him stand watch from the window instead, but I know he wouldn't. Everyone's still on edge about that Balrog. I hear voices at the bottom of the tower, one of the Men with us calling to Thranduil, telling him to quit haring off on his own like that. I can't see where Thranduil's gone, but the two Men who'd been guarding the door are looking around the edge of the woods. Then a leather wing covers the window for a moment and blocks my view, something flapping around the tower carrying a rider, and I shout to the others to wake up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm sitting at a bar drinking something green in a shot glass, when iron handcuffs are snapped around my wrists. Some crime has been committed, something which I'd planned to do. I didn't go through with it, though. I'm innocent. But it's still my fault that someone else carried out my plan, and I'm willing to take the punishment.