Carabas

Near Dark, back when Homer's actual age was close to his apparent age. He and Jesse are in a motel room with a guy who appears to be a friend - not like them, exactly, but not someone they intend to kill either. This guy's offering to teach Homer to play poker, and Homer says he already knows, but it's no fun because he has to give Jesse all the money he wins afterward.

(Woke up at 5:51 am, after going to bed at 4:30. Back to sleep.)

A young man has somehow traveled to another world, one populated almost entirely by vampires. They subsist off each other's subpar blood, donations are required and a vital part of the economy. Unaware of any of this, the guy from another world has walked into a store run by this world's equivalent of a friend of his, the magician who sent him here. She isn't a magician in this reality, and can't help him. It takes her a while to realize that he's human, they're so rare and unexpected, but she can smell his blood and when she figures it out, she has him in a trance before he realizes he's in danger. At that moment, her equivalent in his reality pulls him back to his own world - but the vampire follows him.

(Woke at 7:37. Back to sleep.)

A fragment of a scene involving Dracula, theater, and mythogenesis, using that term specifically.

A woman genetically engineered as a mate for a certain clone. The clone leads a double life, with a job and a wife who is unaware that he's anything other than a normal human, but he's also in close contact with the doctor who created both him and his 'brother', who he is somewhat obsessed with, and he suspects his genetically-engineered mate is secretly in love with that 'brother' - the brother is entirely unaware of any of this and believes himself a perfectly normal human, although the genetically engineered woman has recently appeared in his life and dropped some cryptic hints. The clone pulls the genetically engineered woman into his lap, which she tolerates, and demands that she tell him why she likes him, him specifically, "not the other one." She, with a charming accent I can't place, says it doesn't matter, and it's clear she's bored with his insecurity and instability.

(Woke at 9:40. Back to sleep.)

Three people whose lives are connected, although only one of them realizes it.

The first: A young man who recently beat cancer, legal guardian of his two younger sisters. One of them's been acting out in school recently and he's jokingly threatened her with calling in his biological mother, a woman who works with delinquents. But he is seriously wondering whether he should arrange for them to get together casually and talk - he doesn't mind her skipping classes but he's worried about what's going on in her mind.

The second: A teenage girl in a cancer ward, the same place where that man had been treated. Her death has been predicted to fall within the range of (the note said either Apr. or Aug., I couldn't tell which) 10-24. She has nightmares where this death is accompanied by a swarm of wasps. She doesn't fear death, but she hates wasps.

The third, and the one who is aware of the connection: A man who visits the hospital and watches the girl and the angel who lives there. The angel's voice can shatter glass, and it's going to kill this man someday - but it won't do anything until after that girl's death.

(Woke at 12:10.)

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.

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

I'm playing the role of a blonde woman with some kind of investigative background, now working with some kind of crime boss. People keep describing this as "a deal with the devil," me as "the devil's instrument," and so on, though I think of him as basically a decent guy. I meet up with him in a storeroom full of stolen goods waiting to be sold - small scale, everyday objects - and he tells me he doesn't mind if folks think of him as the Devil, it works out to his advantage, because after all, this way, "I am not real." I'm aware there's a double meaning there, it's a metaphor meaning I'm the person who deals with the world directly while he gets to stay in the background, like a ghost, never to be caught; but it's also a reminder that none of this scene is real. Since it's not real, I decide to stop wasting my time here and wake up.

Earlier fragments: following a truck transporting exotic animals; working on a farm picking berries, and getting annoyed at a coworker's spiel on northerner-vs-southerner work ethics; googling for references to Janette DuCharme, under that alias specifically; browsing a Halloween forum.

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. 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.

(Technically lucid, in the sense that I clearly knew I was dreaming, but there was no more control than usual and no particular moment of becoming lucid that I remember, I seemed to have simply started out that way. Then again, I can't remember how this scene started. Background info: I recently read something claiming dreams usually don't include all 5 senses, mostly just sight.)

I want to test out that bit about how senses work in dreams, so I float up to my bedroom ceiling and run my fingers over the ridges of the plaster. My sense of touch seems to be working fine to me. I even break off a piece of the plaster and taste it - the taste is probably not what plaster really tastes like, and it's very bland, but the sense of taste is certainly present. I decide I need to wake up to write this down.

(And I did. Rather than being any more aware than usual, it seemed more like I'd unintentionally programmed my dream self to complete this task, and my dream self was just carrying out those orders, without me having to take any active control of the dream. I went back to sleep for a few more hours.)

I'm playing the role of Louis de Pointe du Lac and watching a performance of Les Miserables in french. The girl playing young Cosette reminds me a little of Claudia, which makes me remember the songs she used to sing around the house. Their voices are similar. But Lestat's distracting me, talking as we watch the performance, telling me about his run in with Daniel and how he'd given him that 'choice I never had' line. And then he says to me that really, that was something of a lie; Daniel was already 'for the blood' as he puts it, since he'd met me.

3rd person dream following a character shortly after his mother's funeral. This man believes he's just been 'granted a power to evade death.' He's currently out riding with the woman he used to be engaged to and his closest friend, who is now pursuing that woman himself. Watching the two of them together, he decides there's nothing here for him and turns his horse away, thinking about traveling.

Years later, the same character is white-haired and recording his memoirs, dictating them to a recording device. He's describing that 'power or curse of evading death' and his wife, who'd been listening, rolls her eyes. She's heard that story of his before. Losing interest, she leaves the room. In his dictation, he's just started describing the moment he was summoned to his mother's deathbed, to take the last of her life and inherit her power. As he speaks, his dead mother appears in the room. This is something he's used to, although he's the only one who can see her, and although she hasn't appeared very often recently. She dislikes watching him let himself grow old. But he's only allowing himself to age as long as his wife is alive, so they can grow old together; after she passes away, he intends to go back to feeding off other people's lives. Still dictating, he remembers the last words of advice his mother had given to him on her deathbed: 'In this life, do not just feed. Remember to dance.'