Carabas

A woman is standing in my home - I'm not physically present at the moment - and looking into a mirror that's showing her various visions. Currently it's showing her the man she loves with a very beautiful young servant standing underneath a tree, carrying out an affair. This isn't a surprise - she was already aware of it.

The scene in the mirror changes, showing her an image of herself in a shop. There's no sound but the shop owner seems to be repeatedly asking her something that she refuses to respond to. When he approaches her, she throws out a hand to tell him to back off, but her nails brush his throat and cut it open, covering her with his blood. She looks shocked, but quickly recovers and hurries out of the shop.

This second vision reminds her of my instructions to her. She has to eat a human heart tonight if that young and beautiful body I gave her is going to become hers permanently. And regularly after that, but that's not important, that's just basic dietary needs - the important part is this first time, making a deliberate decision.

She steps through a portal back into her world, the courtyard of her own home. But as she looks around things look strange to her - most notably, the sky is covered with grey clouds that seem unnatural to her. It's as if she's seeing both her world and mine at the same time, and she wonders if this is how I see her world all the time. I'm thinking, you're getting a bit mixed up about which world is yours now.

I'm standing on an empty stage, going over some papers for the show currently in rehearsals. My soprano calls down to me from one of the boxes - she calls me Mr. Bevelle or Deville or something similar-sounding. She's got black hair done up like a Gibson girl, and an unusually high speaking voice, but in a way that I find pleasant. However, we're both aware her singing voice isn't going to last - she's only going to be able to perform in a few more shows. Because of that, she keeps coming to me like this with demands on how to run her last shows.

Scene changes to show her at rehearsal. I'm disembodied this time, without Deville's sense of background information, and I only catch three notes of her singing - lovely clear tones - but I recognize Lohengrin.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm disembodied and observing a setting based on China some centuries ago. Literally just observing the setting - I'm outside of the timeline. Nothing is moving, not even the waves, and the colors of everything are incredibly saturated. I'm on a path with the sea to my right after a long drop, a long single-story house directly in front of me on this path, and several two-story buildings off to my left, among green fields. Far off in the distance I can see the shine of a building decorated in gold. Following the path, it curves to the left of that long house, and off to my left there's a man and a woman standing in a field, embracing, yellow flower petals frozen in the air around them. I know of them, though I don't know them personally. There's something secret about their relationship.

I retrace my steps back to the entrance to that long house, where those two live. I look in briefly, noting the room where she stayed off to my right, with a window looking out to the sea. I leave the house again and circle around to the right, hovering over the sea, sticking closely to the side of the building. There's a door hidden here - she escaped through here, sometime after that embrace in the field among the flowers. It becomes difficult to cling to the side of the building. I float above the water, following the path she took, until I come to another building and look inside - there's a pallet on the floor where she stayed for a while. A doctor looked after her here.

I'm someone playing cards with three other guys, and one of them mentions the (some surname beginning with T) manuscript. It's this anonymous collection of old medical notes. A few copies have been made of it, but it was never published, so it's very rare. I tell them a bit about that manuscript - I love having the chance to do so, I enjoy sharing stories from the past a great deal.

During the war, it was an open secret that T. was seeing a certain woman. He always used a nickname when he mentioned her to others, but everyone knew. (As I'm saying this, I'm seeing an image of myself playing cards with T. in the past, much like the scene with these men now, both of us in uniform; and then an image of that woman walking down a street.) And she'd often go to his room to make use of his typewriter. (I'm seeing a typewriter that doesn't actually make sense for this time period.) For whatever reason, when he left to return to England those notes she'd been working on were mixed in with his typewriter and his other things. He didn't make it back to England of course, and when his things were eventually recovered, that anonymous manuscript was naturally associated with him. But the identity of the author of the T. manuscript is Florence Nightingale.

This doesn't get the reaction from the other card players that I'd been hoping for - I get some odd looks but mostly they just seem bored. They change the subject, talking about pharmaceuticals. I'm disappointed - I'm reasonably certain Florence is still a household name, recent enough and well-known enough that I'd thought they would find this interesting, even though they were all born well after her death. It's always an isolating feeling when this happens - no one much cares about old dramas. But at least they only see it as the eccentricity of a history buff, and I don't have to worry about them seeing me as a threat.

A couple who've been married for about a year are traveling together through another country in a vaguely historical-inspired setting. The husband, who's in the military, suspects his wife is unfaithful. He comes back to their room at the inn with a gift for her: a set of cords for her to use to make knotted ornaments, to hang from the wooden cases he travels with. They both behave as if this is a sincere gift, but he gave it to her to convey something unpleasant: normally, a newlywed couple would have made such things months ago, when they were first married.

There's a man coming down from his room to breakfast at an inn, somewhere expensive and in the mountains, there's snow visible outside, the place looks like a ski lodge. The woman he checked in with is sitting at a table, and he's surprised to see that she's still here, he half expected her to have left during the night. He goes and sits down with her, starts talking with her, but he's distracted, noticing that the innkeeper and his husband are watching them, not being at all subtle about it. This woman is someone in the public eye, and she's married or engaged to someone else, and the innkeeper looked a little scandalized when they checked in together last night.

He says to the woman now, "That... Well, it wasn't an accident. And will you just leave?" By 'that', he's referring to something that happened between them at dinner last night that made it clear he wants her - but it's something small, like a touch on the cheek or the leg; they aren't having an affair, despite the impression they've been giving people. He stands up and as he leaves he gives her this sort of very slight bow, and says "Sleep tight, Sonja."

A woman who used to work with some kind of 'private security company' - which in this case appears to be a euphemism for something not entirely legal - who left that job a while ago and is now a manager at a hotel, currently talking with an old friend, a woman still working at that 'security company,' about how much faster emergency services respond when there's gunfire reported.

Vague fragments involving combat, next scene I remember clearly the combat's over and that hotel manager's picking up her dog, Max, from the dog daycare service - but both dog and daycare service had been involved in that combat scene and the woman running the daycare now refuses to allow Max to come back there again. The hotel manager protests, saying that "We're doing really well," and the daycare woman hesitates over that 'we', highlighting the parallel between dog and owner here, then stresses 'he' - he, Max (and by extension his owner), may seem like he's doing well on the surface, but he has these undercurrents, things that are always going to come back to the surface eventually, and because of that she can't have him around. The friend from the 'security company' is there throughout this scene, petting Max and not saying anything.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: "Covered in ashes, the boy king Yuuma."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: A party at my IRL home, some people have passed out, someone suggests putting on a Terminator movie and asks whether I've seen them. I point out that the last thing I need is to see those movies again after dreaming about them for a month straight. (That's actually true, except IRL it was 2 months.)

A man, a professor, is having an affair. He'd planned to meet his mistress today and finally leave his wife - but at the last minute he's realized this was all a terrible mistake, and he's confessed everything to his wife, Julia, who already knew. (Despite the name, the wife here is not the same as my recurring DC Julia.) She insists on meeting the mistress, and he agrees, taking her to the place where he and the mistress had planned to meet for lunch.

As they park across the street, the mistress is just leaving the building, and he points her out to Julia. At first Julia doesn't believe him. She'd expected some silly college student, the midlife crisis cliche. The woman across the street is beautiful as a movie star, long blond hair and dressed smartly and conservatively in all black, poised and polished, everything about her indicates power. Julia suspects her husband just pointed out a pretty woman in the crowd to throw her off from meeting the real mistress, it's so unbelievable that her husband could be with this woman - but he's gotten out of the car and ducked into the woman's taxi, talking to her. He points back to his wife, and the mistress, confused, looks right through her, saying, "Where?" She saw Julia and immediately dismissed her as someone this man would be with. (Julia is thinking of herself as a plain middle-aged housewife in comparison to the mistress, but in actuality she's quite stunning herself. Short curly red hair, wrapped in a white fur coat and gold jewelry.)

The professor goes back to his car and the scene switches to follow the mistress as she arrives at her destination and gets out of the taxi. The professor stops her in the parking lot - he followed her taxi. He says to her, "Maybe I slept with the body of the garden, but the meat of it hardly tasted." He means by this that throughout their affair he never really got to know anything about her beyond the surface, and that he'd like to. Nonetheless, he's going back to his wife. He doesn't like the way he's dressed, in the nice suit and white scarf he'd put on to meet his mistress, as if to keep up with her pace; he feels quite ridiculous. Rain is beading on the top of their umbrellas, but it's red, and I, disembodied observer, wonder whether that's the rain itself or a trick of the light, a reflection of something I can't see.