Carabas

A man came across a woman seemingly sleeping in the forest, but when he approached her she spoke quietly, asking him to kill her quickly and to leave her mother alive, so that her mother could continue to feed the others. He's shocked by this, but that's because he's under the impression she's human. She's a wolf, she only looks human. She knows he came there to hunt them.

She's speaking to her mother, also human-appearing, and says she wants her next lesson to be that lesson - the implication is she's decided to marry that hunter.

The hunter speaking with two other men, also hunters, one of them saying, "You can't stay married to that madwoman."

The hunter sitting in the forest, chanting a prayer or a spell that talks about the eyes of the wolves. Although the rest of the dream had been in English, he's speaking Spanish here. As he chants, the forest around him seems to change - the shadows become darker, the moonlight becomes brighter, patches of glowing fungi appear around him. He's amazed and enchanted by all of this. He's not aware of this, but from my disembodied perspective, he himself also looks different - his eyes are faintly glowing gold, and there's a sort of shadow over him, as if looking at a photograph of him overlaid with a photo of something else. Behind him, a pile of vines and undergrowth heaves upward into the form of some great beast - he's delighted by everything now but I'm sure he'll be afraid when he sees this.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm talking with a wizard from another world over tea. He's brought some of his people here as a sort of emergency hideout, and he's concerned about them picking up bad habits while they're here, to the extent that he's got them camped out at the bottom of the hill instead of in the house with me. He describes my form of magic as 'lax' and not something he wants spread to his people, which I find ridiculous for all sorts of reasons - for starters, when we'd first met he'd been seeking my help with some murderous wannabe dark lord type. I'd put a compulsion on the man to prevent him from taking human lives, which seemed such an obvious solution, I can't believe he couldn't manage it on his own. And really, as far as I can tell his world's form of magic just requires you to say the right nonsense words in the right order to express what you want, so if you're going to talk about laxness and discipline, that seems lax as hell to me.

But in any case, while we're talking about the arrangements for his people, two guys from my world come into the room. They're trying to avoid getting into trouble with their boss - they'd claimed to be unable to carry out some duty on account of being busy elsewhere, which was a lie. Now their boss is on his way to the house and will certainly sense their presence, and since I've already got a portal open, I wouldn't mind if they ducked through until the coast is clear again, would I? Fine, fine, I wave them through. That wizard objects strongly, but for crying out loud, those two aren't going to corrupt your world's magic system in a few hours, it'll be fine.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

In the American western desert, me and an older man are standing next to a car, watching a group of police vehicles pull up. We're going over a few last details before we talk to them. At the moment I'm telling him about a body I'd left floating in a pool of a private home. I see a mental image of it as I describe it, struck by the way his legs had stayed bent underneath him even as he started to float in the water. That older man says he already knew about that one. That's everything then.

He says there's a saying, "The liar does two steps worse." Do I know why that is?

I say I don't know, but then I look where he's looking. His family's just gotten out of one of those police cars - his wife, his daughter, and the daughter's boyfriend. They're looking around, haven't seen us yet with all the confusion around the scene downhill. It's clear to me they're the meaning of that saying. Lie to the people you care about and you lose them even if you're still physically present - you've separated part of yourself from them.

My brother's killed and drained a number of people in some public building in the desert, a rest stop or similar, but he has no memory of doing so. In fact when he saw the bodies he assumed they were my work - which would normally be a reasonable assumption, but since it's not true in this case, and since it seems there's something wrong with him, we've been having a very frustrating conversation. We left in a hurry and now he's assuring me that there's no need for me to make excuses, he's always understood that occasional lapses in self-control are an unavoidable part of my nature, none of them blame me for it. Thanks for that note, but that's really not the issue here.

Meanwhile, back in that building in the desert, my brother's leftovers have woken up and managed to find their way outside. They're huddled together, not really aware of their surroundings, barely able to move - more like zombies really. Torn clothes, bloodstains, visibly dead. There was a woman just outside the building when they found their way out the door, and the one in front managed to grab her and drink her despite her struggles, and once he's had his fill he passes her back over his head, one-handed, to the next.

He walks into the desert, away from the little horde, looking slightly more aware now, and he walks straight up to the mangled body of another vampire lying in the dirt, trying to pull himself together and looking rather pitiful. This one actually is my work. Leftover asks mangled body what he (leftover) is. Mangled body informs him he's a vampire.

The leftover says, "I'm a what? Oh, fuck." Utter disgust at the ridiculousness of this. Disembodied, I'm thinking how much I love the modern reaction.

Scotland sometime in the 1700s, I'm in the stables brushing a horse and speaking with a young man I've just been riding with. He's about to inherit some position from his father and he's extremely uncomfortable about it, particularly about how little education he's had - less for its own sake, and more to do with how others will see him. The conversation's wandered around a bit on the subject of education, and I've just mentioned Jim, a servant I grew up with in the American colonies who's devoted to learning, more so than anyone I ever knew. Brilliant man. The man I'm talking to asks how much schooling he'd had - none. I feel vaguely ashamed about that, for my home and for myself for not thinking about this when we were younger - Jim certainly would have wanted to go to school and it had never occurred to me to think about that. If he'd been white, he'd almost certainly have gone to a college.

Two dull scenes I'm noting for the character who appears in both - at the end of the previous scene I went to sleep and "dreamed" of a long-haired old man who was a teacher in a modern classroom, who said that the two times are only nine steps apart, so it's silly to make such a fuss. At this point I was fully aware the classroom scene was a dream and had modern memories, but didn't believe the Scotland scene was a dream - I considered the classroom dream a way of communicating with this man while I was in the past. Woke up (really), went back to sleep, and some scenes later I was forging a series of swords - masterpieces. The same old man appeared, this time as the master of the forge, and was so impressed that he insisted I destroy one of them by peeling back layers of metal so he could see the core, see what I'd done.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm reading a letter from an old friend. She's telling me she's spent the last six years in Vienna, and that she's devoting this lifetime (meaning however long this particular identity lasts her) to the study of music. She uses a word that specifically means playing instruments rather than singing, and she says she's giving her voice a break after "those swan songs" in Canada. She's studying the piano, which reminds her of me - she asks if I remember the old spinet I used to play for them.

Scene changes when I think about when and where that had been. There's an image of a little room, dark for just a second, then lit up with this golden light in shapes created by a lantern - this incredibly intricate fantasy scene, silhouettes of people and leaves, and an impression of bars, as if inside a birdcage.

I'm flirting with this young woman. A while ago, me and Julia had this mission that required us to help her. I think of her as sort of coltish - she's got an unbelievable amount of power and no idea what to do with it, aside from awkwardly trying to help the people around her. Incredibly endearing to watch. Afterward we'd gone back to England, but now I'm back in America. Julia didn't come this time, and I said it's because she's busy with her music right now, which is true. But the main reason I'm here on my own is because our mission might require this girl's death. Julia doesn't know, and I don't want her to have to be involved - she likes this girl, we both do.

Someone's been describing a group of people to me, and he's just moved on to describe two partners who are separate from all the others in some way. His description focuses on one of these two, but my memory only really picks up when he moves on to the second one by saying "Another one, always in darkness." (Or shadows, or something with a similar meaning). I see an image of him as a tall hooded figure. I like him instantly. The guy describing him says that unlike all the others, this one exists in "both long time and short time." I see him in modern clothing now, living and working at an isolated shrine. By "exists in long time," it means that this guy's forced to go through time the long way around, living through each day one at a time (that is, the way time usually works), waiting for the others to reappear. That seems tragic. I'm thinking that he must be immortal in some fashion, to be able to wait for the others' timelines to intersect with his over centuries. The guy talking references "the swords that take the end of each user's life."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm sitting on a bus waiting at an intersection, looking out the window. One of the other passengers says we've reached Las Vegas now. I see a sign on a building that includes Las Vegas in the name, but the road we're on now is in a small neighborhood, small town atmosphere. The bus is just across from a small store, and there's a guy standing by the door playing a guitar. I'm enjoying the music. So is the girl sitting on the seat next to me. There's an old man sitting across the aisle who looks over at us to make sure we're paying attention to the music. He talks about the importance of paying attention and enjoying what's going on around you, something about being open to messages from the universe and synchronicity and all that. I'm bored with this conversation, but then I think that I've been hearing that sort of thing so often lately, between work and now this guy, it's a synchronicity in itself. (Except since it's turned out to be a dream, that's no longer true. Dreaming about things from work isn't exactly synchronicitous.)

I'm looking at an image of a woman wrapped in this dress made of blue cloth; the cloth also wraps up her neck and over some kind of tall headgear in a way that reminds me of a nun, or some medieval headdresses. The only skin visible is her face - or it would be, except that in this image, she has the head of an elephant. I'm aware this is specifically something added to this image, it's not literally her face. It's representing something to do with the shape. I briefly see a second, similar image, using the head of an anteater instead of an elephant, reinforcing the point about shape.

Scene change. That woman, with her own human face now - or at least, a woman in that same dress - standing in an immense room. A man's come to consult her. His skin has cracks running through it in a way that reminds me of magma. He's aware, as he approaches her, that this isn't the woman he's come to consult - she's a stand-in, a decoy, to protect the real one. He can smell the difference between them. He's about to say something about this, but he's distracted by noticing a different scent in the room. There's a dead body of a man lying on the floor a little way away, and now he walks back to that body and bends down to look at a circular metal medallion on the corpse's chest. He can smell two other people who were here earlier. One is his sister. The other, he asks the woman in blue about - a man he describes out loud only as "a writer," and his voice sounds annoyed. In his mind, he's thinking that this writer left for America years ago, and shouldn't be here now.

Then I have the impression that I'm looking at one in a series of scenes showing an alternate past, of what would have happened if that writer hadn't traveled to America back then, but I only actually see one scene - a group of people, mostly adults, celebrating the 8th birthday of that previously mentioned sister, Julie.

A setting based on the early 1900s. I'm sitting at a dinner table, with my POV character's mother sitting somewhere to my right, and a woman who I'm having an intense argument with to my left, at the foot of the table. We argue frequently, I enjoy it; and I realize that although we're stating how much we hate each other, we're using words usually associated with passion or love.

Dinner's over, the woman is gone, but my mother and I are still in the same room, standing now. I'm talking about breaking my engagement to someone else. I've never met the girl I'm engaged to - she lives in (either New York or Boston, can't remember which - I thought of it as far away), and our fathers had arranged it between themselves, before my father died. My mother is warning me about possible consequences. She describes the girl's father as "the power behind the throne."