Carabas

A deal has fallen through. Sort of. I've got a prince in my debt, but that's pointless - what I needed was for him to eventually become a king, so that a little further down the timeline, he'll be able to ask another king for a favor. But the princess I'd intended him to marry has now been burned and beheaded due to a minor demonic possession incident, so now he's useless to me.

I find another kingdom that will work, a desert. Two daughters. In the throne room, I meet the younger daughter, but that timeline doesn't interest me. The eldest is locked in the dungeon, and I take the prince to meet her instead. I recognize her, though she doesn't recognize me - I'd met a version of her in another world. She'd been a he at the time. The prince had known her in that world too, and I think that could work out either very well or very badly. She's a lot angrier this time around, something of a freedom fighter, turned against her own father. This is promising.

I'm being told a story. There's a man, a shapeshifter who can seem to be anyone, but when he smiles you see the shards of glass filling his mouth, grotesquely. I see the moment he'd died, falling from a horse and landing on a glass bottle full of something he'd been carrying, shattering it.

The story shifts to the woman he'd loved when he was alive. She was called a witch, and a mob took her and chained her to a tree in the forest, with a circle of some kind of wooden pegs placed in the ground to prevent the body from leaving that spot after death. Her body's left there without her head. I 'hear' the body briefly feel a dim sort of awareness of the presence of something familiar and loved nearby.

Over time, the body comes loose from the chains as it decomposes, sinks into the ground and is covered by - I hear the word 'loam', but I'm seeing moss growing over the body. The arms separate from the rest and hang from the chains. At one point, a horse that had belonged to her while she was alive comes to the tree and noses at those decaying arms, and they reach out and pat it. At another time, the body rises up from the ground and seems to dance, with those arms dancing along as if they were still attached - slightly altering how my vision works, I can see dark strings which would be invisible, manipulating the body like a puppet. That man with the mouth full of glass shards is pulling the strings.

Later, a scene in which I'm using Mephisto as a pseudonym.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

On a ship after some incident in which several of the crew died, the captain came to me privately to ask a question. He's under the mistaken impression that I can see the future. I don't see the future, I just have more memories to draw on to recognize old patterns playing out again. The captain asks, essentially, whether any of those who died were important - he uses the word 'cheap.' I say to him, "No life is cheap." He acknowledges that this was poor phrasing, but "I need to know-"

As he speaks, I see a go board. The point is made that certain moves will have a drastic impact on the outcome of the game, and others won't. The captain needs to know if any of the people we lost would have been necessary for this journey to succeed, in ways he can't foresee himself.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm looking at paintings hanging on a wall, a series mostly depicting figures of the zodiac, with one in the center of a man labeled Dream.

I'm meeting with a man named Snow who'd initially tried to conceal his identity from me. He's disappointed to find I recognized him immediately. The persona he'd put on for me was this sort of affable type; the real Snow is - well, he gives the impression of being intimidating but I'm not personally intimidated, I'm just enjoying watching how complete his transformation is.

The majority of the scene after that reveal consists of a tango, during which he leads - which is different, but I find I have no difficulty following. Great fun. He's proposing some kind of deal - there's something about him recognizing the way I've been challenging myself, and how working for him would be beneficial for both of us, something about working for a greater cause, a sense of direction - but when the tango's over and he wants an answer, I just start laughing. Man, have you got the wrong guy. I'm thoroughly enjoying every aspect of his presentation - the intimidating attitude, the seriousness of the deal he's proposing, the song and dance, his whole look - it's all incredibly appealing, but I have no intention of taking it seriously.

A man walks up to a wall and shouts at the guards on the other side, trying to get them to chase him somewhere. It's part of a bigger plan - but I've already seen this happen, and the plan didn't work, we need more people. So I shout to the guards too, telling them this man is a monster, send help, send backup, send everyone you've got. He turns around to look at me and is completely bewildered - he doesn't know me, he has no idea what I'm trying to do. But it works. He ends up being chased by far more people than he was expecting.

They've surrounded him, and everyone's drawn their swords. There's a small audience of people who are thinking of this as a duel, despite the difference in numbers. He's killed immediately, but I rewind time to let him try again. As I do so, I see an image of a page in a book describing this scene as though it were a story - it only describes his actions, the duel, not the part about me turning back time. He keeps being defeated, and I keep rewinding time by moments. He's the only person aside from me who's aware of what just happened, so he has the chance to adjust his actions accordingly, although that's easier said than done and he dies over and over again. But I'm giving him an infinite number of chances to succeed.

Just now he's cut the head off one of his opponents. The people watching the 'duel' exclaim over this. From his perspective that was the end of a long struggle in which he's lost far more often than he's won, but from the audience's perspective, the duel's only just started and he's completely dominating. A woman calls it horrific, the way he coldly executed his opponent. A young man who's an aspiring duelist is admiring what he calls 'the skill that comes with experience,' which amuses me, given my very different perspective on how well this fight is going.

In a wild west-inspired setting, there's someone called 'the Kid', although he's a grown man with greying hair and wrinkles. I'm watching him ride a motorcycle out of town, and I'm thinking that although he may not be a Kid, it'd also be wrong to call him a man, since he's not human.

There's a man and a woman in some kind of storage space, looks like an attic. She's asking if he's ever even tried moving to 'a real town' and setting up 'a real life,' the way she says other heroes have done. He's surprised she called him a hero and says she's got the wrong idea, and that he's not even human. As a third person observer, I'm thinking how cliche he is, the self-loathing vampire hero type. I focus on his appearance for the first time - a man in a red coat, with a face that reminds me of some actor but covered in scars and boils, and I'm thinking that at least this one's not pretty.

There's a dead guy on the floor between the two of them, and now he wakes up. The guy in the red coat picks up this huge sword with a curve in the blade which I associate with beheading, and he says something about how what he really wants isn't 'a real life in a real town'; what he wants is this weapon, automated, on a massive scale. The dead guy says something about being grateful before his head's taken off.

There are people arguing in the town square. The guy in the red coat gathered everyone here and is standing up on a wooden stage trying to talk to them. One person says, "You act like one of 'em, the game's won!" 'Them' meaning vampires, and 'won' meaning won by the vampires. The person he's arguing with says, "You resist 'em, the game's won!" Everyone seems to think it's hopeless. While the guy in the red coat is focused on them, he doesn't see the burned and headless body which is crawling out of town.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Dracula, a girl, and a priest/vampire slayer, in a field in daylight. Dracula's kneeling, and the priest's saying that He often seems to hear him and know what's needed. In response, black shapes fill the sky, blotting out the sun, which Dracula doesn't like at all. As a 3rd person observer, I'm thinking about how this is an interesting switch; normally you'd think of darkness favoring vampires, but Dracula was fine with sunlight. The girl says something about sending him to hell, but she's got it backwards; the priest isn't in the business of damning souls. On closer look, the things blotting out the sun are crows; and then among them appear the souls of all those he'd turned.

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.

I'm evacuating a place where True Blood's Eric and Bill had been staying; Bill's already gone, but Eric's chained to a chair, and I have no intention of freeing him. I'm going to carry him out in the chair. Despite this, I have nothing against him, and I'm asking him if he wants me to bring any of the belongings he's kept in these rooms. I'm kneeling in front of the chair as I speak to him, and I say that I may need him to carry something of Bill's in exchange, to which he consents. Aside from 2 belongings which needed no discussion, he says he doesn't need anything else. It seems a shame, the rooms are full of things he's collected over his lifetime. I pick up a sword he has on display with a hilt that looks like carved ivory or bone, and I say sure, you may not need anything else, but it's better if it can come, isn't it? I put it on the chair with him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: a mention of Louis, a king.

I've heard about a gathering of people I'm thinking of as 'the British' tonight - there's a connotation of a specific politically subversive group in my mind - and I intend to arrange a meeting with the queen, although I'm not as close to her in this reality as I have been in past iterations; I've spent too much time focusing on other contacts this time through. I sit down beside the queen at her mirror. Her daughter, Antoinette, is here as well, standing by the window; she's beautiful but spoiled, self-centered. That's largely my fault - in other versions of this reality I'd devoted more time to her and she'd developed into a very sweet girl. This time around, we're not particularly close, and she notes only that she owes her name to me. In French, I ask the queen her plans for this evening after the party. I don't speak to her in a particularly deferential manner. She seems wary, suspicious, but I think I have enough influence with her to pull this off.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I need to kill a giant snake, but I can't find a weapon. Finally, a woman produces a long knife and beheads the snake herself. But I tell her that it's still alive, you need to destroy the brain, otherwise beheading it is just slow death by suffocation, it's cruel. I point to its eyes, which are still moving; I tell her it's suffering. She doesn't care. It's harmless now, that's all she cared about. I can't believe this. But I do my best to put it out of its misery without a weapon, until finally its eyes stop moving and its skull is crushed. I pick up head and body and carry them outside.

When I reach the door, the storyline changes - at first I was still aware I was carrying something and needed to get rid of it, but I forgot about it quickly and so the snake disappeared. I was distracted by the sight of colorful glowing orbs floating down the river, just through the trees. There's a festival going on all this week, and tonight is the children's celebration. I walk past the women handing out colored orbs for the children to light candles inside and carry down to the water, and as I walk I see a couple kids carrying their lights the wrong way, down to the sea instead of the launching place at the river. Some adults are trying to point them the right way, but the oldest kid says something about their father's ship out at sea.