I enter a lecture hall and speak to the man who I believed summoned me, dressed in black with a small white owl on his shoulder, but it turns out the owl is the one that called me; this is news to the man in black, and he's not pleased about it. The owl speaks in a pleasant woman's voice and changes into the shape of a four-sided mask, one face for each direction; three of them are simple stylized masks made of wood or similar, but the fourth is an actual face - it moves, it has eyes - just in cartoonishly distorted proportions. She's been sealed/trapped/stuck/reduced to this. She introduces herself as Loki Laufeyjarson, which is not the name I was expecting her to say but I roll with it. She talks about each of her masks - in the one that resembles an actual face, she says she'd taken this form and scorned high heels (meaning an artificial way of gaining the height she feels she should have had anyway - 'height' is not really the issue she's talking about). In one of the wooden masks, she talks about using this form for dealings with a magician, and she suspects that magician of having a hand in her current unfortunate circumstances. She returns to the form of the owl sitting on the man in black's shoulder, and we're now in a yard behind an estate, surrounded by partygoers. The man speaks of my payment and I dismiss the small amount of money he offers; I tell him I expect him to provide me with food and lodgings, pea soup and three packs of smokes a day. (Neither of those are things I'd want IRL, but I wasn't being my IRL self here.) I'm already leaving, stepping over an ornamental pond; it's a demand, not a negotiation. He's irritated, but she accepts immediately. I walk off into the trees along the border of the property. In earlier scenes, symbols of eyes and blue lotuses above the entrance to a cave, and drinking a polar bear's blood from a glass while wondering about parasites.
A young woman's walking quickly through the woods just before dawn - the trees are sparse and thin, lots of fallen leaves from past seasons covering the ground; she's wearing simple dark clothing and a white cap, from maybe around the 1500s. She's very nervous. I follow her as she steals a black hen - she's thinking about some dog as she does it - and makes her way to a well. But just as she reaches the well, an older woman grabs her and shouts, "Witch! Possessed!" This woman's familiar to me. Painfully thin, red hair so short and strangely cut that I suspect it's growing out after being shaved off completely, wearing a nightdress as if she'd just seen my witch and jumped out of bed to stop her, but I don't believe it's a coincidence that she's here; I believe hunting witches is something she's done before. The scene changes. Three men - two middle-aged, one older, all still looking like it's the 1500s - are discussing the woman who'd been caught as a witch, and her mother. Her mother had been the same, accused of "magical transformations," but she'd died years and years ago, and the daughter had been raised by another since she was a child, changed her family name. The last these men had heard of her, she was to be married to some knight. They frame this marriage as a very good thing, that she had a good life that she's thrown away; but I hear them say this and I think indeed she was married to him, and that had gone very badly for her, and that's why she summoned me. Later. Different scene entirely, my IRL home, a pair of men attempted to break in and I turned them into cats. Cat burglars. They made for very angry cats but I was pleased with myself for the joke, and my sister had been wanting a white cat anyway.
Updated 09-05-2016 at 04:04 PM by 64691
I watch the magician enter a building. Unusually, he's dressed in modern clothing and wearing round glasses with very thick lenses, and I make a point of remembering to write that detail down after I wake up. As I'm thinking about it, I wonder what dream interpretation would make of those glasses. The assumption here is that interpretation is the wrong way to go about it and will lead to mistaken conclusions. When he returns, he's ridiculously tall and wearing armor I associate with the temple of Mythal - less about Mythal, more about the temple - which is also unusual but in the opposite direction from before; the mental association is that he's dropped a disguise I'm used to seeing, though this one isn't exactly not a disguise. He asks me about various things I don't remember, and I answer as if I'm providing a status report. He's troubled by my responses. He tells me to wait for the sparrow. There's a sense that this is a reference to folklore or a fairy tale.
A woman has another woman tied to a tree, and is spreading caviar on her face to attract animals to eat her. She's interrupted by some panic among the people she's working with. People are transforming into creatures - from what they're shouting, I have the impression that it's mostly insects, but when I switch to first person, the only transformation I actually see is a bird emerging from a woman's shoulder and flying away. Mostly I just see panicked people running away. I'm leaving too, with several others, at a calmer pace. I look down at my bare feet, and notice that the girl whose body I'm possessing has decorated her toenails in Satanic symbols - not just painting them, but actually growing them into horn-like shapes. I comment on this to one of the people I'm walking with, although I'm careful to phrase it as if I'm the real owner of this body, not something possessing her. Still in that body, I'm at a club with a woman named Pepper. I'm wearing sunglasses - it's night, but I need them to protect myself from the electric lights. I'll take them off when we're outside. We're leaving, waiting by a coat check or something similar, when we're approached by two men, one of them hitting on Pepper, the other hanging back. At first I'm irritated, but then I remember that I'm using a female body at the moment, and I realize the other guy is playing wingman. I'm amused. Since Pepper seems interested enough, we all leave together. We briefly stop by my IRL house, and when I look in a mirror, I see my IRL self, although my reflection isn't mirroring my actions. Pepper calls for me to hurry up, calling the name of the girl whose body I'm possessing for the first time - Julie. Outside, it's dawn, the clouds are starting to change colors, so I put my sunglasses back on. There's a large car parked outside - wingman's in the driver's seat, Pepper and the other guy are in the back. I get into the passenger seat. We drive past several rundown-looking houses, and the guy in the back seat asks me if they're haunted, this being my neighborhood. I say sure, a house that looks like that has to have a few ghosts around. I'm not being serious, just humoring him. He goes on and on about the dead, and he's beginning to irritate me - he's attempting to show off his knowledge, but it's not particularly impressive. He says that he can speak to the dead more easily than others because he still has all his canine teeth - I have an image of one tooth behind another, like adult teeth behind baby teeth, though he's an adult. He says they make a point of telling you that they're dead. And he asks me something about dead and dreams - I didn't catch most of the question, too much background noise, but I assumed he was asking me if I'd ever been visited by the dead in my dreams. I say, sure - I may not know much about talking to dead people, but dreams I can do. Wingman calls my attention away, asking for directions - left or right here? It's not even really a fork in the road, the road we're on just curves right and another road splits away, but I guess it might look confusing if you're not used to it; I tell him to bear right. The guy in the backseat offers me and Pepper beers from a cooler, and asks if we find him creepy, with all that talk about dead people. I say no, the talk about dead people's fine, it's the way you talk about getting me and Pepper to drink that's creepy. Pepper agrees, but she's laughing about it. I was only half joking. Even the wingman agrees - the guy's phrasing is odd, as if he's trying to get us incapacitated. We hit a bump in the road and he spills some of his own beer on the upholstery; I tell him he better clean that up, although I'm not at all sure who owns this car. I'm certain it's not him.
I'm about to open a portal for someone, and I'm trying to explain the difficulties of this type of teleportation to them. I'm saying, no, it doesn't have to be a place I've been to before, but I have to be able to keep the precise location I 'feel' in mind. Things like direction or distance from here to there, those matter - what the place looks like doesn't. As Rumpelstiltskin, I'm using magic to sort of scan someone for some information, together with Belle, and Belle is able to feel it - she's surprised by the feel of it. It seems like it's happy; she didn't expect it to have a mind of its own. And it worries her that it seems happy, when the person we're scanning is sick. I'm thinking, the magic doesn't care about the person being sick one way or the other, it doesn't really understand what people or sickness are, it's just happy about the way it's being used - it's got a life of its own to a degree but it's not that sentient. I'm outside my IRL home at dawn, and there are all these beautiful birds. A great horned owl on a tree stump, a snowy egret walking across the lawn, a variety of smaller birds that I don't recognize in the trees, and four peacocks that show absolutely no fear of humans, I'm standing right next to one and it's not bothered, I'm thinking the peacocks must have been tame. There are two guys climbing up a rock - they think of it as a mountain, but it's barely a hill - carrying a radio and a guitar. A musician they like died here, and one of them has insisted on making a sort of pilgrimage, to play his music at the place he "breathed his last breath." At the top of the rock they turn on the radio. A female vocalist sings "At last the time fell-" The guys brought their own instruments and are joining in. One of them is on the guitar, but the one who insisted on this trip has some small metal instrument that looks vaguely like a comb, played with the thumb.
Updated 02-02-2014 at 11:45 PM by 64691
Dean and Sam are trapped inside a house they were investigating, something to do with a piano and a song that was being worked on at the time of the composer's death. As Dean, I'd been calling someone on my phone the moment the house trapped us inside, a woman we've worked with before. She'd been having lunch when I called her, and after a while the phone is taken by some guy she was eating with, someone who doesn't understand anything about what's going on and who tells me off for being rude, insists I should "use sir and ma'am" or else he'll hang up. So I call him "sir and ma'am" and piss him off. Thankfully the woman from before takes the phone back. I have the impression that if I hadn't been on the phone already, if I hadn't already had a connection established, the house would have prevented the phones from connecting; if this call ends, we won't be able to contact the outside world at all. I've got a creature perched on my finger that's something like a crow and something like a bat - it's furry rather than feathered, but it's got a beak. The feeling of its talons around my finger is odd - not exactly discomfort, it reminds me of holding a mouse in your hands. I raise my hand and launch it into the sky. There are two little girls, elementary school age, who are carrying out some illegal deal, weapons or something similar, something stored in the trunk of a car. They have some mentor who usually does this, he doesn't realize that they're here in his stead, he would have stopped them if he knew about it. This meeting with the customer was supposed to be an initial negotiation, a sample, but one of the girls declares that they're going to do the deal now. The customer reacts badly. The other girl gets shot, the one who'd declared they were doing the deal now takes a gun out of the trunk and shoots the customer, the cops come, they're all put in handcuffs, and the customer is bewildered, he was a good customer and doesn't understand why they tried to change things. The girls escape, go home, and try to cut the chains around their wrists with their father's tools.
There's this guy running from some gang. It's about the patent for something he invented. He can't believe his invention is something anyone would be willing to kill him over, but I remind him it's not the invention they want to kill him over, it's the money. He's got some legal document - not the patent itself, but related to it, possibly he hasn't filed for it yet - which is what everyone's after, and after I get him to reveal it to me, a man who is my brother appears and snatches both the guy and the document away and runs into the forest, just as the gang catches up to us. This was our plan, the woods are my brother's territory. I act like I'm on the gang's side, or at least as if I want to catch that guy as much as they do - they were already aware from past interactions that I have an interest in the guy with the patent, and they've assumed I want the document for my own reasons. So they follow me when I lead the chase into the forest, into my brother's traps. The path into the forest that I lead them on - and which my brother appears to be on, we catch glimpses of him now and then, though I'm aware he won't stick to the path - curves back and forth in strange ways, it's disorienting. I see an odd bullet coming - dark green like a beetle's wing - and I make sure I'm out of its path, that it picks off one of the gang as intended. It was fired by one of three men who work for/with my brother, people I know well. Time seems to have slowed down, and when one of the gang starts grumbling about the strangeness of it, a man emerges from the woods, the second of my brother's men. He explains that it's the insect-birds. They're insects which mimic birds and sing constantly, disorienting the birds and causing them to mistake night for day, and for us, creating an illusion of time slowing. They prevent violence being done in my brother's forest. But "their element is in possessing one," he says; that is, the insect enters and controls a single bird.
A nightmare from over the weekend: I'm watching a TV show involving something supernatural, and the character in the show is looking at a TV screen with some monster/demon/spirit/etc on the other side of the screen, coming closer, intending to break through. It looks like a white-skinned (literal colorless white) woman with brilliantly red hair and this blazing sparking moving light where its eyes should be. I notice that I can see it not just on my TV but on all the reflective surfaces in the room, and I know it's really trying to break through into the real world. I try holding it back with various protective symbols and calling on various things (not Apollo, curiously, as that's been my go-to nightmare cure recently; possibly it's because this one's not on the theme of darkness like all the others were) but they're not very effective, I have the feeling it's only a matter of time. At the same time, the door at the far end of the hall is open - I came through it earlier - and through it I can see a woman laughing, different from the woman in the screen but I have the feeling they're related. Feeling like I don't have much time, I sprint across the hall, slam the door and lock it. The dream 'camera' zooms in on that image of the lock turning, and closely focuses on the feel of it - and then the scene isn't a nightmare anymore. The thing on the screen is gone, now it's showing the main character saying to his sister, "It's you and me, we're all we've got now." At some point while I was watching the show (I can't remember whether it was before or after the nightmare part), I thought to myself that watching creepy things every week might impact your dreams. (Woke up around 5:30, an hour after bed, with a high-pitched ringing in my ears that reminds me a little of TV static, so that was presumably the cause of this. Recall for the rest of the day was terrible.) Tonight's dreams: People living in tunnels who have to move due to some imminent danger. I'm walking through this vast room, mostly filled with a pool of water, cranes are standing in it, and one of the people I'm with comments on the way one of the birds is holding its leg up out of the water, she says she bets it's pointing to something, we should investigate. I disagree, but investigate anyway just to prove the point. I float above the water, and pass various cranes pointing in different directions, meaningless. But at the far side of the room I meet a man, a traveler, who I start talking to and who decides to come with us; he's standing beside this curtained alcove, and through the white curtains I get a glimpse of this beautiful woman sitting on the stone floor in white robes, hair down to the floor, and at first I think she's wearing a mask, something representing the moon, and I think she must be a princess or a priestess. Then I realize that's not a mask, it's her face, beautiful and strange. 3rd person, that traveler and the man who I was in the previous scene are walking down a flight of stairs with a little boy running ahead of them. There's a festival, a sending on of spirits, which are these floating pale lights filling the room, sending them on involves covering them with cloth, and the boy reaches for one of them, but it's acting differently than the others. The traveler says that because this one had been killed, it would be wrong to send her on in that form. The light takes on the image of the little girl it had been, and starts talking to the little boy, calling him Koya, saying he's gotten older. He tells her he's not Koya, sounding frustrated, but one of the older men says quietly to him that she needs him to be the person she's waiting for.
Updated 10-10-2013 at 08:49 PM by 64691
Hypnagogia: A woman's voice saying "Run!" over and over again. Disconcerting. Woke myself right back up. Nightmare: I'm in a dark cave full of dangerous creatures. So I decide to summon up a pterosaur to kill them for me. I hide behind a door against the wall and listen to it move around; it won't be able to reach into that narrow space, so I'll be fine. Except I start doubting whether the space is small enough, and become aware that I'm not in a narrow space, I'm in the much more open space of my bed. (Woke up at 5:30 am, half an hour after bed. Back to sleep.) A connection between the Palin family and a family of actors, a law that makes it possible to win an election without gaining a majority of votes, and a great deal of anger at both these things, though I don't much mind myself. Birds flying overhead in V formation above my IRL home, thinking about luring them down. (Woke up. Back to sleep.) I'm the Doctor, the ninth, traveling with Rose, and trying to get into a building which is apparently strictly for the upper class and we don't look the part. The guard at the door stops us at first, then lets us in after I wave the psychic paper at him. After we're inside - looks like a casino - Rose asks if the paper made him see us as someone else, or in nicer clothes. I tell her it doesn't change the things people see, just the way they interpret them. (Woke up. Suspect that last scene was inspired by the 'Run!' hypnagogia. Back to sleep.) A little dark-haired girl, a relative, who hides behind the furniture and speaks quietly, tells me I should have listened to my visions. I'd just agreed to something, and I probably shouldn't have.