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    1. A four-sided mask

      by , 12-24-2016 at 05:08 PM
      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.
      Categories
      non-lucid
    2. Iudex

      by , 10-23-2016 at 03:23 PM
      A woman made a deal with one of my kind, a short man in a black suit who irritates me, and so he's placed his mark on her wrist, a symbol in the shape of a sword, representing "Iudex," the judge. This will allow him to possess her, though she was unaware of this. I'm furious. He's well within his rights, but I deeply dislike him and his people who bear that symbol; I'm going to destroy his mark. It's not difficult, any changes to the lines in her skin will do the job. I ask her to choose the method (a knife) and if she wants me to do it for her or if she'd rather do it herself (she asks me to do it), three horizontal cuts distort the symbol sufficiently, and then I set out a bandage for her.
    3. Fragments

      by , 09-05-2015 at 05:16 PM
      I'm on a lake. In the lake, there's a small island; there's an enormous tree whose roots cover almost the entire island; at the base of the tree, there's a standing mirror, silver in color this time; and in front of the mirror, there are two steel bars. There's a steel vine covered in thorns that's wrapped around the bars in an arch, serving as a lock. I unwind the thorny vine and remove it. The mirror's open now.

      Traveling through the basement of a ruined mansion, where the walls have crumbled so much there's a sense of open air and greenery, there's a painting of Joan of Arc commissioned by the woman who used to own this estate, and I'm pleased to see she had it painted so that Joan resembles the commissioner herself. This would be considered disrespectful, which is why it was hidden away in the basement.

      I'm in an open, airy, bright library where some event is going on, some new release that's drawn in a lot of upper class, scholarly types. It's interrupted by a woman who's some kind of monster I'm familiar with, delivering a hostile message to me and leaving again. She frightened most of the people into backing away. I'm thinking, although these things are hostile and my automatic reaction to them is equally hostile, they only exist because of my "tainted blood," which was what originally created her kind, generations back; thinking about that, there's a shift in attitude, I start to pity them. They're essentially my responsibility, though they're not aware of it.
    4. Little fangs

      by , 05-27-2015 at 06:13 PM
      In some small early 20th century village, I'm the youngest in a family of three sons, and for years now it's been expected that I'll marry the neighbor's youngest daughter when we grow up - we've always been good friends. In the previous scene we'd all been sitting around my family's dinner table; now I've gone to meet her down by the river, which is so full of plants it gives the impression you could walk across them like a bridge. The girl's here waiting, but before I go to meet her, I'm distracted by another girl, a stranger, standing in the center of the river. The observer side of me thinks, I have to remember this.

      Her hair is probably blonde, but it's so matted and dirty that it's hard to tell. She's dressed in old-fashioned men's clothes, a shapeless and colorless coat over a blue velvet waistcoat with a pattern of rosebuds. Then I realize that while I've been focusing on remembering the details of her appearance, I've been missing the conversation the character side of me is having with her. I drop back to focus on what the character side of me is doing.

      Years later, but near that same river. One of my brothers is handing me a silver pocket watch that belongs to our father, and telling me that he's in Madrid - they've known this all along, apparently. My brothers got me to come back here on the pretense that our father's missing - I'm annoyed but not surprised to find that was a lie. There's a woman here, somehow connected to that girl in the river but not the same person, and something about biting down on a chain, and her little fangs.

      I'm carrying one end of a wooden box through what looks like an abandoned house, with that woman holding the other end - it's not particularly large or heavy, just large enough to be awkward for one person. I'm looking at our hands on the box, close enough to be nearly touching. Her nails look thick and discolored, greyish; there's blood ingrained around the nail, but I'm thinking that the blood's not what's causing the dark greyish appearance, since there's blood all over my hands too.

      That woman is kissing me and holding me in place, not letting me turn my head to see what's going on, telling me not to move when I try to. Something is very wrong. There's other people here; the observer side of me recognizes this moment and I switch to third person to avoid it. The scene still continues in front of me, they kill her, but I don't see much of it, focusing on remembering the earlier scenes.

      Updated 05-27-2015 at 06:15 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    5. Desertion in the making

      by , 03-12-2015 at 07:50 PM
      I'm disembodied, following a man as he walks out of a stone fortress through a side door. He's upset. I'm trying to mentally push him into making a choice that he doesn't see yet - there's a group of people staying at this fortress, and when they leave, I want him to leave with them. I need him working with them, and he'll be much happier as well. It only hasn't occurred to him yet because that would be desertion, which I think of as a minor nuisance. He's in a position of command in this semi-military, semi-religious order, a position he'd never wanted, and I've been mentally pushing him to focus on all the ways he feels trapped here.

      The fortress is surrounded by an evergreen forest, and there's a little snow here and there. He stops right outside the door, believing that he's just getting some air. He's thinking about that group traveling through that I want him to leave with, and thinking about how his order can't show emotion, contrasting it with that group. He's looking at something on the ground that I can't see, and he's thinking that he'd be crying right now if he was capable of it.

      I push him to walk further from the door - he thinks of it as walking aimlessly, but I have a direction in mind. There's several tables set up from something going on here during the day, mostly empty now. He looks over the devices assembled on one of them - he doesn't understand how any of them work, but he feels like he's spent all day protecting this stuff from overly curious onlookers, and managing the nobility, and running errands for the great and the good - it seems completely ridiculous to him that this is his life. It's the opposite of where he ever expected to be.

      He keeps walking. I make sure he focuses on the little pool of blood on the stone ground here, a dozen or so dead crows around it, deliberately placed in a certain formation. One of his men had called it "a battlefield for crows" earlier. He has absolutely no idea what this disgusting thing is for, it's just one more thing he's had to keep people away from today. As he's looking at it, he sees someone standing at the edge of the woods. He's startled; at first glance, it looks like the man who used to be in command here, who'd moved on a few months ago and left him in charge. He feels relieved - and by feeling the extent of that relief, he's just now become really aware of just how much weight's been on his shoulders since that man left. But then the person moves and breaks the illusion. It's not him.
    6. Shapeshifters

      by , 02-21-2015 at 11:52 PM
      My brother is lying in fetal position on the ground, out in the woods, blood on his hands up to his elbows, just now returned to human form and very out of it. There's a girl with him. In the previous scene they'd been on a date in a restaurant, and she'd already known he wasn't human, and that he was violent - she'd gotten some kind of thrill out of it. But now that she's actually seeing the reality of it for herself, she's yelling at him, and being horrified by the blood on her own hands where she'd touched him. I'm watching from a distance, and I'd intended to give them privacy, but now that I've seen her reaction I'm disgusted by her - and disgusted by his behavior too, but that's not unusual. I allow her to see me and I go to get my brother on his feet.

      Another time. I'm standing next to that same girl, making sure she doesn't do anything to interfere. We're watching a friend of hers go through a sort of rite of passage. She's standing in the woods, holding a sickle. Some variety of large wild cat walks out of the woods. The girl is supposed to kill that cat, but she doesn't move - she can't do it. The cat kills her instead. The cat then returns to her human form; her animal form was supposed to be passed down through her death.

      Another time. A mistake's been made and we're going to need to allow one of our people to go to prison. An older man is offering to take the fall for her - he's been in prison before and he thinks it would be better this way. The youngest of us says there has to be some way to avoid this - none of us can leave this territory anyway, so a prison seems pointless to her.
    7. A deal

      by , 02-02-2015 at 10:14 PM
      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.
    8. Rescue mission

      by , 01-26-2015 at 10:32 PM
      A woman's just rescued two men and they're currently escaping through a series of underground tunnels. She's just shoved one of them up a ladder, to a manhole leading out of this tunnel, but apparently that's her limit - she collapses onto the floor, which is a sort of metal grate over water. I can see blood on her face. The other man says, teasing about the way she's been telling him to just let her handle things this whole time, "This is your plan? To lie here and bleed to death?"

      She says, "See, I knew you wouldn't be down with the plan."

      He picks her up and carries her up the ladder. I switch to first person, from the POV of the man she'd shoved up the ladder before; we've climbed up to the level of the subway tunnels that are currently in use. We walk along the tracks for a while, and just as we reach a platform - currently empty, though I'm aware people could show up at any moment - we hear a train in the distance. I have to help both of them up onto the platform, he's so tired from carrying her, and I'm thinking about how we each keep exhausting ourselves to pull the other two up. I climb up after them, and collapse on the stairs, exhausted, listening to the train.
    9. The cop, the soprano

      by , 12-02-2014 at 09:40 PM
      A man's talking to a woman he's recently made immortal. She's very upset, talking about the moment when she'd thought she was about to die, and how she'd thought back on all these things in her life - her family, and the man she'd almost married. I see an image of that man lying in a pool of blood with her kneeling beside him - injured in the line of duty; he's a fed, she was a cop. He survived that. She's saying to the man who made her immortal that she doesn't expect him to be able to understand any of this - it's implied that she thinks of him as too inhuman. He's annoyed. He says to her, if she's so fixated on dying, go right ahead. If a year goes by and she's still feeling so "inconsistent," come tell him, and he'll kill her himself. He's entirely serious, but he believes that this won't be necessary - he believes that trying to make her focus on living will just drive her further into this self-destructive line of thought, but that if she spends time thoroughly thinking about death, she'll stop desiring it.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      The soprano from the other night, looking a little younger here, is sitting in a room with another woman, both of them dressed all in white with long white gloves. There's a mirror on the wall behind them. This other woman is standing up and singing, holding sheet music in her left hand - it's light popular music; she sings prettily but not professionally. The door to the hall opens, and a third young woman says, complaining, "Cora, it's almost dawn."

      Updated 12-02-2014 at 10:08 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    10. Janette and LaCroix, white roses and a buffet table

      by , 11-03-2014 at 08:43 PM
      As FK's Nicholas, I saw an image of a vase of white roses, bleeding a few trails of red blood - I believed that this was a hallucination, thinking of it as "a bit of silliness" - and then I saw a mental image of Janette lying on a white couch, looking unwell, somehow connected with those roses. Now I'm sitting on that couch, and Janette's lying on her side with her head resting against my thigh, my hand in her hair. We're talking about a particular time in the past when things had been better between the three of us. As we talk, I'm thinking about how easily I revert to this version of myself when I'm around them - without thinking, my body language, my speech patterns change automatically. It's like taking off a mask.

      POV shifts to show LaCroix. He's at some kind of charity event. At the moment he's talking to a man near a buffet table, a man he knows in some professional capacity, and a moment comes when he has to either eat or make some excuse. Without hesitating, he puts some item of food in his mouth. As a disembodied observer/Nicholas, I'm incredibly jealous of his ability to do that without flinching. It would make my life so much easier if I could pretend to eat - socialization revolves almost entirely around food and drink, so just imagine how much easier it would be to blend in. After a moment, LaCroix makes a displeased face, reaches for a napkin, and removes the thing in his mouth. He makes some comment about the poor quality of the food this year compared to previous years, and the man he's talking to agrees. LaCroix's posing as a gourmet, picky about what he eats - it's his usual trick, insulting the food wherever he goes. They make a joke about not being able to trust the food in a place that has such skinny staff, and then the man LaCroix's talking to complains that this event has gone downhill in general - disappointing for such a worthy charity. LaCroix makes a comment about the decline of morality as time goes by. He manages to say this with a straight face.

      Updated 11-03-2014 at 09:04 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    11. Vampires and snakes, rain and memory, underground storage

      by , 09-05-2014 at 07:01 PM
      There's this vampire who went through a bit of a rock star phase in the 60s. During that time he had this assistant who would occasionally arrange for the vampire to wake up with one of his groupies locked in the same room. The vampire resents this. He compares it to throwing a live, venomous snake at someone - neither the snake nor the victim has any choice in the matter, the snake is used as a tool.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      This woman, thoroughly soaked by the rain, just completely drenched, has just been put into the back seat of a car. The man who's just gotten out of the car and insisted she take it is now standing in the rain. After just a moment the woman gets out of the car again, makes this sort of exasperated sound, drapes her coat over his head to keep the rain off, and gets back in the car. The coat is thoroughly drenched so this does absolutely nothing to keep him dry, but he gets this big lopsided grin.

      There's another guy standing in the rain with him, and my first impression - before the woman had gotten back out of the car - had been that the two men were enemies of some kind, but that the first guy was obliged to go along with him for something. But looking at the second guy again now, on second thought I'm thinking of him as a friend.

      The scene changes to show the woman and that first guy again, parting at a rural train station sometime in the 1800s. I'm thinking about how during the scene in the rain, they hadn't remembered each other from this time. Part of immortality - it's important for them to forget every so often.

      False awakening. I try to write down this past scene, and write that there were three different ways things could go for that pair in the rain. The best route for them is associated with fire.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm a man passing a large arched opening in a stone wall, and as I look at it I remember that someone had asked me to fetch something for him from down here. I hadn't intended to, but since I'm here anyway I might as well. I go inside, into an immense underground stone dome with a dirt floor. It's empty, and large enough that it's difficult to see the other walls, but I'm aware there will be a door off to the right leading to a place where things are stored. As I'm walking, I hear a voice accusing me of enjoying blood. I don't see a physical source of the voice, but I expect he'll show himself eventually. I sort of laugh at the accusation but otherwise ignore him and keep walking. The voice continues: "If you are one of the evil dogs, care to know as much as I do?"
    12. Cursed brothers, two versions

      by , 04-11-2014 at 07:18 PM
      There's a frozen lake with a hole in the center of the ice, and a school building at the bottom that's an exact duplicate of a building on land. As Dean, I'm remembering fighting Sam in this lake sometime in the past, when he was trying to stop me from taking something out of it - I'd been filling a canteen from something at the bottom of the lake. Now we've come back to that same lake, and I'm thinking out loud about the "misfortune" that "follows" people who steal from this place. I point out that we didn't take anything back then. Sam pulls out that canteen, revealing that he'd secretly kept it. There's blood inside it - I'd gathered it for him - and it's a neverending supply, so if he relies on that canteen, he doesn't need to take it from anyone else. But it's still cursed. So he says to me, I might as well go ahead and steal what I need from the lake; the misfortune has already been following us anyway.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      There's a man talking to a woman just outside the door of a church, saying "What have you done to your hair?" He knew her in the past, but she's meeting him for the first time in her lifetime. I see images of him as one of six brothers who'd been cursed lifetimes ago. The images are like photos moving against a black background; he and his brothers give me an impression of being arrogant, self-centered, maybe not deliberately cruel but thoughtless, a vague association of violence. But the modern version of him had been very different, and I'm thinking about that change in him while I walk up my IRL street, into my IRL home, and start making tea. Standing over the stove, I'm thinking, "the debt has been paid" - the man suffering now has little in common with the brothers that the curse was originally placed on.
    13. Unfinished business at Sleep No More

      by , 03-08-2014 at 11:30 PM
      I've just walked back into the McKittrick Hotel. It's the middle of the day, so the place is mostly closed, but there's a guy at the front desk who tells me the owner has died. I climb up a few flights of stairs and come to a room with an old glass bottle hanging on a rope from the doorknob, with a red liquid like blood inside. Hanging next to it there's a card with a series of about 10 questions about the purpose of your visit. One of the questions mentions Maximillian, and reading it, I realize that each question is a reference to a different riddle to solve or mission to carry out, each given by a different resident of the hotel. If a visitor has completed one of these riddles/missions but didn't have a chance to report back before the end of the night, the hotel will permit them to return during the day, to wrap up unfinished business.