Carabas

I'm talking to a man, a great inventor or artist of some kind, who's been given an arena to work in. The structure is very white and the sky is very wide and very blue, and the arena's filled with shadowy figures he's been given to work for him, something like automatons, not alive. Human-shaped, but when I focus on them they look a bit like something that's been burned to charcoal, flaking at the edges, except for their teeth, which are white and sharp; inactive right now.

Until this moment I had a lot of contempt for this man. But he's saying to me, "I'm not an idiot," and that he knows he's already made his last great work. Though he's currently working on a project, and though his masters who gave him this arena have great expectations of him, he doesn't expect to live to complete it. His bitterness makes me think a little more highly of him.

Working for these things was a mistake. I don't say this to him out loud. There are a couple floating hooded figures with white masks in the arena, and we're both putting on something of an act for them. They're not his bosses, or guards, exactly, but they are effectively monitoring him at the moment. Something more like citizens, as opposed to slaves like him, however honored a slave he might be. He turns off the music he's been listening to while he works, and he's trying to give the impression that he's simply stopping work for now and going to bed as usual, that there's nothing wrong.

I'm coming out of a mine with a box a man gave me. Sitting down at a table across from a woman I know who's eating lunch, I open up the box and we have a look at the books inside. There's a two-volume set on healing magic that catches my attention; I've seen the first one before but the second is completely new to me, I'm very pleased. The woman asks me for a demonstration, and I laugh, saying I've barely got any understanding of it - it's not something you can learn from books, they're just for pointing you in the right direction, it takes time and work to actually put into practice. She's disappointed and leaves. As I look through the book, I call up a blue healing light that plays around my hand. Reading, the book is saying that it's impossible to progress further without "the Lady's smile."

I see an image of said Lady, a woman in a void. She's aware of my attention, though her eyes don't focus on me; she talks as if this is a visit from an old friend, sounding surprised and pleased, saying that I've come earlier this week than expected, and calls me by a name that starts "Shari-" But she cuts off partway through that name, and gives the impression of focusing on me, though still not with her eyes. She says then, "Isfael? Is that you?"

The observer side of me splits off, recognizing that this Lady and Shari-whoever are figures that often appear in stories together under various identities. When she correctly called me Isfael, I realized that Isfael is one of those identities, a specific young version of Shari-whoever without knowledge of his older self.

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.

I got on an elevator expecting it to go up, this being the ground floor - there's only one floor above us, and only arrows instead of floor numbers. But it went down. I wonder how many basement levels there are. I reach to press the up arrow, saying something about my mistake to the woman still on the elevator with me. I'm new to this building. We talk about the company a bit as the elevator continues down, about finding your way around the various floors, and various luxuries that are provided for employees. I mention soul-selling and Satan, meaning it as a joke, but she talks about Satan fondly. We reach her floor, and she leaves.

My point of view switches to follow her - she walks down a hallway into a club. Her brother who goes by the name of Beelzebub - a fake name, it's really Samael - is lounging around with a cocktail glass in his hand, some glowing blue drink inside. He's a pretty man with long dreadlocks, wearing something black covered in stylized eyes in red. The woman's removed the pale coat she was wearing on the elevator, and the dress she's wearing underneath matches her brother, black and covered in stylized eyes in red. They consult about someone he describes as "a friend and a most simple prize."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's this swirling black mass of many colors, like an oil slick, lit up from within like lightning seen from above. I'm eager to dive in immediately - it's a portal - but I'm also thinking I should stop and go lucid first. As I'm torn between these two desires which are apparently conflicting, I wake up.

(Side note: that last was a reaction to trying reality checks. As a rule I'm not interested in them, but I have a lot of false awakenings that I tend to just spend dream journaling and I thought I could put reality checks to use there. So today I tried a reality check as I wrote that first dream up, and apparently this sort of thinking is the immediate result - associating lucidity with stopping what I'm doing to perform an action. Nuisance.)

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.