Carabas

There's a very earnest-looking young man scaling the tower of a magician's castle, trying to reach the window where a woman is sitting. He incorrectly believes her to be held captive against her will and is trying to rescue her. She only notices him when he falls. Sounding bewildered, she calls down to him, telling him there's an easier way to get in on the other side of the castle; if he can't find it, just watch the rabbits, follow them. The man walks off.

Eventually, the woman comes outside to look for him. She finds him pinned between the wall and a black wolf with a white pattern around his eyes and chest. The wolf isn't doing anything particularly threatening. I'm aware that the wolf is the magician, though the man doesn't realize this, and the woman only suspects. The wolf starts acting like he's completely ignoring the man pinned against the wall and walks over to her, and she holds out her hand for him to sniff as if he were a dog. He ignores the hand and instead bumps his shoulder against her as he passes, and walks into the castle.

Inside, she sits the man down at the table with something to eat, and he says something that makes her laugh and twirl around. She's under the mistaken impression that he's looking for the magician, so she's treating him like a guest. She's treating the wolf the same way, and asks him which room he'd like to stay in until the magician returns. He bumps his head against the locked door of his own room, and she laughs and says sorry, no, that's quite impossible - even though she's fairly certain who he is at this point, she won't have him on the furniture in that shape.

I started questioning the dream in a fairly dull IRL-based scene, and then questioned why I was questioning it - but I did eventually become lucid. Once becoming lucid, however, I as Jaime immediately started looking for Cersei.

(Side note: this was an interesting level of lucidity. Fully lucid in most respects - lucid about the fact that I was dreaming, lucid about my ability to control the dream, no desire to stick to the previous dream storyline - but I wasn't lucid about my own identity. On top of that, I only started playing Jaime's role when I became lucid - up until that point I'd been my IRL self. It's standard for me to play the role of other people when I'm non-lucid, but I'd thought that conflicted with lucidity - apparently not.)

I was still in a room that was meant to represent my IRL home, but it had no doors, which I understood signified a resistance against me taking control and changing the scene. I had the feeling I had to get out in a hurry if I wanted to maintain lucidity. So I turned around in a full circle in order to create a door that would be there when I turned around again. It was a wooden door, rounded at the top, and when I opened it I saw a scene that was meant to represent my IRL neighborhood.

I closed the door, called out to Cersei, and opened it again, understanding that this will have changed the location it links to. Now on the other side of the door there's a dark stone enclosed walkway with large windows overlooking a castle courtyard. Better, but this isn't the place I was looking for. I have a mental image of a glittering gold-and-white castle that I want to get to, where I expect Cersei to be. I try again - I close the door, call to Cersei, and open it again. The scene on the other side of the door hasn't changed this time - it's still the dark stone walkway. I decide that this means Cersei must be in this scene somewhere, so I walk through the door.

Recall gets increasingly shaky after this. After walking through the castle a bit I found Cersei in the courtyard, and after a short conversation she took me to a rowboat that we'd both have to row - she gave me some explanation involving the word 'knowledge,' and I made an (apparently less than successful) effort to remember her phrasing so I'd recall it after I woke up, it seemed symbolically important. The boat carried us briefly along a waterway running through the castle, and I think I began losing lucidity at this point. There's a memory gap, and very little recall after that - before I woke up I'd wound up back in an IRL-based scene, and I'm unsure how much lucidity I had by then.

I'm with a group of people looking around the ruins of this small castle or fortress. I'm trying to track someone down - I don't expect her to be here, but I know she was here sometime in the past.

Switching to third person view, there's a hidden room in the ruins somewhere below us. There's a kid inside, a little boy, the son of the person I was trying to track down. He's been a kid for 170 years. The spell or curse or whatever it is that keeps him frozen in time also means he can only speak for one day in each year. He's listening to us move around over his head, and thinking about how he's saved that one day of speech so he can give us a message now.

That same boy is walking down a suburban street, and he's spotted and recognized by a young woman in a passing car. She tells the driver to pull over, and he does. Her name's Giselle, and though she's a vampire she's never killed anyone - she's been kept away from people by the man driving the car and his wife, her sort of self-appointed guardians. They feel some kind of personal responsibility for her, but they're very nervous around her. They're looking particularly nervous right now, as she gets out and talks to the kid. She's very friendly, she's delighted to see him, but without really thinking about it, when she gets close enough she bites his throat. She can't help it. As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking that she's going to wind up serving as a sort of adopted mother to the kid, and it'll work out well for both of them as far as that goes. But I'm also thinking that this is a sign that our - her, me, the kid, the kid's mother, some other people - our window of opportunity to become human is closing for this timeline. Once we've missed that opportunity, we'll inevitably wind up dying off one by one - the timeline wrapping up loose ends.

An earlier semi-lucid fragment - I'd been riding in a car someone else was driving, they took a turn much too fast and swung wildly into the next lane, and I was thinking to myself with some annoyance about how ridiculous dream driving can be sometimes.

There's two women locked up in a circular stone room with no apparent doors and a ceiling so high it can't be seen, like a well or a small tower. I get the impression they're a couple. They're both blonde, one with darker hair and wearing purple, the other with hair so light it's almost white. Hovering around the one in purple is this sort of little glowing gold ball; she's leaning towards the other one, who's unconscious, but who starts to softly glow when that glowing ball gets close to her. They're rescued by people who break through the wall - an old woman and several people I think of as Hunters who've been doing something with a fountain in the center of the room on the other side of the wall. The old woman looks at the hovering glowing ball and calls to the Hunters. "Got one more for you - two!" she adds when she sees that the unconscious woman is also glowing. As they get both the women free, the woman lifts this fancy white horn and says to the woman in purple, "It's yours." And then she quotes a riddle or poem or something similar that led them to this horn - "With the wit, the way." Wit turns out to have been a pun on wet, something to do with that fountain in the other room, and it's those two women locked up who'd figured it out.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man trapped inside something like an enormous hourglass, tied to a chair in the bottom half. It's slowly filling with this black liquid. I'm following this from the POV of a man outside the hourglass, watching. This is something like a form of brainwashing - the man in the hourglass is on the other side of some conflict, and a serious threat, and we're turning him to our side. But as a 3rd person observer, I'm aware this is going to backfire; we seriously underestimated how insane that man was to begin with, so making him loyal to us doesn't actually mean he won't still be a threat to us.

Still as that same character who'd been watching the hourglass, I leave the room and go to meet a woman I work with for lunch. But just before we start eating, someone bursts in and stops us - the food's been drugged, something connected to that man I'd left in the hourglass. We leave with that person who burst in, and as we walk he's saying, "We all talk about the war, but does anyone remember what it was about?" We don't. He explains something to do with Skins - the gold or silver markings on our skin that remind the 3rd person observer side of me a little of circuits. Mine are gold, the woman I'm working with has silver; in earlier times, we'd have been on opposite sides of the war. We find this an uncomfortable concept.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm a young man walking around our castle at night with a girl from a visiting family. We're supposed to get married sometime in the next year or so if negotiations keep going well. Neither of us are supposed to be out of bed right now, but we both were sneaking around on our own and happened to meet up. Right now we're hiding behind a door, watching the leaders of our families talking in the next room. I'm thinking that the colors they're wearing make them both look like they're part of the same family; my family's colors are red, gold and black, but right now our patriarch's only wearing black, except for the sword pin at his throat, which I think of as "hardly red at all" - a dark red, nearly black.

There are two women sneaking around a castle at night. They'd been intending to escape and then come back when the vampires are asleep and destroy them, but they've just now realized that the vampires never sleep; and on top of that, they've just realized that one of the vampire women here is the exact same woman written about in Quincey's journal. Reading this journal is the thing that made them realize their hosts were some kind of monsters - they don't know very much about vampires at all except what they've read in this journal. So it's a shock to discover that the women in this castle don't age or die, and the idea that the monster in Quincey's journal still exists makes them feel like they can't win. At some point Ephesia is mentioned, a woman's name, though I can't remember whose. One of them suggests giving up on their plan, since it seems hopeless, and tries to convince herself that becoming one of them wouldn't be so bad.

A fragment where a character was referred to first as Silverhand, and then specifically as Airgetlám.

An army and civilian followers are camped around a castle they're allied with, south of their home. Their next ruler is with them, but he hadn't officially taken the throne yet. Now, someone still in their home country is making his own move for the throne; in response to that, the one with the army is standing up in front of his people and officially declaring himself king. This gets a mixed response - some people ask, by what right? Even though they were already following him, you still can't just crown yourself.

A woman's sitting on the outskirts of that crowd listening to his speech, by the top of a cliff, with three gnome-like creatures. She seems amused by the speech. One of the gnome-things distracts her from it by making too much noise - she casually kicks it off the cliff. One of the other gnome-things then grabs her by the foot and does the same to her, much to her surprise.

A fragment about a castle where there's a bottle containing the souls of witches, kept as a historical item for tourists to look at.

Based on Legend, I'm visiting Darkness. He's going on and on about his plans to marry Lili, have her kill the unicorn and so on, gloating. I say to him, no. Her human boy, Jack, he's on his way here, and she's going to have to make a choice. She might have sided with darkness for the moment, but my side's going to win her in the long run. Darkness grants me that point - but "we don't have years." The choice she makes in the moment is the one that matters, not whatever regrets she'll have afterwards.

There's a set of boxes which, when arranged properly, will display a poem by Rumi; it's a game, a puzzle. Each box is engraved with a few lines, the trick is in figuring out the proper order, and there are hints, such as do not separate the loved ones, send the child to school, don't leave him to wander the shore with the mermaid and her knife. The last part is easy enough - one box ends with a line about water spirits, another box starts with a line about a child, I'll just be sure not to connect those two; but there are quite a few different lines that could be interpreted as 'loved ones.'

A woman is sending a message to her employers, as a result of which the building she's in will be locked down and everyone inside will be killed, including herself and her two assistants. Her assistants are artificially-created humans, and display no emotion, but I'm thinking that the loss of their lives is just as important as any other life.

A woman has just been teleported into a castle, somewhere very dangerous, by someone named Anna, and she's very annoyed about this. Although Anna isn't here, the woman yells about it anyway, on the assumption that Anna will be watching her with magic. It's not just the danger that's upset her; at any other time she would have killed to be able to get into this castle, but right now, she'd been in the middle of something urgent, and she really needs to get back to it, so she looks for the way out. A hooded figure appears and reveals a passage to her, a passage that seems to violate the laws of physics and which is filled with a seemingly endless line of graves, and he tries to speak to her, to guide her into that passage, but she ignores him - she's spotted the main doors. As she walks away from the graves and towards the exit, she passes a box with some marking on it that makes her think about dragons, thinking of them as the product of elemental spirits that gathered together and festered.

There's a crowd of people leaving a castle - although the castle looks historical/fantasy-ish, the clothes the people are wearing are futuristic, as is the glass-enclosed walkway they're leaving through. A woman who works for the castle as a kind of hostess is escorting a small group of people at the head of the crowd, congratulating them for winning a spot on some vessel, and then she says to the rest of the people following them, "Good luck in the race!" By which she means - these people are following the winners because they intend to take their spots by force, and the moment they're beyond the castle's protection it'll be every man for himself.

At the end of the glass walkway, the hostess leaves them, and the people pass through some barrier. The people in the walkway had seemed, not necessarily good-looking, but like people who put a lot of effort into their appearance: well-dressed, well-groomed. Once they pass through the barrier, this changes: they're naked, they look like they haven't bathed or shaved in months, more fat, less muscle. The castle was a kind of retreat, but everything it provided was an illusion; now that they've left, the illusions disappear. The people's reactions vary - most of them are shocked, but there's an old man who seems to have expected this with a sort of I-told-you-so attitude about it. There's a teenage boy with a bad knee who's particularly horrified, as he'd believed his knee had been fixed by the castle; he's complaining to his parents that they might as well have stayed home, at least at home they had servants. The castle had its guests doing a variety of chores, citing the spiritual benefits; now it's clear that was a scam.

A woman's saying, "It must not have been a good reality for Vanessa and Vilya." 'Vanessa' is an alternate version of herself. As she's speaking, I see the two people she's talking about, sitting before a very large fireplace. Vilya suddenly leaps up, as if he's just been hit by some stroke of inspiration, and he rushes to a table set up with a variety of alchemical instruments.

Three people in an underground room, grey stone walls lined with bookshelves. A woman and an old man who she's close to, and a young-looking man who made some kind of deal with them - I'm a disembodied observer, but I recognize him from my most recent lucid dream, as the 'future version of myself' who doesn't actually resemble me at all and who looks more like he's from the past. They've barred the doors in the hopes of giving themselves a little more time before someone arrives to stop them - guards or police or military, something along those lines, they're expecting some specific group and they know it's just a matter of time. But they've come to this room to find something specific, and there are hundreds or thousands of books here and no obvious organization to them. The woman's saying "Wherever (something) it'll take us forever to find it." The young-looking man had been sitting down with his eyes closed; now he opens them. They're glowing yellow, which startles the woman. He says, "I have found it. He has used the Britannica articles-" He continues talking, but I've become distracted by curiosity about that locating technique he just used; I associate it with a search technique I'd used in yesterday's dream.

Just a name: Sven Odinson.

I've got some government job in which I'm part of a team of people in suits protecting someone, and we're currently in a hospital, when I pass a room where a team of people in red uniforms, EMTs maybe, are preparing for something. Something about them catches my attention as odd, and I mention to a coworker the possibility of a disguised threat. She agrees with me.

Something about political opposition to dances in cathedrals by night.

A zombie apocalypse setting, in which someone was approaching the house I was holed up in and we nearly shot each other, wrongly assuming each other to be zombies. She tries to convince me to come with her to some camp and I agree only because I'm fairly confident about being able to escape her along the way if it seems necessary, whereas if I start a confrontation with her here and now I'm fairly confident she'll shoot me. She's traveling with someone who joins her then and gives me a checkup, and she takes a very long time to find my pulse. When she finally says "Found it," I say, "Look at that, I have a heart. That's one for the books."

A little girl saying "(something) to read hearts, death to solve the mystery." A choice between two different goals, reminding us to match the approach to the goal. This is a girl who I and the people I'm traveling with met a long time ago, and at the time she just seemed like a tragic figure, sole survivor of some massacre in which she watched the deaths of everyone else in her castle and the surrounding village. When I'm thinking about this, I see a memory of one of the people I'm traveling with standing in a pool of water with her, up to his neck in the blood and gore surrounding this girl. The journey we're on somehow involves the spirit of a certain place - either we're searching for it or it's opposing us or something - and we met this girl fairly early in that journey, but now that we've met her again, we realize she's more than she seems; the tragic figure we met originally was at least partially an act, and I strongly suspect she is that spirit.

Now she's saying, "Sure you shouldn't just make perception your goal?" That's following on the death-to-solve-the-mystery thing she said just before. One of the guys I'm traveling with says, "Sorry, our goal is to take the cat out of the box." A Schrodinger's Cat metaphor; we don't want to just find the answers for ourselves, we want to eliminate the mystery completely.

(Fragments: I noted down 'veve' and 'garden party' and went back to sleep. I can't remember what either of those were about.)

3rd person, following a lady's maid in a castle. She's with her mistress, a blonde woman, very angry at the master of the house right now, a man with very long black hair and a very deep voice, and the master sends the maid away to go wait for a delivery of fabrics, from which the materials for the mistress's new wardrobe are to be chosen. The servant does as she's told, thinking of how hard it is for her mistress to adjust to her new husband and the customs of the empire, and while she waits for the delivery she weaves some threads into Scholar's Knots, a game for the mistress to unravel later, to calm her down. She makes the knots that represent the Emperors, and then, although they don't traditionally go together, she makes the knots for the Richards kings, which she thinks her mistress will appreciate. As she weaves she thinks, as a way of welcoming the mistress into the empire, welcome to your first thousand years.