Carabas

A fragment - I'd just been fighting someone who's run off, and I'm looking at the way our fight has corrupted patches of the ground, feeling regret over that.

A woman is riding in a carriage and carrying a baby, with a small tapestry depicting an angel hanging opposite. She speaks to the angel in the tapestry, referring to it as the baby's father. The angel in the tapestry speaks back.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

An odd level of lucidity. I thought of it as feeling exactly like my waking perspective, which I disliked - I felt like I was stuck halfway between something. I had difficulty controlling anything, or even flying properly, though I could float just a bit off the ground. I was at my IRL home, and since I failed to change the scene at the front door, I started walking down the road, figuring that once I got far enough that my surroundings were less familiar, the scene would change naturally.

At the end of the road - which indeed has stopped resembling its IRL equivalent fairly quickly - I come across a small construction crew, and there's immediately an accident involving a passing car and one of the machines. I'm called over to speak as a witness. Eventually the construction worker invites both me and the driver of the car back to dinner at his house, saying that it's too late to be outdoors, it's not safe.

Some barely-lucid scenes at his home in which I meet one interesting young woman with some chronic disease; otherwise I'm mostly focused on finding an excuse to avoid eating anything and keeping my appearance hidden behind the high collar of my coat, which causes people to come to some wrong conclusions about me. I don't correct them. I eventually find an excuse to step outside.

He was right, it is dangerous to be out this late - many people have been infected by something like madness or bloodlust. It's a kind of miasma. I come across infected people in the woods armed with farm equipment, pitchforks and that sort of thing; they've been waiting in this one patch of shadows to ambush whoever comes along. I enjoy this. Whatever this miasma has done to them, it doesn't affect me directly, not in the way it affects them at least; but their resulting madness is something I sort of feed off of, it's exhilarating.

At a crossroads I come across a group of four people who work for me - a blonde woman with her hair in a bun, a very pale man with long black hair, a small man wearing glasses, and a bald man with a tattoo in the center of his forehead. They've plainly been enjoying the night. As we greet each other, that young woman from the house emerges from the woods and attacks me with a sword. She makes this stunningly noble and upright figure, in stark contrast to the general miasma; I like her instantly.

One of my men intercepts her, and as she's fighting him, she's accusing me of being responsible for everything going on around here. She says she recognized me at the house - apparently I'm someone in the public eye in some way - and that she'd always suspected me of being corrupted, and now I've proven it. She's not exactly wrong. I'm not the one who corrupted this place, in fact I'm trying to hunt that person down - but I am part of the corruption, she's right about that much. When my man's got her restrained, I try to explain this to her; we have a mutual enemy. If she wants to hunt him down, my corruption could be useful to her.

I'm driving through a familiar IRL location, semi-lucid - aware I'm dreaming but still just automatically following the dream storyline. While thinking about this being a dream, I go fully lucid and remember a lucid goal, one that involves traveling to a particular building, so I set out to find it. I'm at a crossroads, and I think to myself, oh look, there's the road that leads to that place! I drive down that road for a while, and the scenery gradually stops resembling IRL.

Eventually the road curves, and rather than turning with it, I drive off the road, directly through a dry yellow bush, although it gives my car no resistance at all. I drive through the forest for a while, without a road, and I pass construction crews - men in hardhats, bulldozers, and a vast number of tree stumps that they've cut down. I begin to have trouble with visuals, things start going black and I worry that I'm waking up, but I'm able to clearly see a tree branch against the sky as I drive up a hill, looking upward, and I keep focusing on that vivid image, wondering why I can see some things and not others.

I exit the forest, away from the construction crews, and am now at the top of some rolling hills covered in green grass. In the distance, I can see a blue building flanked by white pillars, and I decide that must be the place I've been looking for. As I get closer, I see that it seems to be a school - which is not what I'm looking for - but I keep heading for it anyway, figuring it'll work out when I get there. I cross a bridge, and looking down I can see some land covered by a thin layer of water far below, a sort of web-like network of tiny streams. The place I'm looking for has a vague connection with water, so I think of this as promising.

I park in a small parking lot, a good distance away from that building. You have to walk from here, this place is the official entrance. There are a few other people around heading toward that building too. I hear sea birds. Over to my left, the opposite direction from the building, there's a low wall; I walk over to it and look down into a bay. I can smell the sea air. The bay is filled with fish - some of them are on the rocks instead of in the water, but they seem fine with this, and I have the feeling it's a visual trick to allow me to see them clearly. Similarly, there are giant versions of some sea creatures that would normally be much too small to see from this distance. I think of this as something like an aquarium. I can hear triumphant-sounding orchestral music.

I walk back to the entrance that leads to the building. The 'entrance' mostly consists of a large wooden message board with various things posted on it, including a place where people have left written messages about their visit to this place. I look it over briefly and continue on the path towards the building. At the other end of that wooden board, someone's left a backpack behind. As I look at it, I realize I'm waking up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man who's conducted a study of the languages in his country, who's so far cataloged over 300 languages and dialects. He's currently walking down a dirt road with a lot of foot traffic. Ahead of him, some people are setting up a kind of gate. A man who he's meeting here arrives through that gate, accompanied by a small escort of soldiers.

Now that they've met up, the soldiers move on ahead, leaving the researcher and this man a little separate. One of the soldiers says something to the man, and he starts to address him as 'my captain' or something similar, a title involving rank, but he catches himself after the 'my' (or the equivalent rather; this wasn't in english). This man isn't his captain (or whatever the rank was) anymore. Both the soldiers and the man are a little sad about that, though none of them show it, but walking together with the researcher rather than with the soldiers sort of rubs it in. He'd served with this group of soldiers for a long time, and he was just recently forced to resign from his post due to something that was revealed about him. It wasn't any action on his part; it was some inherent quality that he had been unaware of, something he thinks of as something like a taint, although as a disembodied observer, I believe it's not actually a bad thing in itself, whatever 'it' is.

Addressing the researcher, he identifies himself as 'language group 246' - that is, although he doesn't expect the researcher to remember him, they've met before, when he'd participated in that researcher's survey of dialects. He takes some food out of a bag - a corn cob sliced into halves - and he offers one to the researcher, who's surprised but accepts. The man is reflecting on the opportunity for conversation with this researcher now, versus with the soldiers he used to command.

Various non-lucid scenes: two immortals discussing faith and religion while rummaging around one's kitchen; the owner of the kitchen and her mother are both christian, and I'm surprised and intrigued since I hadn't found that to be very compatible with physical immortality. Rose and Martha meeting all the past incarnations of the Doctor in the TARDIS. There's some fantastical mystery involving spirits, and I was tasked with demonstrating the rational, physical origins of the events - the drama with the spirits is still considered real, but as a sort of reflection of the physical world, not actually physically present there - however, now that I believe it's all been solved and wrapped up, I'm asked a series of questions that force me to go through and reevaluate all my conclusions, suggesting there may be another answer. IWTV references, thinking about Lestat's life-has-no-more-meaning-what-if-i-could-give-you-a-new-life speech, resulting in a bit of an IWTV-themed power trip. That ended in an unpleasant party, which I left and returned to my IRL home.

In my home, looking out the window I've noticed various construction or roadwork or similar workers out in the street, and one of them's walking up the driveway. I move away from the windows since I need to go put some proper clothes on, but before I can do anything more than that I hear two of them inside the house, just in the next room. I'm aware that when I deliberately moved away from the windows, they'd mistakenly believed there was no one home and came inside. So I step into sight now and ask them wtf. They're surprised to see someone home. They talk briefly to each other. One of them says, "He's not going to forget. How do you want to do this?" After that, the two of them raise tools as if they're weapons - one of them's holding a hammer, the other a mallet - and although I'm aware this is a dream (I'm thinking as if I knew it all along but felt no need to act on that knowledge before now), I have difficulty defeating them or removing them. In that case, I decide to summon up something to remove them for me - I think of a dragon. One doesn't appear, but instead, as a direct result of that thought, I have a feeling that I think of as "a part of me that hasn't been fed," and with a voice much deeper than my own I say "Get the fuck out of my home," after which I see fire. Then I'm looking at the fire from a distance - I'm somewhere outside, and neither the burning cottage I'm looking at nor the scenery has any resemblance to my IRL home, I've completely changed scenes. Despite this, I believe that I've succeeded in removing those two from the house and feel satisfied.

False awakening. I'm in a bed - not one I'm familiar with IRL, though I believed it was in a relative's house - and I reach for my dream journal. I can't find an empty page to write in, and I realize this is an old journal, one I'd already filled up. A few pages have been torn out.