• Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views




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    Carabas

    1. Cards, aliens, and cannibals

      by , 02-11-2014 at 01:15 AM
      I'm reading cards for an off-duty cop or detective - it's about his case, and it's not official. The Hermit - that's the criminal. The Emperor - that's him. And then a minor card that indicates cooperation between the two of them, and things going smoothly.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm talking to this alien I'm traveling with and my first instinct is to call her Red - she's red from head to toe - but I stop and think about how nicknames work in alien cultures. Best case scenario, everyone's going to wind up calling me Pink, not sure I'm up for that. Me and another alien head outside on some errand, crossing this huge field, and as we're walking I ask him about nicknames. He says, "You don't want to say my name?", and I don't know how to interpret his tone - maybe bewildered, maybe hurt, maybe I've just accidentally proposed marriage, I don't know. We're still crossing the field, but we've wound up walking on top of/sliding down a pile of giant, motionless serpents.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      There are these people trapped in a cabin on a mountain by a group of killers, and they're wondering if their two friends who left earlier made it off the mountain okay. The scene changes to a group of people standing around a car parked near the base of the mountain, across a field of tall grass - the killers, a 'family.'

      I switch to the POV of the father figure of the group, and I'm looking at the two young boys with us who are new to the family, keeping an eye on them. Not too worried though. Someone spots a figure moving out of the forest and into the field - the figure shouts to us when she sees us, waves her arms to get our attention. I'm thinking, huh, we missed one. We'd found a guy in the forest earlier, I hadn't realized there was still another one out there. That was sloppy.

      Me and those two boys go to meet her, and she starts talking about how she needs a lift. Walking her back towards the car, we get to the part of the field near the road where the tall grass is all flattened down from what we'd done earlier, and there are a few things, plastic bags and such, scattered around on the ground. She's looking at the things on the ground and looking a little uncomfortable, she asks what we were doing out here. Having a picnic, one of the boys says. The rest of us laugh. It's technically true.
    2. A haunted piano, an odd pet, and a deal gone bad

      by , 01-31-2014 at 11:23 PM
      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.
    3. Werewolf witnessing a car crash and Rumpelstiltskin selling dreams

      by , 10-22-2013 at 08:27 PM
      A cop who'd reported various odd cases passes a strange, monstrous-looking guy driving in the other direction.

      There's a car crash. This werewolf kid had been running along the road, with a couple guys from school following behind him in a car, shouting at him and trying to catch up. This happens a lot - usually the guys in the car give up, he can run a lot faster than they can drive; and usually when they give up one of them sends him some insulting text message instead. But this time, as he was running, he passed that monstrous-looking guy the cop saw, this is someone he knows and someone who shouldn't be in town; and although he's lost sight of the guys from school, there's no insulting text message this time. He's worried. He turns around and heads back, and finds the car that the guys from school were driving has been run off the road into a field, flipped upside down.

      A witch, the werewolf kid's mother, walks up to the car. One of the boys who'd been driving it is dead. The other one's been transformed into a fox. She picks up the fox and talks to him a bit, and tells him she isn't going to restore him.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm setting dreams out on a stall in two rows, they're things that look like something between a bubble and a crystal ball. I call to this guy I recognize, I call them unregulated dreams, or unprocessed, unauthorized, some word like that - the point is there's some official approval process dreams are supposed to go through before they can be sold legally, and these ones haven't been through that process. I say to him that I know he wants them for his store. He says something positive but looks conflicted, and he looks over to Rumpelstiltskin, the guy who brought me here and helped me set up the stall.
    4. A murder in the woods, Hogwarts, and alien Copernicus

      by , 09-25-2013 at 10:43 PM
      3rd person, there are two people looking down at a body lying face down in the mud, in the woods, pine trees, not a lot of underbrush. They're just barely out of sight of the road, although it's night and it's raining so no one's likely to see them anyway, and they're both wearing dark rain ponchos; the body on the ground, a middle-aged man, isn't dressed for the rain. They're talking to each other, the one talking right now's a woman, saying something about a bike, and about getting his fingerprints on the shovel. There's another body deeper in the woods, and they're making sure this guy will be blamed for that murder.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      HP, as Draco, fragments mostly - the new DADA teacher is suspicious (how unusual); running into Snape in the hall and feeling relieved; overhearing Weasley complaining about feeling 'used' by Potter, I'm surprised and pleased.

      I'm someone who's just moved to America, or possibly just temporarily staying there; either way, my parents have a somewhat distorted idea of what that entails, they seem to be expecting a great deal more muggings and car chases than are actually happening, their letters keep giving me advice on same.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      A man who's been traveling for a long, long time and wants to rest is given a mission which is described both as a task and a reward for him, saying he'll be "the Copernicus of" the place he's going. The actual Copernicus also appears on the scene, except 'actual' Copernicus is a woman disguised as a man, and also from outer space.
    5. Crime and punishment in ancient Rome

      by , 09-01-2013 at 08:45 PM
      A setting based on ancient Rome, I'm looking up at several criminals being punished. This is my fault; I encouraged them to break a rule I thought of as minor, without thinking about what the consequences might be for them. One of them is praying, and a man with me, a foreigner, catches a variation on the word 'august' in the prayer, and he asks me in his own language, "'Augustina' - means honored, right?" He's quite enchanted by the lady Augustina, a mutual acquaintance. The man praying is being offered a deal - 30 years of imprisonment, in other words the rest of his life, but this torture will end. As this is being explained to him, I go to the others being tortured and try to convince them of a better option. Let them break your legs, then wander the world for 7 years, and at the end of this time you will be permitted to return and be forgiven.

      Fragments: stumbling across a Forever Knight tie-in novel with 'amber' in the title; and a visit from a people-shy cat who IRL died when I was a kid.
    6. Fragments - fallen leaves and murder investigations

      by , 08-26-2013 at 09:46 PM
      A classic black and white movie called Death in the Rain, with Ingrid Bergman, and a reference to Rappaccini's Daughter.

      Labyrinth's Sarah falls into an oubliette, but it's a fairly large and well-lit spherical room built of pale brown stones, a few fallen leaves drifting around, and with a pale gold stylized metal sculpture in the form of a double helix rising in the center. She's just walked all the way around the circular room with one hand on the wall searching for openings, when Hoggle appears and she asks where he came from.

      Playing the role of a man who lives in a major city. Two detectives have just left my home after questioning my family and everyone else on the estate, and stressed out, I go to the park for a run. The tree branches are all bare.
    7. Fragments

      by , 08-23-2013 at 07:40 PM
      One guy telling another a story, talking about certain things he'd been taught to believe about people in the city. "Were they right?" "No, it was Inanna." (Meaning a festival.) "Everyone was pretty much partying."

      A guy enters an underground medieval fantasy city, and quickly manages to get himself suspected of thievery by the blacksmith's daughter who marches him over to the jail. The jailer takes him off her hands, then tells him confidentially that actually, he's got a job in mind and could use the help of a more experienced burglar, if the stranger's up for it.

      The word 'bokor' written backwards as a spell.

      An old text adventure game's been converted into a movie, and it starts off with this adventurer falling out of his spaceship - which is an in-joke for the players, about how if you typed the least thing wrong you'd get the character killed in a variety of creative ways, and most people managed to die at least once with their first command, just trying to walk out of the spaceship.

      A guy's giving a friend a pair of gold gloves with protective octagonal symbols on the back. He's been concerned for a while - the friend receiving the gloves holds some important, inherited religious rank which requires him to handle a ceremonial weapon on certain occasions, and he's meant to take good care of his hands because of that. But lately he's been getting careless, particularly when sparring with someone, allowing them to go too far.
    8. Very brief lucid

      by , 08-17-2013 at 09:01 PM
      I'm playing the role of a blonde woman with some kind of investigative background, now working with some kind of crime boss. People keep describing this as "a deal with the devil," me as "the devil's instrument," and so on, though I think of him as basically a decent guy. I meet up with him in a storeroom full of stolen goods waiting to be sold - small scale, everyday objects - and he tells me he doesn't mind if folks think of him as the Devil, it works out to his advantage, because after all, this way, "I am not real." I'm aware there's a double meaning there, it's a metaphor meaning I'm the person who deals with the world directly while he gets to stay in the background, like a ghost, never to be caught; but it's also a reminder that none of this scene is real. Since it's not real, I decide to stop wasting my time here and wake up.

      Earlier fragments: following a truck transporting exotic animals; working on a farm picking berries, and getting annoyed at a coworker's spiel on northerner-vs-southerner work ethics; googling for references to Janette DuCharme, under that alias specifically; browsing a Halloween forum.
    9. Bounty hunting, Buddha, and Lucifer.

      by , 08-16-2013 at 08:31 PM
      Bounty hunters, or at least people who do odd jobs including bounty hunting. A member of my team, Regina, comes back to the motel we're staying at to tell us she's got a job at a local bar, which solves our immediate money problem. She's been trying to talk us out of hunting down that bounty we've been focused on. There's another woman who left the team over this bounty, she wouldn't talk about it but it seems like she had some personal connection that none of us had known about until she left.

      Scene changes, that woman's come back, taken care of whatever business she needed to take care of. She's a beautiful, melancholy woman, and as we drive out of the city she's reflecting on all her memories, 'some bad, some good, but all worth having': her and her orphaned brother, the threat of war, their childhood determination to end war; a white Cadillac with fins, and the driver, a man who'd just struck it rich, tossing money into the air.

      A few fragments: a thief who became a Buddha, and how that story's changed over time. Lucifer going through a Bible and scribbling out words here and there.
    10. Vampires, holy books, alchemists, and Starks.

      by , 08-14-2013 at 08:30 PM
      I've been blamed for a crime I didn't commit, and if I'm going to avoid being staked, I have to find something before dawn. I thought I knew where it was, but I was wrong. Dawn has come -

      - but I've managed to buy myself a little extra time. Same setting, new backstory: this is all a game. Someone on the staff by the entrance, without realizing it, let slip the location of my final goal. But in order to reach that goal, I need an intermediate piece of the puzzle, a Bible. I find it - it's not an actual Bible but a book of many different passages, one of which looks like a Bible quote, and a few words are written in red, reminding me of one of St. Germain's codes. It's in Swedish. I head back to my room to translate it, but I lose the passage and can't find it again, and flipping through the pages, I find -

      - a family tree representing the Baratheon family with stag symbolism, with a crown for Joffrey. I'm Jaime, sitting in a pit of a jail cell as I turn the pages, with the Starks looking down on me, and one of them suggests in an almost sympathetic tone that I've lived long enough. So many days down, so many more to go.
    11. Tolkien and handcuffs

      by , 08-09-2013 at 07:43 PM
      I'm traveling, spending the night in an old stone tower. Thranduil's standing watch out in the woods, I can see him through the window. The rain's coming down pretty hard, much harder than it was during my watch and I'm still trying to warm up, sitting up brewing something hot to drink. I'd like to call him back inside, let him stand watch from the window instead, but I know he wouldn't. Everyone's still on edge about that Balrog. I hear voices at the bottom of the tower, one of the Men with us calling to Thranduil, telling him to quit haring off on his own like that. I can't see where Thranduil's gone, but the two Men who'd been guarding the door are looking around the edge of the woods. Then a leather wing covers the window for a moment and blocks my view, something flapping around the tower carrying a rider, and I shout to the others to wake up.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm sitting at a bar drinking something green in a shot glass, when iron handcuffs are snapped around my wrists. Some crime has been committed, something which I'd planned to do. I didn't go through with it, though. I'm innocent. But it's still my fault that someone else carried out my plan, and I'm willing to take the punishment.
    12. Witches, vampires, monsters, and divorce.

      by , 08-08-2013 at 08:44 PM
      3rd person. A wealthy household full of various factions is gathered by a very old tree to discuss their leader's potential divorce, and how they can use it to their advantage. But I wind up focusing on a group that's ignoring the family politics and telling a story about this old tree, something like a fairy tale or a ghost story. Two children were transformed by the ashes of a witch's bones. One transformed into the image of the witch herself, the other transformed into something monstrous and deformed, vaguely donkey-like, and this allowed them to 'walk in strange places.' On certain nights a parade of witches (both men and women) passes by this tree, and disguised with the witch's ashes, those children joined the parade.

      1st person. For political reasons, something to do with an organized crime group, I was briefly married to Julia, an extremely influential businesswoman and vampire. Now I've just about gotten things with that crime group settled and there's no real reason for us to keep up the sham marriage, and I'm surprised how conflicted I am about that. I'd gotten used to life as her husband far too easily. I'm thinking about how up until now I've been dealing with a 'tame' vampire, not the real deal. I'm looking over my shares in her businesses and thinking about selling. It'd be enough for me to live on for the rest of my life, if I do leave.