Carabas

Disembodied, I'm standing on the second floor, looking over a railing down at the main hall of this three-floor antebellum mansion filled with women waltzing to Que Sera, Sera. There's men here too, but they might as well be props, they're not what I'm here to see. A fire breaks out with no apparent cause, and I recognize what moment in time this must be; the fire here is a reflection of what's happening in reality in the place where they're sleeping. One of the women is caught in the fire and starts screaming. And then the fire's gone, and she's fine, and they go back to dancing. Though they're not aware of it, the end of the fire signified the end of their connection with reality; their sleeping bodies have died, and they won't be able to leave this dream world.

Circumstances have caused a woman to temporarily move in with me; we're not romantically entangled in any way. At the moment I'm cooking breakfast and she's sitting at the table - she's asked for eggs benedict. I'm mentioning some gadget that was around in the 50s for cooking breakfast that I'd liked, I don't know why they don't make that one anymore.

As we're talking, at some point I make a reference to something else that had happened in the 50s, and she gets the reference and responds as if she was also there. The character side of me doesn't take notice of this, but the dreamer side of me finds it odd that she got that reference - I take this as an indication that she's also, if not immortal, at least significantly older than her appearance. It's also clear that she knows I'm not human, though the character side of me doesn't know she knows.

When I bring the food to the table, I say something to her and she responds with yes, father, and then immediately looks embarrassed. The character side of me takes it as a joke in response to what I'd just said to her - but the dreamer side of me is thinking, that explains it.

I'm dancing with a different woman in my apartment. She's got short black hair in this 20s finger wave look, deliberately trying to recreate that look from the past, but this is the 1990s, and she's mortal. The dreamer side of me thinks of the song we're listening to as 'bland, inoffensive 90s romance music.' She's describing some kind of dull pain that lasts for weeks on end, and asks if I can imagine living like that, expecting the answer to be no. I have, actually. I try to describe the actual sensation without being specific about the setting, but she figures it out immediately and gets excited: "The Inquisition? You were there?" She always gets excited about these big name historical events she's read about, and they're never the parts worth remembering.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Someone of no immediately identifiable gender, who has been on the road for a very long time, parks their truck outside my IRL home and starts to eat lunch, clearly believing that no one is around here during the daytime. When they see me watching them from the window they start to leave, but I stop them, telling them I don't mind them stopping here.

Unfortunately, the dream apparently took that as an open invitation. While I'm outside talking to them, a great deal of people walk into the house - a married couple under the misimpression that it's theirs now and all their relatives. When I confront them they quickly accept that an error has been made, but they still keep standing around in the house. Telling them to get out does nothing.

So I rephrase, framing it as a narrative instead of a command. "And the people walked out of the house."

And giving no indication that they've heard me, as if it's their own idea, they all turn and start making their way out of the house. I'm pleased by how easy and effective that was compared to trying to control through commands - admittedly I hadn't put any mental force behind the command here, but there wasn't any mental effort involved in the narrative approach either. They're moving more slowly than I'd like, so I continue narrating. "It's a beautiful day, so they all decided to go outside." I'm curious whether the weather will respond to that - it doesn't seem to, but then it was decent weather to begin with. They're all outside now, but they're milling around outside the door. "They all decided to go to the park to catch up with their relatives." They start moving toward the road, and the women closest to me have started discussing some cousin they haven't seen in a while. This is really wonderfully effective, I'll have to remember that in the future.

A human wandered into our territory and due to an accident, got stuck here. He's spent the past few days trying to figure out a way out of this, but right now he's relaxing with us. He's taken some of the things out of his luggage and has been showing us how they work, and now he's putting on a demonstration. He's a performer, a dancer, and he's showing us what he'd been working on before the accident got him stuck here. A woman's joining him, he gave her a costume to wear, a white dress. The man directly to my left is in charge of starting the music at his signal; he's been spending more time with this guy than any of the rest of us except the woman he's dancing with, so he's learned how to make records work. The rest of us are sitting around on the rocks in a circle, watching.

In the center of the clearing below us, he and the woman take each other's hands as if starting a formal dance. He repositions her closer to him, and she 'laughs' and 'says' that they're going to be dancing right on top of each other this way - in quotes because we don't use sound to 'talk,' though the laughing expression/gesture is the same.

He starts to lead her through the dance. The dreamer side of me recognizes this as a sort of mix of an old court dance with modern sensibilities; the same could be said for the dress he gave her to wear, a sort of fantasy version of medieval clothes, very much a costume. From this perspective, it's clear that this was a dance designed for a specific performance, but the dream character side of me is under the vague misimpression that this is just how his people dance to celebrate things. Either way, I'm enjoying watching.

His actions are oddly tentative, uncertain, more so than hers though he's the one teaching. I find that hesitation fun to watch, too. I'm also aware that this is the moment when he started to doubt whether he wanted to leave at all - so of course his immediate reaction was to become even more determined to get out as soon as possible.

(The next two dreams after waking up and going back to sleep were also on the subject of dances and concerts.)

I'm at a formal party midway through the 20th century, and everyone's talking about the mysterious disappearance of the leading lady during intermission tonight. I'm as baffled as anyone, though in a slightly different way - I killed her, but I left the body in her dressing room. Someone else removed the body, and I need to find out who and why.

We pair off and start to dance, and I focus on a man who's not dancing, just watching the rest of us - he's in some position of authority in the theatre. I switch to third person, and now I see the scene as he does - he 'saw' that leading lady emerge from between two of the dancing couples, a pale woman dressed in red, black hair pulled back tight to her head, with a haughty and sort of mocking look on her face. That attitude doesn't square with the way I remember her at all; it's clear to me that the version of her he's seeing is his own hallucination, not an actual visit from her spirit.

She puts a hand on his shoulder and begins to dance along to the song with the rest of us, though he's not moving with her. She circles around him, saying that she knew from the start that this wouldn't work. She sings along to the music: "-won't let me leave you, but amore, that's to blame."

At the McKittrick Hotel, I ran an errand for Hecate, and in return she's granting me access to a certain flight of stairs. I hand her written note to this effect to the doorman, and he removes the rope blocking off the stairs. He looks bored. He warns me that the things I'll see up there are just ghosts, so don't take any of it too seriously. I tell him I know. I'm still looking forward to seeing something new.

At the top of the stairs, everything is airy and bright, and there's the dead body of a soldier in dress uniform sitting against the railing that overlooks the ballroom, arms spread and head dangling forward in a way that reminds me of a scarecrow. His name's Jeremy. A woman in white walks up to him - there's something careless about her. Jeremy gets up from the railing, and they begin to dance through the rooms of the hotel. There's no music.

I'm reading a scientific news article. There's a video of a man with a fox, and the fox is crying - as in, shedding tears. Through the use of some frequency, the man is able to induce "conscience." Reading this, it's causing me to rethink the nature of violence in the wild and morality.

Two extremely elegant women I'd been sitting with at a restaurant have gotten up to tango. I remain at our table, enjoying the view. They were the only two dancing at first, but a few other couples join in as the song goes on. The couple from the table just to my right gets up and goes to the dance floor, and they choose to place themselves directly between myself and the women I came with, blocking my view of my companions. I consider this rude.

Bela Lugosi as Dracula, waltzing with a woman in a long pale dress. I'm seeing them in black and white, like a movie.

A late-for-school dream - usually for me those are about feeling unprepared, but this one was much more positive. IRL setting, I'm outside when I see the bus pull up, and while most of my school supplies are inside, I have a few necessities with me, a notebook lying in the snow, so rather than go back inside for all my things and miss the bus for sure, I grab what I have and sprint for it. I miss it anyway, but the bus for the middle school pulls up behind it and they're heading in the same direction, so as it pulls away, I jump on the back and hold on, intending to switch to the high school bus when there's a chance. We hit a fork in the road and we lose the bus I want, but I'm confident I can meet up with it later.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Lady Liberty's torch being referred to poetically as the light of 2 things, one being the light of reason.

I'm John Constantine, in a bar, showing off by handing out predictions. It's a con, they're all just stuff I made up. But what I didn't know at the time was, by speaking predictions in that particular place, specifically by putting them in words, I was dooming them to come true. If I'd known, I would've come up with something nicer for myself. Made some (Hannibal-inspired) reference to a 'red dragon' I would have left out.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A separated or divorced couple, the ex-wife calls her ex-husband to ask if their oldest is with him. The dream 'camera' changes to show their youngest of 3, sleeping in a crib in the father's home; he's got a vestigial tail. They intend to have this surgically removed, but it hasn't been done yet. His paternal grandmother is standing over the cradle, thinking about that tail, and holding a gun in her hand. The father comes in then and stops her; the mother, still on the phone, hears enough to get an idea of what's going on, and she thinks, 'She's not wrong. Our species is a threat to yours.'

3rd person dream following a character shortly after his mother's funeral. This man believes he's just been 'granted a power to evade death.' He's currently out riding with the woman he used to be engaged to and his closest friend, who is now pursuing that woman himself. Watching the two of them together, he decides there's nothing here for him and turns his horse away, thinking about traveling.

Years later, the same character is white-haired and recording his memoirs, dictating them to a recording device. He's describing that 'power or curse of evading death' and his wife, who'd been listening, rolls her eyes. She's heard that story of his before. Losing interest, she leaves the room. In his dictation, he's just started describing the moment he was summoned to his mother's deathbed, to take the last of her life and inherit her power. As he speaks, his dead mother appears in the room. This is something he's used to, although he's the only one who can see her, and although she hasn't appeared very often recently. She dislikes watching him let himself grow old. But he's only allowing himself to age as long as his wife is alive, so they can grow old together; after she passes away, he intends to go back to feeding off other people's lives. Still dictating, he remembers the last words of advice his mother had given to him on her deathbed: 'In this life, do not just feed. Remember to dance.'