Carabas

I'm entering a large garage, looking for the owner. Off to the right I see a white truck I recognize from the first time I met him, when he'd kidnapped the queen. There are three vases full of red roses sitting in the truck bed now. The man I'm looking for is further into the garage, off to the left, along with another man who I also met during that kidnapping incident. I exchange the usual greetings with this second man, then walk up to the one I came to see. He's an incredibly big guy, tall and muscular, and he doesn't turn from what he's doing to look at me. Neither of us say anything for a moment - I have a hard time deciding how to talk to him - and then when we do speak, both of us start talking at once.

He asks about the queen at the same moment I say, "(the queen's name)'s sick." Dying, most likely.

He's shocked and horrified, as expected, and asks me a bunch of questions about her. As we talk, we raise the question of whether her sickness is a reflection of the state of the land, or whether the land's sickness is a reflection of the state of the queen - that they're linked is obvious, but which one started it, which is the cause, that's the question.

The other man joins in the conversation at this point. They'd been tracking the changes in the land on their own, not realizing what was happening to the queen; and comparing our information, the two of them become convinced it started with the land. That second man shows me one of their maps on a computer screen, showing when a giant creature associated with cold moved into the far northwest and burrowed deep into the earth - that was the first one, the one that started it. They'd already been planning to remove or kill it. It goes without saying that I'll be coming too.

As I'm looking at his data, I'm thinking, amused, how convenient, making this into a problem that can be solved with our skillset.

A setting based off the Victorian era or thereabouts. A man who belongs to some organization or secret society made a deal with another member, who is now dead. Now the man's been debating whether he'll bother keeping his end of the deal, since the other party's dead and thus isn't in a position to know or object. Right now he's in the dead man's home, in a type of storage area, going over some of his belongings that relate to that organization they're both in - that was part of the deal, disposing of some of these things according to the dead man's wishes. One of those belongings is something I think of as a 'cookie', though it's dry and tasteless, makes me think of hardtack. He decides to eat it after all, keeping up his end of the deal. Eating it causes him to become immortal.

That same man at a later date, confronting his wife in her home, a basement room with brick walls but with several potted ferns and a table set up holding a large, beautiful book - her journal. She believed him dead, there was a funeral. He's standing over her journal, and he's asking why she hasn't been writing. He says, "You're not a (his family name - Bowman or Barrow or something like that), you don't (something along the lines of being driven by a consuming passion)." He feels that the changes and upsets in her life - such as his own 'death' - shouldn't have shaken her disciplined, well-ordered approach to her tasks. She's also immortal, in a different way than he is, but linked to him in some way. The nature of their immortality means they can't possibly live together again, even if they'd wanted to.

That same man again is being pinned to a wall, held off the floor, by his daughter. They'd been talking relatively calmly earlier, but he realizes she's become a vampire, and her eyes glow blue and then gold, and now she's got him pinned to the wall. As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking that she has the same face as a pirate woman who'd died in this man's arms long before his daughter was born; the pirate had been Chinese and the daughter's a white Englishwoman, but I think of them as having the same face and being in some sense the same person, and I have a vague impression of a third woman, a servant in England, who also has the same face. The daughter says to him, "You know what to do. Then come get me!" He stakes her, and she crumbles into dust. He's still stuck hanging on the wall.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm standing between a coyote and a bird. The scene after this discusses the coyote as wandering and gathering a pack of odd strays - other species, including housecats.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a woman, a leader of witches, who's given me some instructions to carry out, something I'm meant to do with her grave after she's been buried. Now I'm digging down through the loose dirt in her grave, sinking into it. I'm afraid of it closing over my head and suffocating me. I get out of the grave and fetch my staff, and use that to probe through the dirt, waiting for it to hit something.

After a few other scenes, mostly involving the witches but gradually transitioning into scenes with IRL characters, I'm walking through a bookshop and I spot a book with a title that mentions one of my lucid goals, the one I'd intended as my task for the day. I immediately become lucid, but realize I'm already waking up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a group of people getting together at a restaurant, taking up the second floor, a sort of balcony area looking over the main room. The owner of the restaurant's friends with the leader of this group, and he's saying as he escorts them in, "You're the one who wanted to do this here. If you wanted privacy, you should've-" The tone's good-natured. There's a table set out for three: the boss, his wife who hasn't yet arrived, and a prostitute. The restaurant owner's wife comes over to talk to them, and she knows the prostitute, they exchange some friendly words. The prostitute's asking what this is about; the leader's got some plan in mind involving her, but they're waiting for his wife to arrive before he'll talk about it. The rest of his people are arranged at the surrounding tables, waiting and watching the main table quietly.

There's a woman who rose from the dead. Her girlfriend's explaining to her that this has all happened before, repeatedly: they meet, after a few days this woman dies, and then a little while later she'll turn up again and 'meet' the girlfriend again, with no memory of this having happened before.