Carabas

I enter a lecture hall and speak to the man who I believed summoned me, dressed in black with a small white owl on his shoulder, but it turns out the owl is the one that called me; this is news to the man in black, and he's not pleased about it. The owl speaks in a pleasant woman's voice and changes into the shape of a four-sided mask, one face for each direction; three of them are simple stylized masks made of wood or similar, but the fourth is an actual face - it moves, it has eyes - just in cartoonishly distorted proportions. She's been sealed/trapped/stuck/reduced to this. She introduces herself as Loki Laufeyjarson, which is not the name I was expecting her to say but I roll with it.

She talks about each of her masks - in the one that resembles an actual face, she says she'd taken this form and scorned high heels (meaning an artificial way of gaining the height she feels she should have had anyway - 'height' is not really the issue she's talking about). In one of the wooden masks, she talks about using this form for dealings with a magician, and she suspects that magician of having a hand in her current unfortunate circumstances.

She returns to the form of the owl sitting on the man in black's shoulder, and we're now in a yard behind an estate, surrounded by partygoers. The man speaks of my payment and I dismiss the small amount of money he offers; I tell him I expect him to provide me with food and lodgings, pea soup and three packs of smokes a day. (Neither of those are things I'd want IRL, but I wasn't being my IRL self here.) I'm already leaving, stepping over an ornamental pond; it's a demand, not a negotiation. He's irritated, but she accepts immediately. I walk off into the trees along the border of the property.

In earlier scenes, symbols of eyes and blue lotuses above the entrance to a cave, and drinking a polar bear's blood from a glass while wondering about parasites.

I've broken into a building for a specific purpose, but it's not been going well. I killed someone while trying to stop him from raising the alarm, I hadn't intended that. Still standing over him, to my right there's a room with three men in 19th century dress uniform speaking. They're the reason I came here, and I'm certain I won't be able to finish what I came here to do now that they've seen this - but they're not reacting. On further examination, there's some manner of barrier between that room and this one, invisible from this side but seemingly solid from theirs. I lean through for a moment while those men are facing the other way, feeling no resistance, and find that from their side, it looks as if I'm leaning through a mirrored wall. Interesting setup; I'm thinking about why the owner of this home would need such a thing.

Then I focus on the men speaking on the other side, the reason I'm here. One is saying, "What do we do about Shaw?" Another replies, "Escaping-"

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Revisiting that one-way-mirror setup, there's a vivid yellow tint to the air on this side of the mirror, and I'm looking at an image of a white rabbit hanging from a noose held in a man's hand. I'm hearing a man I think of as some kind of instructor saying to me, "...exists in the past."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man I recognize from a previous dream leading a group of people out of some tunnels onto the surface. There's only a narrow ledge to stand on here, the top of a cliff, and it's raining, windy. Last time I'd described him as pale; this time there's something wrong with his skin, but I'm not focusing on it. I'm looking at his eyes; there's a red ring filling the outer half of his iris, that's new. Someone's saying in response to a question he just asked, "Perhaps we could talk on the way there," like they're in a hurry to get away from here.

Earlier, he'd been having a conversation with another man in those tunnels, taller, with white hair that's mostly fallen out. This man's arguing against him leaving with that group of people and going back to civilization, saying that either he'll spread corruption like a disease, or else he won't but he'll be blamed for doing so anyway. Previously, they'd unknowingly allowed some kind of corruption to spread before their own symptoms started to show, not realizing they were the cause.

There's a woman who is retrieving a certain object for me, while I watch in third person. The object is in a cave, in the possession of this large, strange creature who she's speaking to now - she's got two or three people with her. He's willing to make a deal. But after discussing terms for a while, the woman ultimately refuses; she isn't willing to agree to his terms. He accepts this, clearly believing she'll be back eventually - she has no other choice, she needs that object.

She and the others start to leave, but one of the others evidently has their own plan - another woman starts playing a strange kind of music that puts the creature into a kind of trance. She encourages the leader of their group to simply take the object. The leader is conflicted, so the woman with the music does it herself. The creature's trance is deep enough to allow her to get close to the object, but it snaps out of it once it recognizes that they're stealing from it. They run.

The cave is in the center of a sort of maze of tunnels, but although it looks confusing, the tunnels are all interconnected; as long as they keep running in the same general direction, it doesn't matter which tunnel they choose, they'll get out eventually.

They come out of the tunnels into a place that I think of as a certain type of dream, a sort of desert-like place, barren brown rock, with various dreamers here and there like landmarks. In one dream, there's a family in a yard where grapevines are growing; two heavyset old men who are brothers, and two grandchildren playing a little distance away. One brother leans in to say something to the other in a language I don't recognize, and the eyes of the one listening turn all black, which I recognize as an outward sign of the usual effect of staying in this particular type of dream too long. He's the dreamer here, these others are illusions. They see the group passing near the edges of the dream and just watch them.

The group comes across a dreamer they know, a man who the leader of this group is in love with. The others hang back on a ledge overlooking his dream, but she approaches him. He's sitting in front of the ruins of a small house - it's meant to be their house, his and hers, though they've never actually lived together outside of this dream. There's dead bodies lying around outside, things he killed, but too late to save this place from them. When he sees her there, he says, "I tried," with a sort of smile, as if this was inevitable and the only surprising thing was that he tried to save this place at all.

Then he sees the object she's stolen, and there's a shift - he stops paying attention to the storyline of the dream he's in. He asks her why she went to all the trouble of finding that thing, when there's no guarantee that the man she got it for will be grateful for it. There's an association here with trying to help a scorpion - the story of the scorpion and the frog, doing what's in your nature rather than what's in your best interest. She agrees with him, there's no guarantee that this will have the result she wants, but she wants to help the 'scorpion' anyway. She makes a joke about having a weakness for older men - lifetimes older, in this case. Her man doesn't find this funny.

A man came across a woman seemingly sleeping in the forest, but when he approached her she spoke quietly, asking him to kill her quickly and to leave her mother alive, so that her mother could continue to feed the others. He's shocked by this, but that's because he's under the impression she's human. She's a wolf, she only looks human. She knows he came there to hunt them.

She's speaking to her mother, also human-appearing, and says she wants her next lesson to be that lesson - the implication is she's decided to marry that hunter.

The hunter speaking with two other men, also hunters, one of them saying, "You can't stay married to that madwoman."

The hunter sitting in the forest, chanting a prayer or a spell that talks about the eyes of the wolves. Although the rest of the dream had been in English, he's speaking Spanish here. As he chants, the forest around him seems to change - the shadows become darker, the moonlight becomes brighter, patches of glowing fungi appear around him. He's amazed and enchanted by all of this. He's not aware of this, but from my disembodied perspective, he himself also looks different - his eyes are faintly glowing gold, and there's a sort of shadow over him, as if looking at a photograph of him overlaid with a photo of something else. Behind him, a pile of vines and undergrowth heaves upward into the form of some great beast - he's delighted by everything now but I'm sure he'll be afraid when he sees this.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm talking with a wizard from another world over tea. He's brought some of his people here as a sort of emergency hideout, and he's concerned about them picking up bad habits while they're here, to the extent that he's got them camped out at the bottom of the hill instead of in the house with me. He describes my form of magic as 'lax' and not something he wants spread to his people, which I find ridiculous for all sorts of reasons - for starters, when we'd first met he'd been seeking my help with some murderous wannabe dark lord type. I'd put a compulsion on the man to prevent him from taking human lives, which seemed such an obvious solution, I can't believe he couldn't manage it on his own. And really, as far as I can tell his world's form of magic just requires you to say the right nonsense words in the right order to express what you want, so if you're going to talk about laxness and discipline, that seems lax as hell to me.

But in any case, while we're talking about the arrangements for his people, two guys from my world come into the room. They're trying to avoid getting into trouble with their boss - they'd claimed to be unable to carry out some duty on account of being busy elsewhere, which was a lie. Now their boss is on his way to the house and will certainly sense their presence, and since I've already got a portal open, I wouldn't mind if they ducked through until the coast is clear again, would I? Fine, fine, I wave them through. That wizard objects strongly, but for crying out loud, those two aren't going to corrupt your world's magic system in a few hours, it'll be fine.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

In the American western desert, me and an older man are standing next to a car, watching a group of police vehicles pull up. We're going over a few last details before we talk to them. At the moment I'm telling him about a body I'd left floating in a pool of a private home. I see a mental image of it as I describe it, struck by the way his legs had stayed bent underneath him even as he started to float in the water. That older man says he already knew about that one. That's everything then.

He says there's a saying, "The liar does two steps worse." Do I know why that is?

I say I don't know, but then I look where he's looking. His family's just gotten out of one of those police cars - his wife, his daughter, and the daughter's boyfriend. They're looking around, haven't seen us yet with all the confusion around the scene downhill. It's clear to me they're the meaning of that saying. Lie to the people you care about and you lose them even if you're still physically present - you've separated part of yourself from them.

I got on an elevator expecting it to go up, this being the ground floor - there's only one floor above us, and only arrows instead of floor numbers. But it went down. I wonder how many basement levels there are. I reach to press the up arrow, saying something about my mistake to the woman still on the elevator with me. I'm new to this building. We talk about the company a bit as the elevator continues down, about finding your way around the various floors, and various luxuries that are provided for employees. I mention soul-selling and Satan, meaning it as a joke, but she talks about Satan fondly. We reach her floor, and she leaves.

My point of view switches to follow her - she walks down a hallway into a club. Her brother who goes by the name of Beelzebub - a fake name, it's really Samael - is lounging around with a cocktail glass in his hand, some glowing blue drink inside. He's a pretty man with long dreadlocks, wearing something black covered in stylized eyes in red. The woman's removed the pale coat she was wearing on the elevator, and the dress she's wearing underneath matches her brother, black and covered in stylized eyes in red. They consult about someone he describes as "a friend and a most simple prize."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's this swirling black mass of many colors, like an oil slick, lit up from within like lightning seen from above. I'm eager to dive in immediately - it's a portal - but I'm also thinking I should stop and go lucid first. As I'm torn between these two desires which are apparently conflicting, I wake up.

(Side note: that last was a reaction to trying reality checks. As a rule I'm not interested in them, but I have a lot of false awakenings that I tend to just spend dream journaling and I thought I could put reality checks to use there. So today I tried a reality check as I wrote that first dream up, and apparently this sort of thinking is the immediate result - associating lucidity with stopping what I'm doing to perform an action. Nuisance.)

I'm walking through a desert at night, heading south. I was traveling with someone before, and we're meant to be meeting up again later, but she's driving and I'm on foot, and there's a lot of territory between here and where we're going. We've been heading south along the west coast, and I'm thinking of the area I'm in now as Butte County, and also the northern edge of the desert in California. This desert is incredibly beautiful by night, and there are walkways cutting through it, no roads. I come to the top of a little hill and see a large city in the distance; the walkway splits to run north and south around the edge of the city. There are a few other people walking here, and I'm putting serious thought into just walking along these paths forever. (Similar theme came up in an earlier dream this week - a girl impatiently waiting for me to wander the world on foot with her, me pointing out the reasons I couldn't just drop everything and start walking this instant.)

Yeo-Wool's blindfolded herself with this white cloth I think of as a veil - it's transparent, but it's folded over and over so she can't see through it. She's sworn to wear this until (a certain thing I can't remember is accomplished). She and some guy she travels with are stopping at this fortress, and in the halls they meet a man, someone important. Kang Chi's with the important man - Yeo-Wool, blindfolded, isn't aware he's here. Without letting her know it's him, one or the other of them (can't remember which) says something to establish that it's still not time to take the veil off yet, much as they'd like to. He's smiling as he watches her - the majority of the dream just consisted of me, 3rd person, looking at her. I wondered something about the school - it was clear she wasn't associated with it at the moment - and the dream switched over to show Gon eating in his room at the school, which he's inherited from her father.

(From yesterday.) There's a girl on the grounds of some large estate, talking to a boy. She's been chosen to play some role in some tradition or game or something - it's something of an honor, but she's refusing to have anything to do with it. He's trying to convince her - not with any particular effort, just an aw-c'mon kind of way.

Scene change - elsewhere on that same estate, there's a different girl, wearing a rather old-fashioned maid's uniform (this is a roughly modern setting), and she's standing against a tree. I have the impression she's tied there, but I don't see ropes. This is the role that the other girl had originally been chosen for. There's a group of people who've just found her - searching is part of the game, or tradition, or whatever it is. She's got an oval metal ornament on her forehead, covering her eyes, engraved with some scene. A boy reaches out to remove it - this is also part of the game/tradition/whatever. The 'dream camera' angle changes then, so I can't see the girl's face, but I'm aware that - and this isn't part of the tradition - it will turn out the ornament has a long, thin spike underneath, and the girl is dead. I have a brief image of blood around her eyes, or possibly eye sockets - from the angle I'm standing now, off to one side, I'm not sure which.

A man's just finished examining the crime scene, though he's not anyone official. He's feeling outraged about something else he'd found, some belonging of hers that had been put on display, hung from a tree with ropes. Standing behind him is the owner of the estate, and that's who the outrage is directed towards. Highlander-inspired then: the man doing the examining takes out a sword - it had been concealed under the grey trenchcoat he's wearing - and formally introduces himself to the owner of the estate, who also has a sword, and who simply says "Yeah" - the implication being that his name's already known.

A sort of ancient China-based fantasy setting. Someone's left an offering of a fish for me at my shrine, and I'm suspicious of it, so I only take a taste. It turns out to be fine. Now I feel regret; if I'd known it was good, I would have eaten the whole thing. From my perspective, after I tasted it, the rest turned to stone; I'm aware the humans offering it would have seen it differently.

Nearby, there's a man talking with his wife in their home late at night. He's going through a sort of existential despair, and he's sort of thinking through it out loud, talking more to himself than to his wife. Someone else appears and tells him that this existential despair is good, it's an indication that it's time for him to move on to the next stage of life, to become immortal. The man totally buys it. I'm a disembodied observer, but I still have the mindset of the character from the shrine in the previous scene, and I'm extremely irritated with that new person/creature. I think of this man and his wife as mine, and I don't appreciate others attempting to mislead and take advantage of them.

Outside - I remain in 3rd person POV and lose that shrine character's mindset. That couple's house is part of a small complex of several buildings enclosed by a wall, and elsewhere within that wall there's a woman who hunts demons, dressed like a man, chasing after a three-eyed crow, with another woman (a local, not a demon hunter) trying to keep up with her. They don't manage to catch it; it flew over the wall, and it didn't seem at all concerned about its pursuers. She's seen that crow before, the one controlling it has caused trouble for her in the past.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm traveling through a forest, and changing into a suit of chainmail. It's gleaming white, head to toe.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A fantasy China setting again. There's an elf woman dressed all in white, head to toe, and there are two men taking her over to an island in a rowboat. One of the men is young, the other is middle-aged and has been recently disgraced in some way, he's cut off his hair to reflect that. Reaching the island she wants to go to involves passing through several veil-like things in the air covering the opening between two cliffs.

When they reach the town on the other side of that passage, the older man immediately jumps out of the boat and heads off through the streets, moving quickly. As a disembodied observer, I follow him, and I'm thinking that I've seen this scene before, from the younger man's POV. (Which is probably a false memory, but there's a chance it's true - it's true that I was in the young man's POV in a scene just before the rowboat, and I can only remember very vague fragments of that scene.) I'm thinking now that last time, that man had met up with us after we'd taken care of some business, just before we left the island. I had wondered what he was doing while he was gone, but he'd refused to say, he's always very secretive - I'm pleased I'm going to be able to find out now. (Of course, as soon as I thought that, I woke up.)

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.

Started out based on the Mulan musical that played in Tokyo a few years back, but the storyline started following the general, who no longer looks anything like the actress who played him, and now the dream has lost any theatre aspect. Now the general is the emperor's son, and has a name which translates to "divine," and has been summoned before the emperor. The emperor is blind, and from his eye sockets there are two strange things - flat, rectangular, worm-like things, something parasitic or symbiotic. Each has a small, white circle with a mark in the shape of ᛣ, and the general is aware that those marks can open and extend something that latches onto eyeballs and rips them from their sockets, he's seen it done before. The dream had been in 3rd person ever since I lost track of the theatre framing, but as I examined the things I shift to 1st person, the pov of the general, who is disgusted and afraid of the things.

When his father dismisses him, he indicates that he should leave through a door beside the throne instead of the way he came. It's a small opening, extremely low to the ground, so that a man would have to crawl to get through it; it's designed to shame people, to stress rank and obedience. The general gets down on his knees before it, then hesitates and says "Father" - at which the emperor lurches forward, placing the parasite-things close to the general's face. It's not a threat, just an attempt to get a 'look' at him using the parasite's senses, which 'taste' the air, but it's an inhuman-looking motion, and the general drops whatever he was going to say in favor of getting away as quickly as possible. But he/I have a difficult time moving through the door as quickly as I'd like, and I realize it's because I'm becoming aware of my body lying motionless in bed.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm leading some team climbing a mountain covered in snow, explorers, the first to climb this mountain in history. But the men keep seeing something, some shadow figure, and insist there's someone already here. I dismiss this as nonsense. But now that the peak itself is in sight, I can clearly see there's somebody up there.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

For the past few dream scenes, I've been in a car with my IRL sister S. and two women, a couple, witches; and we've been lost. We were lost on the road, we were lost driving through water, we were lost and mistakenly in the wrong house, we were lost and running from that house's owner, and now we're lost and we've stumbled across a street where every house seems to be having a party, spilling out into the street, blocking our way. They invite us to join the party, and while I want to just get back to the road, the others want to stay. I spot someone in the crowd, some minor celebrity, and I'm intrigued enough to agree, we check out the party. I talk to the minor celebrity briefly and find him disappointing.

Later, inside one of the houses where the party's going on, not much liking the company and wanting to get a move on, I've been cornered by some guy who's much taller and larger than I am and who seems to have mistaken me for a woman. He asks me if I believe in promises, and starts hinting very strongly that he believes we knew each other in a past life and are destined to be together. Yikes. I manage to shake him off and go find my sister in the kitchen, tell her that it's time we leave; the witch couple we were driving with join us and say "Um, we should go. Now." The lady of the house is in the kitchen with us and at this point she probably thinks we stole the silver, but we get out of there - through a window that opens onto the porch on the side of the house, rather than going back through that party to get to the door. As we're climbing out the window, one of the witches says something explaining to me and my sister why we've got to leave in such a hurry, something involving some guy who'd introduced himself as 'Psych', and I suspect it's that same creep.

Out on the porch, one of the witches looks behind us and gets a horrified look on her face. My sister asks what it is, and the other witch says oh, she just saw Ben - her ex, who's dead - don't look, just go, get off the porch, now. The porch is narrow enough that we have to go single file, I'm the last, and as each one gets off the porch and onto the street and looks back, they look increasingly horrified - Ben's a minor nuisance, their expressions indicate Ben was just a symptom of something more going on here. I feel something strange on my back, at the base of my spine, and my motions seem too slow; I become aware that it's because I'm waking up.

A fragment in which I'm waiting for someone in a subway station and meet an android, though they've been banned. She looks human except for her eyes: they're filled with a constantly-moving white light, and her eyelids are covered in jewels.

Utena's dueling someone, and her clothing's changing as she does so. Other duelists are running up the stairs and arrive just in time to see her win, and Touga says something complementing her on her confidence, that she could trust that the changes going on around her would serve her.

He goes on to say something about those changes reflecting past eras, which transitions into images with some vague connections - something about a limousine, and then something about flight patterns with an image of a witch flying on a broom, which leads into the next scene:

A guy who's just now become a witch is looking out the window at the approaching dawn, and he wants to go flying and feel the world wake up around him; but he has responsibilities to attend to, keeping him here.

I'm walking home after a storm, a few trees and power lines have been knocked down. But there are also a lot of trees that look as if they were cut down, and I'm thinking it's as if the town tried to get into the woods to clean up something after the storm, and they simply cut down anything in their way.

I have to walk over a downed power line to get to my property, I stop at the mailbox, and as I pick up the newspaper I/Quincey think about Mina and how calm and still she's been, and I think - in words, as if this were something I was writing out - "that's when you really have to stay with people. But I couldn't."

Mina's sitting on the sofa, perfectly straight and upright and with her hands folded in her lap, and when I drop the newspaper beside her she doesn't move, only smiles a little. I'm reluctant to disturb her further but there's something I have to show her, something I've learned about the way we think, her and I and anyone else caught in this transition; it will upset her, but all information we can gain from our condition is something that can be used as a weapon. I fetch a white sheet and silver hand mirror and I shove them at her, apologizing as I do so; I hold the sheet up behind her and ask her to take up the mirror. I/the dreamer as disembodied observer wonder what I/Quincey am planning to show her with those - surely not just our lack of reflection, that can't be new information. No, I/Quincey am thinking something about pattern or texture.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A man who's risen to political or religious power - either way, a man who's gained sway over a small community, virtually overnight. His collaborator is disgusted with him.

A girl yells after Freddy Krueger as he's forced by something else to retreat into the woods, "You're a real (some insult)!"

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I wake up sitting in a chair in a hospital waiting room, I note the time as "sometime between 2300 and 0800." I had a friend do an autopsy on a case I'm working, off the record. The victim had a demon eye transplant in his forehead, and sometimes those things go bad. But my friend at the hospital found no more than the usual amount of decay around the eye. I'm looking out the window at the billboards you can see around the city, there's one with an image of a guy with a demon eye, another one directly across from the hospital with a picture of a woman on it, and I'm wondering exactly how large these things are in terms of a percentage of your field of vision; most of the time I hardly consciously notice them, but how much of an impact are they really having on people? I'm remembering a line from a book, about a woman who'd just arrived in the modern age and was pleased by the sense of desire everywhere. (Accurately remembered line, the book was Clive Barker's Weaveworld.)

The zombie boy from the American Horror Story series is sitting on the floor, focusing on the burnt, hollowed-out eye sockets of his rapist's body. He fits the head back into place, then looks up at the witch girl who brought him back to life, who looks sickened, and he says, cheerfully, "Doctor!", like he's calling her to go to work and pull off another resurrection.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A young woman sitting with a book is talking to another woman sitting in a curtained bed, saying "Gonna wave you in. Stop me if (something)." The one in bed acknowledges this, and the one with the book passes her hand over the other woman's face, then starts reading a series of words from the book that sound random to me - "If, old, some..." As she speaks, the one in bed gets purple-tinted flashes of another person/place, too brief to make out anything but getting longer and more stable with every word spoken from the book.

I'm standing at a crossroads of a low-income neighborhood out on the edge of the city, reading a sign that says Cheese Road (or Lane or Street or something), and pleased to have found the place from that vision in the last scene. A car drives up to the stop sign very slowly, I find it suspicious, but it drives off in the other direction.

I'm standing in a clearing filled with men in armor and horses, near some trees. The guy I'm talking to is psyching himself up, saying he can't get excited about fighting unless it's (the particular people we're about to fight) - with anyone else, why bother? I refer to Alexander, the man we're following, as "the undiminished king."

A woman in a modern setting believes she's being punished, looking up at the sky and addressing her father the storm god, "What have I done?" - but what she saw as a punishment was meant as a message, about a friend who she's separated from.

1st person, as a wolf, a woman stroking my jaw and debating out loud whether to leave me in that form.

A teenage boy having guilt-induced hallucinations about a man he'd hurt, seeing him with a face burnt black and empty holes for eyes, I can see the wall behind him through the holes.

A book with an illustration of a red circle covered in black markings has gotten soaked and the markings are washing away, and the boy who damaged it is apologizing, but the girl who owns it is saying it wasn't the real deal after all, if it would run.

I'm walking up the steps to a graveyard. I'm a teenager or young man who lives and/or works in a temple or shrine or similar attached to this graveyard. In the previous dream scene I'd been talking to friends at the foot of the stairs to the temple about hard times their families had been through, and I'd been thinking that I couldn't really relate, my family never having been through anything like that, and I'd removed myself from the conversation - but now I'm thinking about the hard things in my life I couldn't tell them, specifically I'm thinking about an old man buried here whose death I couldn't tell them about. I float over to his grave.

But there's a guy here waiting for me. He attacks me - though I just float away from that - while blaming me for causing that man's death by convincing him to expose us to the media. He'd been one of something secret, supernatural or not quite human. But it wasn't like that - I hadn't been the one to convince him at all, and I'm frustrated by this mistaken rumor; it had been some pretty girl who'd talked him into it, I'd been completely against it, and I'd hated that he could throw away a lifelong belief in secrecy so quickly.

I'm sitting outside what looks like a very small cave entrance, too small for a person to get through, and I'm talking with several very small spirits, and a much larger, much older one in the cave. We're having a disagreement about a course of action, and finally the spirit inside the cave decides to force the issue by possessing me and taking control of my body. In doing so, he forces out the much smaller, relatively harmless spirit that usually possesses me, and it's quite shocked by this; it tries to get back in, but there's this glowing blue crescent on my forehead, like a closed eye, which acts like a lock.

I'm standing on a city street near a warehouse, surrounded by government vehicles, and talking to my boss, who works for the FBI. He wants me to see what's going on inside the warehouse, but I can't do that. I'm tired. The thing possessing me doesn't understand why this is an issue, takes over and answers easily - his answer has something to do with drugs - he speaks using his own accent, very different from mine, some variety of English, but if the boss notices he chooses to ignore it.

(After valerian root was mentioned in a previous dream, I looked it up and found it was used for insomnia, and gave it a shot in an effort to get my sleep schedule back in order - I've been going to sleep around 6-7 am, a good 2-3 hours later than I prefer. Marvelously effective tea, managed to get to sleep before dawn. Predictably, dream recall was terrible - but since I'm only using the tea to help me get back to my usual sleep schedule and don't intend to use it long-term, that's acceptable.)

Just the one fragment: an image of an absurdly beautiful man representing either St. Michael or Apollo, with a comparison between the blue of his eyes, the blue-within-blue eyes of Dune, and the blue lotus.