Carabas

A man who wore a heavy overcoat and hat to hide his appearance - though we eventually saw him out of it, and he's far from the strangest thing we've seen in this world - is currently talking to me about his trick with languages. He hears meanings, not words. And he's concerned because when we had been talking with those demons earlier, to his ears the demons were saying nothing at all. In other words, they were lying. I can't say I'm surprised.

Lestat and Claudia have been fighting on a ship - mostly verbally, but they're fairly serious. He'd gotten angry and taken her up into the air with him, and now she's broken away and run toward the prow of the ship. She turns and looks at me, and my image of her changes - I see a human girl, long brown hair under a white cap. She mouths, "Help me, Father."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A flashback to the 1930s or so. A movie's being rewritten to expand a starlet's part, and the leading man's being told this over the phone. He doesn't take it well. The movie's focus was on a struggle between two men, the romance subplot with the starlet's character had been relatively minor. He doesn't like people messing with the storyline just because they got a big name involved.

In the present - which is the 1950s or so - that former actor's talking with a man in an office, someone he thinks of as a servant in some sense. The actor's blackmailing him or something similar. A knock comes at the door, and that 'servant' hurriedly puts on a black suit coat and slouches. He looks greasy - part of the act. When the person who knocked comes in, the actor does all the talking but he treats that 'servant' as his boss, deferring to him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Two men and a woman are trying to figure out a plan to break someone out of a guarded cell. One of those men leaves and starts stirring up a great deal of trouble - getting on the loudspeaker, taunting the guards, bringing up the security camera image that shows a guard he'd killed earlier. Now that alarms are ringing, that woman who'd been planning with him earlier manages to get to him before security does. She asks, "What are you doing?!" He hadn't told them this earlier, but he's a known criminal - his face would have given them away on the way out. So he figured it's better if he puts that to use and acts as a distraction. She's incredibly exasperated with him.

Shortly after passing a man whose head is a snake, three creatures are presented as things I'm meant to fight. But they seem harmless, and when I walk up to them, they disappear. Past them, I walk into a hidden door set into a tree, and spend some time walking through a series of rooms. The passageway I'm walking through makes a large circle, and when I get back to the start (there were a lot of scene changes along the way, so this "start" wasn't actually the same place as the tree-passage from before), I notice a flight of stairs heading down that I hadn't seen before, with small, glowing blue arrows hovering just above the floor, pointing down.

The stairs lead down into an enormous room filled with books and a portrait of a man I recognize as someone infamous named Corvo - he's someone I've heard of often, in the context of being a doctor or a researcher or something similar, responsible for some tragedy or some sinister event; but I personally think of him positively, even though I know very little about him - mostly I feel curious. I realize this was his room, and these are his records.

I'm standing in a city street in Corvo's POV, sort of - I'm aware that this is me going through his records, his reflections on the past. At this moment in time, he'd been disgraced, along with some other man who I'd also heard of, someone who's walking away from him right now. I have some mental connotation between this man and violence but also think of him as a better person than Corvo, someone who dislikes Corvo intensely but works more closely with him than anyone else, I have the impression Corvo somehow forced him or manipulated him into carrying out a lot of dirty work for him. Now Corvo's looking at the open gates to the city, looking at the crowds of people entering, aware that they're unknowingly carrying some danger that others refuse to listen to him about, and feeling powerless. With the knowledge that this is a flashback, he's feeling an incredible amount of pain over this moment in the past and whatever it eventually led to, and I feel that same emotion so intensely that I have a false awakening or something similar and spend it looking for some space to just calm down from that scene.

Fragment of a previous scene involved a boy covered in words and strange designs related to a demon (or demons). Now, elsewhere, his father's poured something over himself which causes his flesh to melt and transform him into the image of a demon. Another man speaking to him says "Why did you do it?" "Because! I wanted to know his pain!" 'Him' referring to his son. The other man says something to the effect that this was a very foolish thing to do.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

The words "If you could know, wouldn't you?" and a paramedic getting annoyed at a woman who keeps trying to kill herself.

I'm standing in front of a checkout counter, looking at the rows of rock candy, picking one out and talking about nostalgia with the woman behind the cash register, the vampire who made me. I ask her how far back her memory goes, and she says she still remembers her mother. Talking about some other vampires, we agree that their method is much more sensible than ours, them being able to make more than one vampire, which is something we can't do unless the previous one dies; we can't support more than one at a time.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Something about a 'Lazarus Door' for resurrection, and fog and some kind of danger.

A car that won't turn off. The owner's already taken the key out of the ignition, and for a moment I wonder how it's still running, but then I wonder why I thought keys in the ignition have anything to do with turning a car on or off. We take the car into the woods.

A fragment involving two teenage kids in the woods transitions into a sort of flashback showing the parents of one of those kids, back when they were still alive. They're both some kind of doctors or scientists, the wife has this mass of curly hair, and they're sitting at a table in some kind of office or lab and going over a file acquired by the husband's brother, while he stands across the table from them. The brother is "not like others," which is related to whatever the husband and wife are working on, and he's frustrated by working together with them, he's used to his freedom.

On the file they're looking at, there's a stylized drawing of two humanoid figures, one with the head of a bird, the other the head of a wolf, and although the husband and wife don't realize this, I'm aware that image represents the two teenagers from the previous scene, who are "not like others" in the same way as the brother. The wife is saying, "But what's really (some word meaning something like 'strange' or 'unusual' or 'notable' or 'attention-grabbing') here is that the bird has a Double Hartford rank, ten pages in. I can't open it up."

3rd person. Two sisters were raised by their grandmother, and the grandmother favored the younger one over the older one, to a ridiculous degree. The older sister confronts her grandmother on this, which she's done a thousand times before, but this time the grandmother tells her a story about her past. One day the grandmother's wayward daughter, who'd disappeared months before, just turned up on her doorstep with a girl who looked about 4 years old, a creature created by magic. She didn't explain where she'd been or what she'd been doing all this time, she just left the creature and disappeared again. Now the grandmother feels she's done her duty by the little monster just by taking her in and raising her at all, so now that the truth is out, she expects the older sister to understand the favoritism and quit complaining.

(Technically lucid, in the sense that I clearly knew I was dreaming, but there was no more control than usual and no particular moment of becoming lucid that I remember, I seemed to have simply started out that way. Then again, I can't remember how this scene started. Background info: I recently read something claiming dreams usually don't include all 5 senses, mostly just sight.)

I want to test out that bit about how senses work in dreams, so I float up to my bedroom ceiling and run my fingers over the ridges of the plaster. My sense of touch seems to be working fine to me. I even break off a piece of the plaster and taste it - the taste is probably not what plaster really tastes like, and it's very bland, but the sense of taste is certainly present. I decide I need to wake up to write this down.

(And I did. Rather than being any more aware than usual, it seemed more like I'd unintentionally programmed my dream self to complete this task, and my dream self was just carrying out those orders, without me having to take any active control of the dream. I went back to sleep for a few more hours.)

I'm playing the role of Louis de Pointe du Lac and watching a performance of Les Miserables in french. The girl playing young Cosette reminds me a little of Claudia, which makes me remember the songs she used to sing around the house. Their voices are similar. But Lestat's distracting me, talking as we watch the performance, telling me about his run in with Daniel and how he'd given him that 'choice I never had' line. And then he says to me that really, that was something of a lie; Daniel was already 'for the blood' as he puts it, since he'd met me.

A setting that looks like it's based on ancient China. I'm about to transport a prisoner, a high-ranking woman, but the focus of the dream is on the people I ran into guarding her cell, two men I'd known during what I think of as 'the bloodstained war.'

The dream moves into a flashback to the war: I was some kind of government official, something to do with money. It kept me out of the fighting at a time when most men my age were soldiers, and I was conflicted about that, especially since my job required me to work closely with the military. Those two men guarding the cell had been soldiers who briefly acted as my guards while I was traveling through a dangerous area. During this flashback, we met a priest who I'd kept in contact with since, and I'm thinking about the major contrast between how earnest and naive he was then and how cynical he grew to be.

(I woke up. I went back to sleep for one more hour.)

Modern western setting, I'm playing the role of some teenage guy. I'd gone back to my hometown by the sea, thought I was just passing through but got into some kind of trouble and wound up stuck working as a camp counselor as some kind of community service. I'd resented it, wanted nothing more than to get out of town, but as I stuck around I've wound up being a lot fonder of the place than I expected, like some kind of cheesy family movie plot. Also my ex-girlfriend is working at the camp and maybe isn't an ex- anymore. And this is the last day of camp. So I'm in a good mood as I'm riding my bike back to camp after running an errand in town, getting stuff for the ice cream party at the cabin tonight, looking around at the streets and remembering dumb kid pranks and rivalries and shortcuts around here, when I happen across an octopus in the middle of the road.

It's still alive, though it doesn't look too good, it's not moving much. We're just above the beach here, so I scoop it up and return it to the water, and it perks right up - and immediately crawls right back out of the water to cling to a rock. But at least it's not in the road anymore, and it can get back to the water if it wants. It left burns on my arm, like a jellyfish, which I think of as the normal result of picking up an octopus. When I get back to camp my maybe-not-an-ex sees the burns and goes "oh, you didn't," and yes, letting myself get burned was dumb, but what else was I supposed to do?