• Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views




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    1. Fuel

      by , 09-17-2015 at 06:28 PM
      I'm observing a time period when humanity's living on only one planet. Everywhere else has grown too cold to support them. I'm watching one man chase another into space, and he's thinking something about fuel. I'm thinking about my own choice of focus, a little amused - in a time period like this, I'd expect my focus to be on someone's epic struggle to save humanity or something to that effect. But that doesn't interest me here; this last world is going to fail regardless. I'm interested in this man's more personal struggle.
      Categories
      non-lucid
    2. A futuristic boar hunt

      by , 11-21-2014 at 09:02 PM
      Previous scene had been on the subject of breaking through layers - in a futuristic setting, there'd previously been a big struggle to break through (something, either the earth or a ship - either way, the important part is that it's the ground we stand on), and we'd thought that was the end of it; now we're discovering there's another layer to break through.

      In that same setting, I'm part of a team of people in uniforms, rounding up some wild animals. But most of the scene is spent in disembodied 3rd person, following one of my partners. She's watching a boar - huge thing, at least twice my height - and a voice is saying to her through some communications device, "If (something), think how much could be got from a boar of that size under good conditions."

      She asks, "Are these good conditions?" She's referring to the boar's behavior.

      "Best I've ever seen," is the answer.

      She's nervous, but she activates this sort of mechanical set of wings she's wearing; they glow green as they lift her into the air, and she starts rounding up the boar - chasing it down, frightening it, until finally a great green light bursts from inside the boar, creating this swirling transparent sphere around it, fragments rising and dispersing in the air. The light's invisible to the animal itself. She lands on it, clings to its side and uses a vial to collect that light. It's a kind of energy we use, given off by these creatures' heightened emotions - it's the same thing that's powering the weapons we're using to hunt them.
    3. A hole in the ceiling and the heat of a star

      by , 04-05-2014 at 07:15 PM
      I'm lying in my IRL bed, looking out into the hall, and I seem to see movement, as if there are several small creatures on the floor. It's too dark to be sure my eyes aren't playing tricks on me. I reach for the lamp - as I do so, I think I see one of the maybe-creatures-maybe-tricks-of-the-eyes come into the room and look up at me - but the lamp won't turn on. Although I'm aware the bulb could just be out, I suspect this is a dream.

      To test it, I will myself to float up into the air, but nothing happens. I close my eyes to test whether I can see through them anyway, and I can't (in fact, after closing my eyes here, there were no more visuals for the rest of the dream). But I'm still convinced this is a dream. As one more test, I reach up and touch the ceiling, sure that it won't be solid. I encounter solid material, but
      it's spongy, my finger sinks into it, creating a depression, and then reaching some limit - the material breaks, creating a small hole. For a second I consider whether this might not be a dream and I've really poked a hole in the ceiling. But I keep digging at it until I create a larger hole, large enough for me to pass through, and I climb up into it. As I pass through, I find I'm now moving downward, not upward - and this makes me wonder if opening up this hole was really a good idea. I have a vague thought about moving down into a basement which stores unpleasant things. But once on the other side, I become aware that I'm lying in bed, and that I've woken up.

      Fragments from later (insomnia's been killing me this past week and my recall's a mess):

      A desert in a futuristic setting. I'm talking to my wife about some intrigue going on within an elite group of all-female guards who work for us. They're slaves, and I'm thinking about the tensions created by relying on people while keeping them in slavery.

      Different scene, same POV character. I'm in a small spaceship, with the pilot - a good friend who works for me - to my left, and a boy whom I'm kind of mentoring sitting behind us. I'm explaining to the boy about a weapon I'm expecting our enemies to use, something that increases the heat of a star. It's related to the lifespan of the star, and the boy deduces that since the star in this system is very young, the effect will be very great. He sounds horrified, but I'm not feeling particularly concerned; it's just one more thing to take into account.
    4. Wings and clockwork

      by , 01-27-2014 at 11:44 PM
      There's a girl walking up a narrow attic staircase that she very much doesn't want to go up. There's something that looks like a child at the base of the stairs, forcing her to go up and see 'mother.' 'Mother' is something that this girl has fed people to before, but she's never gone up the stairs herself. Now she's failed the pair somehow. Whatever's at the top of the stairs feels nightmarish enough that I decide I don't want to see this, and take just enough control to back out of the scene. There was some resistance, and it felt like a race against time, whether I could get out before the girl got to the top of the stairs.

      I'm standing somewhere airy, white walkways, a few white walls, mostly open space. There are a few pages on the ground, a story I was reading, but I feel too on edge to focus on it. I put my back to a wall, that helps.

      The Magician on a city street with a little girl. He's saying, "Countless thousands of worlds, or (something, along the lines of 'a few') worlds and those you know." She asks what he means, and he says nevermind, but he's talking about the price for what he's about to do for her; something's going to be lost. He doesn't want her to feel guilty over it, so he doesn't explain the details. He raises his staff and these gold shapes form in the air around them - flat, curved, with sharp points, something like a tribal tattoo come to life, I have vague associations with wings and clockwork (they do resemble stylized wings, but no clue what the clockwork association's from) - and then their surroundings seem to shatter, taking them somewhere 'between worlds.'

      Memory gaps and vague fragments after that: those same two characters standing in front of images like holograms, representing people that little girl knew, but the images are fragmentary, like they've had pieces digitally erased, leaving a bit of hair or a corner of a dress hanging in midair, but never any faces. Something to do with the importance of the little girl remembering "Rose," but there's a trick to it - she knew someone who was called Rose, but who also used another name, and it's that other name she really has to remember. Four knights, two in red and two in blue, male and female, and the man in blue has some message to do with the kid's father and something about a doll.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm playing some kind of game based on Middle-earth - there's no sense of me physically playing a video game or the like, I seem to physically be there and it seems to be a real place, but I think of it as a game. At the moment I'm trading in some weapon and given a new selection to choose from. It's mostly swords and daggers. I choose a staff. This alters the way the game is played, although I hadn't realized it when I made that choice; it removes me from the fighting and instead allows me to travel freely, flying over the countryside, exploring the world, unlocking all the elven settlements that were otherwise hidden. I won't be able to continue the storyline this way, but it has its appeal.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      A movie about robots, filmed in first person POV, full of scenes designed to make you feel sympathy for the robots, even while the robots themselves remind you that they're just tools and there's no need to feel concerned.

      Belle and a newly-human, rather fragile-looking Rumpelstiltskin have been traveling somewhere and are now in some dimly-lit house where they're finally meeting with Rumpelstiltskin's son. (His personality's so different from Bae's that I hesitate to use the same name for this dream version.) Belle and the son talk while Rumpelstiltskin's sort of collapsed in a chair, Belle's next to him, the son's on the second floor and looking down at them over a railing; she seems suspicious of him. It seems they've met before, in a shared dream, and something that she saw in that dream is making her suspicious of him now. He warns her not to take shared dreams too literally, as other associations tend to leak in.

      Updated 01-27-2014 at 11:50 PM by 64691

      Categories
      lucid , non-lucid , nightmare
    5. The sky barrier, monitoring an android, trains and ships and gods

      by , 01-21-2014 at 10:16 PM
      I'm looking at some kind of travel ad with a picture of a bridge and a quote calling it magical. A woman's complaining about the misuse of the quote - apparently it's a line from the end of a long poem about a more literal variety of magic, and the way the ad is using it is going completely against the spirit of the poem. She summarizes the poem, saying something along the lines of 'magic's one and only purpose: getting us outta here.'

      As I think about what that means, I become lucid. I'm floating above the bridge from the image in that ad, high over a river, surrounded by trees; I fly along the road, over the trees, flying higher until I can see that this is an island, and I fly out over the water. It's all very beautiful, but I'm still thinking about what that woman had said, and I associate it with a quote from Tolkien in defense of escapism. (The quote: Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?) Thinking about Tolkien, I think that while I'm lucid, I'll go find some elves. But suddenly I feel a desperate need to, as the woman said, get outta here - rather than flying peacefully over the water, now I'm thinking of the sky as a barrier I have to break through; I'm very worked up about it. I fail completely.

      When I stop trying to break through the sky, I find I'm now flying outside my IRL home.
      I land in a tree. My IRL neighbor's on the steps outside with some people I think of as her cousins, and she sees me. I feel embarrassed, a grown man climbing trees. The branch I'm sitting on breaks with a very loud crack, and although I don't fall very far at all, they run over to me. She scolds me for climbing trees when people are trying to sleep. We go inside. I'm still vaguely aware that I'm dreaming, but I'm thinking that I'll have to wait for these people to leave before I can do anything very interesting.

      I 'wake up' on a bus. I think about the lucid dream I just had, but am distracted when Danica Patrick starts making out with the woman sitting next to me. (And yet it doesn't occur to me that I might still be dreaming...)

      I'm in an office, talking to someone about the android I've been monitoring. The guy I'm talking to is the same model, and I'm asking him about some of the skills he was programmed with; I think there might be something wrong with the one I've been observing, she seems to have let some of her skills decay. He hints that maybe I've got an ulterior motive here, and he's right, but I insist I'm only concerned about my employer (their manufacturer)'s reputation. I'm thinking I'm going to have to download a training program so I can pose as a servant and infiltrate her owner's household.

      (Woke up. Had an unusually difficult time getting back to sleep, I was up for at least an hour.)

      There's two men sitting in front of a fireplace, a young man and an old one. The young man's saying, "Don't you want to help me?" There's a long pause. The young man isn't aware of it, but the person he's speaking to is his father-in-law; his wife, the old man's daughter, has recently passed away, and for some reason the old man thinks it's to his benefit to keep that connection secret. Now the old man says, "Your wife... Very sweet creature."

      (Woke up. Back to sleep without difficulty this time.)

      I'm on a train named after a greek goddess; I've just changed from a train called Autehna (which is meant to be Athena - my dreams have mixed up that name in a similar way before, again pronouncing it with a 't' instead of 'th'), and I'm thinking of the naming of the two trains as pleasantly symbolically appropriate. I'm writing in a journal. As I write, I see an image of what I'm writing about: a very powerful and morally dubious man offered me a position, and I turned him down, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. In the journal, I write that I must have learned in another life to refuse to get tangled up with the wicked and powerful.

      Continuing as the same character from the train, I find my wife and children asleep around/under the Christmas tree.

      Still the same character, I'm standing on a dock next to a rowboat full of men in red uniforms, casting off. I'm in the same uniform, as is the man beside me, but the two of us aren't going back to the ship with the rest. I'm thinking about that position I'd turned down, and the possible ill will resulting from that refusal, and I start to feel suspicious about the guy next to me. When I look at him, he takes off running down the dock, reaching for a rope. I reach for the weapon I've concealed in my false leg, and as I remove it I hear someone say "mon dieu!" I'm thinking about the various bits and pieces of myself that I've left behind.

      (Woke up, once again couldn't get back to sleep and eventually gave up on it, even though I'd gotten only about 5 hours of sleep. Unusual.)

      Updated 01-22-2014 at 03:04 AM by 64691

      Categories
      lucid , non-lucid , false awakening
    6. Space race and malfunctioning robot

      by , 01-12-2014 at 12:07 AM
      Friday: A mountain "full of fog, 'wolves' and 'sheep'", where a woman who'll wind up becoming a historical figure is setting out to show the other side that some of their 'wolves' have deserted and are now helping her guard the 'sheep.'

      Today: A guy in space, traveling toward Earth along with many, many other ships in some kind of race, the ship he's in seems made up of many different old parts, pieces are falling off along the way but he seems to have expected that. He's full of rage. There was something to do with lots being drawn, and his younger sister had been one of the winners, which would have meant she was safe and wouldn't have to take her chances in the race with the rest of them, but her parents (from whom he's estranged) had convinced her to give up her slot, that she must live or die and "become ashes" with them, so that they wouldn't be separated in the next life and lose her forever. She told him about this as he was looking over her ship for her, and he found something wrong with it, something that had been sabotaged, that would prevent him from communicating with her after the journey even if they both survived. He fixes it, and is furious.

      Still the same storyline - there's a woman somewhere "left behind", the place all the people in the race and the lottery were abandoning. She wakes up with a gun next to her - not hers - and sees someone who says something to her. She, outraged by what he said, says "I don't look like a nice person to you?", and shoots him. Her logic being that if he couldn't recognize a good person when he saw one, he must be a bad person. As she shoots him, her face changes in some subtle way, something to do with her teeth, and I'm aware that in this place, now, people physically change to reflect their actions, and this is part of what the others were escaping from.

      A conversation between a man and a woman in a bedroom as she's tying sheets together into a ladder, preparing to escape:
      He: "I thought you might have missed it."
      She: "Missed what?"
      He: "The window."
      She: "I can't miss the window. You're my destiny - war."

      After an incident with a robot - it appeared human and was programmed to act as a caregiver to a group of four kids, something had gone wrong with it and put the kids in danger. Now someone's complaining to someone else about it - one's in law enforcement, the other's in politics, not sure which one is which. The one listening to the complaint responds, "I believe I oversaw the (something). And (something) to call in some backup." But when she says 'backup', she's not talking about something official. I see an image of two guys, not in any kind of uniform, one's scrawny and one's a little overweight, they have some connection to photography, possibly the press - they're the 'backup' she was referring to.
    7. Android, duel, witch

      by , 01-05-2014 at 01:09 AM
      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.
    8. Outlanders, off-worlders, distant places and isolated islands

      by , 01-04-2014 at 12:18 AM
      I'm reading a book. In it, the main character is looking at a river and thinking "The mare of time." The river surface usually looks calm, but it's been disturbed due to the ongoing combat. There's a thought that it's only humanocentrism that makes him see the 'calm' river as better/more natural than the 'disturbed' river. There's a reference to a distant place he's been searching for, or came from, or that otherwise has been referenced frequently in the story before now; from this point in the story onward, that place will no longer be a major part of the story. There will be a few minor finds, items from that place, fruits, henna - accompanied by the line "It was a good henna, but not enough to sit in front of the Skillet-mirror" - but the place itself will never appear in the story again, which gives the story as a whole a sort of surreal feeling, with storylines that go nowhere and scenes that don't quite match up, aside from always containing the same main character; a focus on imagery rather than plot. It reminds me of a less surreal Maldoror, or a more surreal Gormenghast, and I start thinking about the surreal in my own writing.

      There's a Lost Boys tv show, currently showing the Boys versus some vampire skinheads.

      A doctor who is giving up his practice and moving to an isolated island, moving in with the couple he loves. He's talking to his mother (a relatively young woman who insists he refers to her as his sister in public) about his intent to stop practicing medicine. They're standing on a small wooden hanging bridge high over a river, surrounded by tropical plants with broad leaves and looking out over the sea; it's very beautiful.

      I'm in a marketplace filled with angry people. They don't like being guarded by off-worlders like us, and we're trying to arrange things so we can get at least half the guard duty covered by their own people. One of our guys in uniform is saying something about how surveys indicate the majority of locals don't mind having some off-worlder presence, and we're trying to find the best solution for everyone here, and more research is going to have to be done. I'm not joining in the discussion, I'm sitting in the dirt at the edge of the marketplace, out of uniform, just listening and watching. There'd been a chance of a riot here, but the danger seems to have passed. Now that things seem to have calmed down, the kid who alerted me to the situation and led me here reaches out and picks up the chips - money - that I left beside me on the ground. I put it there for him, but he seemed unsure if it was really okay for him to take it. When he sees me looking at him, he looks scared and smiles at me; I nod, and he grabs the money and runs off.

      Someone with a different face than usual is explaining to a horrified listener that he's learned to shapeshift. The listener asks who he can shapeshift into; the answer is something along the lines of "oh, people I've eaten, people I've physically bonded with, anyone really." The listener wonders, but doesn't ask out loud, what physically bonded means exactly; he's wondering if just seeing someone is enough. "Objects, even." The listener, horrified by all this, asks, "What happens to your personhood?" The shapeshifter says he's removed a piece of himself and keeps it separate in this box, which he's now asking the listener to deliver to his aunt for him for safekeeping. It looks ordinary, and the listener asks if this shouldn't be labeled in some way. The shifter mocks the idea. It's not necessary to know something's significance to keep it safe; often it's the opposite, it's simpler and safer if they don't know.

      A pair of time-travelers who've recently reunited are stopping by a football game they've been to before. They kept meaning to get around to changing this one little moment in time, and now they've got the chance. There's a guy who's been meaning to propose to his girlfriend, and they're about to be featured on the big screen; the first time around, neither of them had noticed they were on camera, and something unfortunate happened afterward. This time around, the time-travelers are sitting just behind the couple, and they poke them and draw their attention to the camera. The guy takes the moment to propose, the girl accepts - but they both seem rather awkward and uncomfortable with all the attention.

      I've been living in a foreign country, working as a live-in tutor, but this is the end of my last day and I'm about to leave. I'm packing up the last of my things and then head downstairs. Downstairs appears to be the house I grew up in, but I'm thinking to myself that this stuff isn't really here, I'm dreaming, and this is only being used as a convenient background, so there's no need to pack it all. Despite this thought, I don't become very lucid; I just focus on sorting out which things only seem to be here because it's a dream, and which things I actually need to pack.

      Julie's patting a big, shaggy old dog, in a room with four guys behind her, talking to her, though I can't make out what's being said. I'm using magic to check in on her from a distance and I don't have a very good connection in this room. She gets up and goes into the corridor, where I can't see her at all, but I recognize the sound of her sister's voice. I realize they're heading outside, which is convenient, there's tons of running water out there I can use. I switch the spell to a bit of water running down the side of the wall, and see that they've gone out into the courtyard and are sitting down on the benches around the fountain - even better. As I move the spell, I remember seeing a post here on DV with a title about learning to control the elements in dreams, which I hadn't read, since thinking of the elements as something you have to learn to use sounded counterproductive. I'm thinking about how helpful water spirits have always been. Again, I don't go lucid; the spell's POV has been moved, and I go back to focusing on the view. They're in the courtyard of a building made of large sand-colored stones, surrounded by potted and hanging plants, and from the fountain I'm looking up at Julie's sister, a woman with long black hair, wearing a black dress. She's saying something about "outlanders."

      I'm with a group of people crossing a desert, when a girl - Julia - arrives in our camp on foot. She'd been following us after we left town, refusing to take her with us. She's an English woman, dressed in Victorian clothing; she looks as if she must be very hot in those clothes, but she's kept struggling along. Then a scene change, just a quick image: Julia walking in the desert on foot, while I and a woman sitting behind me are riding a horse, far ahead of her.

      A fragment: an image of cities and towers in domes surrounded by wilderness, one of which has been heavily decayed, but which appears to rebuild itself as I'm watching; it's related to the breaking of a Sleeping Beauty-style curse.
    9. Bordeaux, the sense of taste, breaking down, cable systems, and building a swamp on a spaceship

      by , 11-21-2013 at 11:17 PM
      Wednesday:

      Fragments involving a man with a hook for a hand, giving him a hand and taking his hook myself; a witch who was trying to force the hook-man to sleep so that she could somehow influence him in a dream; a prince and his army who arrived on this scene, with no knowledge of anything going on between the witch and the hook-man; and a man with some form of mental connection to the witch, his sister.

      A man visiting his wife's family with her, the first time since they were married. The father-in-law's distant and judgmental. He's saying, "You'll have to understand, we only drink old French wines here - Bordeaux," that being where the mother-in-law's from. Inside, the mother-in-law is a tiny woman with long, thick grey hair, very warm and expressive. She asks her son-in-law how his meditation practice is going, and asks if he's getting by okay in New York - which he loves, but she doesn't understand how anyone could enjoy living in cities. She says, "You've been in that city for about a hundred years, but you seem to have left in a good mood." He finds her energy overwhelming.

      In a small restaurant, the baker's brought out samples of new doughnuts for everyone to try, I had two, one with a peach filling, the other blueberry, and I was surprised by the taste of the 'blueberry' - it reminds me of pixie stix and sweet tarts and similar childhood candies, not in the sense of being sugary, it's more the type of flavoring those candies use. I comment on it, and someone at the next table asks what this lump in theirs is. I look and point out to them that it's a blueberry. They've never seen a blueberry before?

      While walking across a field, I'm explaining to someone what juice is. I wind up having to describe it as crushing something until its external protection breaks down and its liquid insides run out, and I'm trying to figure out how to make it very, very clear to the creature I'm talking to that this is something that should be done only to plants.

      As Rumpelstiltskin, I'm in a dream world, talking to an image of Regina that is breaking down and melting after being attacked by someone else, and I'm saying, "This isn't you." Allowing herself to show weakness, I mean. I say it again, then reconsider - it's possible this is one side of her, or even how I think of her. There had been a young girl with her, and now I take the girl by the hand and lead her away, ignoring the image of Regina that's still falling apart.

      Someone's telling me they need me to act as a detective. I cut them off, saying, "What, I'm supposed to magically figure out where the dying guy came from?" But I do find some form of trail, scratches on the floor, leading to what seemed like a wall but which must have some kind of opening.

      Vampires. I brought two humans to see a friend of mine, I wasn't intending to kill them, and I'm a little annoyed at my friend, but I'm not making any effort to stop him either. He's saying to the humans that he hasn't decided yet whether to kill them or turn them. His fangs dig into his own lip, and he spits blood on the human he's got pinned down, which has a sort of acidic effect. I, the dreamer rather than the character, observe that it's much like the way flies break down their food.

      I've been working on a system of cables to allow transportation around an island. It's something two guys had been using on a very small scale on their own property, and I've been working with them to expand it to cover the entire island. I'm mostly doing this to help out a woman I'm in love with who lives in a very remote area, but it's going to benefit everyone on the island. Now I'm looking at the initial stage that's about ready for a test run, and feeling proud, when a troop of soldiers with wings descends out of the sky. Their leader - who I've met before, in a friendlier setting - arrests me on suspicion of killing the king, among others. This is a setup - I know who the actual killer is, and I came to this island in the first place to hunt that person. I'm blaming myself for getting distracted with this side project; if I'd focused solely on my mission, maybe he wouldn't have had time to frame me.

      Thursday:

      There's a room on a spaceship that's being converted into a sort of swamp. This alien species needed this certain type of room for some cultural reason to do with the sharing of emotions, and so we set it up for him. One of the other aliens, from a different species, says that if humans turn out to be understanding and reasonable, s/he's going to be very disappointed. I say nah, don't worry, no matter how many understanding and reasonable humans you meet, you can always count on a few of us to mess things up, every time.

      A group of vampire hunters. A man leading things over the phone; someone who is either a doctor, a former doctor, or simply someone who steals meds from hospitals, refusing to be hurried by the hunters around him; a recording of a man interacting with someone who doesn't show up on video, with viewers arguing that it's definitely faked.

      Updated 11-21-2013 at 11:40 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    10. Exorcism, house elves, living book

      by , 10-18-2013 at 08:50 PM
      I'm saying "Amen," the end of an exorcism. I'd been dealing with a demon and got in over my head, and I'm conflicted about whether exorcising it is the right thing to do - seems rude, you can't go around summoning people up and then flipping out at them - but either way it's been kicked out now, laughing as it leaves, which is never a good sign. I float back down the hall to bed, observing the lack of footsteps, and then get into bed, surprising the cat.

      (Woke up, about half an hour after going to sleep. The cat had curled up at the foot of the bed while I was asleep.)

      A fragment with a character who's king of a small people who don't necessarily want him - he's traveling.

      A guy who runs a tavern screwed up a recipe, using potato instead of sweet potato, and his house elf tried to help by offering some spices to cover the taste, so the master blames it all on the house elf, starts yelling at it, then hitting it. I'm seeing this as I'm walking past the door, and I'm thinking that this is a particularly ugly house elf, only one eye and covered in bruises - but then house elves always look a little suspicious. Which makes me think - they're also very traditional, and use the term 'Dark Lord' rather than 'You Know Who,' so I wonder if maybe I could entrust it with a certain thing I need taken care of - but when I start to talk to it, it gets scared and disappears off to wherever it is house elves go.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      Fragment of a scene involving a teenage guy talking to a vampire woman carrying a sword. Now he's home and sitting down on the couch, and the dream switches to 3rd person to focus on his father's husband, who'd been at his desk in the same room but goes to the door now to accept a delivery.

      The guy at the door is a friend, or a professional contact anyway, someone who's personally delivering a book he'd requested. It's a living book. His friend delivering it warns him that he'll need it back tomorrow, someone else had reserved it. The man says that's fine, he just needed to speak with her - the spirit in the book - tonight. Although he doesn't say it out loud, there's something going on tomorrow that he's worried about, and he wants to talk it over with her. He's also thinking about a new room that's being built. The man who delivered the book says she's been reading sheet music lately; although he doesn't need to say it out loud, it's an implied request for the guy borrowing the book to provide her with some sheet music when he's done talking with her, as she doesn't like being left alone with nothing to read.

      The first of several gods is watching the first humans age, and aging himself to match the oldest of them.

      I'm walking past a shrine on a holiday, and hearing kids sing a song that I recognize as being part of a game like tag or hide and seek. There's a cloud of something floating in the air, I can't tell if it's tiny petals or some kind of dust, but it floats through the shrine gate and where it gathers I see a brief image of some great horned creature.

      There's some futuristic family watching a concert, wearing shoes that let them fly, but the youngest girl can't get hers to work right, can't sit still, keeps flying off in different directions. Finally her mother catches her and makes her turn the shoes off, angry with her.
    11. Fate, queens, and fragments

      by , 08-31-2013 at 07:54 PM
      A man talking about an opponent: "He had fallen on the might of (something), and he himself had fallen back and disappeared." The 'he' in question is described to me as "one of Fate's creatures," Fate being our enemy, but this guy is on a completely different level from those we've been fighting up until now. The man speaking is trying to get through to me just how serious a threat this guy is. He says this guy participated in "sanguinary" interstellar wars (that's the second time this month I've had dreams emphasize war with blood-related adjectives; seems redundant, but the dream seems to think that changes the meaning significantly), and in "civilized eras" he attached himself to prison transports, weapons transports, and managed to gain influence through this.

      (Woke up, back to sleep.)

      The queen of this country is always seen accompanied by three men attending her in robes, one red, one blue, one gold, all intricately embroidered in white, and I worked hard to become one of those men, but now that I've gained the position of the blue, I just feel chained down. Once we leave the Queen's presence, we're instructed by an aide to remove the robes, and with them the role we played. Such a role exists only in the Queen's presence, and it seems to me as if she exists in her own bubble, reality shifting with her presence or absence, so that she never touches the real world.

      Fragments:

      My roommate's watching a surreal horror movie called Repo Man starring Nic Cage and Meg Ryan. I comment that I had a dream about those two starring in a vampire movie the other night. (Which is true, I did.) I wanted to watch something else, though.

      Something about David Bowie and outer space.

      I'm saying "Where is all this going?" and in response the scene changes to show me and the people I'd been talking to sailing off into the sunset on a yacht.

      Trying to read a document with errors in the font. When I go to change the font, I scroll past a font called 'lucid dreaming.'
    12. 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.
    13. 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.