Carabas

I'm inside a mental simulation of a memory from my past, allowing two people to go through the contents of my memory, a man and a woman. I'm lying down on the bed while the woman goes into the next room to look around.

Will Graham standing in a room, alone, but with mental images of many people moving around, he's piecing together what happened here in the past. He's watching the phantom images move, but he's mostly thinking about Hannibal and the increasing inevitability of consulting him on this case. This whole image is replaced by written words in white: "The Kingdom".

I'm a man who's been doing research into my own unknown ancestry, and turned up some info that my father was a cult leader. And while my mother's still a mystery, I'm complaining to someone that at this rate she'll probably turn out to be a goat. It's a reference to an image of goat-headed Baphomet that was connected to the cult.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm watching three women try to recreate images from old photos of other people, dressing up like them and trying to copy their poses exactly, in order to figure out something that happened in the past, something about a girl with some sense of guilt towards another woman. Copying the photos requires one of the women to adopt some really uncomfortable looking poses, she's dressed up in a wedding gown and the angle she's holding her neck at looks like it should be fatal.

There's this guy who killed someone, and I told him over the phone 'I'm not going to come for you' unless he does something about the body himself. When I get there, I look out the back window into his yard, and see a few of those big black trash bags full of fallen leaves, and I note that there are a couple more bags now than were there when I left. I note that he split it up into several bags instead of just one.

I'm in the yard of some huge mansion with a few white tables and chairs set up for a party, abandoned now; I'm out at the very edge of the yard, near a river, standing over someone who's been shot, and I'm saying to Hannibal, "One person, you could have saved one person!" He says something disagreeing with me. I'm thinking about Abigail.

I'm standing in my IRL shower, and there's a spider in here, well out of the way of the water; but I accidentally drip some on it and it slips down into the tub, gets caught in the water and washed down the drain before I can catch it. I feel guilt about that. I didn't want to drown it. But then an insect crawls up out of the drain - a huge winged ant, and then another one - and I feel sure the spider will be able to make it back up too.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm meeting some people in a dream. A woman and I have just arrived on a beach, bright sunny day, clear blue-green water, and we've got these dark fragments of void-stuff hanging around us from our arrival, dissipating like smoke. She's telling me about the guy she's going to introduce me to, who's supposed to guide me through something specific. He appears in a puff of darkness like we did, but standing on the water a little bit away, dark-haired guy wearing a suit, and he jogs across the water to meet us on the sand. He apologizes for taking so long to get here, and I'm thinking to myself that it only took him so long because he's accepting limitations that are unnecessary in a dream, not really a promising start. I expect him to say something else but he doesn't, they've both gone silent and stopped moving, and I realize that we've lost the connection and I'm waking up.

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

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

Withnail & I, in which '& I' has an audition he's nearly missing, wrapped up in a sheet on the floor of the apartment and brooding. I, disembodied observer, am noting that no matter how badly off you are, looking at these two will make you feel better.

Hannibal, in which Will is in Hannibal's room, examining the things hanging on the walls and feeling wary and suspicious.

A prehistoric bat-like underwater creature.

ElfQuest, in which I've just come back to the Wolfriders after a long time away, centuries, things have changed a great deal while I was gone. They have new rules for staying hidden - 'new' being relative, these rules are old and well-established for them, to the point that they don't always remember this is all new to me, and both I and the people who were away with me mess up from time to time. It's been a strange readjustment in a lot of ways. I'm up in the treetops, looking out over the forest to a place where a river and a road meet, a road that was never there before, and I think even the river's moved. I'm thinking about how drastically the humans have changed while I was gone, and how my people have had to change along with them.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragments of a few related scenes, not sure what order I dreamed then in. Pretty clearly influenced by Hannibal. Switches back and forth between 1st and 3rd person, following a man who does some very strange job for the FBI:

Walking down a sidewalk in DC with a black-haired woman with an upturned nose, her with a cup of coffee in her hand, none for me, I don't drink coffee - we have some professional relationship, we work very different jobs but we talk outside of work, we're old friends, with occasional attempts at being more than friends but the timing's always been wrong.

A different woman, my partner, talking to our boss about his faith in us on some very strange case he's given us.

My partner again, we're on assignment in some small town, been here for a few days, and right now we're not working, she's fooling around uploading photos of me to some social network site that her mother is on. I've met her mother, I like and respect the woman, and my partner's teasing me about posting something inappropriate. I try to see what photos she's uploading and she keeps shooing me away.

Same small town, been here longer now, I'm talking to a police officer I've gotten to know a little just as we're wrapping up for the day, he says it's good that I'm dating, "even if you do fight a lot." I have no idea what he's talking about, I think maybe he misinterpreted something about me and my partner teasing each other - we do fight a lot when we're filling out paperwork - then I turn around and see that other woman from before has come to pick me up, and she's dressed for a night out, stunning, the dream 'camera' does this slow pan up her legs, black dress, done something fancy with her hair - I'd known we were going out for dinner but this I was not expecting. I'm thinking it's something to do with being out in the middle of nowhere like this, the people around me aren't content to let me keep holding them at a distance. It's not a good thought.

Last fragment before I woke up, more obvious symbolism than the rest, 3rd person for all of it - he's at dinner with that woman, not at a fancy restaurant but at a place with some activity that keeps them on their feet. She's eating ribs, messy, sauce smeared on her face. It looks like blood. So mostly I'm left with this image of her crouching with blood on her face, and I, the disembodied observer, hear TdV's Sarah's line in my head: "Blut, Liebling. Leck es ab." She hands him a rib, and he, obligingly, eats, just as his phone rings, work-related, so that when he answers his phone he also appears to have blood on his mouth.