Carabas

I'm standing in a cave with a group of people, discussing a man who came through here just ahead of us, someone we need to seal away - this is something he'd requested but now he's running. Our time is limited. A woman is suggesting that we use a certain box - it fits in the palm of your hand - that her husband had originally designed to seal himself in case of an emergency. She believes that her husband is no longer a threat so the box can be turned to a different purpose, and I can see her joy in that. But I refuse. No matter how safe her husband seems now, we need to save that option for him.

Following the man we need to seal, we come out of the cave into the open. There's a group of people living here who view him as a god; we avoid encountering them directly. Two of us get into a discussion on the nature of worship, talking about projecting the way your own perspective works onto a macro level, with a powerful leader to control things and a drastically overvalued role of consciousness. I make a comparison to a machine that can feel every impact of cogs and gears.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragmentary scenes with that woman who led the pilgrimage through the mountains earlier:

I'm sitting at a large round wooden table, eating a snack, while she's saying to me something about "would you bear hope" or would I be "a bearer of hope." I'm a little taken off-guard by this conversation, and I'm annoying her by not giving what she's saying serious consideration.

I'm surrounded by wolves, or something like wolves - they've got faces that seem built for snarling, I think of them as someone's nightmare of wolves. I can feel them as they each brush against me, rubbing closely against my legs. They're mine now apparently. I can't believe that worked, this is wonderful. I look over to that woman, standing a short distance away - I want to see her reaction. She has this sort of "you have got to be kidding me" expression. The wolves had started out attacking us, and she seems more exasperated by this turn of events than anything else.

We're standing on a snow-covered mountain, the ground here at a steep angle, with some threat above us, and I'm saying to her, "-here. I would rather stand and fight being a single person. And you, we'll-"