Carabas

There's a man, some kind of ruler, lying in his sickbed, potentially his deathbed. He's speaking to two servants to either side of his bed. Circumstances are forcing him to return to a place he'd once tried to conquer many years ago, but had been forced to turn away from at the last minute. His servants think returning now will be a disaster, given his health. But he's inspired. He says that when he first marched on that place, he'd felt he was approaching the height of his power. As though if he'd reached that place, he also would have reached his dream of creating something that would change the world. I want to use the word 'technology' here, but that gives the impression of some new gadget - what the ruler is after is something as revolutionary as the invention of writing. His statement makes one of the servants focus on the symbol the ruler is wearing around his neck. It's a gold star with 14 rays, arranged much like a jack, the toy, or like a three-dimensional version of a compass rose. I, disembodied, think of alchemy.

There's a white horse and rider walking through a hall of the palace. An extremely agitated servant is trying to get them to leave, but the horse and rider brush him off. They walk through a pair of wooden double doors, into a room where the ruler who'd been in his sickbed is now up and in military uniform, going over maps. The setting looks significantly more modern than I'd thought in the previous scene, maybe as late as the 1800s.

The ruler reacts about as you'd expect when a stranger on a horse walks into your room. The rider asks, "Don't you recognize me?" And his face changes - now he's identical to the ruler. "Though when we last spoke, it was more..." And his face changes again, growing younger. Very little changes, really - skin's a bit tighter about the jawline, mostly. The rider reaches up to feel that jawline, and compliments the ruler on how well he's aged. Perhaps that's the result of easy living. This is sarcasm - an accusation. The rider says "we" expected greatness from the ruler - but what has he done with their gift in all this time?

The rider says, "We convene in the morning. I expect you there." And he leaves.

Disembodied, I'm looking at a woman standing on a pier some two hundred or so years ago, facing away from me, looking out to sea. She makes a striking image, her black hair and her long dark skirt in stark contrast against the bright grey of the clouded-over sky and sea. There's music being played badly. The men she's been staying with or traveling with are having a going-away party for her, but she's stepped away from it for a moment.

The scene changes to the place she's headed - a man's riding a horse recklessly fast over hilly terrain, playing what he refers to as a game of tag with her.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After a few other dream scenes, I'm back to that woman on the pier. This time she's turned around, talking to one of the men from the party. He has a going-away present for her, two small dark objects that he presses into her hands, something that I think of as 'artifacts.'

I'm a man traveling together with an old friend and several people I've met more recently - we're on a mountain road covered in snow, leading horses. A few red berries on the branch we're passing underneath caught my eye, everything else is bare. I'm thinking about the place we've just been turned away from, feeling annoyed. We were counting on this letter written by the head of a monastery to convince the master of some estate or something along those lines to let us stay there until the snow melts, but there was some trouble with the man the letter was addressed to. Right now I'm walking next to a blonde woman dressed in red who's worried about food. I cheer up as I talk to her, and I'm saying that food won't be a problem for tonight, "Dieter and I found a veritable mountain of-"

3rd person dream following a character shortly after his mother's funeral. This man believes he's just been 'granted a power to evade death.' He's currently out riding with the woman he used to be engaged to and his closest friend, who is now pursuing that woman himself. Watching the two of them together, he decides there's nothing here for him and turns his horse away, thinking about traveling.

Years later, the same character is white-haired and recording his memoirs, dictating them to a recording device. He's describing that 'power or curse of evading death' and his wife, who'd been listening, rolls her eyes. She's heard that story of his before. Losing interest, she leaves the room. In his dictation, he's just started describing the moment he was summoned to his mother's deathbed, to take the last of her life and inherit her power. As he speaks, his dead mother appears in the room. This is something he's used to, although he's the only one who can see her, and although she hasn't appeared very often recently. She dislikes watching him let himself grow old. But he's only allowing himself to age as long as his wife is alive, so they can grow old together; after she passes away, he intends to go back to feeding off other people's lives. Still dictating, he remembers the last words of advice his mother had given to him on her deathbed: 'In this life, do not just feed. Remember to dance.'