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    1. Reworking a deal

      by , 01-26-2016 at 09:28 PM
      A deal has fallen through. Sort of. I've got a prince in my debt, but that's pointless - what I needed was for him to eventually become a king, so that a little further down the timeline, he'll be able to ask another king for a favor. But the princess I'd intended him to marry has now been burned and beheaded due to a minor demonic possession incident, so now he's useless to me.

      I find another kingdom that will work, a desert. Two daughters. In the throne room, I meet the younger daughter, but that timeline doesn't interest me. The eldest is locked in the dungeon, and I take the prince to meet her instead. I recognize her, though she doesn't recognize me - I'd met a version of her in another world. She'd been a he at the time. The prince had known her in that world too, and I think that could work out either very well or very badly. She's a lot angrier this time around, something of a freedom fighter, turned against her own father. This is promising.

      Updated 01-26-2016 at 09:30 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    2. Dark, the emperor, and the queen

      by , 12-13-2015 at 09:33 PM
      I gave an old woman a recipe which includes a poisonous flower. She later turns up dead by the effects of that poison - but I suspect her son took advantage of that situation to kill her himself, knowing that it would be dismissed as an error in dosage. There's an inheritance involved.

      Disembodied, I'm 'standing' at the edge of the ring of a gladiatorial circus, observing a man who's now lying on the ground looking half-dead, but he's nonetheless victorious and a crowd-pleaser. I'm bored. These games have been going on for days now and it's gotten repetitive, I'm impatient for him to move on.

      I shift my perspective, finding the emperor in a large private room attached to the circus. A man in armor is talking to him about the man who's won the games, and the emperor is incredulous - why should the emperor fear or make concessions? That man fears him, the emperor - the proof of that is in the way he travels from place to place and uses the name he does. (His name is a word literally meaning "dark," but associated with low, dirty things.) The man in armor raises the issue of Dark's rumored connection to the queen.

      The queen's present in the room, tall and dark and with green-tinted hair, hair mostly covered by a black veil. She's legendary for her beauty and suggested to be not entirely human; there's a rumor that Dark is one of her kind, and looking for her. It's close to the truth, but not quite it - in actuality, he's a survivor of the court of her previous husband. She's unaware of this. She only survived that massacre because the emperor refused to give her up, treated her as a prize.

      She joins in the conversation, teases the emperor, saying that if she ever sees this Dark, she might recognize one of her own kin and turn on the emperor. Her voice is nasally. She then speculates more seriously about what would happen if she ever really did meet one of her sisters - "Lure her to her death."

      The emperor is irritated with this line of conversation, and tells the two of them that this is enough talk, focus on the tribute instead.

      Later. Dark is standing in front of an open shrine, holding an antique sword in poor physical condition but with great symbolic meaning. He's telling the spirits that if he enters the dream with this weapon, with all that meaning attached, it will become something miraculous. He's lying. But in actuality, it will lead him to a cross buried in the ground - I see the cross glowing dull red - and then to a bow which will infect him with hatred for a time.

      I have a body now. I'm standing in a temple somewhere bright, talking to a woman who's explaining to me that she won't leave this building. She took a demon into herself, made herself its prison. She describes how she'd been fighting someone, and when it was over, a part of herself that should have been restoring was draining instead, and she hasn't been able to stop it - she can feel herself flaking away, and if this continues, there'll be nothing left of her in a mere few thousands of years.
    3. Kind and cuddly demon summoning

      by , 12-12-2015 at 07:37 PM
      In the 1940s, I'm watching three expensively-dressed women being transported from a large building to a long black car with the top down. They're speaking Spanish.

      My partner says to me, if those women take this opportunity to escape, their guards will be killed in their place. She disapproves of this idea.

      I say, she can't be sure of that. We haven't met their boss, so how can we know how he'll react?

      She says, you don't summon up demon soldiers because you're such a kind and cuddly person.
    4. Jules in Bangladesh

      by , 12-01-2015 at 07:39 PM
      There's a party full of drunk and pretty people I've gotten caught up in; it's being held in the honor of someone I don't really know, and when a group splits off for the private party, I go with them. The door closes behind me and Jules. Jules is dead sober - I'm not - and he doesn't look amused.

      I'm talking to him about the person I've been trying to meet up with, a guy who's meant to be part of this group of party people somewhere; I'd first met him in a cell in Bangladesh, where I'd been trying to track down a particular object. I'm trying to stir Jules' memory of that time, but he just nods, goes yeah, yeah - he's annoyed.

      He says, "Was I shot?" in a tone that suggests this happens frequently, and is probably my fault.

      "In the left arm," I tell him.

      He looks at the fingers of that arm, and I see a mental image of the neck of a stringed instrument. The implication is that getting shot affected his ability to play. Jules says, less annoyed now, "I do remember that one."
    5. A griffon and a ring around an island

      by , 06-04-2015 at 07:09 PM
      A woman's landing a griffon. People come to meet her, and as she talks to one of them she's going to her bag and attending to her armor, getting out gloves and a helmet that weren't practical to wear while she was riding. She's talking about the things that need doing, acknowledging that some of them might be impossible at a small outpost like this, without the easy access to resources you get in the cities. And there's an animal strapped to the back of the griffon, restrained to keep it from hurting itself during the ride, in need of medical attention. They're next to the stables, but the griffon's too large for that - once everything's unloaded, it curls up on the ground like a cat, beside a tall fence.

      That woman and the man she'd been talking to are walking past me into a circle of armed enemies. Someone in the crowd says, "It is the corruption against the corruption." They sound surprised. I'm ostensibly on the crowd's side, but I arranged to bring these two here tonight, and I expect them to kill the man who leads this little group, currently sitting on a kind of throne. Although I say nothing, I see him watching me and I can tell he understands my intention - or more likely he's imagining some grand paranoid plan; but my plan here is very straightforward, just his death. I'm aware he and I are a minor nuisance for these people I've brought here, just something to be dealt with on their way to something else - I have a vague association with the moon - not at all the grand schemes he's been imagining.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm traveling through a city and taking the opportunity to meet with an old friend who was reassigned here recently, a promotion. She works in a form of law enforcement. She's talking about the changes on the island where we last saw each other, talking about the ongoing conflict there. She says the forest has been burned down, so they'll have no more place to hide. There's no more way to get past the patrols skating over the water - I have a mental image of a ring, a platform floating on the water, encircling the whole island, with the port itself as the only opening.

      She describes all this as if they're good things. Time was, she'd be helping me get my people out of places like that. She's met the man who leads the people in that forest - his people aren't mine, but their situation is nearly identical. But I'm thinking, I shouldn't be surprised - the last time she helped me, something happened that frightened her. It's why she stopped working with me. My people weren't at fault, but I'm not surprised that she'd take that fear out on them. But listening to her now, talking as if my people should be locked up, it's like she's forgotten I'm one of them.

      Updated 06-04-2015 at 07:12 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    6. Dreamers in a hospital

      by , 05-29-2015 at 07:00 PM
      I'm in a hospital, speaking to a doctor. There was some information I'd wanted to get from him, but he's assumed I'm here about something else, a person who's been checked into the hospital with a specific condition. I hide my surprise and go with his assumption, only expressing my surprise that he'd known about this patient, since the ward they're in isn't his responsibility - has he kept an eye out for this condition since the last time we met? I'm privately thinking that if that person's developed that condition, then this both simplifies my job and complicates it; I no longer need the information I'd come here for originally.

      I'm discussing this development with three other people in an empty hospital room - a man with a shaved head, a teenage girl, and a person whose gender I'm not completely sure of but I'm going to go with 'she'. Black hair, ragged like she cut it herself, short in the back and long in the front; pale with bad skin; and a grey hoodie zipped up, making her look heavier than she is.

      Talking about that patient's condition, the guy with the shaved head had just been saying something about how dreamers have it rough. Talks about how badly things can go wrong just from being interrupted at the wrong moment; talks about people traveling through a dream being dumped back into reality wherever they happen to be at the moment, and hoping you're lucky enough not to be overlapping some physical object at the time; and that's just the passengers, the dreamers themselves get it worse.

      The person in the hoodie shrugs this off, says at least if you can heal people, no one cares what nastiness you've got going on; they're content to leave you be in your swamp.

      The guy with the shaved head is disgusted by this, says yeah, you enjoy making yourself the worst person you can be.

      She says to him that she learned in prison, "There's no such thing as letting go of vanity, Wade."

      Updated 05-29-2015 at 09:05 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    7. A black river and a yellow wreath

      by , 05-02-2015 at 05:04 PM
      I'm wading through icy water, tracking someone down. It's dark, the water looks black, and there's this mist in the air, I can't see very far. There's bodies floating in the water, wrapped in cloth. There's another man here with me, he calls me by the name of Logan. I'm focused on the dampness in the air - it caused problems earlier when we couldn't get a fire to catch.

      Thinking about fire makes me see another time, standing in a large stone hall, standing off to the left of the woman presiding over some ceremony, having to remain still throughout her speech, wearing armor, uncomfortable. There were rows of people arranged in front of us, and as she called each of them up she'd hand them a lit candle, symbolic, but I was looking at those candles and thinking of them as never enough to hold off the chill.

      Back in the icy water, we've found the person we were looking for in a little area surrounded by bare trees. He's standing off to one side and watching an old woman perform some kind of ceremony, something like a funeral for the old ruler here - I have a vague impression of something strung up among the trees, either the last ruler's bones themselves or at least something representing them. She knows who we are. She tells me that just because I've killed the old ruler, that doesn't make this place mine. The territory is passed down through the blood, and there's still someone with the elf blood to inherit it - the man we've been tracking down. He's not related to the old ruler, and he's more human than anything else, as is she, but that doesn't matter; this territory will remain in the hands of his people, not mine.

      The man in question objects to this - this is a situation being forced on him. He tells me he's sorry. The guy who'd tracked him down with me makes some sarcastic comment, telling him to quit the humble act; but I believe him, this isn't something he'd wanted. Nonetheless, the old woman's in the right; there's nothing I can do here, we've lost. I tell him it's all right. It's only when I speak and hear the tone in my voice that I (the dreamer side of me) realize he and I (the character side of me) had been sleeping together; we're most likely going to have to end that now.

      The old woman resumes her ceremony, now involving him. It doesn't take long, just a few words. There's a wreath of pale yellow flowers which he accepts from her; as soon as the ceremony's done he drops it and it falls apart in the water. I'm thinking of the moment I first met him, when he'd been locked up in a cell.
    8. Shapeshifters

      by , 02-21-2015 at 11:52 PM
      My brother is lying in fetal position on the ground, out in the woods, blood on his hands up to his elbows, just now returned to human form and very out of it. There's a girl with him. In the previous scene they'd been on a date in a restaurant, and she'd already known he wasn't human, and that he was violent - she'd gotten some kind of thrill out of it. But now that she's actually seeing the reality of it for herself, she's yelling at him, and being horrified by the blood on her own hands where she'd touched him. I'm watching from a distance, and I'd intended to give them privacy, but now that I've seen her reaction I'm disgusted by her - and disgusted by his behavior too, but that's not unusual. I allow her to see me and I go to get my brother on his feet.

      Another time. I'm standing next to that same girl, making sure she doesn't do anything to interfere. We're watching a friend of hers go through a sort of rite of passage. She's standing in the woods, holding a sickle. Some variety of large wild cat walks out of the woods. The girl is supposed to kill that cat, but she doesn't move - she can't do it. The cat kills her instead. The cat then returns to her human form; her animal form was supposed to be passed down through her death.

      Another time. A mistake's been made and we're going to need to allow one of our people to go to prison. An older man is offering to take the fall for her - he's been in prison before and he thinks it would be better this way. The youngest of us says there has to be some way to avoid this - none of us can leave this territory anyway, so a prison seems pointless to her.
    9. Hieroglyphics and a jailbreak

      by , 02-14-2015 at 10:01 PM
      As Constantine, I'm strapped to a chair again while a man in a suit - a different one from last time, older - is loading a film strip into a projector. When he turns it on, it shows an external shot of Ravenscar. I remember this moment in time, this guy with the projector - this is when I was sealed off from magic. It wound up only being temporary, but the observer side of me is terrified of getting caught in the start of that without being able to stick around long enough to come out the other side. I don't want those mental associations getting into my head. I bail out of Constantine's perspective.

      I'm on a small boat, the size of a rowboat but moving under its own power, taking me and several others in their own boats across a lake. It's surrounded by walls, artificially made, rounded so that the lake as a whole is circular - I associate this with the moon. The walls are composed of several giant slabs of pale stone, many of them carved with some message in hieroglyphics. Once I notice this, I have the boat back up to the first stone with carvings on it. It starts with the name of the artist and a short line in praise of the king who commissioned this work. The next panel includes two jackals, along with a lot of hieroglyphics I can't read, and I wonder whether the jackals are Wepwawet or someone else - there's nothing that looks like a name or a title, even among the hieroglyphics I can't read. In fact, I'm not sure I should call them hieroglyphics at all - aside from that first panel with the artist's name, the rest of this represents concepts, not words. The symbols I can recognize on the third panel include two rattles and a woman kneeling. This represents music and dance. It becomes clear to me that this entire series of symbols is depicting a prayer ritual - not just depicting it; the walls themselves are a prayer given physical form.

      There's a woman who's been running from a very powerful man, and I've agreed to bring her back to him. But the powerful man isn't the one I'm doing this for - the woman's uncle is the one who made a deal with me. For the sake of the rest of his family, he needs to stay in that powerful man's good graces. Now that woman's standing on some platform above me, I'm on the ladder below. She's pointing to two objects on that platform just out of my line of sight, saying, "This is that gun you've been waving around, and this-" But I don't stop to hear the second part - I reach up and knock that gun off the platform, out of both of our reach. She tries to stop me, holding a knife, but she reacts too slowly, the gun's already gone. She shouldn't have wasted time trying to talk with me. We struggle over the knife for a bit, and I manage to turn it so it winds up embedded in the wooden platform instead of in me, but she recovers from that and quickly escapes before I can climb up the ladder.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      My partner and I are breaking a group of men out of a jail or dungeon or something similar. The men insist on taking the time to steal water from this place before they leave - they don't believe me when I tell them the place we're going will have plenty of water. It's faster to let them do it than to try to convince them - but for crying out loud, could you at least stick to the relatively sanitary stuff? Finally we get them moving, and we head up a flight of stairs, my partner leading them, me hanging behind to make sure we're not followed. I wind up falling further behind than I intended; at the top of the flight of stairs, we cross a long hallway with paintings on the walls, and then head down another flight of stairs. By this point I've fallen so far behind that I've lost them.

      At the bottom of the flight of stairs, I'm in a place that's something like an airport lounge for travel between worlds, a transportation hub. The people here are speaking French, and I talk to one of them to confirm that I've arrived in the location we'd intended. Through a floor-to-ceiling glass window, there's a great view of the ocean and several green islands. It also overlooks several other glass corridors running through this place, and I see my partner leading the men from the jailbreak through one of them. They look completely bewildered. One of them sees me and gestures, clearly wondering how I managed to get over there. I should join them, but honestly, no one's chasing us, my partner's got the babysitting side of things covered, and that ocean looks really inviting.

      After flying over the ocean for a while enjoying the view, I come across an area where a few people are swimming. I drop down into the water and join them. The further I go, the more crowded it becomes - it's beginning to get irritating. I try to talk with someone who seems interesting, but there's a woman right next to us showing off some kind of athletic feat who's talking constantly and difficult to hear over. I comment, "She's very loud, isn't she?" She immediately gets louder, ridiculously loud,
      and I remember that narrative versus command thing I'd been thinking about yesterday. Whoops. "Be quiet, please," I tell her, and while that's a command, she immediately goes back to a normal volume. Deciding to use the narrative to clear a little more space, I close my eyes, lose visuals, and describe the space clearing out - but while it does feel like I've got a little more space to move, when I open my eyes again, I find I'm opening my real ones.
    10. Pilgrimage and slave trade in the mountains

      by , 02-09-2015 at 09:50 PM
      I'm traveling with a woman who most recently has been climbing these giant stairs cut into the mountains, leading a very large group of people, guided by her visions and signs. Now she's reached an old shrine that's of great personal importance to her. But that's not what she was looking for - she thought her visions were guiding her to a place where all these people could be safe. Now it seems it was just something personal. She believes she's led them all this way for nothing.

      I'm extremely frustrated by all this, because the place I've been trying to guide her to with those visions I've sent her is still further on - I wanted her to see this shrine first for personal reasons, because I like her and I thought she deserved to know this part of her past, but it's not our final destination. Unfortunately, the stairs end here; there's no easy path after this point. How am I going to convince her to keep going now that she's doubting the visions? I'm almost tempted to just suggest scouting ahead myself and then conveniently 'finding' the place - but I need her to be the one to discover it, not me. I'll think of something, but I need to talk to her privately, and there haven't been many opportunities for that on this pilgrimage.

      Right now she's busy talking with a priest I dislike - I'm not fond of priests on general principle, but this one in particular irritates me. She's apologizing. She's saying she shouldn't have rejected the idea of divine guidance - maybe if she'd believed, she wouldn't have gotten them lost like this. The priest reassures her, saying, "You delivered what would not be prayerful."

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      Still in that same mountain range, but this time I'm working separately from the main group, it's just me and a couple of her soldiers. I'm talking with a slave trader - he's got a group of people I've been looking for and I need him to release them. He says he can't possibly do that, they're an extremely sought-after species. He shows me a cage with a human man and woman instead, and a falcon that comes with the woman, and says that he'll give me one of them as a sign of good faith - he'll even trade me all three, the two humans and the falcon, if I'd be willing to give him one of my soldiers. He has a buyer who likes that specific shade of skin. Incredulous, I tell him this isn't a negotiation. He's going to release the people I came for, I'm not going to give him anything, and I don't care about his humans or whatever else he's selling.

      But then he takes the hood off the human woman - white hair and a young face. I know her. I'm shocked, and she looks just as shocked to see me - I'd thought she was dead. Last time I saw her, she'd sacrificed me to her people's gods. It didn't work obviously, I can't die that way, but there was no way she could have known that. When my 'death' didn't stick, her people reacted very badly. I'd seen them holding a funeral for her later, but I'd been watching from a distance - they must have held the ceremony without a body. I'd just assumed they'd killed her. I'd liked her a great deal, sacrifice aside.
    11. Ephigenia, an interrogation, don't interrupt the music, St. George and the dragon,

      by , 02-01-2015 at 10:07 PM
      I'm giving a woman a ride somewhere in a carriage, and when she's gotten settled I knock on the wall twice and we start moving. I go to lower the curtains on the windows, and as I do I catch sight of her fiance out on the street, obviously looking for her. She's already made it clear she doesn't want to be found at this moment. As I'm looking at him I'm struck again by how incredibly dull he seems. I say to her, "On God's green earth, what do you see in him?" I gave up my chance with her so I have no right to judge the man she chose, but still - him?

      She says, "On God's green earth, I won't let you steal my plan. I can't." Either she has drastically changed the subject or else I've drastically misunderstood their relationship - either way, I have no idea what she's talking about.

      Just then, her fiance spots us - I should have lowered that curtain - and he shouts her name, Ephigenia. He is being ridiculously overdramatic, people will think I'm kidnapping her.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      Disembodied, I'm watching my son be interrogated by a pair of policemen. We don't have any legal ties under my present identity, at his insistence - he's old enough now that we look the same age, so adopting him again wouldn't have been practical, but I'd wanted to arrange something, and he'd refused. I'm particularly annoyed about that now, when a legal connection would come in handy.

      They've accused him and his sister - his biological sister, I didn't raise her, hadn't known she was alive until just now - of murder, and he's been repeatedly telling them he's innocent, but they've just produced an audio recording of what is clearly his voice stating that "we" - he and his sister - have been waiting for this since he was nine years old. As I hear the recording, I see a mental image of him at the moment he spoke those words, with a man tied up in front of them. Up until this moment I'd believed he was innocent. Back in the interrogation room, he's insisting that the voice on the recorder isn't his, but he's clearly fooling no one. They've been letting him tell his story, knowing he was lying the entire time.

      I've heard enough. I remove my awareness from the interrogation room. Back in my body, I'm standing in my son's apartment - a tiny studio with a mattress on the floor, cluttered with random piles of clothes and other things. He wasn't doing well. I'm extremely annoyed about this situation - he'd betrayed me, he'd made it clear he was going to cause trouble for me, but for him to simply be removed from the situation like this by unrelated people, that doesn't sit right with me.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm running - as fast as I can manage, which isn't very - along a snow-covered mountain path, trying to hold my throat closed as much as possible. I'm wearing black leather gloves, the blood blends in very well. This isn't the first time I've had my throat slit, so at least this time I know my voice will come back eventually - just the memory of how frightening it had been the first time I had my throat slit still makes me uncomfortable. It's still incredibly inconvenient until it heals. One of my least favorite ways to 'die.' I'm thinking about the man who 'killed' me - a soldier on the same side I am. I don't know why he did this - he enjoys violence in general, so I'm hoping it was just something personal and not something larger I'd have to worry about.

      Thinking about that man's possible motivations prompts a scene change. I'm peeling an orange as a visitor goes upstairs to meet with that man who'll slit my throat. I can hear the sound of an opera recording on the phonograph, and I warned the visitor that it's best not to interrupt while he's listening to his music - I didn't say this, but I'm pretty sure opera is the only thing that man loves aside from violence - but the visitor ignored me. Shortly later I hear the visitor scream.

      I'm looking at a painting with the artist beside me. St. George and the dragon - I recognize that the dragon is meant to be myself. After noticing that, I recognize who St. George is meant to represent too. I say to her, very slowly and deliberately, "George can't save you." Whether I can do anything for her either isn't certain, but "George" definitely can't, despite what he believes.
    12. Breaking wings and a game in a field

      by , 01-30-2015 at 10:30 PM
      A woman's feeling every bone in her wings break in half, one at a time, methodically, starting at the tips and working their way up. This isn't happening now - it's a memory. I'm not even sure it was originally her memory - this woman doesn't have wings now and I don't know if she ever did. But she's feeling the pain of it as if it were happening to her now.

      She's strapped to a chair, and a man in a suit has just taken his hand away from the top of her head, ending her experience of that memory. He didn't get the reaction he wanted. He says something to the effect of "I was saving this for a reward, but-" and puts his hand on her head again.

      This time she sees a memory of Constantine strapped to that same chair, from the perspective of a woman speaking to him. The woman runs her finger under his jaw - he makes a joke about how he would've shaved, but there's this whole held prisoner thing. Although I'm in third person throughout this dream, and although visually, I'm seeing this particular image from the perspective of that woman speaking, same as the woman in the chair is, nonetheless I feel the sensation of her finger on my/his jaw, unusually vividly tactile.

      The man in the suit takes his hand away again. From what he's saying now, I get the impression that the woman strapped to the chair loves Constantine, and that this man and the group he's with are using that to groom her to kill him.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      At a school, two boys close to graduation are lying in a field, watching a group of underclassmen playing some sport nearby. There's an underclassman in that game who one of them sort of took under his wing, and now the kid's developed a crush on him. The other boy is saying, great, take him home, get him "thoroughly raunched." The first boy takes this as a joke, says that he's not interested in anyone else, and kisses his throat. The other boy goes distant and pulls away. He resents emotional attachment - the first boy hasn't figured that out yet, but he will.

      Updated 01-30-2015 at 10:35 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    13. A ghost story, no life is cheap, a tango

      by , 01-25-2015 at 12:04 AM
      I'm being told a story. There's a man, a shapeshifter who can seem to be anyone, but when he smiles you see the shards of glass filling his mouth, grotesquely. I see the moment he'd died, falling from a horse and landing on a glass bottle full of something he'd been carrying, shattering it.

      The story shifts to the woman he'd loved when he was alive. She was called a witch, and a mob took her and chained her to a tree in the forest, with a circle of some kind of wooden pegs placed in the ground to prevent the body from leaving that spot after death. Her body's left there without her head. I 'hear' the body briefly feel a dim sort of awareness of the presence of something familiar and loved nearby.

      Over time, the body comes loose from the chains as it decomposes, sinks into the ground and is covered by - I hear the word 'loam', but I'm seeing moss growing over the body. The arms separate from the rest and hang from the chains. At one point, a horse that had belonged to her while she was alive comes to the tree and noses at those decaying arms, and they reach out and pat it. At another time, the body rises up from the ground and seems to dance, with those arms dancing along as if they were still attached - slightly altering how my vision works, I can see dark strings which would be invisible, manipulating the body like a puppet. That man with the mouth full of glass shards is pulling the strings.

      Later, a scene in which I'm using Mephisto as a pseudonym.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      On a ship after some incident in which several of the crew died, the captain came to me privately to ask a question. He's under the mistaken impression that I can see the future. I don't see the future, I just have more memories to draw on to recognize old patterns playing out again. The captain asks, essentially, whether any of those who died were important - he uses the word 'cheap.' I say to him, "No life is cheap." He acknowledges that this was poor phrasing, but "I need to know-"

      As he speaks, I see a go board. The point is made that certain moves will have a drastic impact on the outcome of the game, and others won't. The captain needs to know if any of the people we lost would have been necessary for this journey to succeed, in ways he can't foresee himself.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm looking at paintings hanging on a wall, a series mostly depicting figures of the zodiac, with one in the center of a man labeled Dream.

      I'm meeting with a man named Snow who'd initially tried to conceal his identity from me. He's disappointed to find I recognized him immediately. The persona he'd put on for me was this sort of affable type; the real Snow is - well, he gives the impression of being intimidating but I'm not personally intimidated, I'm just enjoying watching how complete his transformation is.

      The majority of the scene after that reveal consists of a tango, during which he leads - which is different, but I find I have no difficulty following. Great fun. He's proposing some kind of deal - there's something about him recognizing the way I've been challenging myself, and how working for him would be beneficial for both of us, something about working for a greater cause, a sense of direction - but when the tango's over and he wants an answer, I just start laughing. Man, have you got the wrong guy. I'm thoroughly enjoying every aspect of his presentation - the intimidating attitude, the seriousness of the deal he's proposing, the song and dance, his whole look - it's all incredibly appealing, but I have no intention of taking it seriously.

      Updated 01-25-2015 at 12:08 AM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    14. A phonograph played too loud

      by , 01-21-2015 at 09:56 PM
      A concerned-looking woman and a businesslike man are checking in on a man who's recently been dug up from a grave - not his original one; someone else had decided to lock him up for a while. They'd been able to find him and retrieve him, but he'd needed some time to recover. The man he's staying with stops them at the door and says, "I don't know if he's ready for this yet." The businesslike man says something to the effect of "ready or not" and comes inside anyway. It's very pleasant inside - an open plan, wood paneling, lots of plants, dim lights with a slightly orange tint. There's a phonograph playing an old string quartet at a ridiculously loud volume. This is a modern setting, so the phonograph and the choice of music indicate the man who'd been buried is trying to calm himself down by turning to things from his past. The volume, as if he's trying to drown something out, implies it's not going well.

      The man who'd tried to stop them at the door backs up so he's sort of standing guard in front of the door to the bedroom, but before the guests can force the issue, the man who'd been buried comes out on his own. Superficially looking completely recovered, friendly and open, neatly and formally dressed as usual - though as a disembodied observer, my first thought on seeing him was along the lines of, Was my hair really that short? What was wrong with me? Anyway, though he seems composed, he gives me the impression that it's just an act - that he's trying too hard to be his usual self.

      The guests are surprised, wary, to see him seemingly doing so well, and he explains to them that so often when he's gone into the ground, he'd miss out on years, decades, centuries, and he'd expected the same thing to happen again. "Tonight I am an immortal," he says, by which he means the experience of having 'died' and returned without having missed anything, with his old life and identity still in place, "and I intend to remain that way. So I've had to squash some of my plans." The implication is that he'd spent his time buried coming up with revenge fantasies - but since it turns out he's only missed a few days, he's not going to destroy the identity and life he's constructed here just to carry that out.
    15. Fragments

      by , 01-19-2015 at 10:57 PM
      I'm looking at a man lying on the floor, bound in ropes, while a woman talks to me about him. He doesn't have a shirt and the ropes are cutting into his skin, I can smell blood, though he's otherwise unhurt. I can't see his face. The woman's saying, "We would walk a (something) of this guy. (Something long) lest he move-" I'm thinking that this situation reminds me of something I did under Charlemagne's rule.

      FK, catching up with Janette. She's shocked to learn I haven't turned anyone since we separated in 1683 - it's been a century or two since then. She finds it impossible to imagine spending all that time without your own kind.

      On the subject of writing, the man I'm speaking with is arguing that using a gateway to hell as a plot device is trite. The gateway to hell should be the book itself, not a device.

      Walking aimlessly down the halls of the McKittrick Hotel, I was considering passing the time at Hecate's replica bar - she'll be out for a while yet but it's always possible someone interesting will stop in. But I heard the beautiful sound of a piano coming from the room just beyond the bar's entrance, and followed it, and met a classical composer who I could not convince to give me his name.

      I'm trying to hold a conversation with a giant. He's holding an ax, the blade of which is currently buried in the roof of a building, and there are a few terrified people running away - they're being very loud and making it difficult for me to continue our conversation. But the giant's just thanked me for something, and I respond in disbelief, "You thanked a jinxed magician." That's something you shouldn't do, very bad luck.
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