Carabas

I'm standing by a light switch in pitch black darkness, and the lights won't turn on. I question whether this is a dream, doubt it at first, but then realize yes, it is. I have a sort of false awakening in which I still realize I'm dreaming, but now I become aware that I'm lying on my back in a bed in the guest room of my father's house (no resemblance to anywhere he's lived IRL), with his cat curled up against my legs - nothing's changed visually, it's still pitch black. I look up at where the ceiling would be and think about stars, and about a previous lucid dream where I removed the roof and floated up into the sky, and debate whether to do that again. I feel like there's something else I want to do here first. I can hear my father and his girlfriend watching TV in the next room and talking to each other. As I listen to them I forget that this is a dream.

Memory gap - some time later I'm standing in a different room, again trying and failing to get the light switch to work. I hear the sound of my stepbrother coming home and going straight to his own room. This light switch has several different switches and dials that I can't see in the dark, and this time I wind up taking out my ipod and holding it up as a flashlight. I can see the switches and dials now, but I still can't get them to work, and then I remember that this is a dream.

(Woke up at 5:30, half an hour after getting to bed. Back to sleep.)

I'm going to visit someone I owe thanks, bringing a guitar to play for them. One of the strings snaps.

At my father's house, some guy is trying to talk to my sister S., he's angry and seems obsessed, and while they're arguing he picks up a knife - not to threaten with, but it's the last straw, me and my father kick him out.

At my mother's house, one of her former students is at the door with some friends, and he's talking to her about some technique that's recently become a fad. Everyone's very impressed by his expertise, and it's driving me nuts because this technique is just a cheap knockoff version of something I've been doing for years that no one's ever taken seriously, and this popular version is much less effective. We get into a really idiotic argument which leaves me feeling frustrated even after I woke up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm lying in bed in the wrong house, and some boy shakes me awake to tell me I have to go. I apologize and try to explain that I'm not there to do anything bad, I just got the wrong place, but I can't remember the word for 'place' in Japanese and have to fumble around trying to find a different way to say it. He gets the point but doesn't really care, he didn't seem particularly threatened by a stranger in his house to begin with, he just wants me gone before his mother wakes up. I walk out a back door that, aside from a little ledge, opens directly onto the river. The kid tries to correct me, pull me back inside so I can use the front door and actually leave, but I just step out onto the river and stand on top of the water, which is a normal thing for a witch like me to do. The kid's surprised, the water and the light are really vivid, it's all very pleasant. As I'm appreciating the vividness, I become aware that I'm thinking of this as a dream.

I walk a few steps into the sky and start floating, heading somewhere specific. As I float above the river, I pass various people, and I start to hear a song, people are singing it. I pass two brothers sitting in chairs having some fashionable procedure done, a row of string sewn above their lip, to me it looks like they're having their mouths sewn closed. It strikes me as odd, but I remind myself that this isn't my time period so I don't have the full context, not for me to judge.

I reach a roller coaster, and there's a man and a woman riding it, the people I've been looking for. They're also singing that song that's been going on, and the lyrics tell me a little about their history. She has (or possibly had, up until very recently) a life-threatening heart condition. Their song is about the possibility of fixing a heart only to get hit by a bus or something similar, and the way people think they have time. The guy, singing in English with an Irish accent, sings a verse about how if (some name, some guy he knows) died he'd be singing a toast to him.

Song's over. Now that we've all met up in a dream, as planned, the guy asks whether we should wake up now. I'm inclined to agree, mission complete, but I think it's a little ridiculous to waste a lucid dream, there ought to be some fun we could have before we go. The guy leaves anyway, the girl stays. She says to me, "I have questions." I say to her, "I... probably don't have answers." She starts to say something else, but I become aware that I'm consciously thinking up her next dialogue for her, and that I'm waking up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Forever Knight-based setting, I'm Nicholas, and I'm being posed a question: between Janette, LaCroix, and an apple which represents my hope for humanity, I can only save one. What's my first instinct? I dismiss the apple completely but can't decide between the other two, which is annoying since the entire point of this exercise was only to see which came to mind first, without overthinking it.

Scene changes to an Umineko setting - Beatrice, who'd posed the question, is annoyed with the way I've spoiled it, and she retreats into the other room with aunt Eva. She says something to Eva that I can hear through the door, something about how the only hope is the "good key (name of key)."

Fragment of a previous scene involved a boy covered in words and strange designs related to a demon (or demons). Now, elsewhere, his father's poured something over himself which causes his flesh to melt and transform him into the image of a demon. Another man speaking to him says "Why did you do it?" "Because! I wanted to know his pain!" 'Him' referring to his son. The other man says something to the effect that this was a very foolish thing to do.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

The words "If you could know, wouldn't you?" and a paramedic getting annoyed at a woman who keeps trying to kill herself.

I'm standing in front of a checkout counter, looking at the rows of rock candy, picking one out and talking about nostalgia with the woman behind the cash register, the vampire who made me. I ask her how far back her memory goes, and she says she still remembers her mother. Talking about some other vampires, we agree that their method is much more sensible than ours, them being able to make more than one vampire, which is something we can't do unless the previous one dies; we can't support more than one at a time.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Something about a 'Lazarus Door' for resurrection, and fog and some kind of danger.

A car that won't turn off. The owner's already taken the key out of the ignition, and for a moment I wonder how it's still running, but then I wonder why I thought keys in the ignition have anything to do with turning a car on or off. We take the car into the woods.

A fragment involving two teenage kids in the woods transitions into a sort of flashback showing the parents of one of those kids, back when they were still alive. They're both some kind of doctors or scientists, the wife has this mass of curly hair, and they're sitting at a table in some kind of office or lab and going over a file acquired by the husband's brother, while he stands across the table from them. The brother is "not like others," which is related to whatever the husband and wife are working on, and he's frustrated by working together with them, he's used to his freedom.

On the file they're looking at, there's a stylized drawing of two humanoid figures, one with the head of a bird, the other the head of a wolf, and although the husband and wife don't realize this, I'm aware that image represents the two teenagers from the previous scene, who are "not like others" in the same way as the brother. The wife is saying, "But what's really (some word meaning something like 'strange' or 'unusual' or 'notable' or 'attention-grabbing') here is that the bird has a Double Hartford rank, ten pages in. I can't open it up."