Carabas

Several fragments based on Tolkien, involving hooded figures, the statement that "No (name of hooded figures) will survive Aragorn" which has some vague association with atheism, and a few scenes in which Aragorn is either fighting the hooded figures alongside one or two other humans, or calmly talking to them, and either way shown to be in complete control.

As Rumpelstiltskin, I'm stopping by the door of one of the storerooms. Belle's inside, talking. The room's mostly filled with straw, but it also holds a mirror, and she's using it to speak with the image of an old woman sitting in a chair and knitting, a woman I know. The woman's giving her advice. I'm pleased - partially at seeing the two of them get along well, but mostly at seeing Belle making use of my magic. They stop talking and Belle turns around and sees me watching them, and I feign disinterest.

As FK's Nick, I'm stretched out on the floor of my apartment, talking to someone and using a laptop on a low table to search for something; the side of me that's a disembodied observer associates this with the semi-lucid search techniques used in other recent dreams.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A vampire watching a woman turn, which at this stage mostly consists of becoming more physical, much like the old movies - not sexual specifically, just more aware of the senses. He's saying something about how there's no need to believe in a divine plan to explain the way they find each other again and again.

Mina and Grayson are talking in a train car; she says she loves him, and the moment she does, he's flung by some invisible force out of the car, into the next, which is filling rapidly with water, up to the ceiling. He's thinking something regretful about Lucy.

There's a set of boxes which, when arranged properly, will display a poem by Rumi; it's a game, a puzzle. Each box is engraved with a few lines, the trick is in figuring out the proper order, and there are hints, such as do not separate the loved ones, send the child to school, don't leave him to wander the shore with the mermaid and her knife. The last part is easy enough - one box ends with a line about water spirits, another box starts with a line about a child, I'll just be sure not to connect those two; but there are quite a few different lines that could be interpreted as 'loved ones.'

A woman is sending a message to her employers, as a result of which the building she's in will be locked down and everyone inside will be killed, including herself and her two assistants. Her assistants are artificially-created humans, and display no emotion, but I'm thinking that the loss of their lives is just as important as any other life.

A woman has just been teleported into a castle, somewhere very dangerous, by someone named Anna, and she's very annoyed about this. Although Anna isn't here, the woman yells about it anyway, on the assumption that Anna will be watching her with magic. It's not just the danger that's upset her; at any other time she would have killed to be able to get into this castle, but right now, she'd been in the middle of something urgent, and she really needs to get back to it, so she looks for the way out. A hooded figure appears and reveals a passage to her, a passage that seems to violate the laws of physics and which is filled with a seemingly endless line of graves, and he tries to speak to her, to guide her into that passage, but she ignores him - she's spotted the main doors. As she walks away from the graves and towards the exit, she passes a box with some marking on it that makes her think about dragons, thinking of them as the product of elemental spirits that gathered together and festered.

There's a crowd of people leaving a castle - although the castle looks historical/fantasy-ish, the clothes the people are wearing are futuristic, as is the glass-enclosed walkway they're leaving through. A woman who works for the castle as a kind of hostess is escorting a small group of people at the head of the crowd, congratulating them for winning a spot on some vessel, and then she says to the rest of the people following them, "Good luck in the race!" By which she means - these people are following the winners because they intend to take their spots by force, and the moment they're beyond the castle's protection it'll be every man for himself.

At the end of the glass walkway, the hostess leaves them, and the people pass through some barrier. The people in the walkway had seemed, not necessarily good-looking, but like people who put a lot of effort into their appearance: well-dressed, well-groomed. Once they pass through the barrier, this changes: they're naked, they look like they haven't bathed or shaved in months, more fat, less muscle. The castle was a kind of retreat, but everything it provided was an illusion; now that they've left, the illusions disappear. The people's reactions vary - most of them are shocked, but there's an old man who seems to have expected this with a sort of I-told-you-so attitude about it. There's a teenage boy with a bad knee who's particularly horrified, as he'd believed his knee had been fixed by the castle; he's complaining to his parents that they might as well have stayed home, at least at home they had servants. The castle had its guests doing a variety of chores, citing the spiritual benefits; now it's clear that was a scam.

A woman's saying, "It must not have been a good reality for Vanessa and Vilya." 'Vanessa' is an alternate version of herself. As she's speaking, I see the two people she's talking about, sitting before a very large fireplace. Vilya suddenly leaps up, as if he's just been hit by some stroke of inspiration, and he rushes to a table set up with a variety of alchemical instruments.

Three people in an underground room, grey stone walls lined with bookshelves. A woman and an old man who she's close to, and a young-looking man who made some kind of deal with them - I'm a disembodied observer, but I recognize him from my most recent lucid dream, as the 'future version of myself' who doesn't actually resemble me at all and who looks more like he's from the past. They've barred the doors in the hopes of giving themselves a little more time before someone arrives to stop them - guards or police or military, something along those lines, they're expecting some specific group and they know it's just a matter of time. But they've come to this room to find something specific, and there are hundreds or thousands of books here and no obvious organization to them. The woman's saying "Wherever (something) it'll take us forever to find it." The young-looking man had been sitting down with his eyes closed; now he opens them. They're glowing yellow, which startles the woman. He says, "I have found it. He has used the Britannica articles-" He continues talking, but I've become distracted by curiosity about that locating technique he just used; I associate it with a search technique I'd used in yesterday's dream.

My IRL father and I are having a conversation. We're both aware this is a dream. (But I'm not really lucid, or at least not very - 'this is a dream' is just part of the plot.) We're talking about recurring dreams I've been having of falling. (IRL, I can't remember ever having dreamed of falling.) He's concerned about it, doesn't like the idea of me repeatedly splattering myself on the ground. I assure him that I hardly ever splatter on the ground.

As we're talking, the scene shifts, and now I'm falling from a great height - but I land lightly on my feet on the ground, demonstrating my point. I've landed somewhere near an airport. Near where I've landed, there's what I think of as another version of myself from another fall - but rather than being me, it's a woman with long red hair, lying on the ground, bending backwards at an awkward but not fatal angle, and motionless, because she's not really here, she's just an image, like a three-dimensional photograph. Looking at her, I remember various dreams where I watched other characters fall and was unable to stop them, and I acknowledge my father's point, that sometimes the falls don't go so well.

A woman I seem to know very well is waiting for me when I walk away from the airport, and we go to meet back up with my father and his girlfriend. (No resemblance to his IRL one.) We come to a street where we'd meant to meet with them, but we don't see them. I call out "Dad! Ada!" but there's no response. There's a bit of a crowd, people talking to each other, one guy handing out flyers, I get the impression there's a festival going on somewhere nearby. The end of this street is a dream boundary; if we cross it, the dream will change. But the festival is on the other side, and we're wondering if my father went on ahead, through the boundary. The character version of me starts to head for the boundary, but the part of me that's a disembodied observer zooms out and takes a look around, and spots my father and his girlfriend sitting on a bench under an overhang. They'd been blocked from my view by the crowd around the guy handing out flyers. So I cause the character version of me to have doubts about crossing the boundary, reminding him that it'll be hard to get back to this same scene if I'm wrong about my father going on ahead. Character!me turns around.

I tell the woman I'm with that I want to take one last look around, and I go and find a bench to sit down on. I hold my palm up in front of me, and speak to it as if to a computer, "Run search." Two glowing screens appear above my palm, one vertical, one horizontal - I think of it as a way I've created to execute dream programs. I give it more commands to run a scan of the area and locate my father and his girlfriend. Meanwhile, as a disembodied observer, I find this a neat trick, and make a note to try it sometime when I'm actually lucid; I'm wondering if it would still work. The dream scan finishes and has successfully located them, very close to the bench where I'm sitting.

I walk over to them. They seem a little out of it, as if they're high. Apparently they'd heard me calling, but it didn't occur to him that by 'Dad', I meant him. I say to him, "What did you expect me to call you? Paul?" (His name isn't Paul.) Some passerby who's clearly enjoying the festival overhears this and sticks out his hand to my father to introduce himself, saying "Hi, Paul!" My father and I tell him to buzz off, which his girlfriend objects to, as the random passerby seemed nice. By nice, she means good-looking.