Carabas

A production of Faust, I'm going over a written list of the scenery needed for each scene. One scene is described as the Altar of Hell, and I have a mental image of Faust being pinned to a circular stone by two demons; that's the contract signing scene. The next scene is set in a field surrounded by trees, and my perspective changes so I see this as the audience would.

Curtain rises on Marguerite and women of the chorus in the field; shortly afterward Faust enters from the right. In response to what the women had been singing, he sings something satirical about the dangers of love and the unfortunate fools who are caught up in it. This annoys Marguerite, and she turns away and pointedly ignores him. The women of the chorus exit, and Faust realizes how angry Marguerite is, so he jokes around in the hopes of getting back in her good graces, teasing her by singing a humorous song that starts with a verse about roosters and hens. She forgives him easily, and by the time he gets to the chorus she's joined in the song, flirting right back at him. The second verse is about deer and hunters, and she playfully leads him on a chase around the stage. As they exit, laughing, Mephistopheles strolls by in the background, keeping an eye on how things are playing out.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There are four men, or people who were once men and are now weapons, kept chained up in their sleep. Two 'chains,' really - the collars around their throats, but also something much deeper that's never meant to be removed. I'm removing that second 'chain' from each of them. They wake up as I do so, and their first reaction is to moan about the pain, but gradually they regain a sort of awareness. It's interesting to watch - they're becoming aware of how much of their personality has been stripped away from them, but without actually regaining that personality they lost. Their master arrives then, and I expect them to attack him in revenge - that's the whole reason I freed them - but instead they cower in the corner, just looking at the pair of us.

Memory gap. Next thing I remember, I've gone semi-lucid in order to pursue that master of theirs. He's closed himself off inside a tower where I shouldn't be able to follow, with an irritatingly arrogant attitude about it - he's essentially the god of this place, it won't allow me entrance if it goes against his will. Or at least it's not supposed to. The tower's a sort of futuristic art deco confection, lots of spheres and glowing purple lights, and I'm flying around it, demanding that it create an opening. With my next pass around the tower, I find an entrance has been created, opening onto a single room containing an elevator. It signifies that this place is as willing to depose its 'god' as I am. I take the elevator up to that man's private sanctuary - the elevator doors open to show me a vast pool lined with twisted white trees without leaves, and quite a lot of statues, including some of himself. This guy is unbelievable. There's a mansion at the far end of the pool, and I expect his mental trail to lead me there, but instead it leads me off to the right, to another body of water, and I focus on a light at the end of a pier.

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.

Napping on the couch during the night: A nightmare of the vague, unseen, menacing, I'd-call-it-demonic-except-the-demons-in-this-dream-are-on-my-side variety starts to take hold. Since I think of this as associated with darkness, I summon 'the golden light of Apollo' which lights me up from inside for a moment and this does the trick, but Amon and the other demons around me look rather hurt/betrayed that I would do such a thing, calling on some light god instead of relying on them.

Fragments from 8 and 10:19 wakeups, having gone to bed at 7 am:

A man with a phobia of the upper class he's trying to join; the name Benjamin.

An immortal man offering another a light for his cigarette and saying "Here. Rachel's mother couldn't stand (this brand), could she? Now it's the scent of (a three-syllable name of a town in China, a place associated with another woman)."

My new wife, Julia, has drawn me away from my potion-brewing for the night, and as I carry her up the tower steps to her bedroom, she quotes, "And it was better that the beloved behold the tainted cities of Mephisto dreaming."

(Woke up at 10:19, and shortly afterward my neighbor started to play the drums. After half an hour I called him. Back to bed at 11, though I didn't get back to sleep for at least another 20 minutes.)

I'm riding in a car with my IRL sisters, and I notice that I can see the grand houses we're driving past even though my eyes are closed. I keep them closed for a while to be sure of it. I suspect I'm dreaming. I take out my sketchpad and start drawing what I see with my eyes closed - the inside of the car, I considered drawing the scenery but better to go with something that isn't passing so fast - but I find that although I can see both car interior and sketchpad, my drawing isn't enough to prove anything. We stop at a hotel and I've run out of drawing paper, and I go through an old sketchbook and find it's full of paintings from Shadow Hearts.

Dream briefly switches to Shadow Hearts scenes featuring two Alices, one 'real', the other either dead or the result of time travel shenanigans or a figment of Yuri's mind or some combination of the above. It's this potentially imaginary Alice who more closely resembles the version from the game.

Back to the hotel - my father's current IRL girlfriend comes to the hotel room to tell me to hurry up, Dad's in the car and waiting. I'm surprised since I thought I was the one waiting, all I have to do is stick my sketchpad back in my backpack and I'm good to go - but no, I see my sisters are already at the door too. My bad. I grab my things and go after them -

After I walk through that door there's a memory gap, but I wind up lucid, floating up and down through the levels of the hotel through a convenient octagonal hole in the floors leading up to a skylight. I stop floating around and look for a door to go through to change to a more interesting scene, but as I pass through the door I get a sense of danger, and immediately look for another door. I pass through a series of rooms this way, most of them halls filled with marble statues and skylights or balconies opening onto clear blue skies, but still with that sense of something wrong, until finally I open a door to a public bath filled with attractive people making out with each other. I have no particular desire to join in but it makes for pleasant scenery and the sense of danger is gone, so I strip and get into the water.

I seem to have gotten my timing wrong, most people are getting out of the water and getting dressed, but I'm not bothered by this. The doors on the far side of the baths are so large the view is almost entirely brilliant blue sky. Someone offers me a tab of acid, and I take one and offer one to another before handing the rest back to him, which he's surprised by. I wonder if it'll have any effect in a dream, and as I wonder this I decide to find a robe to put on. I remember the summoning-by-putting-your-hand-behind-you trick and decide to try summoning a robe - which doesn't work, but I walk past a stack of towels, and then a stack of clothes, and this seems to be the dream's response to my request. The clothes are slightly too large for me but I put them on anyway, listening to the conversations around me.

(Woke up just before 12:30. Resigned myself to a bit of sleep deprivation.)