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    1. Repeating a journey

      by , 05-12-2015 at 08:49 PM
      I'm walking out of a large red tent in the woods. In the previous scene I'd been having some kind of argument with two guards who work for me, but we were interrupted by a man who's now following me out of the tent, someone who I have some kind of deal with. He'd mentioned my son. I want to continue the conversation more privately.

      Deeper in the woods, there's no underbrush, and the ground's covered in old fallen leaves. I drop the illusion I'd been using. I've been borrowing the identity of the man those guards used to work for, some kind of ruler, dead now. Without that illusion, there's a sort of shadow over my skin, like a photo overlaid by an image of something else - I (correctly) remember that I've used that specific comparison before in another dream; though I don't remember the details until after I wake up, I'm aware the parallel's intentional.

      I'm dismissing whatever the other man has just said, angry. I tell him, "I swore to make this journey a thousand times, but you - you didn't uphold your part, did you?"

      Updated 05-12-2015 at 09:04 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    2. Romanticization and ugliness

      by , 02-27-2015 at 11:01 PM
      I'm in a garden, speaking in Russian with a very old human man in a wheelchair. We have an arrangement. I'm to kill him, but as he puts it, without ugliness. That he wants his death to be smooth, I have no problem with, but this ugliness he's referring to isn't about his own death, it's about preserving his image of me, or rather what I represent to him. He says I'm a man who should understand this, unlike that brother of mine - he uses a word that my dream doesn't bother to translate aside from noting that it's uncomplimentary. The old man wants to believe in the existence of a creature that's above all the things he dislikes in humanity, an embodiment of death without ugliness. I'm disgusted and feel illogically betrayed by hearing this from him, a man more intimately acquainted with violence than any human I've ever known - he of all people shouldn't have any illusions about this. It's hypocrisy.

      As he talks we move indoors, to a dimly-lit room that's kept very cold. He has a selection of alcohol lined up before a mirror, and I go to pour him a glass; as I do so I see a small portrait of a blonde woman, which I pick up. A woman who works for him, who's been pushing his wheelchair, urgently asks me to be careful with that. I recognize the image as his granddaughter - she's how I met him in the first place, years back. He laughs and corrects me, and he says this in English: "Vivian. Her mother." This startles me, and I examine the portrait again - I would never have guessed they weren't the same person. Her mother had died before I met her.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      While using a spell to pull out some relevant books and scrolls from a collection, one of the books that comes to me is titled "The Unbeauty of Life," by a Japanese author.

      I'm running up several flights of stairs, spiraling upward through a ruined building, piles of rubble around; I should have fled the building with the others when I reached the first floor but instead I kept going upward, thinking of the woman I'd originally come here to track down. As I reach the upper levels I find her laboratory, with her books scattered on the floor, sarcophagi in rows. The next level above that is devoted to "the theatrical vampire," complete with red stage curtains hanging on the wall, full of what I think of as romanticized images from stage and screen, and as I look at it I remember the sound of her laughing. There's one more floor above this.

      Updated 02-27-2015 at 11:10 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    3. Fa'Sun

      by , 02-23-2015 at 09:11 PM
      I've been traveling through a dream, but now I've wrapped up my business here. I'd intended to leave the same way I entered, but I happen across a border area, an entrance to a place called Fa'Sun, which translates as the Shifting Dreams. Out of curiosity, I decide to check out that entrance. I'm familiar with Fa'Sun in general, but it's a very, very large place; it's like sticking up an entrance sign that just says "Earth," who knows where on Earth you'll end up.

      It leads me onto a rocky path through a canyon, various rock columns and outcroppings around, a dark sky without stars overhead; a transitional space. A short distance away there's a group of small goblin-like creatures; they usually attack people in dreams but they don't pay any attention to me, and I didn't expect them to. But one of them is off to my right, sitting on a rock ledge and crying. This is very strange, I didn't think they were capable of crying - they shouldn't have the mental capacity for it. I speak with it, and it tells me it's not a (word for the goblin-like things) at all; it's been stuck in this form by the one who runs this region of Fa'Sun. The idea of being stuck in a single form here is horrifying to me.

      I see a memory of the first time I came to Fa'Sun as a child. My sister and I were playing around with the portals in our mother's study while she was out. We didn't go far from the portal entrance, and I see the two of us hiding and watching while our mother comes through looking for us. Like the rest of us, she's dressed in clothes from the early 1900s; she's got a dark blue cape on, and her hair is this frazzled wiry black cloud sticking out in all directions. She looks about as close to frightened as I think of her as capable of.

      Updated 02-23-2015 at 09:15 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    4. 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.
    5. 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.
    6. Back from hell

      by , 05-14-2014 at 05:17 PM
      I'm a guy sitting at the counter in a bar. I'm here a lot, I live nearby, maybe in the same building. I'm talking with a younger woman who's sitting to my right - brown ponytail, in her 20s maybe, someone I rely on. I say to her, "You weren't there (meaning Hell), but you know I was there. That's comforting to someone who (don't remember the exact wording for this next bit, but it amounts to trying to stay out of the nuthouse. Implication being that otherwise he'd start doubting his sanity, think his past was a delusion.)" She cuts me off by kissing me. It's a first, it takes me completely off guard.

      Over her shoulder, I see my wife (widow, rather - his wife from before he'd died) sitting a few stools down with her boyfriend or fiance or whatever he is. She doesn't know me - or rather, she 'knows' me, casually, as the false identity I've been using since I came back from Hell; she doesn't realize who I was before I died, to most people I look like a completely different person. But even without knowing me, she's looking at us now and looking disgusted. She and the guy she's with get up and leave.
    7. Metal ornament

      by , 04-26-2014 at 08:07 PM
      (From yesterday.) There's a girl on the grounds of some large estate, talking to a boy. She's been chosen to play some role in some tradition or game or something - it's something of an honor, but she's refusing to have anything to do with it. He's trying to convince her - not with any particular effort, just an aw-c'mon kind of way.

      Scene change - elsewhere on that same estate, there's a different girl, wearing a rather old-fashioned maid's uniform (this is a roughly modern setting), and she's standing against a tree. I have the impression she's tied there, but I don't see ropes. This is the role that the other girl had originally been chosen for. There's a group of people who've just found her - searching is part of the game, or tradition, or whatever it is. She's got an oval metal ornament on her forehead, covering her eyes, engraved with some scene. A boy reaches out to remove it - this is also part of the game/tradition/whatever. The 'dream camera' angle changes then, so I can't see the girl's face, but I'm aware that - and this isn't part of the tradition - it will turn out the ornament has a long, thin spike underneath, and the girl is dead. I have a brief image of blood around her eyes, or possibly eye sockets - from the angle I'm standing now, off to one side, I'm not sure which.

      A man's just finished examining the crime scene, though he's not anyone official. He's feeling outraged about something else he'd found, some belonging of hers that had been put on display, hung from a tree with ropes. Standing behind him is the owner of the estate, and that's who the outrage is directed towards. Highlander-inspired then: the man doing the examining takes out a sword - it had been concealed under the grey trenchcoat he's wearing - and formally introduces himself to the owner of the estate, who also has a sword, and who simply says "Yeah" - the implication being that his name's already known.
    8. The power behind the throne

      by , 04-20-2014 at 07:26 PM
      A setting based on the early 1900s. I'm sitting at a dinner table, with my POV character's mother sitting somewhere to my right, and a woman who I'm having an intense argument with to my left, at the foot of the table. We argue frequently, I enjoy it; and I realize that although we're stating how much we hate each other, we're using words usually associated with passion or love.

      Dinner's over, the woman is gone, but my mother and I are still in the same room, standing now. I'm talking about breaking my engagement to someone else. I've never met the girl I'm engaged to - she lives in (either New York or Boston, can't remember which - I thought of it as far away), and our fathers had arranged it between themselves, before my father died. My mother is warning me about possible consequences. She describes the girl's father as "the power behind the throne."
    9. Failed rescue mission

      by , 04-14-2014 at 07:49 PM
      I'm tied up in a chair, and this guy who was interrogating me is now struggling with another guy who wants to get me out. The guy on the rescue mission was carrying a needle, and during the struggle, the contents of the needle wind up getting sprayed into the air - they're behind me at the time, so I don't see it, but I can feel the spray, and I don't hear them fighting anymore.

      The guy on the rescue mission's been captured. It turns out he got a small dose of the contents himself during the fight. This will cause something that we refer to as 'hunger', and he believes this is something he'll be able to use, to focus on his enemies. Having experienced it myself in the past, I know he's mistaken, and that it'll make it more difficult for him to think clearly.

      We're both taken out of the building. Outside, we're in a junkyard, and there are a few men with guns escorting us. The guy on the failed rescue mission is starting to have a hard time walking, and one of the guards is shouting at him about it. I'm remembering a time in the past when I'd been out of it and he'd carried me. I'm aware I should do the same for him now, but I don't. I don't want to be associated with him.

      Switching to third person, there's a kid watching us from a distance, out of sight. He leaves, gets on a computer and reports what he saw to a woman who I think of as the mother of my POV character, though she looks too young for it - long brown hair, upper-class British accent. In the kid's report to her, he mentions a "guy that you call the Judge" who's holed up in the woods nearby.
    10. Corvo

      by , 04-11-2014 at 03:34 AM
      Shortly after passing a man whose head is a snake, three creatures are presented as things I'm meant to fight. But they seem harmless, and when I walk up to them, they disappear. Past them, I walk into a hidden door set into a tree, and spend some time walking through a series of rooms. The passageway I'm walking through makes a large circle, and when I get back to the start (there were a lot of scene changes along the way, so this "start" wasn't actually the same place as the tree-passage from before), I notice a flight of stairs heading down that I hadn't seen before, with small, glowing blue arrows hovering just above the floor, pointing down.

      The stairs lead down into an enormous room filled with books and a portrait of a man I recognize as someone infamous named Corvo - he's someone I've heard of often, in the context of being a doctor or a researcher or something similar, responsible for some tragedy or some sinister event; but I personally think of him positively, even though I know very little about him - mostly I feel curious. I realize this was his room, and these are his records.

      I'm standing in a city street in Corvo's POV, sort of - I'm aware that this is me going through his records, his reflections on the past. At this moment in time, he'd been disgraced, along with some other man who I'd also heard of, someone who's walking away from him right now. I have some mental connotation between this man and violence but also think of him as a better person than Corvo, someone who dislikes Corvo intensely but works more closely with him than anyone else, I have the impression Corvo somehow forced him or manipulated him into carrying out a lot of dirty work for him. Now Corvo's looking at the open gates to the city, looking at the crowds of people entering, aware that they're unknowingly carrying some danger that others refuse to listen to him about, and feeling powerless. With the knowledge that this is a flashback, he's feeling an incredible amount of pain over this moment in the past and whatever it eventually led to, and I feel that same emotion so intensely that I have a false awakening or something similar and spend it looking for some space to just calm down from that scene.

      Updated 04-11-2014 at 03:43 AM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid , false awakening
    11. Fragment

      by , 04-06-2014 at 09:27 PM
      There's a girl dancing at my shrine, a little marker in the woods that's rarely visited. I'm paying attention but I have a hard time understanding what she's communicating with some of the moves of the dance. I'm wondering why she keeps changing the form of it when she comes here; it would be much easier to understand her if she'd stop changing it.

      I shift to 3rd person (although the pov character was also disembodied, so there's not that much of a change) and realize that it wasn't actually one girl who comes to dance, it's actually different girls who came over many generations; the god/spirit of the shrine didn't really understand the difference, or didn't see the difference as important. On top of that, the moves of the ritual they perform weren't always passed down directly; some of them learned at least parts of it from writings and illustrations, without anyone to correct them.
    12. A pool filled with debris, and a green bottle

      by , 02-13-2014 at 11:55 PM
      I'm someone who's investigating a woman, and my partner and I are searching her apartment. I'm going through old chat logs on her computer. As we leave, walking down the stairwell, we talk about something I found in those logs. I'm saying to her something about "the desire to feel someone else can understand your experience, your point of view. The internet can be great for that." I'm thinking that I'm starting to understand this woman we're investigating, to know how she thinks; I can relate to her. I'm also thinking that the internet's never worked out that way for me - but then I think, feeling alone in something is a universal human experience in itself.

      Connecting directly to that feeling-alone-in-something thought - we get to the bottom of the stairwell and walk out the door, and outside, we're in the ruins of an apartment building where I used to live. Everything I can see is covered in debris. We're standing in front of what used to be the indoor pool on the first floor - there's no water, there's a layer of debris at the bottom, and there's no wall or ceiling, the pool is the only recognizable part of the building left. This is a memory of where I was when my wife and daughter died. I climb down to the pool ladder, trying to recreate the moment. But I'm shorter now than I was then, the perspective's wrong. Getting the right eye level means putting my feet on a different rung of the ladder than before. It's not quite right.

      Looking around, I find something in the debris. It looks like a cartridge for an old video game console; from the pictures and words on it, I get the impression it's not a game itself, but a soundtrack. My partner takes it from me and looks it over and says, yeah, if you don't know what you're doing it'll just be a soundtrack - but this contains a hidden emulator.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      Fantasy setting loosely based on ancient China. As a disembodied observer, I'm watching a man teleport into a large tunnel or cave, only to immediately crumble into dust. I'm thinking, whoops. Let's retry that.

      Earlier, a woman showed that man a dark green and glittering substance kept in a small, rectangular, light green bottle, and explained that to use it you simply rub it over the palms of your hands and clap them together. Having seen him crumble into dust, I can tell she was tricking him, deliberately leading him to his death, but I'm also aware that this substance really is something of value - this man only asked her about it because he's seen her use it before. There's an old man listening to their conversation, and when she's left that old man catches the younger man's eye and takes the bottle himself, tucking it into his sleeve. The scene skips ahead to a moment when those two men are surrounded and need to escape in a hurry; the old man produces that bottle, rubs the contents over his hands - which causes them to look claw-like - and claps his hands together. Both men are teleported to that tunnel - this time around, the original teleporter lives, and the old man crumbles into dust.
    13. Sonja

      by , 01-21-2014 at 12:10 AM
      There's a man coming down from his room to breakfast at an inn, somewhere expensive and in the mountains, there's snow visible outside, the place looks like a ski lodge. The woman he checked in with is sitting at a table, and he's surprised to see that she's still here, he half expected her to have left during the night. He goes and sits down with her, starts talking with her, but he's distracted, noticing that the innkeeper and his husband are watching them, not being at all subtle about it. This woman is someone in the public eye, and she's married or engaged to someone else, and the innkeeper looked a little scandalized when they checked in together last night.

      He says to the woman now, "That... Well, it wasn't an accident. And will you just leave?" By 'that', he's referring to something that happened between them at dinner last night that made it clear he wants her - but it's something small, like a touch on the cheek or the leg; they aren't having an affair, despite the impression they've been giving people. He stands up and as he leaves he gives her this sort of very slight bow, and says "Sleep tight, Sonja."

      Updated 01-21-2014 at 12:22 AM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    14. My brother's forest

      by , 01-15-2014 at 10:32 PM
      There's this guy running from some gang. It's about the patent for something he invented. He can't believe his invention is something anyone would be willing to kill him over, but I remind him it's not the invention they want to kill him over, it's the money. He's got some legal document - not the patent itself, but related to it, possibly he hasn't filed for it yet - which is what everyone's after, and after I get him to reveal it to me, a man who is my brother appears and snatches both the guy and the document away and runs into the forest, just as the gang catches up to us. This was our plan, the woods are my brother's territory. I act like I'm on the gang's side, or at least as if I want to catch that guy as much as they do - they were already aware from past interactions that I have an interest in the guy with the patent, and they've assumed I want the document for my own reasons. So they follow me when I lead the chase into the forest, into my brother's traps.

      The path into the forest that I lead them on - and which my brother appears to be on, we catch glimpses of him now and then, though I'm aware he won't stick to the path - curves back and forth in strange ways, it's disorienting. I see an odd bullet coming - dark green like a beetle's wing - and I make sure I'm out of its path, that it picks off one of the gang as intended. It was fired by one of three men who work for/with my brother, people I know well. Time seems to have slowed down, and when one of the gang starts grumbling about the strangeness of it, a man emerges from the woods, the second of my brother's men. He explains that it's the insect-birds. They're insects which mimic birds and sing constantly, disorienting the birds and causing them to mistake night for day, and for us, creating an illusion of time slowing. They prevent violence being done in my brother's forest. But "their element is in possessing one," he says; that is, the insect enters and controls a single bird.
    15. Fragments

      by , 12-19-2013 at 11:29 PM
      Someone's telling me that two serpents, one that spits fire and the other water, have gone missing from their shrine. I say they're taking a trip, "naught to worry."

      Rumpelstiltskin's hit upon a new-to-him form of magic, something that appears as a white light when he's working on it, and it's some major revelation - but he can't pursue it unless he cuts himself off from distractions like 'the boy.'
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