Carabas

A young woman stands downstage center, facing the audience; she never turns around. She's performing a simple, faltering version of the whirling, intricate dance going on behind her - contemporary ballet, the entire troupe on stage behind her. Everyone is in black and silver and painfully beautiful. This is her dream we're seeing play out behind her, her ideal. But the music is melancholy, nostalgic even - it's a waltz in a minor key, reminds me of Dvorak. Starts with just a music-box-like piano, but the music swells as the dancers behind her become the focus, all strings. I get swept up in the overwhelming sound of it and the movement of the dancers, until in the end it gradually fades away again to those music-box-like piano notes. A woman's voice from offstage calls to her to come to bed, the sun has risen. I focus on her profile as she turns to look offstage, towards that voice; when I look behind her again, the dancers have vanished. She leaves the stage.

I'm in a store that sells various forms of blades, among other things, and my attention's caught by an iron mask with a strangely curved dagger set into it, removable. (After I woke up I realized the dagger's shape was inspired by F/SN.) The mask's face seems very narrow, but I believe that the mask's features will fit themselves to the wearer. The eyes are particularly narrow and I don't see any holes to look out of. There's a long and narrow stylized beard that reminds me of ancient Egyptian art, which would cover the wearer's neck, and the mouth is designed to look as if it's been sewn shut. I like it.

I'm distracted by the sound of more people arriving outside. There's a brief confrontation but they dismiss me and the people I'm with as not threatening, which irritates me. There's some debate over whether this post-apocalyptic, breakdown-of-society situation we're in will last, or whether things will return to normal in a few days.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There are three astronauts who've said or done something that their bosses wouldn't approve of, and they've ceased broadcasting in a way that implies they're dead or soon will be. But when I talk to someone who wasn't watching their broadcast live, I find she's got a different impression of events, she believes everything's fine, and some reasonable-sounding excuse has been given for why the astronauts are no longer broadcasting. Their previous broadcast has been censored or changed.

I'm playing a piano, using sheet music for a jazz tune I'd never heard before. The sun's going down, and the light gradually darkens until I can't make out the sheet music in front of me.