Carabas

A man flies into a church in a hurry, and runs across an old friend he hasn't seen for a long time. He's excited to see his friend's still alive, but concerned to see he's not wearing his armor - he's in jeans and a t-shirt, and there's a sense that this means he's rejected a role, walked away from something. And there's a small scar by the corner of his mouth, that's new.

Unfortunately, there's no time to talk, he's running from something - he asks his friend for help, and his friend agrees, opening a portal for him. As he's about to pass through it, however, a group of people fly into the room, wearing armor like the kind his old friend used to have, shouting for him to stop - they're acting like both the portal and his old friend are a threat. From my 3rd person perspective's location, I can't see where that portal would lead.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm fighting someone, but I've stolen his weapons and made them my own - his cloud of mist, his glowing light. I feel a snap. I'm surprised to find he dies as easily as anyone else without his toys. Three of us who'd been fighting him together drive off, leaving someone behind to clean up.

I apologize to the man driving the car, someone I've been with for years now. That whole situation had been my fault - I'm saying I couldn't just follow instructions when I should have, and "Let it get too loud." He says, "And then it didn't anymore."

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.

A man came across a woman seemingly sleeping in the forest, but when he approached her she spoke quietly, asking him to kill her quickly and to leave her mother alive, so that her mother could continue to feed the others. He's shocked by this, but that's because he's under the impression she's human. She's a wolf, she only looks human. She knows he came there to hunt them.

She's speaking to her mother, also human-appearing, and says she wants her next lesson to be that lesson - the implication is she's decided to marry that hunter.

The hunter speaking with two other men, also hunters, one of them saying, "You can't stay married to that madwoman."

The hunter sitting in the forest, chanting a prayer or a spell that talks about the eyes of the wolves. Although the rest of the dream had been in English, he's speaking Spanish here. As he chants, the forest around him seems to change - the shadows become darker, the moonlight becomes brighter, patches of glowing fungi appear around him. He's amazed and enchanted by all of this. He's not aware of this, but from my disembodied perspective, he himself also looks different - his eyes are faintly glowing gold, and there's a sort of shadow over him, as if looking at a photograph of him overlaid with a photo of something else. Behind him, a pile of vines and undergrowth heaves upward into the form of some great beast - he's delighted by everything now but I'm sure he'll be afraid when he sees this.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm talking with a wizard from another world over tea. He's brought some of his people here as a sort of emergency hideout, and he's concerned about them picking up bad habits while they're here, to the extent that he's got them camped out at the bottom of the hill instead of in the house with me. He describes my form of magic as 'lax' and not something he wants spread to his people, which I find ridiculous for all sorts of reasons - for starters, when we'd first met he'd been seeking my help with some murderous wannabe dark lord type. I'd put a compulsion on the man to prevent him from taking human lives, which seemed such an obvious solution, I can't believe he couldn't manage it on his own. And really, as far as I can tell his world's form of magic just requires you to say the right nonsense words in the right order to express what you want, so if you're going to talk about laxness and discipline, that seems lax as hell to me.

But in any case, while we're talking about the arrangements for his people, two guys from my world come into the room. They're trying to avoid getting into trouble with their boss - they'd claimed to be unable to carry out some duty on account of being busy elsewhere, which was a lie. Now their boss is on his way to the house and will certainly sense their presence, and since I've already got a portal open, I wouldn't mind if they ducked through until the coast is clear again, would I? Fine, fine, I wave them through. That wizard objects strongly, but for crying out loud, those two aren't going to corrupt your world's magic system in a few hours, it'll be fine.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

In the American western desert, me and an older man are standing next to a car, watching a group of police vehicles pull up. We're going over a few last details before we talk to them. At the moment I'm telling him about a body I'd left floating in a pool of a private home. I see a mental image of it as I describe it, struck by the way his legs had stayed bent underneath him even as he started to float in the water. That older man says he already knew about that one. That's everything then.

He says there's a saying, "The liar does two steps worse." Do I know why that is?

I say I don't know, but then I look where he's looking. His family's just gotten out of one of those police cars - his wife, his daughter, and the daughter's boyfriend. They're looking around, haven't seen us yet with all the confusion around the scene downhill. It's clear to me they're the meaning of that saying. Lie to the people you care about and you lose them even if you're still physically present - you've separated part of yourself from them.

A woman is standing in my home - I'm not physically present at the moment - and looking into a mirror that's showing her various visions. Currently it's showing her the man she loves with a very beautiful young servant standing underneath a tree, carrying out an affair. This isn't a surprise - she was already aware of it.

The scene in the mirror changes, showing her an image of herself in a shop. There's no sound but the shop owner seems to be repeatedly asking her something that she refuses to respond to. When he approaches her, she throws out a hand to tell him to back off, but her nails brush his throat and cut it open, covering her with his blood. She looks shocked, but quickly recovers and hurries out of the shop.

This second vision reminds her of my instructions to her. She has to eat a human heart tonight if that young and beautiful body I gave her is going to become hers permanently. And regularly after that, but that's not important, that's just basic dietary needs - the important part is this first time, making a deliberate decision.

She steps through a portal back into her world, the courtyard of her own home. But as she looks around things look strange to her - most notably, the sky is covered with grey clouds that seem unnatural to her. It's as if she's seeing both her world and mine at the same time, and she wonders if this is how I see her world all the time. I'm thinking, you're getting a bit mixed up about which world is yours now.

I walk through a portal that takes me up to this stone island floating in the air. Mostly it's this pillar of rough stone but the top, where I'm standing, is level. I walk around the tree in the center and through a second portal - this one takes me back down to the surface, just a few feet away from where I started. Superficially, it doesn't really seem like I'm doing anything aside from walking around - but the act of someone passing through the portals in sequence is leaving a mark, setting something up. I think of stitching a thread through fabric.

To get to the next portal I have to swim across a river. As I'm swimming, I think briefly about growing gills and just walking across the bottom, it might have been more pleasant. I decide to stick with what I've got.

The next portal takes me to an almost identical stone island, except this time there are five portals up here. I step through the first one, and it takes me only a few feet away, in front of the next portal. I'm exasperated by this setup, but I go with it, passing through each portal in sequence. But before I step through the last portal that should take me back to the surface, I step to the edge of the rock and look down, curious about where I am exactly.

Far below, I can see a mountain range. There are two rows cut into the side of the mountain, one on top of the other, with closely-spaced openings for doorways carved into the side of the rock. There are rooms inside - I walked along those paths on my way here. I remember looking up and seeing these two floating islands, and wondering how to get up there. But something occurs to me - I look around for the other floating island, the one I was on just before, and confirm it. Yes - it's still floating upside-down, with the flat surface and the tree on the bottom instead of the top, like an Escher sketch. When I was standing over there, I must have also been standing upside down, at least relative to here. I feel dizzy.

A phrase: "Catherine, and the first dream of a 2000 year-"

There had been a queen long ago named some variation on Selene - I admired her, and I've been looking after all the generations of her descendants ever since. In a few rare circumstances I'll even take one of her descendants in and raise them myself. Some resemble her a great deal, others don't - I think about bloodlines. Now one of her descendants is in love with me, and she's upset that I've told her I would be happy with a platonic relationship or otherwise, leaving the decision entirely up to her - she wants me to feel more strongly about it. She says if I would be happy with a platonic relationship, I can't really care about her. But I've been a presence and an influence in her life since she was born, and I foresaw this moment before she was born - I've had too much influence. I want to influence her as little as possible in this at least. It has to be entirely her decision.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've had too much to drink, and I'm making my way back to my hotel room with some woman, past the now-abandoned maypoles in the lobby, litter from the party on the floor. My vision's blurry, and I have this mental monologue about how I must be getting old if the drink's messing with my vision like this. She pushes me onto the bed, and my vision blurs more - through that blurred vision, her hair's much longer now. Also she has wings, white feathers. Fuck, I know this demon. There goes my night. She sits on the edge of the bed and tells me she wants what I promised her on the night I abandoned my child. I have a memory of taking him (? I think it was a him) to a border of some kind and making him cross, so that he'd be safely out of my reach. The demon's crawled onto the bed now, and when I tell her she's out of luck, the thing we got that night is already gone, she phases her hands through my chest, squeezes and twists something inside that shouldn't be squeezed or twisted.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Setting's a fantasy version of ancient China, a king in his bedroom talking to a priestess all in white via a vision in a mirror. He was telling her about people who will be coming her way, intending to use a sacred object in her care. But she's saying that what they want isn't possible - they've misunderstood its purpose. The portal it opens can't be used to take them to the divine realms. She says, "(something) and onyx must not overlap."

I'm walking along a hall filled with exhibits - first, fragments of stones covered with hieroglyphics; then statues of Dumuzi; then a small section filled with art based on myths from various old African and Middle Eastern cultures, done by artists from the current African and Middle Eastern cultures - a reclaiming sort of thing. A painting of Eve holds my attention. Here I meet a very influential man and a woman who he has some claim on, but who seems mentally elsewhere - she speaks only nonsense. I feel protective of her, and I follow her out to a field where she gathers flowers and speaks nonsense at me for a while, but eventually that influential man and his followers come outside and she has to return. She hands me the flowers she's gathered and indicates I should eat them. Heather, foxglove, peony and violet. I put down a plank for her to walk across to return to him, and she hands me the traditional few coins for her passage.

A scene involving statues who came to life ends with a man speculating about whether it's possible for something carved in stone to change its role. He thinks it's possible, within limits. He speaks in a manner that's difficult for the people around him to understand - they say he speaks in riddles, but that's not intentional.

As I'm listening to him speak, the scene transitions; I'm in a dark stone room, listening to someone else speak to himself. I've lost track of what he was actually talking about, too busy focusing on his mannerisms and speech patterns, because I/Rumpelstiltskin recognize this scene - this is the man who I'll steal some of my more showy mannerisms and speech patterns from. Eventually he says a phrase that he uses very often, and recognizing it, I join in with him word for word. I've got his tone down very well, though my voice echoes, an effect of the spell I'm using to stay hidden - helps distort the location. He startles when he hears me, and I say, "Chilling, isn't it?" The similarity in our voices, I mean.

He looks around to try to find me, unsuccessfully, but he looks deeply unimpressed. "Expressing affection?" he asks.

"Precisely. But as an aside-" I drop the spell and step into the light as I speak.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Me and Jules are meeting as strangers - a man led us down to a room displaying various things that were important to each of us in the past. He wants us to go over our own displays to make sure there's nothing that needs to be changed. When we take a break, however, I wander over to some of the objects that are on the wall. There's a statue of a golden lion - something Jules made. He explains that it was based on an ancient model, but it's difficult when you can't be exactly sure of the symbolism each detail had to that ancient culture. I sympathize - I'd once studied the original pair of lion statues he based this one off of.

After several scenes on the streets of New York, I wander off into some hills, go lucid, and start to fly. Once I gain some altitude, I come across a river with several boats making their way downstream. I'm aware that if I follow the river downstream, it'll lead me back into the city; upstream, elsewhere. I'm torn, but then a large boat on the river draws my attention. Marie Antoinette's leaning on the railing, drinking an immense glass of pink champagne, and generally looking very inviting. I land on the boat and we go inside. Unfortunately, although I hear her meaning instead of her actual words, she complains that she can't understand what I'm saying - she's hearing the actual English words. I have to deliberately switch to speaking French - she can understand me well enough now, but my vocabulary's limited. I join her husband at a buffet table where he explains the various delicacies to me - they all sound fascinating, though I'm not eating. I leave him to go remove my overcoat; I meet a handsome guest and we enjoy some extremely unsubtle flirting. Eventually he leaves to rejoin his boyfriend, and as I'm admiring the pair of them I have a false awakening.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a witch sorting through various moments of time from her past. The first one she selects isn't the one she's looking for - it's the moment when she was taken to the castle, associated with a sense of pain, before she became a witch. She puts that moment back.

The second moment she selects - her daughter's choice between death or banishment. I think of Sleeping Beauty, converting a curse into something that's still a curse, but survivable. The daughter herself would have chosen death - young romantic type, I think of Romeo and Juliet - but her mother the witch says, "I gave him the terms quickly." By him, she means me/Rumpelstiltskin. She struck a deal with me to get her daughter away safely, before the daughter could choose a 'noble' death. The scene changes - I'm standing in the shadows at the very edge of a forest, looking at the castle on the hill in the distance. Despite the various fairy tale references in this scene, this castle's no fairy tale confection; it's a squat, practical thing. The daughter was somewhere inside at this moment in time.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After uncovering a secret lab leaking some kind of contamination that was killing the rats in the neighboring building, and making a quick escape out a second floor window and over a series of rooftops, I've wound up coincidentally coming across a scientist from that same lab and having a civil conversation on the subject of traveling through portals. We passed through one without her realizing it, and I'm baffled as to how she could not have noticed, but also baffled as to how to explain that moment of transition to her - I compare it to a change in air pressure, something you feel rather than something visible that you can point to.

She's excited about having found someone to talk to about this, someone who's used to traveling between worlds, and she asks me a variety of questions. But her expectations are so wildly different from my experiences that we're having trouble communicating - she seems to have a worldview straight out of Lovecraft. She asks me first about Old Ones, and I had no idea what she was talking about - the ancient beings that created the world, she explains. She describes them very specifically. That's something I've never come across, sorry. So then she asks about some other creature I've never heard of, and this one she explains as the demon lords that currently run the world now that the Old Ones are gone. This is hilarious. Again, sorry, no - if there are any demon lords running the world, I have yet to meet them. I start wondering if this story is actually a misinterpretation of some of my own past actions.

Me and a few others have been poking around this seemingly abandoned house, and I have a suspicion that I'm getting more and more certain of as we explore. I finally voice it: this is my house, or rather, this world's version of me; a female version apparently. I'm reasonably certain we can use this as a way to connect between the worlds, since neither version of me is in our original world right now. We'll test it by passing through some random object - I pick up what looks like a game piece, a notched wooden peg painted green. I'll go to sleep with it in my pocket, and it should pass over to her side while I'm asleep.

Time skip. One of the people I'm traveling with - earnest young blonde man, round glasses, dressed in robes that remind me of the Magician's - is setting up what looks like a summoning circle, directing the others. He fills me in on what happened while I was unconscious this time around: the people in the other world were able to deliver the third of the necessary artifacts to us. It goes unsaid, but the important part was less the specific artifact and more the fact that it was an object that had passed between worlds, though they also have to represent specific elements. We're going to use the artifacts to open up a portal we can all get through. I'm vaguely annoyed about having such a one-sided view of things, only being able to see the events unfolding in this one world, getting half the story; but it can't be helped, I have to be asleep for any communication between worlds to occur.

I'm on a ship in a storm, approaching a whirlpool, almost certainly about to sink. None of this affects me, I'm only passing through, but I know one of the men on this ship. I talk to him, asking if he's familiar with a certain infamous pirate - I name a name. He doesn't recognize it. That's a pity - in actuality he's quite close with the woman I named, I was just trying to find out where I am in the timeline. If he doesn't recognize that name for her, that means we're so early in the timeline that she hasn't gone to sea yet. If this had just happened a little later, I could have brought her here to save him. But there's nothing I can do for him here and now. I step up onto the railing at the edge of the deck, looking for the portal in the storm.

As Rumpelstiltskin (in name and appearance at least - mentally, I'm still halfway the version of me from that storm scene), there's a small group of men who've retrieved the witch bottle in which I was trapped for a very long time. They've retrieved it from a point in the timeline when I was still inside it, so as I'm watching them from hiding, I catch sight of that past version of me inside the bottle. He looks so incredibly young to me, though I haven't physically aged since then. It's all the emotion on his face, the fear. I focus on the pebbled skin, new to him - I realize they've taken the bottle from almost immediately after I first lost human form.

When I realize that, I become agitated, anxious, a sort of coldness around my heart (such a strong emotion that it lasted a minute after I woke up - that hasn't happened in a while, I enjoyed that). The emotion is partially from forcibly remembering how it had felt when I'd been in that bottle myself, a sort of flashback feeling. There was something I'd been desperate to avert, but I'd been unable to do anything about it from inside that trap. But remembering isn't the only reason I'm so worked up - if I take that bottle now, there's a chance I could change how things unfold in his timeline, save his version of the person I'd wanted to save. Nothing that's happened since that time has mattered to me as much as this. But I hesitate to act - I'm terrified of how it could go wrong, of wasting this miraculous chance.

As I follow the men with the witch bottle - I'm walking on rooftops or listening from behind stone walls, out of sight - one of them is talking. He's not the leader of their little group, but he's the one who was able to retrieve the bottle from the past. They hadn't been aiming for the bottle specifically, they'd just been trying to capture me, and time can get a bit fuzzy when you're reaching between worlds. You have to be specific. He's saying, "It's the wrong time. He has little power now." It's the present me they wanted, or at least a version of me with a few more centuries behind him than that frightened thing in the bottle.

Three boys at a boarding school have smuggled in a canister containing what they think is going to be a harmless prank. They're wrong. They're in much more serious trouble than they expected, and one of the three boys immediately runs from the room, cluing the authorities in to their guilt. The other two try to explain that they're not at fault, they didn't mean to hurt anyone, it's the person who gave them the canister who caused this, and the third boy's gone off to fetch something that will prove it - but he'll be too late, that evidence will be gone.

Two guys have shown up at my IRL home with a dead girl in the backseat of their car. She won't stay in the ground. They're telling me she needs to be put to rest. I say yeah, she sure does - but not in my yard. Get her out of here. I go back to bed.

After going through a portal, I'm briefly disoriented, looking at this immense black hole in front of me - then I realize I'm still in the void, the portal I just went through only shifted my position within it. I'm floating before this vast swirling dark mass. It's something like a cloud if a cloud had long spines that curl and move, and something like a great tornado seen from above with a black eye at its center, and something like a nest framed with this curling mass of spines. It's unimaginably vast. The hole at the center is many, many times my height, and it's only like the pupil in a great eye; I can't begin to describe the size of the thing itself. I try to look to my left, to get my bearings in the void, but when I try to look away from the thing, static noise fills my head, getting worse the farther away I turn. I swim through the air to that black hole.

On the other side, I'm disoriented again - I'm underwater and I have a hard time figuring out which way is up, and there's too many colors after the void. I eventually work out I'm in the cabin of a sunken ship, tipped so the prow's pointing straight down - I quickly make my way out and shoot right up to the surface. I'm in a great cave filled with several such shipwrecks, with sun shining in through holes far above.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There are two women, lovers, relaxing in a small pool surrounded by Greek-looking ruins in a green field, with plants around the pool for privacy. This planet has been uninhabited for a long time, people only visit it now as a place to relax. An older, beautiful woman approaches the pool. The others dislike the interruption and the loss of their privacy, but it can't be helped; everyone's friendly and polite, and the women in the pool shift over to make room for her.

The scene changes: one of those two women is sobbing on the shoulder of a friend. Her lover's dead - that older woman killed her.

I got on an elevator expecting it to go up, this being the ground floor - there's only one floor above us, and only arrows instead of floor numbers. But it went down. I wonder how many basement levels there are. I reach to press the up arrow, saying something about my mistake to the woman still on the elevator with me. I'm new to this building. We talk about the company a bit as the elevator continues down, about finding your way around the various floors, and various luxuries that are provided for employees. I mention soul-selling and Satan, meaning it as a joke, but she talks about Satan fondly. We reach her floor, and she leaves.

My point of view switches to follow her - she walks down a hallway into a club. Her brother who goes by the name of Beelzebub - a fake name, it's really Samael - is lounging around with a cocktail glass in his hand, some glowing blue drink inside. He's a pretty man with long dreadlocks, wearing something black covered in stylized eyes in red. The woman's removed the pale coat she was wearing on the elevator, and the dress she's wearing underneath matches her brother, black and covered in stylized eyes in red. They consult about someone he describes as "a friend and a most simple prize."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's this swirling black mass of many colors, like an oil slick, lit up from within like lightning seen from above. I'm eager to dive in immediately - it's a portal - but I'm also thinking I should stop and go lucid first. As I'm torn between these two desires which are apparently conflicting, I wake up.

(Side note: that last was a reaction to trying reality checks. As a rule I'm not interested in them, but I have a lot of false awakenings that I tend to just spend dream journaling and I thought I could put reality checks to use there. So today I tried a reality check as I wrote that first dream up, and apparently this sort of thinking is the immediate result - associating lucidity with stopping what I'm doing to perform an action. Nuisance.)

After going lucid and abandoning the storyline I'd been in, I'm walking to a simple full-length mirror leaning against a wall. I focus on my intended destination - the rose garden, a meeting place. As I place my hands through the glass, I lose all visuals. My hands sink into the glass as far as my wrists, but no further. The 'hole' beyond the surface of the mirror that acts as a portal isn't open enough. I can feel jagged edges against my right wrist, as opposed to the heavy liquid-like feeling of the portal. It's like I've broken open a hole in a frozen lake. I stay focused on the destination and mentally dig at those edges until they give.

I can feel a wall of thorns all around me so that I can't move. I still have no visuals, I think of this as between scenes. I'm annoyed at myself - this is the barrier around the garden, I shouldn't have had to deal with this at all. It was an error in focus, thinking about roses and sharp edges. I try to correct my focus but find myself waking up. (Though it wound up being a false awakening. Visuals returned when I 'woke up.')

I'm about to open a portal for someone, and I'm trying to explain the difficulties of this type of teleportation to them. I'm saying, no, it doesn't have to be a place I've been to before, but I have to be able to keep the precise location I 'feel' in mind. Things like direction or distance from here to there, those matter - what the place looks like doesn't.

As Rumpelstiltskin, I'm using magic to sort of scan someone for some information, together with Belle, and Belle is able to feel it - she's surprised by the feel of it. It seems like it's happy; she didn't expect it to have a mind of its own. And it worries her that it seems happy, when the person we're scanning is sick. I'm thinking, the magic doesn't care about the person being sick one way or the other, it doesn't really understand what people or sickness are, it's just happy about the way it's being used - it's got a life of its own to a degree but it's not that sentient.

I'm outside my IRL home at dawn, and there are all these beautiful birds. A great horned owl on a tree stump, a snowy egret walking across the lawn, a variety of smaller birds that I don't recognize in the trees, and four peacocks that show absolutely no fear of humans, I'm standing right next to one and it's not bothered, I'm thinking the peacocks must have been tame.

There are two guys climbing up a rock - they think of it as a mountain, but it's barely a hill - carrying a radio and a guitar. A musician they like died here, and one of them has insisted on making a sort of pilgrimage, to play his music at the place he "breathed his last breath." At the top of the rock they turn on the radio. A female vocalist sings "At last the time fell-" The guys brought their own instruments and are joining in. One of them is on the guitar, but the one who insisted on this trip has some small metal instrument that looks vaguely like a comb, played with the thumb.

An old man and a young man have just gone through a portal to another world, chasing someone who's stolen something. The old man asks around after him, but the description he gives, which would have been very unique in the world they're coming from, is almost useless in this one: they're looking for a man about 6 feet tall, dressed "like a warrior." The majority of the men they're talking to here are wearing armor, so that's not very helpful. Bit of a memory gap then, something involving a woman they know and the young man getting into trouble.

The young man's in jail, where another man from another world - not the one they were looking for - is being kept separate, a big blond Viking-looking guy in a large cell full of straw, who seems a little lost and confused. He's being questioned by the jailer, who's talking about that woman who came up earlier; she has a very long series of names, ending with Williams. She's married to someone very respectable, and she's denied that she knows the man in the cell. The jailer is telling him this to try to get him to admit that his story about knowing her was a lie and confess what's really going on, but the man in the cell is completely bewildered. The young man, on the other hand, is aware that there are three versions of Williams, the one that belongs to this world, the one from his, and the one that loves this man in the cell.

Williams arrives in the jail then - the young man believes she's the version from his world. She refers to the young man as Zachary, and she's carrying a fox - when I look at the fox, I'm aware that Zachary is a shapeshifter, and there's some connection to this particular fox. Williams goes to the man in the cell and she calls him "Tin Man," which is a sort of code name, and she's using it to reassure him of who she is and that she really knows him. Zachary believes that the Williams from his world has been posing as the version from this other guy's world in order to get some information out of him. She has him let out of the cell, and when he goes to her, their eyes - the fox's as well - start glowing green, and I have the feeling this means they're about to move between worlds. She looks to Zachary and says something apologetic, and he suddenly realizes that this is both his Williams and the one this guy loves, and that the fox is him - he's looking at their future.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Just fragments for the rest of the day:

An intelligent species of birds that are dying out after losing all their females to some disaster, giving some other species advice in the hopes of avoiding that same disaster.

Walking down a street, four dancers appear in front of us, concealing an assassin among them.

Something to do with prison and hooded figures "finding their own way."

Describing the story of the King in Yellow to someone.