Carabas

Yesterday's dreams included using abandoned tunnels running beneath a lake as a hiding place to sleep in during the day. There's one place that leads to a glass dome where you can look up and see the lake above you.

Today's: I'm trying to prevent some disaster, and I'm running out of time. At the moment I'm standing on a rooftop, watching several people in a field far below us. Along with me there's two people, a woman who I think of as my partner - she's on the other side of the roof at the moment, busy with her own efforts - and then this man. He has the power to make anything he says come true, but for his own safety and everyone else's, I made him forget about this power. This is an emergency. I force him to remember, and then I have him use that power to say that there's an earthquake. We all hold onto the roof and watch a crack open up in the field where those people are. The ground's still shaking, the people are scattering, but I don't think this will be enough. We should just bury this place beneath the sea, that ought to do it.

The place is covered in white mist now, blocking out everything below the roof we're standing on, and it's quiet, no more sounds of people below us. I'm walking back toward my partner on the other side of the roof, and I believe submerging this place and all the people in it has managed to avert the disaster. But then this dark spire rises up out of the fog directly in front of me, and keeps rising up into the sky.

It's this huge, gothic tower, a single immense spire composed of smaller ones, spire upon spire upon spire, all jagged edges. I think of a cathedral, but there's no religious imagery, just a sense of awe and horror; I think of a clock tower, but there's no face. It keeps rising higher and higher, I can no longer see the top of it. Flooding this place was a wasted effort.

And as I hang onto the edge of the roof and watch the spire rise, I hear an old man's voice in my head. "Here to keep your ledge, little boy, who once rared-"

There's a human boy who grew up with something not human and eventually fell in love, and now the nonhuman one is gradually becoming human. This is something he always wanted, but he's surprised because he expected it to be like flipping a switch, all or nothing; instead, human traits will appear for a while and gradually fade away again. Right now, the two of them are having a conversation about a friend of the human, named Michael, who the human's considering approaching - they have an open relationship, since they both believe it's important for the human to be close with other humans.

Two men, at least one a detective, are on the rooftop of a building in a city, talking about that Michael. They have some kind of personal grudge against that couple, and they have some plan to use Michael against them. One of them is assuring the other that the plan will work, they can trust Michael and he'll come through for them; they mention something about 11 o'clock. The human boy appears on top of the wall at the edge of the rooftop, looking a few years older than in the previous scene, and he tells them that he's "already taken the precaution of" killing Michael, in order to prevent Michael from killing him. Someone (I can't remember whether it was the boy or the detective; both sides agree on this point) makes a comment about how "before all of this," before Michael got involved with them, Michael would have been peacefully studying at this time of night.

As a disembodied observer, I get lost in a train of thought starting with that comment about studying and ending up thinking about disappearing cultural institutions, and then thinking about divination by lottery. With that last thought, I find myself at a shrine in the POV of the human boy from the previous scene. I intend to take a long trip, alone, but I needed to stop here first. There's a woman who works at the shrine performing divination by lottery, where there are small white balls containing messages from the deity of the shrine. The message she produces for me is "please do not go." I'm not surprised by this, and intend to leave anyway, regretfully; I only came here to say goodbye, though I intend to return someday. As the part of me in the mindset of the character is thinking all this, the observer side of me realizes that the deity of the shrine is the same nonhuman character from the earlier scenes.