Carabas

(Though not lucid, this first one was about dream control.)

I've finally figured out how to work with this house. I've begun simply telling it, out loud, what I need from it - not exerting any effort or willpower, just a statement. "House, we need x thing," and the house takes care of it itself, without any effort on my part - simply informing the house what's needed instead of trying to control it. Amazing what a difference clear communication can make.

I'm talking to a servant girl in a room about the size of a closet where she both works and, I'm surprised to learn, sleeps. I ask if she'd like her own room, which of course she does. "House, we need a spare room." I walk out the door and find a new room's appeared, though it's dark and half-finished and covered in dust. "A nicer spare room." Now it's something suitable for living in - and I don't think I looked away, and there didn't seem to be any transition. One moment it had the first appearance, the next moment it was completely different. The girl explores the new room, exclaiming over it. There's a little bundle of fake white roses in a bowl of sugar.

There's what I think of as a wildfire at the edge of the house, just small patches of burning grass but I know it'll grow if I'm not careful. I have the impression this is the result of carelessly reshaping things, creating vulnerabilities around the edges. I have the house stop the fire, and though the fire's stubborn, it goes out as I walk towards it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A servant girl came running into a room at the back of the household after hearing one of the other servant girls shouting, but I grab her at the door and stop her. I can hear voices outside, and I recognize the voices of some soldiers who were causing problems with that second girl earlier, somewhere more public. They were reprimanded. Clearly they resented it and want payback. Realizing this, I admire the girl who came running to help; she's small and only armed with a kitchen knife and completely outnumbered, but she doesn't hesitate. Very noble.

Unfortunately for both of them, I'm in a hurry, so I'm not going to let her go help her friend. I'm just here to track down an object that belongs to me and which was stolen long ago, and which she stole from its most recent owner - a leather journal with a star on the center of the cover.

She showed me her room where it was hidden and ran off as soon as I released her, and I start looking through the journal, full of brief observations and sketches I'd drawn. I stop at the sketch on the last page, Jules sitting in a chair with his head tilted back. I feel like there's something foreshadowing about this. And while I'm looking at it, I hear an old man's voice as if he's looking over my shoulder. He makes a comment that makes it clear he recognizes Jules, and then asks me, "Did you follow me?"

There's a man, some kind of ruler, lying in his sickbed, potentially his deathbed. He's speaking to two servants to either side of his bed. Circumstances are forcing him to return to a place he'd once tried to conquer many years ago, but had been forced to turn away from at the last minute. His servants think returning now will be a disaster, given his health. But he's inspired. He says that when he first marched on that place, he'd felt he was approaching the height of his power. As though if he'd reached that place, he also would have reached his dream of creating something that would change the world. I want to use the word 'technology' here, but that gives the impression of some new gadget - what the ruler is after is something as revolutionary as the invention of writing. His statement makes one of the servants focus on the symbol the ruler is wearing around his neck. It's a gold star with 14 rays, arranged much like a jack, the toy, or like a three-dimensional version of a compass rose. I, disembodied, think of alchemy.

There's a white horse and rider walking through a hall of the palace. An extremely agitated servant is trying to get them to leave, but the horse and rider brush him off. They walk through a pair of wooden double doors, into a room where the ruler who'd been in his sickbed is now up and in military uniform, going over maps. The setting looks significantly more modern than I'd thought in the previous scene, maybe as late as the 1800s.

The ruler reacts about as you'd expect when a stranger on a horse walks into your room. The rider asks, "Don't you recognize me?" And his face changes - now he's identical to the ruler. "Though when we last spoke, it was more..." And his face changes again, growing younger. Very little changes, really - skin's a bit tighter about the jawline, mostly. The rider reaches up to feel that jawline, and compliments the ruler on how well he's aged. Perhaps that's the result of easy living. This is sarcasm - an accusation. The rider says "we" expected greatness from the ruler - but what has he done with their gift in all this time?

The rider says, "We convene in the morning. I expect you there." And he leaves.

A man who wore a heavy overcoat and hat to hide his appearance - though we eventually saw him out of it, and he's far from the strangest thing we've seen in this world - is currently talking to me about his trick with languages. He hears meanings, not words. And he's concerned because when we had been talking with those demons earlier, to his ears the demons were saying nothing at all. In other words, they were lying. I can't say I'm surprised.

Lestat and Claudia have been fighting on a ship - mostly verbally, but they're fairly serious. He'd gotten angry and taken her up into the air with him, and now she's broken away and run toward the prow of the ship. She turns and looks at me, and my image of her changes - I see a human girl, long brown hair under a white cap. She mouths, "Help me, Father."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A flashback to the 1930s or so. A movie's being rewritten to expand a starlet's part, and the leading man's being told this over the phone. He doesn't take it well. The movie's focus was on a struggle between two men, the romance subplot with the starlet's character had been relatively minor. He doesn't like people messing with the storyline just because they got a big name involved.

In the present - which is the 1950s or so - that former actor's talking with a man in an office, someone he thinks of as a servant in some sense. The actor's blackmailing him or something similar. A knock comes at the door, and that 'servant' hurriedly puts on a black suit coat and slouches. He looks greasy - part of the act. When the person who knocked comes in, the actor does all the talking but he treats that 'servant' as his boss, deferring to him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Two men and a woman are trying to figure out a plan to break someone out of a guarded cell. One of those men leaves and starts stirring up a great deal of trouble - getting on the loudspeaker, taunting the guards, bringing up the security camera image that shows a guard he'd killed earlier. Now that alarms are ringing, that woman who'd been planning with him earlier manages to get to him before security does. She asks, "What are you doing?!" He hadn't told them this earlier, but he's a known criminal - his face would have given them away on the way out. So he figured it's better if he puts that to use and acts as a distraction. She's incredibly exasperated with him.

There's a woman who's been unknowingly designated to play the role of Mary. (A reference to Mary Vetsera and/or Mary Kelly - the point is that she was remembered for her death, and that a certain amount of time has passed since, so it's time for events to repeat themselves.) She'd been running from a stranger with a knife, found a friend of hers to help her, and they've wound up barricading themselves inside a room. Due to a struggle at the door, the stranger's knife wound up on the floor inside the room with them. But the stranger wasn't the threat here - he was trying to help her. I'm in the POV of the thing possessing her friend, though possession in this case means only a certain amount of influence over his thoughts - he's the one fated to kill her.

There's a man, a servant, who I made immortal a long time ago. He came to resent me, so I sent him away to the household of a woman I'm close with. From her letters, I believe that's worked out well for them both. I'm staying with her at the moment, and he's showing me something I hadn't realized before - the wounds he had when I made him immortal never healed. The pain is very minor, but it never goes away.

A woman's looking over a small art collection - sketches of the building she's in from various earlier eras, collected in a large book. On the wall directly over the book is a recent painting of this same building, but showing it thousands of years earlier when there was a lake here, with the door opening directly onto the water. She finds this painting a little funny - unlike the historical sketches, she believes this one's a sort of what-if image. The building's old but it's not that old. But the man who commissioned the painting, the owner of this place, she's thinking of him as being oddly precise about where the lake should be in relation to the building; as far as she's aware there's no evidence that there was ever really a lake here at all. The title of the painting is Lake Hae or Hayle or something along those lines. Although the building in the painting and the building in modern times are identical, somehow in the painting it gives the impression of being someplace sacred.

She turns the pages of the book - she's careful with it, it's very valuable. After the sketches of the building there are a series of anatomical sketches and portraits. She's on a page showing several sketches of an old man, mostly bald and with a sort of rounded profile. As a disembodied observer, I'm fond of the sketch, sort of nostalgic about it - both about the subject and about the sketch itself. She keeps turning the pages, and there's a sketch of a young man with a very square jaw; looking at him changes the scene.

Still in the same room, but a couple centuries earlier; the walls are lined with bookshelves. There's a woman sketching, holding a conversation with a man sitting in a chair. A servant comes into the room - he's that young man from the sketch - and the man in the chair stands up to speak with him. A man all in black and with very long black hair, he's the same man who owned this building and that art collection in modern times.

A false awakening during which I tried to write down the previous dream. The dream I was writing down was a Rumpelstiltskin POV, and I'd written that in Belle's version of their shared dream there had been no corresponding scene with Bae. When Rumpelstiltskin found this out from her, he had a sort of bitter "aha!" reaction to it, as if this proved him right in doubting something. But now that I was 'awake' and writing this down, I thought he was mistaken in that reaction. There was more I wanted to write, but my pen ran out of ink. I went to fetch another and was distracted by various things.

(Woke up for real. Back to sleep.)

There are four servants in a mansion, one who's getting ready to serve guests. The other three have to stay out of sight of the guests, and two of them have stepped out a back door to talk about something.

The other one of those three servants, the only woman among them, finds those two standing around the open door and is very upset at them for leaving it open. They have some reason for it - but while doors are open, the spell that freezes time inside the mansion weakens. Allowing a few minutes to pass here and there means very little to them, but that fourth servant, the one currently serving the guests, is human. He only has so many minutes in his lifetime. She wants to preserve that limited life of his for as long as she can, even if it's only a few centuries. She's furious at them for allowing any of it to slip away.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A car crashes out of a portal onto a hill. The woman inside is unconscious, and when she wakes up, she gives the name of a flight that crashed with her and her husband on it. She believes that she's just woken up after that plane crash; she doesn't remember the car or the portal. That plane crash happened days or weeks ago. But she's taken to the hospital where her husband is still staying.

When her husband sees her, he's shocked to see she looks much younger than before she disappeared. He takes out her compact mirror from her purse - he has all of her things that were found at the plane crash site - and hands it to her. As he does so, I see an image of her at three ages. Her appearance now is a young woman with strangely large eyes, blonde hair worn straight back under a headband, neatly dressed. But I'm also seeing a version of her several years older, with long wavy hair and a loose dress; and at the same time, a version of her that's about 5 years old. I realize that she became younger while she stayed in that place on the other side of the portal, and if she'd stayed longer she would have reverted to that 5 year old image.

I'm a man in a room full of people. A woman's being escorted into the room to pick out two of us for slaves. She's known for her harsh treatment of her people; she's got a shaved head and has two servants behind her. I'm standing a little apart from everyone else - there's something different about the way I got into this situation compared to how everyone else got here, most of them came from the same place. The woman looking us over is disappointed by us, says we don't begin to compare to the ones her settlers captured in the wild. We're a group of people selected by Dorothea, and this woman makes plain her distaste for Dorothea's preference for "pretty pets." She declares she doesn't want any of us and leaves again.

A minor tyrant with some nefarious plan has just provided his elite guard with some new, lethal weapon related to mind control and is staging a private demonstration for two prisoners, people who'd been opposing him. But the guard who's supposed to provide the demonstration, after hearing the tyrant's plans, uses the weapon to kill himself rather than go through with it. The tyrant's reaction to this is mostly just contempt, and he orders one of the other guards to take the dead man's place - but instead, they all kill themselves rather than be involved in this plan. Meanwhile, the two prisoners are set free by the tyrant's heir, a younger brother or nephew, someone who never seemed to take anything very seriously; it turns out that attitude was just an act, allowing him to arrange a rebellion without being suspected. Some seemingly-nonsensical comments he'd made earlier make more sense in light of this.

There's a woman bending over a pool table, two guys - her servants - behind her. A man lounging on a couch opposite her is holding a camera and taking a photo of her, and he's asking her if she's sure she wants to play this way, 2 against 1. The man currently taking his shot tells him to knock it off, the lady knows her own mind. I'm a 3rd person observer, and from where I'm 'standing', I can't see this woman's face clearly, but her hair and her bearing remind me of Janette. I have the feeling I've been looking for Janette for a long time, and I go in for a closer look. There's a resemblance, but it's not her. While I was distracted, the conversation's turned more serious and they've stopped paying attention to the pool game; I get the impression that this is some kind of informal interrogation of this woman, or she's being put on the spot in some way. She's saying, "perhaps we have to suffer, to (justify or maintain or deserve, some word like that) our position." The others don't much care for this theory.