• Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views




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    1. 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.
    2. A white horse and rider

      by , 12-05-2014 at 07:08 PM
      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.

      Updated 12-05-2014 at 07:11 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    3. La'ulb, clipped wings, avoiding huli jing

      by , 11-22-2014 at 07:14 PM
      A young woman's confronting this guy, a friend of hers, though she's annoyed at him at the moment. He's arranged things so as to create this sort of antichrist kid - it doesn't really have anything to do with her, but she's angry about it anyway, and is feeling tricked and betrayed by him in general. She asks him if he's Lucifer, expecting the answer to be yes.

      "Nope. One of the major demons." He says it casually, he's smiling easily through this whole conversation. He's doing some kind of work in a manhole, and she's standing up on the surface with her arms crossed.

      "What did you (word that means both infect and possess) my boyfriend with?"

      "La'ulb. But it's clean, and I can take it off."


      There's this young musician trying to get permission to leave a royal court - he wants to travel to a different country. He has to make a plea before the king, and he's deliberately trying to emulate the speech of an older man, a traveler passing through, who'd impressed him - as a disembodied observer, I'm amused, but I think it's a bad idea; it'll just make him sound artificial. He makes a comparison to a young bird having its wings clipped.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      After a short scene in which I'm reminded that cheating on a god out of boredom is not the best of ideas, followed by a shapeshifting fox turning up at my IRL door, I've wound up in a bit of trouble.

      I'm now heading for the rear exit of a theatre, trying to avoid being seen by the group of women - not humans - who are coming up behind me; but through the glass door, I can see a pair of fox demons approaching - a pair of women all in white, dripping in silver jewelry. After hesitating, I decide I'd rather take my chances with the fox demons. There's a crowd of people, mostly girls who work here, coming in through that door, but I don't feel very optimistic about my chances of getting lost in the crowd - until one of the girls quickly slips off the blue robe she'd been wearing over her clothes and wraps it around me, and someone else puts an arm around my shoulders, pushing my head down so my face can't be easily seen.

      He pulls me over to a side hallway and gives instructions to one of the showgirls to fetch the change of clothing he'd arranged for with her earlier. I know him - he's vaguely sinister but not in a way that I consider a threat to me personally, and I generally admire his skill at getting things done. It's a bit like having Hannibal Lecter on your side.

      Updated 11-22-2014 at 08:31 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    4. Resurrecting a killer, and a basic TOTM question left unanswered

      by , 02-07-2014 at 12:05 AM
      I'm aware T. is going to rob my home and kill me tonight, as if I'd seen the future. I took some steps in preparation for that, but I believed that what is going to happen can't be averted. However, it turns out I'd misinterpreted something: while T. really was robbing the place, the killer turns out to be someone else, a stranger who broke in with a knife. T. and some other people who live here help fight him off. We get to the scene I knew was coming, when the knife's supposed to cut deeply into my shoulder and stop just above my heart, and I wonder if I'll be able to feel pain in a dream. I decide to have the scene go a different way instead, I close my eyes and imagine that T. and the others hold him back enough that the knife turns aside. When I open my eyes again, the stranger is on the floor, dead.

      I decide to perform "Deedlit's healing spell."
      (It's been years since I watched Lodoss - did Deedlit even have a healing spell? - I think this was mostly some generic mental association between elves and healing.) I say something I no longer remember, a phrase in English something like a prayer, and there's a warm gold glowing light around my hands, which I hold over the dead man until he revives, though he remains quietly on the floor. I then repeat the spell with the others in the room, although they don't seem to have any wounds, and they're surprised but appreciate it. I leave the room and go to heal my IRL sister L., who in the dream lives next door, waking her up in the process. I then go down the hall to find T. again and heal him too.

      Me and T. talk for a while, and as he talks his appearance changes. He walks into the kitchen briefly and when he comes back, he's become a different person entirely, and he's joined by another man. They both claim to know me and to have been looking for me for a long time, although they call me by two different names. The one who wasn't T. speaks with a heavy Scottish accent and calls me Jack. As I'm speaking to them, I remember that
      while I'm lucid, I had some things I wanted to get done, and I try to remember what those were. I decide it was the Task of the Month. (Apparently reading the TOTM thread last night was enough to overrule my personal lucid goals.) I remember that the Task was to ask a DC who your true love or soulmate is, so I ask these guys, who's my true love? They both go silent and look extremely uncomfortable, like that's a question I shouldn't ask. I tell them any answer is fine, it's just a task, and I try phrasing it with 'soulmate' instead, but that doesn't get a better response. I feel like their belief that they knew me a long time ago is affecting this, that it's part of what makes this a question they don't want to answer, so I decide to go outside and find someone else to ask.

      Outside my IRL home, I'm appreciating how vivid it is. There's a chill in the air, a nicely realistic touch, and there's no snow on the ground, which is a great change. I walk off the driveway and onto the main road, and for some reason I feel like that's an important dividing line, particularly when lucid. My attention is caught by a squirrel across the road standing on its front legs, craning its neck to look up at the sky; and then by the body of a dead deer at the 3-way crossroads. I believe
      (incorrectly) that this dead deer is always here at the crossroads when I dream, and I think about going over to talk to it, but on second thought the idea makes me a little uncomfortable - I think it'll follow me home. Better not. There's a rock just beside my driveway with some words carved into it, and I start to go over to read it, but a car drives by. I stop it and walk over to the driver, ask her who my true love is. Again, she goes silent and gives me the impression that this is a question I shouldn't ask. I decide to go for a ride, and I climb into the car through the window.

      Inside the car, the woman I spoke to isn't the driver at all, she's a passenger. There's six women in the car, all of them working in the fashion industry or as models, and with the exception of the woman I'd spoken to and the driver, the rest of them resent someone who's not part of the industry hitching a ride. No one except the driver knows where they're going - it's a surprise. The driver's name is Audrey, she's someone big in the fashion industry, wearing large dark sunglasses. I ask Audrey who my true love is, and as an answer, she produces a piece of lined paper with something written on it, crumples it up, and throws it out the window. She's not throwing it away - she means for me to reach out my window and catch it. I'm too slow, I just miss it. But I decide - no, I didn't miss it. I caught it. I announce out loud, "Got it!" I 'remember' the feel of catching it, and then I draw my hand back inside the car. No good, my hand's empty. The women in the car look at me oddly for claiming to have caught the paper when I hadn't. I try the hand-behind-the-back summoning trick, but still nothing.

      Since I keep failing to get an answer to this question, I decide I'll switch to a different Task of the Month. For some reason I believe that the other basic task is to kiss a DC. I stop to think about that for a minute, since I'm sure that can't be right, that's too basic, but then I decide it's meant as something simple to stick with a Valentine's Day theme.
      (Was I mixing it up with the kiss-a-zombie one? I had just raised someone from the dead, shame I didn't follow up on that. ) Although I'm not sure how I got here, I'm now following Audrey into an elevator with one of the other women from the car. I ask Audrey if I can kiss her, and she says sure. I can't remember what happened after that, but next thing I remember we're leaving the elevator and I'm thinking that didn't work. We're now standing in a large room with a mirror and a couch, and I ask the other woman, a slightly chubby, very beautiful blonde, if I can kiss her. She says okay. We're standing in front of the mirror, and I'm surprised to see the mirror's actually reflecting her and the room we're in (though not me, as usual), and her reflection looks exactly like her, although it's watching us instead of mirroring her actions. I lean in to kiss her and close my eyes, but perhaps because I was distracted by the mirror, I find I've wound up kissing her reflection instead, through the glass. I move us away from the mirror, focus on the feeling of her shoulder under my hand, and try again. I'm too focused on comparing this to real life and trying to improve the realism to enjoy it much - the feeling of her lips themselves is accurate, but that's about it. I'm thinking that this sort of thing really doesn't translate to dreams well, and I should focus on doing things that aren't possible IRL. So I remember the 'other' (actual) task of the month: I step back and ask her if she knows who my true love is. Again, she seems uncomfortable with the question and doesn't answer. Then I think that asking someone you've just kissed to tell you about your true love may be a little tactless.

      There's a cat by the mirror now, yowling. Two people who work here rush over to it to try to get it to be quiet. On the other side of the room, there's a whole row of mirrors and a hairdresser standing in front of them, talking about originality or lack thereof in fashion shows. I lose lucidity and follow him, listening to him for a few moments before I wake up.
    5. Zachary, Williams, and Tin Man

      by , 01-30-2014 at 10:48 PM
      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.
    6. Dream of a dream, and a deal with a troll

      by , 01-29-2014 at 11:12 PM
      I'm trying to catch a bus, but the station I've found turns out to be the wrong place - it's a place for repairs only. I sit around the station anyway. There's a guy who I initially thought worked there, turns out to be just another person waiting like me, who tells a story about a dead body that was left unburied. There's a girl listening to the story who slips and falls, hurts herself, and I pick her up and carry her somewhere. She works for my family, who owns most of this town, and she's worried that slipping like that might get her fired - her job involves athletic skill. She's not wrong.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      After an IRL-based scene and a memory gap, I'm lying in a bed, watching a dream image form; I have an impression of gold and light and a woman's face, but it's blurred and I'm thinking that I can influence it too easily, I decide I'm not asleep enough for this, it's more imagination than dream. I decide to just let myself wake up instead, and let the image disappear, so there's no visuals. I open my eyes. I'm in a dorm, I'm a high school kid at either a boarding school or a very fancy camp or something, rooming with two other guys, and we go out to the lake and have some competition that winds up accidentally involving other people and getting us in trouble. I fall on top of the rotting body of a snake in the water, and a bit of it gets stuck under one of my fingernails. The teacher or counselor or whoever it is that tells us off for causing trouble mostly just seems amused by us; he refers to us as Vision house, and says it's all valuable experience.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm traveling with two other people, looking for something or someone, and right now I'm making a deal with an old woman I associate with trolls, to allow us to pass. She's sitting on a rock in some canyon, dry earth without any plants, and there's a cloud of dust over some footprints that appear and disappear as if there were invisible people moving around just in front of her. I associate those footprints with whoever/whatever we're looking for, it's why I'm talking to the troll-woman. She agrees to a deal: three for three. She'll allow the three of us to pass if we can win three fights against her people.

      The scene changes: we're at an indoor pool, facing the first of her people. Although the two guys I was traveling with are still here, they're standing aside; I have the impression they'll stop the guy we have to beat if he moves towards them, but otherwise, I'm the one handling this. I'm in the water, and I become aware that I have a long fin on my back like a lancetfish, that there's something off, fish-like, about my hands and skin and eyes as well. The guy and I both follow the same pattern of engaging only to immediately back off, until eventually I get him into the water and hold him under. Once this is done, I look at him and think that he looked malnourished. I recognize him as someone who'd been on death row 'before we all came here.'

      Updated 01-29-2014 at 11:15 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    7. Hooded figure in the mirror, angels and vampires who fell

      by , 01-14-2014 at 12:47 AM
      I'm standing in front of a row of elevators with reflective gold-colored doors, and in a sort of voiceover I'm hearing what sounds like an article about a scientific study of reflections. There's a lot of information that sounded reasonable at the time but didn't actually translate to waking life - for example, your eyes perceive this angle of motion and expect an impact that never comes, causing tension, and resulting in your attention focusing on this or that minor detail. As I get into the elevator, the article is saying something about there being two different ways to think of reflections which both carry different benefits, and it goes on to explain the two ways. I find this interesting and decide to experiment with switching to the other way of thinking, which is viewing your reflection as a separate person, even expecting it to talk. Acting on the article's advice, I address my reflection on the mirrored elevator wall. My reflection's a great deal taller than me, and completely covered by a hooded cloak. I find I like him - or it - a great deal.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      Some vague fragment involving briefly passing through an exhibit to do with planets, and something about Artemis.

      There's a woman who's determined to hold onto the hand of some monstrously deformed figure who keeps trying to shy away. She's thinking about how she's been through some kinds of transformations in the past herself, so it takes more than some monstrous appearance to frighten her off. The monstrous one's thinking something about Cain, and something about two angels, one in favor of allowing the other's creations - humans - to develop variations of themselves (which is to say, to have children); the one who created them was opposed; and now he's found his downfall in a relationship with a human, which wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for that decision, allowing the humans to develop into new variations.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      There's a man who's been running through the halls of a house and now reaches a dead end, a study with a portrait, which I briefly thought was a mirror. A man who's been following him at a walking pace comes into the room and starts talking about the portrait, and about the history of the man in the painting, who was - is? - a vampire. He says, "They forgive him the very thing he (something)," and then something about "fell." Meanwhile the man who'd been running is stumbling around the room with his hand over his stomach like he's been injured, saying "Please!" There's a resemblance between him and the portrait.

      Updated 01-14-2014 at 12:51 AM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    8. Space race and malfunctioning robot

      by , 01-12-2014 at 12:07 AM
      Friday: A mountain "full of fog, 'wolves' and 'sheep'", where a woman who'll wind up becoming a historical figure is setting out to show the other side that some of their 'wolves' have deserted and are now helping her guard the 'sheep.'

      Today: A guy in space, traveling toward Earth along with many, many other ships in some kind of race, the ship he's in seems made up of many different old parts, pieces are falling off along the way but he seems to have expected that. He's full of rage. There was something to do with lots being drawn, and his younger sister had been one of the winners, which would have meant she was safe and wouldn't have to take her chances in the race with the rest of them, but her parents (from whom he's estranged) had convinced her to give up her slot, that she must live or die and "become ashes" with them, so that they wouldn't be separated in the next life and lose her forever. She told him about this as he was looking over her ship for her, and he found something wrong with it, something that had been sabotaged, that would prevent him from communicating with her after the journey even if they both survived. He fixes it, and is furious.

      Still the same storyline - there's a woman somewhere "left behind", the place all the people in the race and the lottery were abandoning. She wakes up with a gun next to her - not hers - and sees someone who says something to her. She, outraged by what he said, says "I don't look like a nice person to you?", and shoots him. Her logic being that if he couldn't recognize a good person when he saw one, he must be a bad person. As she shoots him, her face changes in some subtle way, something to do with her teeth, and I'm aware that in this place, now, people physically change to reflect their actions, and this is part of what the others were escaping from.

      A conversation between a man and a woman in a bedroom as she's tying sheets together into a ladder, preparing to escape:
      He: "I thought you might have missed it."
      She: "Missed what?"
      He: "The window."
      She: "I can't miss the window. You're my destiny - war."

      After an incident with a robot - it appeared human and was programmed to act as a caregiver to a group of four kids, something had gone wrong with it and put the kids in danger. Now someone's complaining to someone else about it - one's in law enforcement, the other's in politics, not sure which one is which. The one listening to the complaint responds, "I believe I oversaw the (something). And (something) to call in some backup." But when she says 'backup', she's not talking about something official. I see an image of two guys, not in any kind of uniform, one's scrawny and one's a little overweight, they have some connection to photography, possibly the press - they're the 'backup' she was referring to.
    9. Outlanders, off-worlders, distant places and isolated islands

      by , 01-04-2014 at 12:18 AM
      I'm reading a book. In it, the main character is looking at a river and thinking "The mare of time." The river surface usually looks calm, but it's been disturbed due to the ongoing combat. There's a thought that it's only humanocentrism that makes him see the 'calm' river as better/more natural than the 'disturbed' river. There's a reference to a distant place he's been searching for, or came from, or that otherwise has been referenced frequently in the story before now; from this point in the story onward, that place will no longer be a major part of the story. There will be a few minor finds, items from that place, fruits, henna - accompanied by the line "It was a good henna, but not enough to sit in front of the Skillet-mirror" - but the place itself will never appear in the story again, which gives the story as a whole a sort of surreal feeling, with storylines that go nowhere and scenes that don't quite match up, aside from always containing the same main character; a focus on imagery rather than plot. It reminds me of a less surreal Maldoror, or a more surreal Gormenghast, and I start thinking about the surreal in my own writing.

      There's a Lost Boys tv show, currently showing the Boys versus some vampire skinheads.

      A doctor who is giving up his practice and moving to an isolated island, moving in with the couple he loves. He's talking to his mother (a relatively young woman who insists he refers to her as his sister in public) about his intent to stop practicing medicine. They're standing on a small wooden hanging bridge high over a river, surrounded by tropical plants with broad leaves and looking out over the sea; it's very beautiful.

      I'm in a marketplace filled with angry people. They don't like being guarded by off-worlders like us, and we're trying to arrange things so we can get at least half the guard duty covered by their own people. One of our guys in uniform is saying something about how surveys indicate the majority of locals don't mind having some off-worlder presence, and we're trying to find the best solution for everyone here, and more research is going to have to be done. I'm not joining in the discussion, I'm sitting in the dirt at the edge of the marketplace, out of uniform, just listening and watching. There'd been a chance of a riot here, but the danger seems to have passed. Now that things seem to have calmed down, the kid who alerted me to the situation and led me here reaches out and picks up the chips - money - that I left beside me on the ground. I put it there for him, but he seemed unsure if it was really okay for him to take it. When he sees me looking at him, he looks scared and smiles at me; I nod, and he grabs the money and runs off.

      Someone with a different face than usual is explaining to a horrified listener that he's learned to shapeshift. The listener asks who he can shapeshift into; the answer is something along the lines of "oh, people I've eaten, people I've physically bonded with, anyone really." The listener wonders, but doesn't ask out loud, what physically bonded means exactly; he's wondering if just seeing someone is enough. "Objects, even." The listener, horrified by all this, asks, "What happens to your personhood?" The shapeshifter says he's removed a piece of himself and keeps it separate in this box, which he's now asking the listener to deliver to his aunt for him for safekeeping. It looks ordinary, and the listener asks if this shouldn't be labeled in some way. The shifter mocks the idea. It's not necessary to know something's significance to keep it safe; often it's the opposite, it's simpler and safer if they don't know.

      A pair of time-travelers who've recently reunited are stopping by a football game they've been to before. They kept meaning to get around to changing this one little moment in time, and now they've got the chance. There's a guy who's been meaning to propose to his girlfriend, and they're about to be featured on the big screen; the first time around, neither of them had noticed they were on camera, and something unfortunate happened afterward. This time around, the time-travelers are sitting just behind the couple, and they poke them and draw their attention to the camera. The guy takes the moment to propose, the girl accepts - but they both seem rather awkward and uncomfortable with all the attention.

      I've been living in a foreign country, working as a live-in tutor, but this is the end of my last day and I'm about to leave. I'm packing up the last of my things and then head downstairs. Downstairs appears to be the house I grew up in, but I'm thinking to myself that this stuff isn't really here, I'm dreaming, and this is only being used as a convenient background, so there's no need to pack it all. Despite this thought, I don't become very lucid; I just focus on sorting out which things only seem to be here because it's a dream, and which things I actually need to pack.

      Julie's patting a big, shaggy old dog, in a room with four guys behind her, talking to her, though I can't make out what's being said. I'm using magic to check in on her from a distance and I don't have a very good connection in this room. She gets up and goes into the corridor, where I can't see her at all, but I recognize the sound of her sister's voice. I realize they're heading outside, which is convenient, there's tons of running water out there I can use. I switch the spell to a bit of water running down the side of the wall, and see that they've gone out into the courtyard and are sitting down on the benches around the fountain - even better. As I move the spell, I remember seeing a post here on DV with a title about learning to control the elements in dreams, which I hadn't read, since thinking of the elements as something you have to learn to use sounded counterproductive. I'm thinking about how helpful water spirits have always been. Again, I don't go lucid; the spell's POV has been moved, and I go back to focusing on the view. They're in the courtyard of a building made of large sand-colored stones, surrounded by potted and hanging plants, and from the fountain I'm looking up at Julie's sister, a woman with long black hair, wearing a black dress. She's saying something about "outlanders."

      I'm with a group of people crossing a desert, when a girl - Julia - arrives in our camp on foot. She'd been following us after we left town, refusing to take her with us. She's an English woman, dressed in Victorian clothing; she looks as if she must be very hot in those clothes, but she's kept struggling along. Then a scene change, just a quick image: Julia walking in the desert on foot, while I and a woman sitting behind me are riding a horse, far ahead of her.

      A fragment: an image of cities and towers in domes surrounded by wilderness, one of which has been heavily decayed, but which appears to rebuild itself as I'm watching; it's related to the breaking of a Sleeping Beauty-style curse.
    10. ASOIAF and OUAT

      by , 12-30-2013 at 11:19 PM
      ASOIAF-based. Jaime's face is covered in burn scars on one side, recently healed; Cersei's pale and has something wrong with her skin, grey spiderweb patterns in small patches on the sides of her face, wearing widow's black with a high collar. Jaime's sitting down next to his uncle - whose face is also scarred, on the opposite side from Jaime, from a cut from a weapon that left a permanent hole through his cheek - and he's saying "Look at us. Three grotesques." He's not including his uncle in that; he means the three siblings, specifically in their role as Tywin's heirs.

      He folds his hands on his chest, and something strikes me as odd about this; I focus on his fingers and feel like there's too many of them. (For reasons that were obvious once I woke up.) He says, "We remember (name of some famous military tactician)" - and then says some quote relevant to their current situation; as a disembodied observer, I'm less interested in the quote and more interested in why Jaime's saying it. I'm thinking that this time period, immediately after all three Lannister siblings had become disfigured, ended up being when they really started to come into their own; that Jaime specifically became serious about various responsibilities that he'd had little interest in up until now, became more philosophical, and wound up distinguishing himself as a tactician.

      Jaime's still talking - he's just mentioned a prophecy which includes a mention of monogamy, and he sneers at the reference, and says something along the lines of 'if only I could get me a good prybar' - he's stuck in an engagement he desperately wishes he could get out of, but which he's resigned to.

      I'm leaning against a wooden fence, wearing a heavy fur coat and digging a bullet out of my side with my fingers, blood all over my hands. It can't kill me, but it's unpleasant. I'm saying to someone, "Wish you hadn't come." Didn't want them to see this.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      Fragments: A photo of a small island containing 6 towers arranged in a hexagon, with a wall around them so that they can't be seen from the water; the photo's accompanied by a note mentioning Florida and Puerto Rico. A girl with a shapeshifter for a brother. The word supranatural. Song lyrics: "Feed on the sickness." Dialogue: "You're familiar. I'm just glad to see familiar-"

      Five teenagers heading to an abandoned playground; three of them are aliens in human form, and they need to go somewhere isolated to temporarily drop the disguise. The other two are humans, their girlfriends, in on the secret. One of them has seen this before, but for the other, Laurie, this is new; although she knew her guy was alien, actually seeing it is a shock. She sits down on a bench attached to a picnic table, and she's thinking about when she slept with him. The other girl, the one who's seen this before, is watching her and feeling sympathetic. The boyfriend comes back over to her and asks what's the matter, except English isn't really compatible with his mouth in this form - he's something vaguely like a very large spider - so "What's the matter, Laurie?" sounds more like "Wassama'ar? Lau-rie?" The other girl comes over and puts her hands on Laurie's shoulders.

      Rumpelstiltskin/Gold has a daughter. She's building a snowman in a park with her mother, along with a large group of other parents and children doing the same thing; Gold's not there, but he's using magic to talk with her from a distance, now and then. She's named her snowman Lefty. It has 3 left arms, one of them with a hook. But while she's not paying attention, one of the other mothers breaks Lefty and uses it as materials for her own kid's snowman. This doesn't come as a surprise. Gold's daughter isn't treated well in this town, she's always ostracized. Gold, hearing about this, starts to encourage her to (do something I no longer remember.)

      While he's encouraging her, Rumpelstiltskin has a flashback: in his castle, with Regina in full Evil Queen mode. He's ranting about some Council which he blames for manipulating him into becoming the 'evil creature' he is today, and which he's now turning against. The rant has a reap-what-you-sow kind of theme. Regina had been on that Council up until very recently and is encouraging him in this; she's the one who informed him how he's been played.

      Updated 12-30-2013 at 11:33 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    11. Altering a DC breaks the dream

      by , 12-28-2013 at 12:38 AM
      A note from an earlier wakeup that I no longer remember: "Rescue mission. 2 people ready to bodily drag this guy away from the queen, not realizing he has his own plan."

      I become lucid. (I no longer remember what was happening before this, if anything.) I'm standing at the bottom of a short flight of steps leading up out of a shop, onto a street, and there's two guys I'm with who are heading up the stairs, and if I want to follow the storyline of this dream I should head up those stairs with them. But given that I've just become lucid, I'm not sure the lucidity is stable enough to last through a scene-changing doorway, so I decide to abandon the storyline. I look around the shop instead, looking at the wooden pillars and ceiling, wondering what I'd like to do. There's a guy working the register who's grumbling, in a bad mood, and we start talking. He's attractive.

      The scene changes; we're elsewhere, having sex, and I can feel everything I do to him as if it were being done to me. He's aware of the sudden scene change, and he's confused, but up for it. His appearance gradually changes, and I become aware that without consciously deciding to do so, I'm changing him to better suit my tastes; now that I've noticed I'm doing it, I consciously encourage specific changes. Everything I change alters gradually, but then suddenly his whole appearance changes in an instant, now a goth/punk look, pale and with half his head shaved; I hadn't intended to do that. I'm thinking that all the gradual changes I was making must have pushed him to some tipping point, and I'm a little annoyed with myself. He's now becoming distressed; I don't think he's aware that he used to look very different, but he's aware something's off. The dream disappears, and I'm in darkness, no visuals, no body, thinking over what went wrong.

      I become aware that I'm lying in bed.
      (False awakening.) I open my eyes: I'm in a dorm, I think of this as a place associated with dreaming. The room's filled with many bunk beds, reminds me of hostels, and although I should have this room to myself, there are a bunch of people here now, new students who've arrived in the night. I try to go back to sleep, although they're very noisy, and I overhear something about framing someone for something as a joke, and something about cats and bad luck. Eventually I remember that I don't live in a dorm anymore, therefore none of this is real and I don't have to be here, so I get up to leave. One of the students tries to stop me, referencing cats and bad luck again, and I get really, irrationally, over-the-top irritated by this - by the idea of a DC standing in my way and wasting my time. I put my hand around his throat - my hand has long claws as I do so - move him out of my way, and walk out the door. (And then woke up.)
    12. Vampires and werewolves

      by , 11-02-2013 at 09:05 PM
      Fragments: A guy preparing to move on, saying "Can I borrow this map?"; a gallery/cafe belonging to an art group called The Future People or something similar; a runway show based on Sleep No More; a newly-made vampire using mantras to learn dreamwalking, using it to watch over a friend, another vampire, who's being held hostage.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm with a group of people stealing some huge metal sphere, but as we're driving off with it, we lose it, and we circle back and argue over where it could be. I catch sight of myself in the rear view mirror and realize one of my front teeth is loose, to the point of falling out. I'm thinking I'm going to have to see a dentist, which annoys me. I notice all the teeth on that side are loose.

      I 'wake up' in my IRL home and go to the bathroom mirror to check my teeth after that dream. I spit out long strings of gritty, bloody material, textured like sand. I'm thinking it's good to get that out.

      This werewolf kid in human form is sitting in a car, tied up, with blood covering his face. There's a blond girl in the seat behind him who didn't believe his stories about werewolves until just now, as a werewolf in wolf form leans in through the door, right into the kid's face. The girl starts screaming.

      I'm dropping off that same werewolf kid at this mansion, and there are three men standing on the steps out front to meet us. I'm saying to them, "Are you all Adrian's?" Adrian's the wolf kid's name, I'm asking if he turned them, which I'm hoping is not the case. And it isn't; they introduce themselves to me, and it turns out the house holds some organization of witches or magicians or something of that variety. They're all very friendly. One of them, this heavyset old queen, mentions that he's single, and I'm amused. When I introduce myself, I add, "And I'd have to be invited in," just so we're all clear.
    13. Rock candy and classified files

      by , 10-27-2013 at 10:05 PM
      Fragment of a previous scene involved a boy covered in words and strange designs related to a demon (or demons). Now, elsewhere, his father's poured something over himself which causes his flesh to melt and transform him into the image of a demon. Another man speaking to him says "Why did you do it?" "Because! I wanted to know his pain!" 'Him' referring to his son. The other man says something to the effect that this was a very foolish thing to do.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      The words "If you could know, wouldn't you?" and a paramedic getting annoyed at a woman who keeps trying to kill herself.

      I'm standing in front of a checkout counter, looking at the rows of rock candy, picking one out and talking about nostalgia with the woman behind the cash register, the vampire who made me. I ask her how far back her memory goes, and she says she still remembers her mother. Talking about some other vampires, we agree that their method is much more sensible than ours, them being able to make more than one vampire, which is something we can't do unless the previous one dies; we can't support more than one at a time.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      Something about a 'Lazarus Door' for resurrection, and fog and some kind of danger.

      A car that won't turn off. The owner's already taken the key out of the ignition, and for a moment I wonder how it's still running, but then I wonder why I thought keys in the ignition have anything to do with turning a car on or off. We take the car into the woods.

      A fragment involving two teenage kids in the woods transitions into a sort of flashback showing the parents of one of those kids, back when they were still alive. They're both some kind of doctors or scientists, the wife has this mass of curly hair, and they're sitting at a table in some kind of office or lab and going over a file acquired by the husband's brother, while he stands across the table from them. The brother is "not like others," which is related to whatever the husband and wife are working on, and he's frustrated by working together with them, he's used to his freedom.

      On the file they're looking at, there's a stylized drawing of two humanoid figures, one with the head of a bird, the other the head of a wolf, and although the husband and wife don't realize this, I'm aware that image represents the two teenagers from the previous scene, who are "not like others" in the same way as the brother. The wife is saying, "But what's really (some word meaning something like 'strange' or 'unusual' or 'notable' or 'attention-grabbing') here is that the bird has a Double Hartford rank, ten pages in. I can't open it up."
    14. Canine creature and railway tracks

      by , 10-23-2013 at 10:02 PM
      There's this strange, vaguely canine creature with a head almost completely covered in bony ridges, giving the impression that it has a skull for a head. It changes shape, sometimes looking insect-like, a vast serpent thing with many legs, and very rarely, it takes the form of a woman. It serves a certain human man who found it on a cliff, and the first time it changes into a woman it freaks him out immensely - he's wondered if maybe the creature is actually a person under a curse, but he's not at all sure which is the true form. At the moment, he's thinking "(creature's name) is the answer" - the moment he thinks that, something else bursts into the room and the creature leaps up to fight it.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      A narrator of a play saying "Young Romeo spies the young witch Barathia in the woods, but..."

      A person I know IRL is annoyed at me over a misunderstanding, and posting passive aggressive messages about it online. I wonder whether I should correct the misunderstanding or just leave it alone.

      I'm standing on a street corner with someone, waiting for the light to change, when I see two people walking towards us, including that IRL person from the previous scene. The light changes just then, and I know I should probably wait for her to catch up, but I hurry across the street instead. I follow the guy I'm walking with down onto the railway tracks, and there's something I really enjoy about walking along the tracks at night. A train goes past.

      Still walking with that same guy, we've reached the trailer where his mother lives. When he knocks on the door, this guy he dislikes answers, some bigot his mother's dated in the past, but last he knew it was over between them, he wasn't expecting him to be here. They say something to each other I can't hear, I can just tell the guy in the door looks angry, and then the guy I'd been walking with turns around and leaves. He's really upset. I tell him to come back with me, we can go spend the holiday at my mother's place, she'll like having us over. At one point he decides to go back and kick that guy out of his mother's house and I physically hold him back.
    15. Werewolf witnessing a car crash and Rumpelstiltskin selling dreams

      by , 10-22-2013 at 08:27 PM
      A cop who'd reported various odd cases passes a strange, monstrous-looking guy driving in the other direction.

      There's a car crash. This werewolf kid had been running along the road, with a couple guys from school following behind him in a car, shouting at him and trying to catch up. This happens a lot - usually the guys in the car give up, he can run a lot faster than they can drive; and usually when they give up one of them sends him some insulting text message instead. But this time, as he was running, he passed that monstrous-looking guy the cop saw, this is someone he knows and someone who shouldn't be in town; and although he's lost sight of the guys from school, there's no insulting text message this time. He's worried. He turns around and heads back, and finds the car that the guys from school were driving has been run off the road into a field, flipped upside down.

      A witch, the werewolf kid's mother, walks up to the car. One of the boys who'd been driving it is dead. The other one's been transformed into a fox. She picks up the fox and talks to him a bit, and tells him she isn't going to restore him.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm setting dreams out on a stall in two rows, they're things that look like something between a bubble and a crystal ball. I call to this guy I recognize, I call them unregulated dreams, or unprocessed, unauthorized, some word like that - the point is there's some official approval process dreams are supposed to go through before they can be sold legally, and these ones haven't been through that process. I say to him that I know he wants them for his store. He says something positive but looks conflicted, and he looks over to Rumpelstiltskin, the guy who brought me here and helped me set up the stall.
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