Carabas

Started out based on the Mulan musical that played in Tokyo a few years back, but the storyline started following the general, who no longer looks anything like the actress who played him, and now the dream has lost any theatre aspect. Now the general is the emperor's son, and has a name which translates to "divine," and has been summoned before the emperor. The emperor is blind, and from his eye sockets there are two strange things - flat, rectangular, worm-like things, something parasitic or symbiotic. Each has a small, white circle with a mark in the shape of ᛣ, and the general is aware that those marks can open and extend something that latches onto eyeballs and rips them from their sockets, he's seen it done before. The dream had been in 3rd person ever since I lost track of the theatre framing, but as I examined the things I shift to 1st person, the pov of the general, who is disgusted and afraid of the things.

When his father dismisses him, he indicates that he should leave through a door beside the throne instead of the way he came. It's a small opening, extremely low to the ground, so that a man would have to crawl to get through it; it's designed to shame people, to stress rank and obedience. The general gets down on his knees before it, then hesitates and says "Father" - at which the emperor lurches forward, placing the parasite-things close to the general's face. It's not a threat, just an attempt to get a 'look' at him using the parasite's senses, which 'taste' the air, but it's an inhuman-looking motion, and the general drops whatever he was going to say in favor of getting away as quickly as possible. But he/I have a difficult time moving through the door as quickly as I'd like, and I realize it's because I'm becoming aware of my body lying motionless in bed.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm leading some team climbing a mountain covered in snow, explorers, the first to climb this mountain in history. But the men keep seeing something, some shadow figure, and insist there's someone already here. I dismiss this as nonsense. But now that the peak itself is in sight, I can clearly see there's somebody up there.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

For the past few dream scenes, I've been in a car with my IRL sister S. and two women, a couple, witches; and we've been lost. We were lost on the road, we were lost driving through water, we were lost and mistakenly in the wrong house, we were lost and running from that house's owner, and now we're lost and we've stumbled across a street where every house seems to be having a party, spilling out into the street, blocking our way. They invite us to join the party, and while I want to just get back to the road, the others want to stay. I spot someone in the crowd, some minor celebrity, and I'm intrigued enough to agree, we check out the party. I talk to the minor celebrity briefly and find him disappointing.

Later, inside one of the houses where the party's going on, not much liking the company and wanting to get a move on, I've been cornered by some guy who's much taller and larger than I am and who seems to have mistaken me for a woman. He asks me if I believe in promises, and starts hinting very strongly that he believes we knew each other in a past life and are destined to be together. Yikes. I manage to shake him off and go find my sister in the kitchen, tell her that it's time we leave; the witch couple we were driving with join us and say "Um, we should go. Now." The lady of the house is in the kitchen with us and at this point she probably thinks we stole the silver, but we get out of there - through a window that opens onto the porch on the side of the house, rather than going back through that party to get to the door. As we're climbing out the window, one of the witches says something explaining to me and my sister why we've got to leave in such a hurry, something involving some guy who'd introduced himself as 'Psych', and I suspect it's that same creep.

Out on the porch, one of the witches looks behind us and gets a horrified look on her face. My sister asks what it is, and the other witch says oh, she just saw Ben - her ex, who's dead - don't look, just go, get off the porch, now. The porch is narrow enough that we have to go single file, I'm the last, and as each one gets off the porch and onto the street and looks back, they look increasingly horrified - Ben's a minor nuisance, their expressions indicate Ben was just a symptom of something more going on here. I feel something strange on my back, at the base of my spine, and my motions seem too slow; I become aware that it's because I'm waking up.