Carabas

In the previous scene, I'd been doing shots with a man who drinks live snakes, one every day. The bartender gives me a dead one, since it's my first time; it'll go down easier. Now I'm walking around half-submerged ruins where I've been before. There's meant to be a door here, though I hadn't seen it the first time around. Now that I'm searching, though, I spot the fold in reality that's hidden it, pull it through so that it becomes solid. It's set in the base of what had been an empty stone arch.

The other side of the door is an in-between place, and I go slightly lucid in order to pause and enjoy the view. It's a stone bridge hanging in space, pale stone, low and sloping walls on either side, and something like coral growing over it in patches. This space has the quality of light seen from underwater, and floating above there's some enormous, amorphous, diaphanous shape, jellyfish-like. It's all very pleasant.

Along the bridge I run into two women with the tails of snakes, mermaid-like, who are frozen in place, and whose verbal words don't match the meanings I hear - the verbal words are friendly, the underlying meaning is to get me to come close enough and stay long enough for them to kill and eat me. I find them pleasant, too; I can't blame them for being hungry, this place sees so little traffic, and I don't intend to stay long enough for them to kill me, so they're effectively harmless.

When I leave the in-between place, it takes me to a scene where an Egyptian woman with a clipboard is consulting a guest list. I have to wait in line behind some snake-haired triplets while a dead human woman talks to the woman with the clipboard, trying to justify why she belongs inside, citing the royal status of her lover.

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.

This kid of no particular gender has just gotten a lift to a particular town, saying "Here's fine," to the person who gave them a ride. They walk into a diner. As they walk up to the counter I'm thinking how feminine they look, in contrast to some previous appearance. They know the waitress, and they greet her in a familiar way; the waitress looks them over but doesn't recognize them and asks if she should know them. They say no. They're happy that she didn't recognize them even after they sort of clued her in that she should.

As they leave the diner, they pass their father coming in. Their father doesn't recognize them either. He mistakes them for being part of some group of out-of-towners who are currently passing through, people he resents, and he complains about that to the waitress when he gets to the counter. The waitress asks if he knew that person leaving, he says no. The waitress says it looks like they knew him - they're still standing outside, looking through the window, staring at the back of his head right now.

Outside, the kid walks past a car. The two guys in the car say something to each other about how that person's too pretty for their own safety, and needs someone to ugly them up a bit - a threat.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man I'm meant to capture - I'm holding a small box which I'm meant to store him in. He's trying to convince me to turn against the people I'm working for, the Head Office. He mentions that they put him in a 7-color-prison - a shield of a particular 'color' prevents the power used by that 'color' from passing through; a 7-color-prison would normally be considered overkill. He mentions this as part of describing to me the cruel way he was treated by the Head Office, trying to convince me that they have to be stopped. But it has the opposite effect; I believe that if he was judged so dangerous as to require a 7-color-prison, I can't trust his words. I put him in the box. His sister was watching this whole thing, but although she's upset there's nothing she can do to stop me - she's an innocent, she's got no power of her own. I hand over the box to a guy from the Head Office who's waiting outside - he's new, young, and looks afraid of the box even as he takes it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've walked into a bath house. This place belongs to a group that I think of with a word that at the time I believed meant the young men of the city protected by Apollo (but the word I actually used was 'lemures,' the restless dead). It's empty and unused, and there are exposed pipes that are turning black. As I look around, I think that this explains the abandoned building next door.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's this kid, high school age, who set out to change himself, improve himself somehow, and I - as a disembodied voice - am asking him what his goal had been when he'd started. He'd wanted to be able to take care of his aging father. He's lost track of that along the way.

The scene changes from a hill outdoors to a classroom - he's popular, admired. This is a recent development, one of the things he's changed about himself. But he doesn't seem happy with the people around him - he seems arrogant, he looks down on them. And he forgets to spend time with his father. I see him with his father at a small table - they joke around with each other and talk the way people who are close sometimes do, with so many in-jokes and understood references to past events that it's effectively their own language. His father doesn't mind that he's so busy. But the kid recognizes that he's lost track of his original goal, and he has to correct his course. He goes to the house that he's been using to change himself, a place that grants wishes of a sort.

Inside the house, which is a Victorian, old and mostly empty except for portraits on the walls, he's greeted by three men. The one who talks to him is short, maybe 5 feet at the most, plain, and with curly red hair. The men ask him to stay and eat and drink himself into a coma with them again. He refuses. They say it's better than the alternative, but let him go on up the stairs. Every time he's come here to change himself, he's had to go a little deeper into this house. The first time, eating and drinking with them was enough.

Upstairs, a creature with a helmet that hides its face and with long metal hooks for hands emerges from the wall. The kid's met this creature before too, and knows how to deal with it. There's a sequence where I see various creatures and people emerge from the wall one by one, and it's implied that the kid deals with each of them in turn, but there's no need to actually watch the process play out since this has all happened before, and how to deal with each one of them is already known. The last one to emerge from the wall is a dashing man, blonde, cheerful, sort of an Errol Flynn-type character, as if he's just stepped out of a swashbuckling flick. They've met before, and they talk for a bit. This man will go up the next set of stairs on the kid's behalf, and arrange for him to get his wish. Other people have done this for the kid before, a different person every time he's visited this place.

My point of view switches to follow the Errol Flynn-type at this point while the kid stays downstairs. In the room at the top of the stairs is a portrait of a little girl - the kid's met her before. The two of them talk, and she emerges from the portrait. Long straight dark hair, a long white dress, and pink satin slippers with rosebuds. She quickly drops the personality that the kid would have been familiar with, and the Errol Flynn-type winds up on the floor in front of her, kissing her feet - fear, not devotion. She states that she collects "shades of the Ampha Berra family" - she opens a panel in her dress, displaying many different shades of bloodstains on the fabric underneath. The Errol Flynn-type won't survive, and she'll change the kid as he asked.

A woman has another woman tied to a tree, and is spreading caviar on her face to attract animals to eat her. She's interrupted by some panic among the people she's working with. People are transforming into creatures - from what they're shouting, I have the impression that it's mostly insects, but when I switch to first person, the only transformation I actually see is a bird emerging from a woman's shoulder and flying away. Mostly I just see panicked people running away.

I'm leaving too, with several others, at a calmer pace. I look down at my bare feet, and notice that the girl whose body I'm possessing has decorated her toenails in Satanic symbols - not just painting them, but actually growing them into horn-like shapes. I comment on this to one of the people I'm walking with, although I'm careful to phrase it as if I'm the real owner of this body, not something possessing her.

Still in that body, I'm at a club with a woman named Pepper. I'm wearing sunglasses - it's night, but I need them to protect myself from the electric lights. I'll take them off when we're outside. We're leaving, waiting by a coat check or something similar, when we're approached by two men, one of them hitting on Pepper, the other hanging back. At first I'm irritated, but then I remember that I'm using a female body at the moment, and I realize the other guy is playing wingman. I'm amused. Since Pepper seems interested enough, we all leave together.

We briefly stop by my IRL house, and when I look in a mirror, I see my IRL self, although my reflection isn't mirroring my actions. Pepper calls for me to hurry up, calling the name of the girl whose body I'm possessing for the first time - Julie. Outside, it's dawn, the clouds are starting to change colors, so I put my sunglasses back on. There's a large car parked outside - wingman's in the driver's seat, Pepper and the other guy are in the back. I get into the passenger seat.

We drive past several rundown-looking houses, and the guy in the back seat asks me if they're haunted, this being my neighborhood. I say sure, a house that looks like that has to have a few ghosts around. I'm not being serious, just humoring him. He goes on and on about the dead, and he's beginning to irritate me - he's attempting to show off his knowledge, but it's not particularly impressive. He says that he can speak to the dead more easily than others because he still has all his canine teeth - I have an image of one tooth behind another, like adult teeth behind baby teeth, though he's an adult. He says they make a point of telling you that they're dead. And he asks me something about dead and dreams - I didn't catch most of the question, too much background noise, but I assumed he was asking me if I'd ever been visited by the dead in my dreams. I say, sure - I may not know much about talking to dead people, but dreams I can do.

Wingman calls my attention away, asking for directions - left or right here? It's not even really a fork in the road, the road we're on just curves right and another road splits away, but I guess it might look confusing if you're not used to it; I tell him to bear right. The guy in the backseat offers me and Pepper beers from a cooler, and asks if we find him creepy, with all that talk about dead people. I say no, the talk about dead people's fine, it's the way you talk about getting me and Pepper to drink that's creepy. Pepper agrees, but she's laughing about it. I was only half joking. Even the wingman agrees - the guy's phrasing is odd, as if he's trying to get us incapacitated. We hit a bump in the road and he spills some of his own beer on the upholstery; I tell him he better clean that up, although I'm not at all sure who owns this car. I'm certain it's not him.

After few non-lucid fragments (one interesting one involving a woman and a mythical being something like a bird and something like a qilin, and his 'missing part', which is in the form of another person this woman knows; otherwise dull), my memory picks up in a scene where I'm already semi-lucid (I'm controlling my surroundings and aware that this control is due to it being a dream, but otherwise have fairly low awareness and mostly go along with the dream storyline). I'm walking through a park with another man, while watching someone I think of as a killer, and I mentally push him toward his next target. However, at the moment I expect him to take out a knife, instead he puts his arm around his target's shoulders and hands him a cigarette.

The killer, the target, and the man I'm walking with are all smoking. I take the cigarette from the man I'm walking with, intending to smoke it myself, but I find the dream won't allow it: first I'm holding nothing, it's back in that man's hand; then when I focus I find I can put it to my mouth and feel the physical pressure of it, but it doesn't resemble smoking. I've had similar problems before, when I deliberately focus on improving the realism of some complex physical sensation, and instead only wind up feeling the sense of pressure accurately, nothing else. I then focus on breath instead of on the cigarette itself, and something interesting happens. I have the impression I can control my surroundings far more easily by working in rhythm with my breathing.

My memory's vague for the next two scenes, while I was focusing on breath - I saw this as a great development. (Dream logic inspired by meditation, maybe. There's no reason I should be breathing in a dream at all. I wonder whether I was actually in the same rhythm as my sleeping body's breath or not.) First I saw something like a shadow play, where the figures moved in rhythm with my breathing, under my control. Then I was walking through halls and passing people who appear to be from America of about 200 years ago, all of whom I find vaguely unpleasant; I still had the impression that I was successfully controlling something through breath in this scene.

I wound up in a room where several people are sitting around a round table, and they call me and someone with me to join them. I start to sit down and an old woman stops me, points me to a different chair. To my left is a man holding what I think at first is a young boy. When I get another look at it, it has the face of an old man, and one of his eyes is that of a cat. This is all very unpleasant. I recognize him as my own cat, S., and I believe he's somehow sick. (S. died a long time ago, but I didn't remember this at the time.) We put him on the table, now in the form of a human-sized cat, and I chant a healing spell over him, mentioning a goddess, exerting dream control. Objects rise off the table and hover in the air, and the other people around the table join in, though by just chanting 'heal!' over and over again. I woke up while listening to them chant.

As Louis, I'm standing next to Lestat and looking down into the hold of a ship. It seems very dark, and I'm remembering a previous incident where he left me trapped somewhere. I tell him, "I've learned," and we're not going to go through that again. He acts exasperated, like I'm being ridiculous, and of course he wouldn't do that to me again, that was centuries ago, don't be so paranoid.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After trouble trying to talk to my IRL father on the phone - I couldn't hear him clearly, but I also couldn't make the phone disconnect - I'm now meeting him at some event. I'm trying to save four or five seats, but that causes trouble with the people next to me; I get the seats I wanted, but the group of teenage guys sitting next to us are annoyed with me now. The one right next to me puts his feet up on the row of seats in front of us at an angle, crowding into my space, until he's practically in my lap. I call him a gay slur, then immediately wonder why I said that; meanwhile, he backs off and looks hurt. One of the other guys with him starts getting into my face, and at one point he suggests that maybe everyone here is dead - "I'm dead, you're dead, we're all dead," in a sing-song tone. I say to him, sure. Land of the dead, dreams, Underhill, it's all the same thing. Everyone around me has a rather unpleasant look on their face after that, and I think it's because I mentioned that this is a dream; then I think that this only happened because I picked up that expectation from other lucid dreamers. In any case, I get up and walk out of the room into the hall.

Thinking about that Underhill reference, I think it's important that I find elves - they're much preferable to the people who think they're dead - and I look for a door, but this building is built on an open sort of plan, with rooms opening onto each other at strange angles, not easy for me to control. I eventually come around to the back of the building and walk out a door, trying to use the door as a portal and thinking about elves, but feeling like I had only limited success. The door opens onto a stable, and there's a car parked here, and a woman in a ballgown getting into the car with a man who's wearing a uniform indicating he works here. On a closer look, he looks rather elfish. I think about hitching a ride.

Bit of a fragmented memory after that - I don't wind up getting into the car, but me and that guy walked out of that stable and into the woods, where we had some encounter with someone else. False awakening after that: waking up in an unfamiliar bedroom, I get my journal out of my backpack beside the bed and start writing down a dream about a (nonexistent) vampire movie involving that woman in the ballgown; as I was writing I believed it to be based on a real movie.

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.

A powerful old dead woman who I'd known when she was alive has possessed a young girl I know, a friend's kid, in high school. She's essentially holding the kid hostage in order to make some demand of me, and I'm refusing her. Another girl, a friend of the possessed one, can't understand why I won't just give in to the dead woman's demands and save her friend, she's very distraught. There's some weapon or power source that used to be sealed away in the ground, and I'm threatening to reseal it, so the dead woman won't be able to access it. She thinks I'm bluffing, because that'd be bad for me too, but I'm willing to do it. She says to me that I don't appreciate the strain she's putting this body under; she's using magic constantly at a level that may seem reasonable to me and her, but which is unsupportable for a kid like this, she'll burn out if it continues.

As the same character, I'm walking across a high school gym, intending to get some coffee. It's after school hours, and there's a group of kids here playing basketball. They keep disappearing and reappearing, teleporting short distances. I'm thinking of it as one of those games with rules that only kids understand, and thinking how great it is to see them given a chance to just come together and play around like normal kids. In the hall on the other side of the gym, I meet up with a guy in a suit and trenchcoat who's also watching the game. He says something along the lines of "I can't believe you (pl.) were able to find so many."

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.

I'm using a tea cup to catch rain that contains some kind of power.

There's a very important (possibly sacred) torch that I was meant to do something with (I have a vague impression of something involving the sky) but, while standing at the edge of a cliff, I've managed to drop the torch, and I'm watching it fall into the waves and go out. "Oops."

A group of five people in a car, on a road trip. They stop at a sushi place and one of them goes off to try to pick up a woman he saw outside. Two of the others say something, sheepish, about how they've been hitting the 'family' note a little too much on this trip, it must have freaked him out, and now he's proving to himself how unattached to them he is. They don't mind.

There's a portrait, tall and very narrow, of a woman standing in front of a Buddhist grave marker. The woman who was the subject of the portrait is standing in front of the painting, looking at it. A strange reptile-like creature steps out of the painting of the grave, and I know this is her dead son.

There's a memory gap - next fragment I remember clearly is in a dark space with three exits, an entrance to an afterlife, and the woman's talking with her son, who now looks more or less as he did in life - human - although there are shadows clinging to him in a shape suggesting a tail, and he's standing halfway in one of those three exits, with flames around his feet. They'd been saying something about how that exit's not for her, after she tried to hug him and he stopped her. She says, "Mommas hurt, darling. Men die." Then she vanishes.

There's a woman having a sort of Cinderella transformation - rags to ballgown - but she doesn't seem in the least bit impressed by it. I'm vaguely annoyed at her lack of reaction, but on with the show. She enters a throne room and asks something of the king, who says "But first answer me this. When did you become the Evil Queen?" She doesn't know what to make of this. She says, "I'm not a queen." "Your father is dead," says the king - her father was also a ruler, she became queen the moment he died. The king here holds out a collection of brown papers. He says it's something her father had been putting together the night he died - last night - something urgent, something for her, since she'd been away on this mission.

I'm looking at a book containing a moving image representing En - a small boat on a river, stylized lotus flowers, a lot of gold paint. The color's faded and chipped in places, but still beautiful.

A musician's writing a letter to a friend of his, trying to comfort his friend, and he's thinking about how limited words are, how it can't replicate the sort of things he'd do if he was there in person, even the simple act of putting on a familiar tune. He goes to the gramophone and puts on the tune he was thinking of, and sits to listen to it before he continues writing, thinking that perhaps the feeling he gets from this song will come across in his words.

A couple. A blonde woman is laying out cards on the floor in five columns, representing the guy's past relationships; he's lying on his back next to her, not looking. She observes that his two longest relationships followed the exact same pattern: lasted the same amount of time, ended the same way, with the same warning signs beforehand. She says based on that pattern, if (event) happens at (time into relationship), he might as well bail immediately.

One of the shorter columns is unique in that every card represents things going well, and she wonders why he'd split up with that guy. Privately, she's realizing that he ended things shortly after he'd had some non-romantic encounter with her, and she's wondering if she was the reason for the split. But out loud she just points out how odd it looks that they broke it off considering it seemed to be going so well. He teases her, saying "yeah, I'm starting to miss a bit of swordplay" - part of the joke here is that the guy in question also did something involving literal swords - and she hits him, lightly, on the arm; then she puts the cards down and straddles him, and says something along the lines of "Not like that. I mean, you had a different dynamic than you did with anyone else. Not in a good way. I mean, I liked him, when he was alive - oh, god." He's laughing at her. What she'd been trying to say by 'not in a good way' was that although the two of them clearly got along, they hadn't seemed really emotionally attached, but she's stumbling over this conversation. He assures her, yes, the guy in question had indeed been great when he was alive - teasing her about her reluctance to sound disrespectful of the dead - he was lovely and wonderful and all that, and she's also lovely and wonderful and all that. There's a lot of laughing from both of them over how ridiculous this conversation is.

Part of a castle has been blocked off to the public for a photoshoot I'm working on. There's a woman hanging around just outside the blocked off area, watching us; she's very pretty, with long red hair under a hat. It starts raining a little and we take a break, and I go over to smoke by the entrance. That woman comes over to me and we start talking. After a while, she tells me she's the daughter of someone I know, someone I watched die in hospital just yesterday. Thing is, in the present, that daughter is just a young child; I have a mental image of seeing her, as a child, in the hospital. There's something to do with timelines or the dead going on. I don't believe her. She tells me she's wanted to see me, and implies that in her own time, I'm dead. Some other people from the photoshoot come over then and distract me for a moment, and then the woman is no longer there.

I can't get a couple light switches to work, and realize this is a dream. (Noteworthy: that's a common dream sign for me, but up until now, it only happened if I went to sleep so early that it was still dark IRL, usually around 5 AM. This time I went to sleep at a normal hour, after sunrise.) I have a false awakening: I'm in my IRL bed, but am fairly sure I'm still dreaming. I wonder what to do with this - I look up at the ceiling and consider removing it and going flying. However, I'm distracted by the sound of a crash, and I see my computer (an old desktop model which I don't actually own IRL) has fallen over and broken. I forget about dreaming and get irrationally stressed about having to replace the computer. (I suspect there may have been an actual noise IRL that affected the dream.)

Based on F/SN, a bunch of photos showing the future of various timelines. I focus on one showing Saber in a park by a lake, with skyscrapers in the background, and it becomes the setting of the dream; someone who I at first mistake for Archer is teasing her, and he winds up falling in the lake. He's wearing some sort of uniform that I associate with the Mage's Association, and which I think of as being 'Saber's colors' (it's blue and gold), marking them as partners; then I realize he's an older Shirou, not a version of Archer.

I'm approaching a dance in the woods together with someone I know, and I recognize the song playing - Bottom of the River, Delta Rae. We walk over to three woman sitting around a fire, to speak with them. I think of the Fates and the Graces.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm Shirou, and Tohsaka's just walked away from those three women from the previous scene, and before I follow her, one of those women says to me, "Nothing like that to make your magic full of fear." I'm thinking that I have just enough awareness of Archer's memories to know there's something I don't want to remember; remembering it would cause me to repeat the same choices he made, and that's not what this timeline's for.

I'm reading an article about genius, stating that long-term caffeine use has disruptive effects on the brain.

I'm trying to buy something but I've upset the woman working the counter somehow and she's refusing to ring me up, or any of the other customers for that matter. She goes so far as to call the police. I literally offer her the shirt off my back - a basketball jersey, something that's worth something to her. We strike up a conversation, and she winds up being friendly.

I'm traveling, and attending this formal dinner. I'm seated next to this older guy who occupies some position I'm very respectful of, something to do with myth and ritual, and he asks me about what my legacy would be. I'm not a native speaker of whatever language we're using but I believe the word he used has a connotation to do with children, so I talk about being an uncle to my IRL sister's kids. (She doesn't actually have any yet.) He and the people around us seem disappointed by that answer - as if it's an acceptable answer to the question, but an indication that I'm not the kind of person they hoped I was. Then, unsure if I'm translating this accurately, I change my answer to "if the stories I tell are remembered." Now he seems much more approving.

Fragments from earlier: Taking a bunch of tourists to see a show claiming to represent old Aztec traditions, stepping back from the show while they watch, and standing next to an ancient Aztec dead man, listening to him mock the show. 3rd person, a magician who traveled and was misinterpreted a certain way by the people he met became known as 'king of kings' (my first waking association with that was Ozymandias).

I'm drinking with a dead soldier from ancient Greece, and we started out talking about Dionysus and Hades but we've gotten around to talking about Chiron in comparison to Buer, and he complains to me that Chiron's been greatly misrepresented, which he blames on a line in Homer that people take out of context. He says that Homer had some nerve to characterize the guy as overly fastidious while he was killing everything "from here to Salamacia" - meaning some campaign they'd been on together, and I see the soldier's memory of Chiron washing the blood and dirt off in a river, stripped to the waist and with so much blood on his hands it looks nearly black. He's human; extraordinarily tall, but human.

3rd person dream following a character shortly after his mother's funeral. This man believes he's just been 'granted a power to evade death.' He's currently out riding with the woman he used to be engaged to and his closest friend, who is now pursuing that woman himself. Watching the two of them together, he decides there's nothing here for him and turns his horse away, thinking about traveling.

Years later, the same character is white-haired and recording his memoirs, dictating them to a recording device. He's describing that 'power or curse of evading death' and his wife, who'd been listening, rolls her eyes. She's heard that story of his before. Losing interest, she leaves the room. In his dictation, he's just started describing the moment he was summoned to his mother's deathbed, to take the last of her life and inherit her power. As he speaks, his dead mother appears in the room. This is something he's used to, although he's the only one who can see her, and although she hasn't appeared very often recently. She dislikes watching him let himself grow old. But he's only allowing himself to age as long as his wife is alive, so they can grow old together; after she passes away, he intends to go back to feeding off other people's lives. Still dictating, he remembers the last words of advice his mother had given to him on her deathbed: 'In this life, do not just feed. Remember to dance.'