Carabas

There's a woman who is retrieving a certain object for me, while I watch in third person. The object is in a cave, in the possession of this large, strange creature who she's speaking to now - she's got two or three people with her. He's willing to make a deal. But after discussing terms for a while, the woman ultimately refuses; she isn't willing to agree to his terms. He accepts this, clearly believing she'll be back eventually - she has no other choice, she needs that object.

She and the others start to leave, but one of the others evidently has their own plan - another woman starts playing a strange kind of music that puts the creature into a kind of trance. She encourages the leader of their group to simply take the object. The leader is conflicted, so the woman with the music does it herself. The creature's trance is deep enough to allow her to get close to the object, but it snaps out of it once it recognizes that they're stealing from it. They run.

The cave is in the center of a sort of maze of tunnels, but although it looks confusing, the tunnels are all interconnected; as long as they keep running in the same general direction, it doesn't matter which tunnel they choose, they'll get out eventually.

They come out of the tunnels into a place that I think of as a certain type of dream, a sort of desert-like place, barren brown rock, with various dreamers here and there like landmarks. In one dream, there's a family in a yard where grapevines are growing; two heavyset old men who are brothers, and two grandchildren playing a little distance away. One brother leans in to say something to the other in a language I don't recognize, and the eyes of the one listening turn all black, which I recognize as an outward sign of the usual effect of staying in this particular type of dream too long. He's the dreamer here, these others are illusions. They see the group passing near the edges of the dream and just watch them.

The group comes across a dreamer they know, a man who the leader of this group is in love with. The others hang back on a ledge overlooking his dream, but she approaches him. He's sitting in front of the ruins of a small house - it's meant to be their house, his and hers, though they've never actually lived together outside of this dream. There's dead bodies lying around outside, things he killed, but too late to save this place from them. When he sees her there, he says, "I tried," with a sort of smile, as if this was inevitable and the only surprising thing was that he tried to save this place at all.

Then he sees the object she's stolen, and there's a shift - he stops paying attention to the storyline of the dream he's in. He asks her why she went to all the trouble of finding that thing, when there's no guarantee that the man she got it for will be grateful for it. There's an association here with trying to help a scorpion - the story of the scorpion and the frog, doing what's in your nature rather than what's in your best interest. She agrees with him, there's no guarantee that this will have the result she wants, but she wants to help the 'scorpion' anyway. She makes a joke about having a weakness for older men - lifetimes older, in this case. Her man doesn't find this funny.

A woman's just rescued two men and they're currently escaping through a series of underground tunnels. She's just shoved one of them up a ladder, to a manhole leading out of this tunnel, but apparently that's her limit - she collapses onto the floor, which is a sort of metal grate over water. I can see blood on her face. The other man says, teasing about the way she's been telling him to just let her handle things this whole time, "This is your plan? To lie here and bleed to death?"

She says, "See, I knew you wouldn't be down with the plan."

He picks her up and carries her up the ladder. I switch to first person, from the POV of the man she'd shoved up the ladder before; we've climbed up to the level of the subway tunnels that are currently in use. We walk along the tracks for a while, and just as we reach a platform - currently empty, though I'm aware people could show up at any moment - we hear a train in the distance. I have to help both of them up onto the platform, he's so tired from carrying her, and I'm thinking about how we each keep exhausting ourselves to pull the other two up. I climb up after them, and collapse on the stairs, exhausted, listening to the train.

A nightmare from over the weekend:

I'm watching a TV show involving something supernatural, and the character in the show is looking at a TV screen with some monster/demon/spirit/etc on the other side of the screen, coming closer, intending to break through. It looks like a white-skinned (literal colorless white) woman with brilliantly red hair and this blazing sparking moving light where its eyes should be. I notice that I can see it not just on my TV but on all the reflective surfaces in the room, and I know it's really trying to break through into the real world. I try holding it back with various protective symbols and calling on various things (not Apollo, curiously, as that's been my go-to nightmare cure recently; possibly it's because this one's not on the theme of darkness like all the others were) but they're not very effective, I have the feeling it's only a matter of time. At the same time, the door at the far end of the hall is open - I came through it earlier - and through it I can see a woman laughing, different from the woman in the screen but I have the feeling they're related. Feeling like I don't have much time, I sprint across the hall, slam the door and lock it. The dream 'camera' zooms in on that image of the lock turning, and closely focuses on the feel of it - and then the scene isn't a nightmare anymore. The thing on the screen is gone, now it's showing the main character saying to his sister, "It's you and me, we're all we've got now."

At some point while I was watching the show (I can't remember whether it was before or after the nightmare part), I thought to myself that watching creepy things every week might impact your dreams.

(Woke up around 5:30, an hour after bed, with a high-pitched ringing in my ears that reminds me a little of TV static, so that was presumably the cause of this. Recall for the rest of the day was terrible.)

Tonight's dreams:

People living in tunnels who have to move due to some imminent danger.

I'm walking through this vast room, mostly filled with a pool of water, cranes are standing in it, and one of the people I'm with comments on the way one of the birds is holding its leg up out of the water, she says she bets it's pointing to something, we should investigate. I disagree, but investigate anyway just to prove the point. I float above the water, and pass various cranes pointing in different directions, meaningless. But at the far side of the room I meet a man, a traveler, who I start talking to and who decides to come with us; he's standing beside this curtained alcove, and through the white curtains I get a glimpse of this beautiful woman sitting on the stone floor in white robes, hair down to the floor, and at first I think she's wearing a mask, something representing the moon, and I think she must be a princess or a priestess. Then I realize that's not a mask, it's her face, beautiful and strange.

3rd person, that traveler and the man who I was in the previous scene are walking down a flight of stairs with a little boy running ahead of them. There's a festival, a sending on of spirits, which are these floating pale lights filling the room, sending them on involves covering them with cloth, and the boy reaches for one of them, but it's acting differently than the others. The traveler says that because this one had been killed, it would be wrong to send her on in that form. The light takes on the image of the little girl it had been, and starts talking to the little boy, calling him Koya, saying he's gotten older. He tells her he's not Koya, sounding frustrated, but one of the older men says quietly to him that she needs him to be the person she's waiting for.