Carabas

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.

A psychiatrist talking to another doctor about music and musicians, saying this is the type of personality that in these days uses hypnosis to tell themselves "this is my fanciful, flighty dream, that no one lets die." In other words: treating a wild dream as a practical career path, and being convinced to abandon a dream, are both viewed as mistakes.

There's a group of women in a small village, they all wear black and cover their hair, and a while ago they summoned up the Devil. Now he can't leave until a certain thing happens - he's trying to cause that thing to happen, the women are trying to prevent it. The women are talking about another, younger woman, who's either new in the village or has been away, and so isn't aware that this thing must be prevented.

The scene changes to show that Devil, who's been posing as a human man in that village, and at the moment is trying to get home without being caught by the sun and without being seen by his wife, who believes him to be human. He gets out of the building he'd been in by crawling down the side of the wall head first, and sneaks into his own home through the kitchen window, just before his wife enters the room. She finds him there casually drinking a glass of wine, and he mocks her for some supposed addiction problem of hers.

Someone's playing a waltz, I'm looking at LaCroix dancing with a blonde woman. I don't know him (I'm not playing Nick's role this time, though I'm not myself either), but something about seeing him gives me the sense that I'm seeing a path not taken. As I'm watching him and the woman he's dancing with, I become aware that this is Underhill, and a dream; and possibly those are synonyms. (This wasn't lucid at all - the character I was at the time was thinking of this scene as his own dream, not mine.)