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    1. Uncreatively named higher powers and an iron fence

      by , 10-22-2014 at 07:00 PM
      There's a war going on between two factions working for two different higher powers - one called the Authority, the other called the Dark Ones. At the moment, I and two other people are untying a woman from a chair, she's been held captive. She's dressed like a candy striper. One of the people helping to untie her is a woman dressed in an old nurse's uniform; the other one is a man I've been working with. I'm explaining something that this man and I recently discovered - the Authority and the Dark Ones are the same entities. They're not divided at all, it's the exact same entities appearing to us under different names, playing us against each other. It's my intention to end the war by eliminating their influence over us.

      The woman in the nurse's uniform has this look of hate as I'm talking about all this. In the end she says, "I hope you win," but it sounds like a curse. She runs out into the street and throws herself backward onto a spiked iron fence, impaling herself. The woman we'd been untying screams "Laura!", the nurse's name. People come rushing out of the building next door, calling emergency services.
    2. Fallen angels

      by , 09-23-2014 at 06:25 PM
      There's a group of people camped out in a field. One of them's a veteran of multiple wars, very old now, and she's berating a young man who wants to leave. He's frightened; he's heard of traps, innocuous-looking pieces of paper which will curse the reader to be killed, or else to kill others until you die.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      A mother and daughter in the center of a crowded throne room, with a royal baby (not either of theirs) in a basket. The daughter quickly steps to the basket and announces that like a sister she'll tend to the child with loving care. This is a calculated move. She wants it to appear to the crowd as if she's being a good loyal subject, and to appear to her mother as if it's part of their secret political power grab. The truth is closer to the former - the daughter has no interest in ruling and is trying to spare the child's life without making her mother suspicious of her.

      Fragment - I'm someone describing the differences between those who fell more recently, the Grigori, and the first fall "for pride or love or whatever we're calling it now."

      False awakening. I'm writing down a previous scene. In it, I'm someone in the lobby of a place where I work, and Satan's just walked in to see me. There were a number of things I wrote down as being off about his appearance - the last thing I wrote was that there was snow still on his shoes - he'd become human. I'm kind of torn about how to react to this. On the one hand, this is bad news for me - whatever happens to him affects me too. But on the other hand, this is hilarious.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm someone in an abandoned warehouse, talking with a fallen angel about his plans. We don't get along. As he's talking, a portion of the roof caves in, and through the hole I can see a human woman up there who's been listening to us. He knows her; she's part of his plan, but she's been opposing him. They have a brief shouted conversation; he says, "You won't hurt me, Jane."
    3. Horn, hourglass, castles

      by , 05-23-2014 at 08:47 PM
      An earlier semi-lucid fragment - I'd been riding in a car someone else was driving, they took a turn much too fast and swung wildly into the next lane, and I was thinking to myself with some annoyance about how ridiculous dream driving can be sometimes.

      There's two women locked up in a circular stone room with no apparent doors and a ceiling so high it can't be seen, like a well or a small tower. I get the impression they're a couple. They're both blonde, one with darker hair and wearing purple, the other with hair so light it's almost white. Hovering around the one in purple is this sort of little glowing gold ball; she's leaning towards the other one, who's unconscious, but who starts to softly glow when that glowing ball gets close to her. They're rescued by people who break through the wall - an old woman and several people I think of as Hunters who've been doing something with a fountain in the center of the room on the other side of the wall. The old woman looks at the hovering glowing ball and calls to the Hunters. "Got one more for you - two!" she adds when she sees that the unconscious woman is also glowing. As they get both the women free, the woman lifts this fancy white horn and says to the woman in purple, "It's yours." And then she quotes a riddle or poem or something similar that led them to this horn - "With the wit, the way." Wit turns out to have been a pun on wet, something to do with that fountain in the other room, and it's those two women locked up who'd figured it out.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      There's a man trapped inside something like an enormous hourglass, tied to a chair in the bottom half. It's slowly filling with this black liquid. I'm following this from the POV of a man outside the hourglass, watching. This is something like a form of brainwashing - the man in the hourglass is on the other side of some conflict, and a serious threat, and we're turning him to our side. But as a 3rd person observer, I'm aware this is going to backfire; we seriously underestimated how insane that man was to begin with, so making him loyal to us doesn't actually mean he won't still be a threat to us.

      Still as that same character who'd been watching the hourglass, I leave the room and go to meet a woman I work with for lunch. But just before we start eating, someone bursts in and stops us - the food's been drugged, something connected to that man I'd left in the hourglass. We leave with that person who burst in, and as we walk he's saying, "We all talk about the war, but does anyone remember what it was about?" We don't. He explains something to do with Skins - the gold or silver markings on our skin that remind the 3rd person observer side of me a little of circuits. Mine are gold, the woman I'm working with has silver; in earlier times, we'd have been on opposite sides of the war. We find this an uncomfortable concept.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm a young man walking around our castle at night with a girl from a visiting family. We're supposed to get married sometime in the next year or so if negotiations keep going well. Neither of us are supposed to be out of bed right now, but we both were sneaking around on our own and happened to meet up. Right now we're hiding behind a door, watching the leaders of our families talking in the next room. I'm thinking that the colors they're wearing make them both look like they're part of the same family; my family's colors are red, gold and black, but right now our patriarch's only wearing black, except for the sword pin at his throat, which I think of as "hardly red at all" - a dark red, nearly black.

      There are two women sneaking around a castle at night. They'd been intending to escape and then come back when the vampires are asleep and destroy them, but they've just now realized that the vampires never sleep; and on top of that, they've just realized that one of the vampire women here is the exact same woman written about in Quincey's journal. Reading this journal is the thing that made them realize their hosts were some kind of monsters - they don't know very much about vampires at all except what they've read in this journal. So it's a shock to discover that the women in this castle don't age or die, and the idea that the monster in Quincey's journal still exists makes them feel like they can't win. At some point Ephesia is mentioned, a woman's name, though I can't remember whose. One of them suggests giving up on their plan, since it seems hopeless, and tries to convince herself that becoming one of them wouldn't be so bad.
    4. Amah

      by , 03-21-2014 at 10:02 PM
      An elephant is making a request of a king or a god, and saying "I am only a lowly guardsman." As he says this, I see him kneeling on a battlefield, wearing armor.

      Next to the elephant, there's a man speaking with a woman from the opposing army, each with their own soldiers behind them. The woman goes by the name or title Amah. She's very beautiful and very prideful, smiling and casually resting her elbow on the shoulder of the man next to her, her servant. This is the second time they're meeting like this. The first time, she made some demand or threat which was fulfilled. This time, her servant announces that she's come to 'kill your wives' or something similar, something about causing the deaths of women at least. He says something flowery about those she's killed in the past, and how the great sympathy she has for these women is the reason she does not permit them to speak her real name. Amah says, "It would murder me. I could not stand it." She's still smiling as she says it.

      She suddenly slumps forward and falls to the ground. The man she'd been speaking to has simply whispered her name.

      Updated 03-21-2014 at 11:39 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    5. Alice and the moon

      by , 02-16-2014 at 12:38 AM
      Alice (of Wonderland) kneels down and waits. I can see movement behind her, something approaching, but I can't see it clearly from this angle, it's hidden behind Alice, until it gets close enough to be standing right behind her: a man and a woman, something off about their eyes. I'm aware they're here to take her to (Purgatory or the Underworld, something like that). I can hear music, a tune that reminds me of vaudeville.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      Three people from a motorcycle gang, driving down an empty highway surrounded by fields of tall dry yellow grass, passing a billboard where the ad's been scraped off. I can only remember vague fragments of the previous scene, but it had been focused on the leader of these three, and he'd been trying to escape something - fate, his role in life, something like that. The transition to this scene means he's failed to escape. He's thinking something about a murder that happened in the past. There are police ahead of them, waiting for them.

      POV switches to those 'police', although they look more like military. Weapons are being distributed, grenade launchers, and one of them exclaims over the model, he's very knowledgeable about it and excited to be using it - he says his father or uncle used this same model in a certain war. Another cop, one who'd been in that war himself, says something sarcastic, along the lines of "Did he? That's nice. Did he bring it home for you to play with?" The cop who'd been excited goes quiet, says "Well, no, but..." The cop who'd been in the war doesn't like hearing it talked about by people who weren't there, feels strongly about those memories being something you should keep apart, not bring home to your family. But he starts talking about it now - he says, "Good war, (he says a year). A single man could've turned the tide by pledging his country to one power or another. And even a warrior likes to hear that."

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm in the moon kingdom from PGSM. (One of my lucid goals is to travel to the moon - I suspect that inspired this non-lucid.) Chibiusa's here, she grew up here, and I'm thinking, wait, how can Usagi and Mamoru's daughter be living in this time period?

      The scene changes with that thought. In the present, on earth, Mamoru's working as some kind of private security, wearing a suit, standing with other security around a limo that's stopped in the middle of the road, having some kind of confrontation. He's in trouble here, and he's aware Usagi's in trouble elsewhere and he won't be able to reach her to help her. He's holding something small and black, and he's remembering when it was given to him by a man who told him some words to memorize in order to use it, to transform. I'm thinking, the fact that he had to memorize the words indicates that he wasn't Endymion at all, he was simply playing Endymion's role, filling in for him; this was also indicated by the uniform that he transformed into, which resembled Endymion's but was much darker, almost black, unlike the real Endymion's much lighter blue. Now that he's trapped, he passes that black object along to one of the other men working security with him. He starts to tell that man the words he must memorize, but as he starts to say them, the man taking the black object finishes the words himself, he already knows them - indicating that, by chance or rather by fate, that black object has finally been passed on to its real owner. Endymion's true, light, uniform appears on him, and he leaves to find Usagi, flying through the air - which I have an incredibly bad feeling about. The real Endymion isn't necessarily a good person for Usagi to know.

      The other people Mamoru was with have left the scene, Mamoru's now kneeling in the street, surrounded by cops with a misunderstanding, and a police detective is holding a sword to Mamoru's throat. One of the cops calls the detective away - there's some order over the radio that means both that they're needed elsewhere and that Mamoru isn't guilty of whatever it was they think he did and should be released. The detective is extremely reluctant to follow this order, he doesn't want to let Mamoru go. The cop relaying the orders from the radio phrases those orders in a way that praises the detective's work up until now and stresses how much he's needed, and finally the detective releases Mamoru and he and the cops all get into their cars and drive off, towards a bridge.
    6. 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.
    7. Dracula, church ruins and running water

      by , 12-16-2013 at 10:45 PM
      Grayson's come across Mina and Harker in some danger and got them out of it by offering them a ride home in his carriage. Now they're discussing a message he's sent someone to deliver, and Mina's objecting to sending this messenger into danger on their behalf. Grayson asks what danger she's referring to. Why, the war, of course. They're not far from the battlefield; that's part of why they were so grateful for his rescue. Throughout this conversation, Harker has become increasingly uncomfortable and is beginning to regret accepting the ride. Mina, sitting across from the other two, is noting that Grayson's in shadows so dark he can't be seen.

      Lucy in a different carriage, with Lady Jayne riding outside. Jayne says to her, "Don't you think you had better go?" "No. My choice is to stay." "Atta girl."

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      A species of small creatures which, as they grow up, take on masters and will instinctively fight the servants of other masters if left alone together - which often results in fighting their own siblings, sometimes to the death. Later, when they grow into masters themselves, they see the other side of that, with the responsibility and grief of killing. (The dream logic was inconsistent about who was actually the one doing the killing, the servant or the master. The main point was violence without thought of consequences in the young, servant version, contrasted with the grief, guilt, and sense of responsibility in the older, master version, and a sense of circular time or mythic time, coming back around to the same event but from a different perspective.)

      I'm breaking into the ruins of an old and isolated church, with a cat, carrying a candle; I climb up the stone wall and up onto the second floor, which is mostly open to the sky. However, just as I get there, I see the property owner returning home across the fields in the distance, in a dogsled. I extinguish the candle I was carrying, but it's too late, he's already spotted the light and is turning this way. I climb back down the wall and run for it. However, I'm on foot and he's got dogs; my odds of outrunning him aren't good.

      We cross a river, and the scene changes to 3rd person; now it's a group of children who are running from him, and they dive beneath the water and stay there. As a 3rd person observer, I'm thinking about legends of creatures that can't cross running water, and about the way the scene changed when I hit the water, the river acting as an event boundary.

      A party where I've been looking for a woman, a dressmaker, known for a dress that resembles the sea. I find her, an elderly woman, and I ask her about that dress, which pleases her, but which isn't the subject I really want to talk to her about. We're interrupted by another woman, someone I know, and the two of them go off to talk in another room, behind a closed door. I eavesdrop from just outside. I hear them mention a Joanna - a dead woman who I keep hearing about, someone who left a widower behind, someone powerful. I'm caught listening, and so go away without hearing the rest of the conversation.

      Rumpelstiltskin. I have some guests, people here to do business, but I've just turned away from them and am talking to Belle, showing her the potion I'm preparing and saying "It's designed to attract." The scene switches to 3rd person, and I note that Rumpelstiltskin loses the showman routine he uses with the others when he talks to Belle; I'm thinking something abut the length of time Belle's been around and how they interact, which is something that Rumpelstiltskin is feeling a little bewildered about. He heads up to the tower to get in touch with someone through some magical means. "Don't go listening," he says to Belle. She's indignant - of course she wouldn't!

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      Based on Carmen - she's dancing, I'm sitting in a chair watching her and thinking about the past, about killing for her, feeling sober. (This felt like it was a variation on the servant creatures from before - as if there was something I was trying to work out but wasn't quite getting, so the dream was rephrasing.)
    8. Photos in Italy

      by , 10-12-2013 at 07:11 PM
      A brief nightmare - I'm at my mother's IRL house, the lights won't turn on, and this is dangerous. I consider whether this is a dream, but decide it isn't. I'm thinking that dreams and waking life feel different, and while dreams might feel real, you can't mistake waking life for a dream. So I don't do any reality checks. I do, however, do my anti-nightmare Apollo trick, but I feel a bit self-conscious about it, since I'm awake, and in my mother's home, and she'll be able to hear me. Afterwards I realize it was just one burned out light bulb, and there's no danger. Outside, it's incredibly bright, even though it's night - the sky is clouded over, and I wonder whether it's a full moon, but it seems too bright even for that. There are incredible gusts of wind, very inviting. My mother comes down to the front door where I'm standing and asks if something has flooded - there are occasional waves splashing over the wall at the edge of her yard. She says she used the incorrect settings on something, and it's caused things to get out of alignment, putting stress on the whole house that will eventually break it down. She needs to go outside and correct the settings. There's a ram standing in the street, looking at us; I point it out, and she says they always come in pairs. A herd walks down the street, from the same direction the waves came from.

      I'm online, reading a conversation between several people, with one of them promising to scan some information about Renfield.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm taking a train from Rome to Boston, going over a map and coordinating plans.

      There's a guy on his way home from a war, making what he thinks of as a 'deal' with whoever's listening, God or whatever else - he just wants his childhood neighborhood to have survived unscathed. If that place was bombed, what was the point to any of this?

      That same guy is at a party, there's talk about political factions, blaming the faction that 'has the princess's ear.' Although this guy doesn't realize it, the princess in question is there at the party, disguised.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      A rich family is discussing inheritance issues after their father's death. His illegitimate daughter from one of his many affairs, a very sweet girl, is the source of a lot of jealousy.

      I'm walking down a street, and through the cracks in a fence I can see statues and ancient temples. I find a way through the fence and walk around, admiring them, wishing I had my camera with me; then I remember the camera on my phone and start taking pictures.

      I walk into a building with a walkway overlooking vast, dark spaces, and I take pictures of those, lighting them up, resulting in beautiful abstract images made up of points of light. One of the spaces overlooks an opera company rehearsing, and there are a few people sitting around here watching, they don't welcome my presence but they don't stop me from taking pictures either. Another space contains a field of snow, and there's a beautiful woman lying there, dead or unconscious, beside some broken wooden boards. As I'm taking photos of her, I say "Nostradamus" - the name of the opera being performed. A woman next to me, one of the ones who'd been watching the opera, asks me how I knew its name; I say I hadn't known until I said it. The woman lying in the snow wakes up, and climbs up onto the walkway. I offer her my arm if she needs it, she looks unsteady - I sound overeager to myself. She doesn't take my arm.

      Outside, the woman asks me how long I'll be staying in town. I'm thinking that I'm stuck here until I can find my portal home; out loud, I say it'll be a few days and I let her know what part of town I'm staying in. She reminds me of a promise I'd made to her, something involving her uncle, and she walks away.

      I go to see her uncle, walking through the streets of a city in Italy, old alleys where cars are off-limits. I want to find a place to stop and go through my phone, delete some photos, make room for more, but most places are closing at this time of day. Finally I find a bookstore that's still open and I sit down. On my phone, I'm looking at a menu for creating shortcuts on your phone, arranged in the shape of a stylized butterfly.

      Updated 10-12-2013 at 07:16 PM by 64691

      Categories
      nightmare , non-lucid
    9. Fragments

      by , 09-15-2013 at 07:09 PM
      I'm standing in a clearing filled with men in armor and horses, near some trees. The guy I'm talking to is psyching himself up, saying he can't get excited about fighting unless it's (the particular people we're about to fight) - with anyone else, why bother? I refer to Alexander, the man we're following, as "the undiminished king."

      A woman in a modern setting believes she's being punished, looking up at the sky and addressing her father the storm god, "What have I done?" - but what she saw as a punishment was meant as a message, about a friend who she's separated from.

      1st person, as a wolf, a woman stroking my jaw and debating out loud whether to leave me in that form.

      A teenage boy having guilt-induced hallucinations about a man he'd hurt, seeing him with a face burnt black and empty holes for eyes, I can see the wall behind him through the holes.

      A book with an illustration of a red circle covered in black markings has gotten soaked and the markings are washing away, and the boy who damaged it is apologizing, but the girl who owns it is saying it wasn't the real deal after all, if it would run.
    10. A bounty, a murder, and an imaginary gun

      by , 09-13-2013 at 06:46 PM
      Hypnagogia: A man's voice laughing, deeply unpleasant.

      A man and a woman in what looks like an interrogation room, although he is technically free to go at any time, and the organization this woman belongs to isn't exactly law enforcement. There's a woman, not human, something else, something dangerous, who's coming for this man - she's not a danger to him, but she is to everyone else - and the people here need to know his story before she gets there. He says to the human woman in the room with him, "And the bounty? P.Big's?" P.Big being the name of the larger of the two bounties he'd recently turned in - these people had confiscated his reward money, along with the rest of his belongings. That's the main reason he's still here. She says, "You can have it back. In exchange for the war story."

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      A man waiting for a tow truck finally hears a vehicle pull up outside, goes to the window to look. There's a woman in a firefighter's uniform entering the house through the back door, without him noticing, and she watches as the man is killed by a wire around his throat. The two men who killed him pick up his body, standing right next to her but not looking at her or acknowledging her in any way.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      There's a boy with an older woman - possibly his grandmother, though relatively young for it, someone who doesn't live with him but who stopped by today - he's crouching in a corner with a weapon, listening to what he believes is someone with a gun in his home. He's eager to face them. Footsteps approach the door, the door opens - it's the gardener/maid, and she's carrying a leaf blower, not a rifle. She makes the usual small talk and walks on. His grandmother says to him that she is not going to ask what he was thinking, she is not going to dignify this by discussing it, but she wants him to think about what just happened.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      Last dream was just fragments, but had similar themes from the earlier dreams: something about a boy, an older woman who knows better than him, and a war.
    11. Fate, queens, and fragments

      by , 08-31-2013 at 07:54 PM
      A man talking about an opponent: "He had fallen on the might of (something), and he himself had fallen back and disappeared." The 'he' in question is described to me as "one of Fate's creatures," Fate being our enemy, but this guy is on a completely different level from those we've been fighting up until now. The man speaking is trying to get through to me just how serious a threat this guy is. He says this guy participated in "sanguinary" interstellar wars (that's the second time this month I've had dreams emphasize war with blood-related adjectives; seems redundant, but the dream seems to think that changes the meaning significantly), and in "civilized eras" he attached himself to prison transports, weapons transports, and managed to gain influence through this.

      (Woke up, back to sleep.)

      The queen of this country is always seen accompanied by three men attending her in robes, one red, one blue, one gold, all intricately embroidered in white, and I worked hard to become one of those men, but now that I've gained the position of the blue, I just feel chained down. Once we leave the Queen's presence, we're instructed by an aide to remove the robes, and with them the role we played. Such a role exists only in the Queen's presence, and it seems to me as if she exists in her own bubble, reality shifting with her presence or absence, so that she never touches the real world.

      Fragments:

      My roommate's watching a surreal horror movie called Repo Man starring Nic Cage and Meg Ryan. I comment that I had a dream about those two starring in a vampire movie the other night. (Which is true, I did.) I wanted to watch something else, though.

      Something about David Bowie and outer space.

      I'm saying "Where is all this going?" and in response the scene changes to show me and the people I'd been talking to sailing off into the sunset on a yacht.

      Trying to read a document with errors in the font. When I go to change the font, I scroll past a font called 'lucid dreaming.'
    12. Critiquing dream magic applications, books, Bush, witches and Superman.

      by , 08-24-2013 at 09:44 PM
      3rd person. A military camp at night, raining hard, ground's mostly mud, the dogs and eagles used for running messages are having a rough time of it - at which point the dream switches to 1st person. I'm standing outside the dream, watching it, complaining to a woman with me about the use of animal messengers. "These people can create magic doorways linking one place to another, why are they still using messengers? Why do they even have supply lines?" She tries to say it's probably just shorthand, but I'm not impressed by this excuse. It annoys me that magic is only being used for flashy combat techniques and such when it could be put to so much better logistic use, it's a complete waste of manpower.

      The next ASOIAF book comes out, and I skim the first few chapters and find a pleasant surprise: another Melisandre POV chapter. I settle in to read.

      3rd person, following a woman who works at a newsstand that former president Bush II used to walk past every day as part of his routine, a long time ago. Now he's here with a bandage around his head, blood showing through, looking dazed. This happens twice. Both times he's found and picked up by his own security, but the woman is thinking to herself he 'looks the way he did in 2004,' meaning on the verge of death. The second time this happens he nearly walks into traffic, looking as if this isn't something he wants to do but is unable to stop himself. Unable to think straight, his mind is following an old routine.

      A woman took me back to her home and left me to sleep, and now I'm hiding behind a door and watching her tend to a crying man, seeming to comfort him. In actuality, the scarf she wears around her hair is soaked in tears; this is how the witch feeds.

      (Woke up with comparisons to Circe on my mind for that last one. Back to sleep.)

      3rd person following a couple who meet for lunch every day, sitting at the outdoor tables of a cafe in a major city. He's a writer, and she used to read his stories during her breaks and tell him what she thought at lunch, but with this most recent book she finds she's got less and less time for it and finds herself making excuses: "I had a few moments in class, but..." He dislikes that she seems to feel obligated to read it, and tries to tell her there's no reason she should be spending all her free time on his writing, but when he says this out loud it just sounds like they're drifting apart. He gives her a peck on the cheek as they stand up from the table, and as he leaves he passes two women bending their heads together for a kiss.

      I'm running some kind of transdimensional superhero team (though everyone here's wearing suits and ties, thank god, or casual clothes in Banner's case; no spandex in sight), and we've just encountered this reality's version of Superman, a version who grew up not on Earth but as the only living creature on a dead planet, raised by recordings, never understanding what had happened to everybody else.
    13. Bounty hunting, Buddha, and Lucifer.

      by , 08-16-2013 at 08:31 PM
      Bounty hunters, or at least people who do odd jobs including bounty hunting. A member of my team, Regina, comes back to the motel we're staying at to tell us she's got a job at a local bar, which solves our immediate money problem. She's been trying to talk us out of hunting down that bounty we've been focused on. There's another woman who left the team over this bounty, she wouldn't talk about it but it seems like she had some personal connection that none of us had known about until she left.

      Scene changes, that woman's come back, taken care of whatever business she needed to take care of. She's a beautiful, melancholy woman, and as we drive out of the city she's reflecting on all her memories, 'some bad, some good, but all worth having': her and her orphaned brother, the threat of war, their childhood determination to end war; a white Cadillac with fins, and the driver, a man who'd just struck it rich, tossing money into the air.

      A few fragments: a thief who became a Buddha, and how that story's changed over time. Lucifer going through a Bible and scribbling out words here and there.
    14. Games of thrones

      by , 08-11-2013 at 08:48 PM
      3rd person. Kimahri's become a leader of his people, but he's having trouble. There's someone who's not considered very trustworthy, and he gave this guy a chance to prove himself, letting him broker a deal with an outsider for a very important supply. But there have been delays, and the people are beginning to worry that this guy isn't going to come through for them. They're having something like an informal town meeting, arguing about it, and the guy who brokered the deal is insisting that things will work out if they just wait.

      1st person, I've struck a deal with someone whose face I never saw, only heard his voice. He sends me to sow something he designed in the cracks of the border between two countries. Greenery grows from the cracks and spreads into the neighboring countries, and it looks beautiful, peaceful, so no one will recognize it as a threat until it's too late. I see the landscape as if on a map, watching the borders shift in a chain reaction, watching control of land flip from one country to another, sending ripples through the ground under my feet, and I can hear that guy who designed all this, now telling me to watch, to learn how this works and to use it myself, but I already know how it works and all I want is to get as far away from the shifting borders as I can. When I get far enough from the conflict to get a clear look around, I can see the country I sabotaged is now completely surrounded, about to be destroyed. I head north, as far as I can get.

      3rd person. Sansa Stark's come back to the north, as far north as it's possible to go before the Wall, and she's sneaking into a hidden tunnel leading to a tomb. She pays her respects and then leaves the tomb to wait in the tunnels, and one by one her brothers arrive - first Rob, then Jon Snow, then Bran (who is walking, and was never crippled in the first place). They're all glad to see each other of course, but Bran's the one they've been waiting for, the one who made a deal with the demon Cassux on behalf of their family. (Cassux - when I wrote this down it struck me that's probably a contraction of Castor and Pollux.)

      Scene changes to a flashback: the recently orphaned Stark children 'captured' Tyrion (he probably could have left at any time if he'd cared to make the effort) and 'interrogated' him (nothing unpleasant, more of a casual conversation really). He's wearing a lion-fur cloak, and he's saying, "not such a bad thing, the Old Ways, not having to work so hard for everything." During a time of desperation for the Lannisters, he'd discovered the demon Cassux in his books and made a deal on his family's behalf, and because of that, everything in Westeros has changed.

      Updated 08-11-2013 at 09:11 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    15. Flashbacks and an octopus.

      by , 08-03-2013 at 09:22 PM
      A setting that looks like it's based on ancient China. I'm about to transport a prisoner, a high-ranking woman, but the focus of the dream is on the people I ran into guarding her cell, two men I'd known during what I think of as 'the bloodstained war.'

      The dream moves into a flashback to the war: I was some kind of government official, something to do with money. It kept me out of the fighting at a time when most men my age were soldiers, and I was conflicted about that, especially since my job required me to work closely with the military. Those two men guarding the cell had been soldiers who briefly acted as my guards while I was traveling through a dangerous area. During this flashback, we met a priest who I'd kept in contact with since, and I'm thinking about the major contrast between how earnest and naive he was then and how cynical he grew to be.

      (I woke up. I went back to sleep for one more hour.)

      Modern western setting, I'm playing the role of some teenage guy. I'd gone back to my hometown by the sea, thought I was just passing through but got into some kind of trouble and wound up stuck working as a camp counselor as some kind of community service. I'd resented it, wanted nothing more than to get out of town, but as I stuck around I've wound up being a lot fonder of the place than I expected, like some kind of cheesy family movie plot. Also my ex-girlfriend is working at the camp and maybe isn't an ex- anymore. And this is the last day of camp. So I'm in a good mood as I'm riding my bike back to camp after running an errand in town, getting stuff for the ice cream party at the cabin tonight, looking around at the streets and remembering dumb kid pranks and rivalries and shortcuts around here, when I happen across an octopus in the middle of the road.

      It's still alive, though it doesn't look too good, it's not moving much. We're just above the beach here, so I scoop it up and return it to the water, and it perks right up - and immediately crawls right back out of the water to cling to a rock. But at least it's not in the road anymore, and it can get back to the water if it wants. It left burns on my arm, like a jellyfish, which I think of as the normal result of picking up an octopus. When I get back to camp my maybe-not-an-ex sees the burns and goes "oh, you didn't," and yes, letting myself get burned was dumb, but what else was I supposed to do?
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