Carabas

I'm walking through a party full of sleeping people on couches, looking for a free space to lie down. This place belongs to my family, but at the moment I'm a guest like any other. One of my sisters notices me and gets up from her space, leaving it to me; the man she'd been sleeping with gradually curls up around me in her place. It's comfortable. The part of me that's aware this is a dream appreciates how realistic he feels.

Outside a window, the scenery is moving. I decide this is because we're on a train, but I'm aware of the rationalization. I become semi-lucid and enjoy the scenery for a while. There's a great cloud funnel something like a tornado, but rolling along the ground like a great wheel stretching between heaven and earth. It's very beautiful. But now that I've thought of it as a tornado, it stops behaving like a wheel and behaves like a tornado instead - which is less interesting, but still very beautiful.

I watch one tornado after another moving in the distance, growing closer, passing in front of the train, until it starts to feel like a danger, and I'm aware this could become a nightmare. I speak a prayer to a goddess until it stops feeling like a nightmare. This causes the man who'd been sleeping to take notice of me; he's aware I don't belong in his dream.

He starts talking, asking me questions which I don't answer. He's pleasant to listen to, and I'm a little annoyed because I know I'm not going to remember anything he's saying to me once I wake up. I make the effort to focus on his words to try to memorize something, but I only end up hearing the sounds instead of the meaning behind them. Eventually he stops speaking. He's left; his body's still here, but nobody's home, and I believe the dream will get rid of it at the next opportunity. The train passes through a tunnel, going dark, and when the room lights up again his body is gone. I leave the train and continue with non-lucid dreams.

Earlier, was just lucid enough to deliberately fly upward with the intent of getting a wider view, instead lost visuals and wound up in a completely different scene, losing lucidity.

Standing on a ladder outside a suburban home, the wind shifts, hot and dry, a sense of the desert that's going to claim this place and incorporate it into my people's territory. I'm the one who led them to this place, but I feel conflicted now. I excuse myself to the man who'd been holding the ladder, and go inside to take care of some loose ends. There are too many signs of how personal an interest I've taken in this world, learning their language, getting much too attached; I should dispose of that evidence.

Elsewhere, among the troops, I'm speaking to one of them on behalf of a man in this world, Adam, trying to make sure they take care when they process him. I say I've never seen a dreamer with power like his before. Which is true, but I'm also being careful to phrase it in practical terms, downplaying any personal attachment. I have to stress the importance of him as a resource not to be wasted. The man I'm speaking to agrees that they'll be careful, but I don't think he's really paying attention, just brushing me off. I end the scene flying back to that suburban house, desperately searching for Adam.

The following scene focuses on a brother figure chiding me for hanging onto a ghost.

I'm standing in a place covered in snow that I think of as "at the edge of all things" - although all I can see is snow to the horizon, I'm thinking of this place as a kind of boundary line. I'm with a woman wearing a black fur hat, and below it some strands of her hair have come loose, the wind keeps blowing them into her face.

I've just said something half-joking to her to the effect of, it's fine, I'm used to traveling. I'm thinking about the way I arrived in this reality in the first place, tracking her.

She, entirely serious, says something to the effect of but if you do this now, you won't ever be able to stop.

As Rumpelstiltskin, I'm singing a verse of an old song from my son's childhood, quiet and bitter and angry. I'm in a room that looks like a private gym - not the sort with weight machines, a room for other kinds of training - and I've been talking with a woman about my son. After singing that one verse, I say that the only thing he'd ever wanted back then had been simple things we already had, things like the sound and feel of the wind through the trees.

The not-Rumpelstiltskin part of me wonders why I'm telling anything personal to this woman - as Rumpelstiltskin, I don't like her or trust her, though we're working together. But I'm so full of rage about my son and the people who've influenced him, and I can't take any sort of action about it right at this moment. I sing the next verse from that childhood song, and that woman puts her arms around my neck, leans her forehead against mine. I'm too focused on my rage and that song to pay much attention to what she does. I don't mind her getting that close to me, but I'm aware any expression of sympathy from her is just an act, not something she's really capable of, any more than I'm capable of feeling sympathy for her.

There's this pair of vampires in an apartment, a young white girl and a tall black man, and today slavery has officially ended. There's celebrations in the street, fireworks. But the sense of time's a bit off - although the vampires and the apartment look like the 1800s, at some point in the conversation it's mentioned that this is 1933, and the view outside the window looks it. The girl turned him a long time ago and they've been traveling together since. It's been a good deal for both of them - since she looks like a kid, she needed someone who looks like an adult to get by in the world; and under slavery, he needed someone to pretend to belong to. Now that's over, he intends to leave. The kid was surprised by this, hadn't expected it at all - they're close, it's not just a convenient arrangement for survival, so it hadn't occurred to her that he'd want to be on his own if he could. They went straight from celebrating to fighting.

He's saying, "You don't think I prefer another kind of life for-" I'm not certain which pronoun he used then - I wrote it down as 'you', and I think he'd been talking about his concern for her at this point, but she responds as if he'd said 'myself.' She went cold and distant before answering. By another kind of life, he'd meant as opposed to vampirism, and she doesn't take that well. So after a long pause, she says, "But you've got mine."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm Howl, a version with black feathers cropping up - a patch of it at my throat at all times, and mixed in with my hair - speaking English throughout the scene, but no Welsh accent. I speak very mildly and seem distant - it's an affectation, particularly when I'm annoyed, and at the moment I'm very annoyed.

Sophie got fed up with me and left after a day or so in the castle. But now my spells have alerted me that she's back in town - just sitting there, inexplicably, not coming home. I'm seeing an image of her sitting down on a low stone wall somewhere, grumbling to herself. Since she's gone to the trouble of coming back to town, we both know she'll be back at my door eventually, she's got nowhere else to go - I'm convinced she's just refusing to come back now out of sheer stubbornness. So I spell her back, have the winds scoop her up and carry her through town, into the house, and drop her in a chair at the table. She complains about this of course, but now that I see her up close, it occurs to me that possibly she couldn't physically walk back to the house - she looks tired and sore.

I'd been in the middle of making dinner when she turned up, and I bring her a plate while she complains at me. Talking about dinner and ridiculous stubbornness, at some point I compare her to my brothers, and she looks aghast at the thought of me having brothers. Did she think I sprang from the ether? "Monstrous. How many of you are there?" I have quite a few brothers actually. Our mother's immortal, like myself - I've visited her just recently as a matter of fact. Sophie says, "You're like rats in a field."

When someone characterizes me as a monster, my habitual response is to prove them right, so I'm leaning into her from across the table in a way that's not physically humanly possible. "Our father's place is human," I say, very mildly. And in response to something else I know she'd been wondering about, I add, "And I'm a married man." I retract back to my side of the table. The point there was less a reference to my wife, who's out of the picture, and more a reference to the existence of my son, confirming that the boy whose pictures she'd been looking at earlier is my son.

(Woke up. Side note: It's been ages since I've had a Howl dream, so when I saw the HMC task of the month I'd hoped it would spark something like this. Success! Not a success at the TOTM of course - this wasn't the task, or lucid at all - but a non-lucid dream with the plot I wanted is even better.)

And a quick dream from yesterday: As Rumpelstiltskin, I'd been following someone who'd stolen something from me. I used a spell to keep the light from falling on me, and then another for shadows to hide me. Then I'd walked myself off the road and left my body hidden among the fallen leaves while the rest of me went on. Finally I tried some spell that failed - I lit up with golden light from within with the effort of it, shining through the lines in my skin, but I was unable to succeed. Giving up for now, I call Belle. She asks, "What has (some name) got on you that-" I interrupt her. "My dagger." She goes silent. It's not the thing they stole at this moment, and they don't know how to use it, but they have it; they're a threat to be taken seriously.