Carabas

I'm occupying someone else's body, and I-the-character am not entirely clear on the body's identity. A woman greets me in Korean, and following her expectations, I enter an elevator. I-the-dreamer am aware that the body I'm occupying owns this building, he's the president of a company, and this is his private elevator to his penthouse suite. There are no buttons inside the elevator; I-the-dreamer am aware it uses facial recognition, I-the-character am surprised when it starts to move.

The elevator opens onto his suite. There are a number of people in the bed, clearly after a party; the body's owner recognizes one of these people, the rest are strangers. I order everyone out; only that one exception stays. He's sitting up against the headboard, wearing an animal's pelt draped over his head, a wolf or a coyote. (It occurs to me after waking up that we were both wearing something else's skin.)

Another man appears, and he grips this man by the throat. I recognize him; he's the reason I-the-character occupied this particular body, in order to meet with him. He speaks to me, believing he's speaking to the body's owner. I-the-dreamer switch to third person because I want to see the expressions of me-the-character.

Speaking in English so that we won't be understood by the man with the animal pelt, I-the-character chide him for being "so eager to sink your teeth."

He says, "Not the only thing I'm good at. But surely we'll still eat this-"

There's a very earnest-looking young man scaling the tower of a magician's castle, trying to reach the window where a woman is sitting. He incorrectly believes her to be held captive against her will and is trying to rescue her. She only notices him when he falls. Sounding bewildered, she calls down to him, telling him there's an easier way to get in on the other side of the castle; if he can't find it, just watch the rabbits, follow them. The man walks off.

Eventually, the woman comes outside to look for him. She finds him pinned between the wall and a black wolf with a white pattern around his eyes and chest. The wolf isn't doing anything particularly threatening. I'm aware that the wolf is the magician, though the man doesn't realize this, and the woman only suspects. The wolf starts acting like he's completely ignoring the man pinned against the wall and walks over to her, and she holds out her hand for him to sniff as if he were a dog. He ignores the hand and instead bumps his shoulder against her as he passes, and walks into the castle.

Inside, she sits the man down at the table with something to eat, and he says something that makes her laugh and twirl around. She's under the mistaken impression that he's looking for the magician, so she's treating him like a guest. She's treating the wolf the same way, and asks him which room he'd like to stay in until the magician returns. He bumps his head against the locked door of his own room, and she laughs and says sorry, no, that's quite impossible - even though she's fairly certain who he is at this point, she won't have him on the furniture in that shape.

I'm standing in a cave with a group of people, discussing a man who came through here just ahead of us, someone we need to seal away - this is something he'd requested but now he's running. Our time is limited. A woman is suggesting that we use a certain box - it fits in the palm of your hand - that her husband had originally designed to seal himself in case of an emergency. She believes that her husband is no longer a threat so the box can be turned to a different purpose, and I can see her joy in that. But I refuse. No matter how safe her husband seems now, we need to save that option for him.

Following the man we need to seal, we come out of the cave into the open. There's a group of people living here who view him as a god; we avoid encountering them directly. Two of us get into a discussion on the nature of worship, talking about projecting the way your own perspective works onto a macro level, with a powerful leader to control things and a drastically overvalued role of consciousness. I make a comparison to a machine that can feel every impact of cogs and gears.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragmentary scenes with that woman who led the pilgrimage through the mountains earlier:

I'm sitting at a large round wooden table, eating a snack, while she's saying to me something about "would you bear hope" or would I be "a bearer of hope." I'm a little taken off-guard by this conversation, and I'm annoying her by not giving what she's saying serious consideration.

I'm surrounded by wolves, or something like wolves - they've got faces that seem built for snarling, I think of them as someone's nightmare of wolves. I can feel them as they each brush against me, rubbing closely against my legs. They're mine now apparently. I can't believe that worked, this is wonderful. I look over to that woman, standing a short distance away - I want to see her reaction. She has this sort of "you have got to be kidding me" expression. The wolves had started out attacking us, and she seems more exasperated by this turn of events than anything else.

We're standing on a snow-covered mountain, the ground here at a steep angle, with some threat above us, and I'm saying to her, "-here. I would rather stand and fight being a single person. And you, we'll-"

A man came across a woman seemingly sleeping in the forest, but when he approached her she spoke quietly, asking him to kill her quickly and to leave her mother alive, so that her mother could continue to feed the others. He's shocked by this, but that's because he's under the impression she's human. She's a wolf, she only looks human. She knows he came there to hunt them.

She's speaking to her mother, also human-appearing, and says she wants her next lesson to be that lesson - the implication is she's decided to marry that hunter.

The hunter speaking with two other men, also hunters, one of them saying, "You can't stay married to that madwoman."

The hunter sitting in the forest, chanting a prayer or a spell that talks about the eyes of the wolves. Although the rest of the dream had been in English, he's speaking Spanish here. As he chants, the forest around him seems to change - the shadows become darker, the moonlight becomes brighter, patches of glowing fungi appear around him. He's amazed and enchanted by all of this. He's not aware of this, but from my disembodied perspective, he himself also looks different - his eyes are faintly glowing gold, and there's a sort of shadow over him, as if looking at a photograph of him overlaid with a photo of something else. Behind him, a pile of vines and undergrowth heaves upward into the form of some great beast - he's delighted by everything now but I'm sure he'll be afraid when he sees this.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm talking with a wizard from another world over tea. He's brought some of his people here as a sort of emergency hideout, and he's concerned about them picking up bad habits while they're here, to the extent that he's got them camped out at the bottom of the hill instead of in the house with me. He describes my form of magic as 'lax' and not something he wants spread to his people, which I find ridiculous for all sorts of reasons - for starters, when we'd first met he'd been seeking my help with some murderous wannabe dark lord type. I'd put a compulsion on the man to prevent him from taking human lives, which seemed such an obvious solution, I can't believe he couldn't manage it on his own. And really, as far as I can tell his world's form of magic just requires you to say the right nonsense words in the right order to express what you want, so if you're going to talk about laxness and discipline, that seems lax as hell to me.

But in any case, while we're talking about the arrangements for his people, two guys from my world come into the room. They're trying to avoid getting into trouble with their boss - they'd claimed to be unable to carry out some duty on account of being busy elsewhere, which was a lie. Now their boss is on his way to the house and will certainly sense their presence, and since I've already got a portal open, I wouldn't mind if they ducked through until the coast is clear again, would I? Fine, fine, I wave them through. That wizard objects strongly, but for crying out loud, those two aren't going to corrupt your world's magic system in a few hours, it'll be fine.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

In the American western desert, me and an older man are standing next to a car, watching a group of police vehicles pull up. We're going over a few last details before we talk to them. At the moment I'm telling him about a body I'd left floating in a pool of a private home. I see a mental image of it as I describe it, struck by the way his legs had stayed bent underneath him even as he started to float in the water. That older man says he already knew about that one. That's everything then.

He says there's a saying, "The liar does two steps worse." Do I know why that is?

I say I don't know, but then I look where he's looking. His family's just gotten out of one of those police cars - his wife, his daughter, and the daughter's boyfriend. They're looking around, haven't seen us yet with all the confusion around the scene downhill. It's clear to me they're the meaning of that saying. Lie to the people you care about and you lose them even if you're still physically present - you've separated part of yourself from them.

A nightmare involving a creature called the Sandman whose facial features are fluid, constantly slowly changing; and then a false awakening in which the Sandman creature is approaching my POV character's bed.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm walking around the grounds of a mansion where I've been staying. Talking to someone, he's looking at something behind me and says, "Look at that, straight out of a painting." I turn around to look. The sky in the distance is yellow-tinged and nearly completely covered by these two dark slabs of storm clouds, like solid walls. The opening between them makes me think of the parting of the seas. The water beneath those clouds is being tossed up in such a way that it's revealed an old and famous shipwreck, it's been pulled out of the depths. Another ship, a modern one, is thrown out of the sea by the winds, and it crashes straight through one of the massive floor-to-ceiling windows of the mansion.

(A false awakening mostly about trying to describe that last scene, then actually woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm looking after an enormous, shaggy black 'dog' - more like an enormous wolf - that belongs to my neighbor. Most of the dream revolves around playing with him and petting him. When I go to feed him, his water is kept in a intricately curved copper tube, almost like a French horn.