Here be dragons

I'm at tha old university, there seem to be a problem with my diploma and the administration is as helping as usual. I get fed up and frustrated and walk out to get a breather. Here I met with a young man*, talking with me about my training period under his wing and being pretty clueless and hurtful. I get even more upset and get away from him, goign to the hospital collaborating with the university. I get down to the basement, which has turned into a sort of warehouse full of glimmering machinery. Operating one of those is the man I worked with, tinkering with it while someone watch. I notice a woman and a toddler off to the side, and while I can't see their face I know that they are his wife and son. I'm happy to see them well and happy; the boy is playing and squealing when his mother give him ice chips to eat. She propose me one and her husband mock-scold her about it; I say that I'll never pass the occasion to eat a book, and she hands me some "dictionnary ice". It doesn't have any particular taste, but I thank her. The man and me talk a little, sharing news. He seem pretty upset that I left the university and the project we worked on, and I try to tell him how hard it was for me, but I make myself upset and can't say the words. He seem to understand and stops me. Before I leave he looks like he's going to hug me, but both of us are too shy and akward for it.

*my superior was a young woman, but she had a lot of students to work with so I was left to my own devices a lot.

I woke up pretty early and decided to go for a WBTB.

I'm slightly lucid, enough that I want to track down the forceful man. The sky is overcast again, the colors both muted and intense. I find myself in a busy crowd, walking on a path in a park. It got a nice landscaping, with stones paths like the one I'm walking on, with nice half buried archways providing shadows in the summer, ponds and old trees, but the paths are riddled with potholes, and this one is caked with feces and sick. It's disgusting and people around me are obvious to it, except a woman who is desesperatly trying not to step in it. I follow her steps and we end up in a store, as crowded as the park, but at least it's clean. I caught a glimpse of a blond-haired man dark clothing, his hair silvery in the artificial light, but he disappear before I can reach him. I fall back to the woman I was with, she's arguing with a vendor about something. Finally she get her bag and smile to me, so we get out together. I ask her about the man I'm looking for, and she seem pretty disaprouving. She tells me he live on the upper hills, in a castle or a manor. I ask her to guide me, and that's the last lucid thing I do, but she say I can't go now. She takes me back to the park, in a nook that's cleaner that the rest, with a old bathtub with clawed feets. The bathtub is full of soapy water, and I strip off to get in and wash off the filth from earlier. The air os cold but the water warm, so I only let my head out of it. The woman unbraids my hair and wash it, before pulling out of her bag a big comb made of black, shining wood with a ivory and onyx handle, curved like a vine and orned with a flower. She starts to comb my hair, taking strands of it out the tub to do so then putting it back in. It float around me, filling half of the tub and covering me like algae.
She then tells me I need some markings to do what I have in mind. She asks me to sit up and I do, shivering in the cold air. She put something cold and hard against my back, between the shoulderblades, telling me it's for speed and flight, and then show me the metallic plate she used: on it is a creature that at first glance looks like a eastern dragon, a snake body with a horned horse head and insect-like wings. It's six limbs are strangely human, and it's warped on itself in a mess of wings and coils. I barely have to see it before she puts my legs out of the water, my head going under and my exposed skin erupting in goose-bumps. I push my head out, spultering, as she pushes two similar plates against my inner thighs, close to my panties. She tells me I'm wearing Lilith's hands* now, and when she takes out the plates I can see that I've got two very intricate design of hands tatooed on my skin in back ink, left hand on right thigh, right hand on left thigh. It's slightly innerving; it looks like the right hand has a eye embedded in it, and as if someone is pushing my legs appart.

*Lilith is supposed to be the mother of monsters, and I birthed a snake in a previous dream. I don't know if it's linked, but it's there.

My mother is home to help me move in on campus and woke me up this morning going on errand. I was wide awake, but my body felt hot and heavy, almost prickly with sleep. I rolled on my back, went through my lucidity check-list and back to sleep.

I'm dreaming, but not really involved, I feel like I'm floating close to my body. I walk across my house to my mother bedroom and idle a little there, wondering. Then I walk in her closet and close the door behind me. I'm trapped between her clothes and the door, but I can reach the side. I feel my way up the wall, I can't see a thing but I feel the clothes against my back and my breath pushed back to me by the closed door. I find a switch and hit it. The whole closet shake, then I feel it going down like a lift.

Now I'm interested. The doors slide open and I get out in a brightly illuminated room, the floor is linoneum and the walls painted white. There are at least three other lifts, with steel doors. No windows, I'm underground. There is a small group of people in this room, all around twenty and casualy dressed. Some of them carry backpacks, and I remember the underground rooms of my highschool. They're start to walk out, and I follow. The floor has a gentle slope upward, and we reach a double open door going outside. This place is a gigantic highschool I dreamed of before. Today it's daytime and overcast. The grassy area are neatly cut, the paths are carefully gravelled and the cement between them painted white. I know that if I turn around, I could see the impossibly tall buildings, with big, round windows half covered by wavy adornements, steel painted white; if I look on my left, I could see the topiary. But the DC keep walking. One of them is standing out from the group: He isn't anonymous, a faceless form here to be set dressing. He wears the face of someone I dislike: a brown haired, fair skined, slightly overweight young man that used to go out with one of my friend before cheating one here with a coworker. Still, he is different. I follow his along the path, and as he walks I wonder.
I lag behind, and he meet up with other men around a cart; at least three of them are gardeners, the last one is crouching a little on the side, his face away from me. I stare at him a feeling of familiarity growning.
"Eli!"
I call him out and he look up and smile. His hair are a little longer, he is less groomed that usual, but he stand up and I run to him with wings on my heels. I jump in his arms and he hold me tight. I scramble to wrap my legs around his hips and my arms around his neck; he hold my waist and my hips to keep me here. He is warm and feel solid and real. He bury his face in my hair and I almost feel him smile. I laugh and marvel at the feeling of the hair on the nape of his neck against my hand, of his light stubble against my cheek. I twist around to look at the DC that lead me here and jockingly tell him that he has a lousy taste in face. He laughs and tilt his head down, his face growing briefly pointed and almost goat-like, with strongly slanted eybrows and weird pointed strands of hair on each side of his head. He throw his head back and it's back to what it was before, but not exactly; there's something lurking there, a intelligence and some humor. He asked me: "How it is with ten more years?"
He do look older, but Still. I laugh, still clinging to Eli. Eli laugh to, and walk backward. I squee and he let go of my waist to slip both his hand under my thights. I push us away from the trashcan he was walking us to with my right foot, and see that I'm wearing cute black suede shoes with my black thigh-highs.

My mother come back home, waking me up again. I woke up still giggly and happy, Eli delighted.
I wonder who, or what was this DC. And why he wore this face, obviously like a mask...