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I am on an old, achingly familiar road. There are tall, vividly green trees on either side. The pavement is cracked and dusty, giving way to pockets of dirt and loose stone. Initially I am in my car, but it is difficult to gain momentum. When I finally do, two teenage boys on bicycles ride recklessly out into the road. I swerve to avoid them, and in doing so I realize I am not so much in my car, as riding on top of something, which topples over. The boys do not apologize for getting in the way, and I right my vehicle...finding it is no longer a car, but an awkward bicycle made entirely of wood. It is painted ivory and dull red, with a wide, long seat. It is too tall for me to easily mount, so that I run alongside it trying to gain momentum so I can lever myself onto the odd seat. As soon as I have gathered enough speed, I am interrupted again, this time it is a stream of young boar followed by a grubby farmer.
In my haste to get out of the way, I strike and stun a piglet. I go to make sure it is okay, and when I turn back, my awkward bicycle has become...a massive riding pig. It is over four feet tall at the shoulder, which connects with a steep-sloped spine. Its skin is mottled pink and brown, dirty and hairy, it has oily leather reins. I climb onto its back but it is hard to control, and before I go too far down the road, I spot two foxes in the trees. One is white, one is red. We make eye contact and they go out of their way to attack me. I kick away the white, and the red briefly latches onto my wrist before I hurl it into the trees. Before I can go more than a few more feet, I am waylaid again, this time by two dogs circling my ridiculous pig mount. One is black, one is white. They are large, and have long, square muzzles and golden eyes. They leap to attack, each latching onto one of my ankles, once again stopping me. Somehow the bow of the pig's rib cage prevents them from getting a good grip on the first lunge, and though they worry at my legs and is almost hard enough to hurt, I feel like it is a warning. I dislodge the white by vigorously shaking my leg, but I have to pry apart the jaws of the black, and in the process I am pulled from the pig's back.
Before I can be attacked again, I decide to run up the street to my sister's house. It turns out to be a spare apartment with pale blue walls and blue commercial carpet. I breathlessly try to tell her what happened on the road, but she is distracted and doesn't really hear me. I climb up onto a bunk bed and lay down. It isn't long before a human attacker that only I can see closes in on me, striking me with a leather strap. They only hit me hard enough to make me flinch. After the sixth or seventh strike I catch the leather strap and yank it from their hands.
After a couple of minutes a pure white cat with golden eyes walks in through the front door and hisses at me before leaping onto my back. I flail around, wrenching it from me and casting the hissing thing away.

I then witness a very odd conversation about my dad selling his house and moving into an apartment with a male roommate, something he is very unlikely to do. He talks about the roommate's payment going through and I try to find a way to ask him why he's moving into an apartment.

The man navigated a cavernous subterranean maze, a confusing warren of suffocating tunnels leading to an abyss which true heights and depths were shrouded by its inky darkness. The tunnels in the cavern walls might lead upward but to reach them he had to cross great expanses on narrow and rickety wooden bridges. Even then, tunnels were treacherous and often deceptive, seeming to lead upward and outward only to lead deeper into the maze.

He could only see a few feet in front of himself and if he paused too long to consider his course of action the sentient, seeking darkness would become aware of his presence and destroy the bridge where he stood, for it could sense the light he emanated and sought only to eradicate it.

He had no idea how long he’d been underground, but it finally happened!
He clawed his way up through a chimney-like tunnel and found the ground floor!
There were windows!
He could see the sky! All wondrous and bright blue and beautiful over an evergreen forest.
Two doorways stood before him and he didn't have long to choose, so he chose the one nearest the window, thinking it would lead out into the glorious OPEN.
Oh, it did, but not how he had hoped, for on the other side there was a balcony. The door snapped shut and locked behind him. I could feel his tremulous, keening panic. As a ghostly bystander, I tried to reassure him that all hope was not lost. He could still jump, that the drop was no more than 8 feet from the balcony to the forest floor. Although he sensed me there, he shook his head to himself and remained convinced he couldn't make the jump because he had injured his leg in the climb.
After an eternity in the dark there was no retreat and no advance.
His despair was immediate and exquisite, he berated himself harshly. How could he be so stupid? He couldn’t even choose the right door! Especially now when it mattered most.

So, exhausted beyond all measure, he leaned against the railing and wept silently into his hands, knowing that now there would only be view of the open and no real escape.

Ahvi huddled in the forge next to her cursed husband. The witch who cast the spell to immolate him intended that he would remain on fire for many days, undying and in agony. Each day, the heat radiating from his writhing form became more intense, unbearable, but Ahvi refused to leave. She only retreated as far as the door, speaking the counterspell that would allow him to die. I could see her through the cracks, one brilliantly emerald eye wide open, the other sealed shut with char. The only spot of color to her otherwise blackened body.
Finally her husband burned out. I waited uncertainly, knowing Ahvi was dead.
Then she moved, wrenching herself from the door, weeping. Fate had spared her because of her sacrifice. The witch would be coming for Ahvi as soon as she got wind of her survival. I worried for her and could feel the witch's roving eye, it wouldn't be long now. Maybe I could distract her while Ahvi escaped?

I am at work, all the lights are out. I'm standing in front of the paint desk when I start to feel faint and I fall first to my knees, then back on my heels. I tell someone that I don't feel well, and all they can say is "Yeah, your face looks strange." Then they move away without any further concern.
I knock on the door of Red's duplex, I have never been to such a place. He opens the door and I sway, again feeling faint. I ask if I can come in and he allows it, I said I didn't want to drive back home like this and ask if I can sleep here. He says it's fine if I don't mind sharing the bed.
We stand in the living room, behind him is the bedroom. I have such trouble keeping my eyes open, and when I do manage it, I can't lift my eyes to his face.
Only so far as his chest. My breath becomes uneven and sadness creeps over me, swaying on my feet. I want him to comfort me, I feel so strange, and know that if he just let me lean on him I'd feel much better. He leaves the room and I black out.
I awake in bed with his puppy laying on my chest. He leaves the room, and sleep paralysis settles over me in the dream (is it weird to have a dream that you're having sleep paralysis?)
The puppy and I are not alone, though. Something grips my hands beneath the covers and I can't quite withdraw them. This happens three or four more times, one time the puppy growls at the spirit hiding under the covers and gripping my hands. The ghost huddles close to me, delighting in my immobility.
I manage to break my paralysis, but when I try to tell Red about it, he says it isn't possible. I say that the puppy was growling and he counters that she never does that without reason. I try to rile the spirit and make the puppy growl again so that he might believe me.

Something about being on a camping trip and zipping up the tiny personal tent around me. o.O

I liked that the twists were surprises. I usually have a tiny thread of lucidity that makes me meta the hell out of my dreams.

Anyway. My starting point was a little confusing. First I see a wounded Damon Salvatore, on the phone with Elena. It's night, he's crusted with blood and looks ten kinds of awful. The camera pans over and I see a white figure standing at the corner of the frame. I' m worried because the thing looks like a threat. But then Damon says something about running into a Sarvati (the white figure, now wringing his hands). Elena asks if he's alright, because apparently Sarvati are dangerous.
"It's fine." Damon says with his trademark smirk. "I persuaded him to help." he pauses. "What about you?"
"Getting a little help of my own. Maybe." She says, and I finally see her. She's in a barn, the moonlight shining through the open door. "I have a plan, I'll let you know if it works." She seemed hurt, too, but it isn't apparent how. Hanging up the phone, opens her mouth wide and lifts her wrist. I assume she's going to feed on herself to heal...and I'm doubtful that would even work.
The camera pans out and I recognize the setting.

In this version of the story, Stefan became like Michael and only fed on vampires. Also being a ripper meant he hurt many people before his friends were able to subdue him. Weary of fighting his hunger, he allowed himself to desiccate and made a deal: he would sleep until they found a cure.
There he lay, under a bare foot of soil, in a weathered wooden crate. Elena meant to feed Stefan. Of course.
For a moment I am irrationally angry with Elena. They had promised him! And here she was, at the first sign of trouble, waking Stefan to his torment. It seems so selfish and, only for a moment, I hate her.

They will need him, though. He is a definite ally in a sea of mistrust. There's a new creature in Mystic Falls. They are vampire/zombie hybrids. In the early days of their Turning they drink the blood of humans, but then require flesh to survive. They can walk in the daylight and may subsist on human food for a time, if they are disciplined. Though the first was the result of a spell cast by a powerful sorcerer, it could be spread via saliva. So, naturally, the first Turned would be a whore of a football player.
A girl named Sandra who looked like the actress Annalynne Mccord is the only one who really notices that the school is slowly slipping into chaos. The faculty are nowhere to be found and sometimes, out of the corner of her eye, certain people have ashen skin. She used to be a cheerleader but has since lost her taste for it. No one knows that the hiatus she took from school wasn't a vacation, she actually went to a care facility for anorexia. There are students milling around, crowding the halls, and debris on the floor. Sandra walks into the locker room, uncertain, arms crossed over her abdomen. She spots Stacy who looks gray, talking to a chubby, blond, blue-eyed Davina Claire. Stacy asks her if she's thrown in her lot for the party food, that they were thinking about ordering pizza, but she has a better idea. In her hands is an advertisement for a company known as Meal A day. Sandra knows it well. Upon release from the hospital, Meal A Day had delivered healthy meals to her door three times a day, she checked her progress after every meal and they took the plates. Each seemed a small victory over the illness.
"So have you signed yet?" Stacy asks.
"You know me." Davina says, "Always hungry."
Sandra intuits that Davina is bulimic. She isn't sure if she can trust a near stranger with her secret, but it would be worth the risk if she could help.
The students don't realize that they are signing up to be the food and their dietary preferences will determine who will be consuming them.
Their hunger is a quiet, fervent energy, a slowly building frenzy. They are cunning in their design.
"I put a spell on you. You're mine now." A male voice says.

I return to the barn where Stefan shakes dirt from his hair. His eyes are an unnatural golden brown, he wipes Elena's blood from his mouth. Still disoriented, he asks how long it has been.
I loathe Elena's sheepish look, wishing she'd just left him alone.
"You've been down for a little over a day."
His expression twists in wry amusement, tinged with pain. "What's happened now?" He asks as she helps him stand.
"I'll explain on the way, we don't have a lot of time." Elena replies. She hopes Damon won't be too angry, he wanted to honor Stefan's wishes.
"I'm assuming you didn't bring a car?" He says this with an air of contained amusement that is achingly familiar. She smiles, casting her eyes to the dirt floor and dipping her head. He grins suddenly. "You always did love to run."
They had always loved to run together.
Yet, this is not a reunion of lovers, just friends who were lovers once upon a time. Their love has since mellowed into fondness. They exit the barn into the soft summer night. Lucidity here is a sweet thread that pulls me through Elena and then back out to observe. They are so happy to be together. Their hasty separation, though it seemed longer to him, had worn on them. This reunion is like the giddy absence of pain amidst torture. For a time, they don't think about what they will face when they arrive at town, or that Stefan will return to the ground when this new threat is stamped out, only that they are here again, running together.

The moon's cloak of clouds pulls apart to reveal swathes of landscape. The grass is deep blue-green, knee high and soft against my legs and bare feet, Elena is wearing a flowered dress. They run almost human slow. Then I am her, smiling as he draws up next to me. His silhouette is immensely comforting. I trip, tumbling into the sweet grass. I fall and roll, we laugh at my clumsiness. And like a dance, he is there to take my arm and help me up. I have been explaining the threat. This fits seamlessly with the male voice speaking at the end of the last segment. Elena tells him about what the sorcerer said.
"He didn't." Stefan says, smiling.
"He didn't even get it!" Elena laughs, then they share a joke, singing "I put a spell on you, and now you're mine." and express their disbelief that their new villain said it in all seriousness. I separate from Elena and pull back as they reach the river and leap across, as graceful as deer.

There existed a demon in the form of a house, it lured women inside and then corrupted their souls over the course of a thousand-thousand years, making them sacrifice everything in the hope of solving the puzzle of its interior while also insisting that if they had played their cards right...maybe they could have kept their bodies. I watch as the woman reaches the bowels of the structure, the walls are bleached bone, with pits in the floor that squat demon head jump from. She is only a head now, lacking even hair, and her skin is deathly pale. Eagerly she rolls onto a switch in the floor, which triggers a sort of mousehole/slide in the wall to open. Sickened, I observe her dogged journey and departure down the slide. I understand that the house is a liar, and though it would like her to think she could have kept her body, even a small woman would not have fit through that hole in the wall.

I pull myself back to a less unpleasant arena, struggling for something normal. This place feels like it is both inside and outside, but there are many rows of Whirlpool refrigerators, all identical and white. Myself, two managers and a stranger rush over to one of them. I am panicky, as though my life depends on this action. The filters in these refrigerators signify purity, and I drop to my knees before one of them and pop open the casing in the bottom. The filter falls into my hand. It is blue and translucent, filled with water. There are dark particles in the water.
"Is it okay?" Someone whispers, leaning down beside me.
"No, it's corrupted." My voice comes out a whisper. Then IT is there, at the end of the aisle. It is so dark here that I only see the suggestion of ITs form, a two-legged, winged monster. In the space of a breath, it is behind us and the world is consumed by the suffocating dark.. My panic and terror spike, I feel its hot breath on my neck in a ragged gust, and I force myself into a less threatening layer of sleep.

There is a rest stop on a highway in Japan, all the roads that look like they lead out have signs saying NO EXIT. The true road is hidden, only me and my manager M can see it. We tried to mark it with a sapling, but the road became a river, and we marked its edge with colored rocks. We try to gather the others, letting them know we will leave at first light. Dusk here is strange and uncomfortable, smoky and ill-lit.
I'm walking on a golden dirt road, I round a bend...and standing there is a small white house. I immediately don't like the look of it, something about its whiteness. There is a distant pulling at my mind, but I understand that whatever fate this thing is promising will never be mine. Then my best friend Denni is there. She is wearing a deep red 1800's dress. It looks almost satiny, but has a low, unpleasant luster. There's a...matching cape from neck to elbow. There's a gold pattern, outlined in dusky purple. She is fascinated by the house, beginning to be in its thrall, wondering what is inside.
"We should leave." I say.
"We'll leave at first light." She says, waving a hand dismissively.
"You don't understand." I reply, finding it difficult to speak past the tightness in my throat. She takes a step toward the house. "The sun doesn't rise here, Denni. It never rises." She doesn't believe me. Since I am behind her, I take her shoulders in my hands and start to drag her away. It's hard because she won't turn around and it's even darker now, and her backwards walking is seriously creeping me out. There's a dark flash and she twists in my hands. Her shoulders collapse backward as though she is facing me, and her head snaps between her shoulder blades, forehead becoming a chin that dips to her chest, then rises, teeth bared. The cloak is now a veil, obscuring all but her chin and teeth. I try to snatch my hands away but her arms are tangled in mine. I divorce myself forcefully from this awful place, trying to wake.

Because I'm me, I have a false awakening. I believe for a moment that I am safe. Then I feel the weight of sleep paralysis and notice a shape in the blankets next to me. It is the witch, she has followed me from the dream. She is like a bundle of sticks wrapped in leather, her skin is sooty grey, her mouth wet and oily, lips nonexistent. She whispers to me, asking if I want to taste her rotting mouth. I struggle to wake myself up and fail for several long, terrible minutes. When I finally do wake up, I cannot get out from under the weight of the SP and find myself next to her in bed again. Sigh.

I went on a date with someone I met at work, I couldn't concentrate on anything he said because every time I looked at his face there was a different insect crawling across it. He wouldn't listen to me when I told him there was something on his face. We look at the menu and order, some time later the waiter comes back and tells me he needs to take our order again. When I look at the menu it makes even less sense than before so I just point at something to get it over with. Later, I leave without so much as a goodbye and after the fact I wonder if I maybe should have said something to him...then I wonder what I was even doing on a date with someone else while I still have a boyfriend.
The restaurant was a part of my workplace, I find myself heading back to the breakroom, feeling slightly panicky and sad. When I round the corner I find my friend's husband DM standing there. I stop to chat with him.
"Are you okay?" he asks.
"Not really."
"Does it have to do with (boyfriend)? Because when I saw you earlier I asked you how he was doing and you didn't seem to know." He replies. I notice that he has one bright blue eye and one brown.
"It's just...we don't really talk anymore."
"How's that? I mean, you live together."
"I know...I just don't see him." I hesitate. "Things have been pretty bad lately."
He asks me why, sounding faintly curious. I glance away, there's a lump in my throat.
"Um...it's like there's this giant chasm between us." I use my hands to gesture, not sure why I'm telling him. We're not even close friends and my co-workers are everywhere eavesdropping. "It's so wide I can hardly see him anymore."
"You'll find a way to cross it." He says. I know he's trying to help, but it just makes me feel like I have to explain that there is no crossing this gap.
"You don't understand." I say, nearly shouting now. "It's not just a chasm, but a cliff. He's at the top and I'm all the way at the bottom and---"
"Then climb up." he suggests with a faintly gung-ho gesture.
"I have been climbing!" My voice issues from my throat in a whispering, grieving shout. "I've been climbing for years and there's no getting to the top, the cliff wall just keeps on going and I'm so very tired of climbing." I stop suddenly, hands in fists at my sides.
"Surely if you tell him this, he'll find a way down to you."
What a useless thing to say. I know him so much better than that.
"But he won't, he'll just stand there at the top, watching me climb, pretending all the while that he's trying to find a way down me. But really there is no way down and I don't have the strength to keep climbing."|


That wasn't at all depressing. Thanks, subconscious.

What is this thing with my subconscious and criminals. I mean, really?

So I don't remember much. With this thick blanket of apathy I've been living under, my dream recall has become dismal. In this one I am a consultant working with a team of law enforcement trying to sway a prisoner to help us figure out who is murdering people in the prison. He looks like an actor whose name I can't remember. It's really bugging me. Anyway. He's not terribly tall, wiry, with prominent cheekbones and sort of sunken eyes. Greying hair. He spends most of his time being irritated with me, and doesn't want the other inmates to know he's considering the deal we're offering. I do something I shouldn't because I'm worried the other inmates will kill him...I smuggle his killing tool of choice back to his cell, it's a scalpel with a curved blue handle. After I've given it to him, I wonder if I've made a mistake. What's to stop him from killing us all? Can I really believe he won't?

I vaguely remember having the scalpel in a large leather purse, and opening it so the guards could look inside, but it was hidden in a secret pocket? Meh.

Initially the dream centered around Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham, how they slowly circled each other with their intricate and subtle webbing of manipulation, keeping each influence small so they would not tip the other off. I saw Hannibal standing in a cavernous dining hall, the walls all carved dark grey stone, with a long table in front of a hearth. He carefully measured out two quarter sized drops of a clear liquid drug, then pulled them into a syringe, smirking all the while.
Then I became a player in this game, a young man in the employ of Will Graham, tasked with infiltrating Hannibal's compound and gathering intel. Over the course of the dream I managed to elude capture every single time, evading the one guard who saw me exiting the building. To my enemy's frustration, I would lock the inner door of the vestibule just as he reached it. He would pull at the door in a useless show of rage, I would grin at him and laugh over my shoulder as I exited the outer door. This time, I proved too slow. He got his hand in between the door and jamb, it never occurred to me to crush his hand. I just released my hold on the handle and began to back away. I shrank from him as he advanced on me with a fist raised over his head in a silent promise of violence. I very much didn't want to be attacked and I couldn't run. He drew back his fist---and I whispered, pleading. "Wait!"
I figured he would ignore me.
But he didn't. He waited. Something behind him distracted me. Absurdly, this something turned out to be an old black woman with grey-white hair sliding between the appliances and the wall in her own escape attempt. It didn't occur to me to call his attention to her so that I might run. Hastily I looked back at him.
"I...don't fancy being beaten to a bloody pulp right now." I said nervously.
He frowned a little. It was like he had waited so long for an opportunity like this and now finding it within his grasp, he no longer cared. His hand dropped to his side. "Fine. Go. I don't want to see you here again."
He wouldn't, Will promised I would not have to be used in this capacity after today. Giddy with relief, I fled. The outside was warm and bright. I wondered at my luck, asking for mercy had stayed his hand. Asking never hurt anything, right?

I am some incarnation of Abigail Hobbs.
Though I am not an only child like in the series. I am the youngest of three sisters and we always reincarnate together.
My oldest sister Colleen looks like Alexis Bledel.
Our middle sister is named Ingrid and has our eyes and skin color, but she has red-blond hair and is usually plump where we are waifish.
We are with Hannibal, and believe that he's helping us find the man who killed out father. Though it was never said, I had an understanding of the story, knowing that he had killed our father, or had manipulated another serial killer into doing it for him.
We are in a barren box car, on a train. It's night and we have all settled down to sleep at one end of the car. The floor is dark weathered wood, which creaks under my feet and feels worn thin. I am the last to lay down. Hannibal is in the right hand corner, under a small sliding window. My eldest sister is in the middle, having left a space for me between her and Hannibal, and our middle sister is in the left corner. We have dully colored blankets in off-white, dusty pink, blue, and light grey with a large plaid pattern. My sisters are already sleep, I can tell Hannibal is still awake. We've rarely been alone together, we still aren't, but this is pretty close. Sigh, what is it with me and serial killers?
He asks me if I'm having trouble sleeping. I say something about it being cold and the movement of the car being unpleasant, presumably because it keeps moving us (slowly) against the wall.
He lifts the blanket and says there's enough to share, and he always runs hot.
I notice he isn't wearing a shirt.
You know where this is going.
I avert my eyes shyly and sidle close to him. At first our shoulders are even and it seems awkward so I scoot down a little, resting my head on his chest. Which felt real, by the way. He asks me what I'm doing, amused by my naivety. I lean back to explain, since I would never presume that he wanted to sleep with me, and he kisses me firmly on the mouth. I can't tell if we're naked, but we must have been because, you know. Sex. It was quickfire and intense. I tried not to embarrass myself by moaning too loudly since my sisters were sleeping nearby.
We move to the middle of the car where there is a simple wooden chair, in the middle of this migration I glance down at my eldest sister and realize that she is awake and seething with ill-concealed rage, glaring at me through her hair.
This strikes me as immensely funny and I can't help it, I start to giggle. Hannibal has no idea why I'm laughing my ass off since, you know. Sex. I try to apologize because I think I've offended him. Sadly, he now knows that Colleen is awake and halts our...activity.
"Right here, Abby? Really?" Colleen hisses at me. "You know how Ingrid feels about him."
Sure I did. Hannibal knows too. Colleen was the most level headed of the three of us, she never really trusted Hannibal. Ingrid was less subtle with her attraction to him. I understand that everything he did tonight was part of his plan to satisfy his curiosity about how we would react. The train's speed has picked up in the last few moments, signaling us that something is wrong.
"How could you let this happen?" Colleen snaps at Hannibal. He makes some excuse about one thing leading to another once we were laying down together.
He hasn't once made a facial expression. Even when we were otherwise occupied he was impassive as stone. He doesn't care about any of us, he just wants to see what will happen.
He moves around the front end of the car, that is now at the front of the train rather than the middle. The far wall is taken up by control panels.
"It seems the conductor has abandoned us." Hannibal says.
As he says this, he's pulling wires from the console and rigging it to explode. My sisters exchange horrified looks, Colleen is sitting on the chair in the middle of the car and Ingrid is sitting on the floor beside her. Hannibal escapes out the window and leaves us to our fate.

I see the train from the exterior, how there's a thick, solid pole at the end of the tracks, and now there is no one to redirect us. I pace the wall of the car like a caged animal, unsure what to do. We can't really jump, we'll die. Immediately before impact I throw the sliding door open and leap out.

There's a lapse. I am not Abby any longer, it's not clear who I am. I am in the Between, the place souls travel through to reach the afterlife. I am following a familiar man through a grocery store to where the employee lockers stand.
Another lapse.
We are in the locker room. The familiar man, I'll call him Bill, is sitting on the floor. Another man clutches me to his chest, I am in a very awkward position that would seem sexual were my hands not bound and between my legs. I can hear his labored breaths as he squeezes me tightly. Squeeze.Inhale.Release.Exhale. Again and again. It hurts and I can't breathe, but I'm relieved when I realize I'm not being raped. From where I am being held I see a third man at the end of the row of lockers. Something strikes the back of his head and drags him backward. Horrifying sucking noises emit from beyond my field of vision. After a few minutes a naked woman with blood on her mouth emerges from the row, followed by a man in a suit and glasses who holds a white handkerchief to his bleeding neck.
My aggressor drops me.
We all walk into a waiting room lined with chairs. Bill takes a chair by the door and I crouch on the floor beside him. I examine the side of his face. He looks so ordinary, how did he come to be in purgatory? Maybe he's a serial killer and the blandness is a mask. I know everyone here is a serial killer and the next level down is Hell.
The naked vampire woman stalks to the middle of the room. Her skin and hair are white, her eyes are like muddy blood, no sclera at all. Her mouth is dark with blood and quirks upward on one side with a humorless smirk. There are arcane symbols and spells, a crescent moon on her abdomen and lines of script wrapping around her thighs.
"Who put you here?" She asks Bill.
"Hannibal..." he starts to explain, but she scoffs.
"HANNIBAL!" Apparently they were all put here by Hannibal. "Don't worry, soon he'll get his."

There's a lapse. I am once more with my sisters, walking through the lighter side of the Between but we aren't heading to the afterlife, we are being prepared to reincarnate. It turns out that we didn't at all survive, our traumatized minds tricked us into believing we had.
I see Colleen in a classroom, she is among the students, sitting cross-legged on the floor. The instructor is a bizarre creature and I have no idea how to describe it...because it honestly looked like a person sized magenta crayon dipped in chocolate. Or a traffic cone. It was terrifying. I see the scene lapsed over a period of time. Each time it flashes, there are fewer students. Finally, Colleen is alone and levitating.
It is suggested that this time we will return remembering all that came before.

The next scene felt sharp, somehow. I am somewhere in Massachusetts, in this life our mother is still around. She stands outside the upstairs bathroom, that sits next to Ingrid's room. Ingrid is telling me about a boy who asked her to prom, and how she wanted to be honest with him and worried that he wouldn't want to go with her after she told him the truth. She's asking for my advice but I haven't really listened to the story, my entire focus is on her lovely face. How I missed my dear sister. In this life her hair is red-blond and falls in corkscrew curls at her shoulders.
She smiles a little, "Hey, are you okay?"
It takes me a moment to find my voice. "Yes, it's just..." She looks at me expectantly. "You're just so beautiful." I lean forward and kiss her on the cheek.
She's pleased by the compliment, if a little confused, and kisses my cheek. "Thanks, I guess. You're beautiful, too."

Dream, Non-Dream

This one really interested me. You see, I have a significant abdominal scar that I've had all my life, due to surgery when I was an infant. While I hardly notice it anymore, a small part of me has always wondered what it's like to be...unmarred.

I don't remember the beginning. The dream picks up in the middle, I'm standing in a small room. It's little more than a closet and they have brought me to Consider. I have applied to undergo a surgery that will result in a kind of decorative scarring. They show me the results, and the process. There's a woman who is famously beautiful because of her scars, she looks like Scarlett Johannson (Of course. Scar. haha subconscious, very funny.) as Black Widow. Short red hair. Tattoos on either shoulder.
She is hanging on the wall, this is supposed to be a kind of deterrent, and I understand why. I regard her, curiously. All of her scars are bloody wounds, all ripped open. There was a whirl of ragged flesh around her left eye, and intricate patterns down her neck, chest and arms. She looks miserable.
I feel inferior when I stare at her, a lesser being because I am unmarred. I think about how beautiful I'll be with scars.
I wonder if I could endure the pain it takes to create them. There is another woman nearby, also Considering. None of us think she'd be strong enough to survive, and seeing Widow's fresh wounds makes her turn tail and run. Seems she didn't have the stomach for it.
Later I see Widow healed, she is telling me to reconsider the undergoing the procedure, that beauty isn't worth the cost. I want to ask her if they restitched the wounds so that the scar lines would be more fine but I don't because I feel it would be rude.

Constantine

Yep, I was rewatching one of the episodes before bed. This one was really confusing and full of symbolism I don't even remember now. Going into my bathroom in the duplex and hearing a song, and then singing it, and being able to see out onto the patio from the bathroom. The lights weren't working. Then I was pushing my desk chair back into my room from the hallway. When I opened the door, my hands were no longer on the back of the chair but on a man's shoulders. It was demon-Constantine. I was telling him about the music I'd heard and the lights not working. I'm trying not to be disturbed by his appearance, his skin is grey and his clothes are soaking wet. I know I need to move him, but I don't remember why.
"What were you singing?"
"It was just a song..." I reply.
"It wasn't just a tune, love. You know that."
The lights flash on and off, bright like lightning. He turns his head to look at me. "Are you going to finish it, then?"
"If I can."
"Good. At least one of us will be out of this mess."

Dreamviews Pub

After whatever the hell that last thing was, I sank deeper into sleep, thinking about the dream I'd just had and how I would type it up. I found myself in the Dreamviews Pub. The walls were paneled in rich dark wood, there were booths lining the walls, and round tables out in front of the bar where I stood. There was a young woman with curly blond hair to my immediate left. CanisLucidus walked up and ordered a drink. He may have ordered one for me too because suddenly there was a large glass full of alcohol in front of me. I tried to tell him about the dream I just had, but as he got his drink he went to stand on the other side of the girl. He apologized, saying he was doing some sort of survey and though he was listening, it would be a minute before I had his full attention. The girl seemed flattered that he was standing next to her and thought he was there to flirt.
Meanwhile, he randomly asked me questions that were on the survey, like "Are you more likely to exert yourself physically or spiritually at the end of a long day?" Meanwhile, the girl kept interrupting and became increasingly rude about us talking.
He asked me if I wanted to sit, and I'm awkward so I start to decline until he makes it clear he's getting a stool for himself too, then he retrieved two chrome bar stools from somewhere. He sat down and pushed one over toward me, before I even had my hands on the damn thing she freaks out.
"What are you doing? She didn't come in with us." The woman snaps. I start to extract myself from the conversation, it's not that important...
Canis held up his hand to stop me, with a slow blink, he smiled a little and turned his focus to the woman. He said cheerfully "If you don't like it, you should sit somewhere else."
The woman scowls and stalks off to a different table. While she was still in earshot, he said the most fantastically perfect insult and, of course, I don't remember the wording. Something like "What a shame, ruining a pretty package with that awful face."

The dream recycled and I was still trying to tell him about the two dreams I'd just had. o.O

Injured Dog, Desperate Factions

Sadly this is all fuzzy now, it was so vivid at the time. There were two factions, they were not equal. One was considered lesser. They had raised a boy of the Higher faction, and hoped that he would be the one to change things, he could prove that their faction was not lesser at all. Then we see him with a woman of the Higher faction and she's twisting his point of view to match her own. It turns dangerous because the boy is ambitious and reckless. He thinks we of the Lesser have lied to him all these years and hates us for it. A fight breaks out and we end up on the run.
We had a large dog, seriously...it was the size of a bear. I am running with one of the others down a hallway and I see him laying on his side in a breezeway. I see two others of my faction with him, but they had to leave. I settled down next to him, aside from his size he had the coat of a boxer, brown with white markings. His eyes are rolled back into his head, and his breath is labored. I make sure he has food and water nearby and lay down by his side. I wonder if he still knows me, or if he'll get confused and attack. I'm worried he's going to die while I'm asleep.

I feel like a lot of time has passed. I am the boy now who was raised by the Lesser Faction and defected to follow the woman. We're in a mansion, the girl I betrayed (me!) is nearby and her group is closing in on us. It's important that they don't find us before we get what we came here for. The Woman has left me instructions and a grappling hook that I can use to climb into the higher reaches of the mansion. The walls are all white plaster, high ceilings and great expanses of windows looking out into the soft blue night. I follow the Woman's path down a short hallway and into an area with...pillars that start out short and increase in height, leading to the upper level. They aren't steps, they're too far apart for that. I guess it's time to use the hook. I pause for a moment. I feel lonely. I don't like where this path has taken me. I know now that the Woman only pretended to love me, that she used me to further her agenda against the Lesser Faction.
I hear movement and know they are close. I sight up my arm and concentrate to release the grapple. (Yay for lucid impulses that don't work!), I try again. Nope. I cut through the narrow area between the pillars before I come to one that's about 7 feet tall. Surely I can get on top of it...

With a little effort I lift myself up onto the pillar and hide in the shadow of a taller one. The girl I betrayed (ME!) doesn't see me. Somehow I know that the dog has died because that thing was always at her heels, and that he isn't now means he must be dead. That makes me sad, too.
I continue to the Woman. She has greying blond, chin-length hair, she's thin like a scarecrow, wearing a flowing pale blue dress. She's standing at a table, mixing a potion. It's supposed to be a seeking potion to help us find what we came here for.
I know I shouldn't, but I lean forward and try to kiss her on the cheek. She pretends that she wasn't expecting it and that some slight movement to retrieve another ingredient made her turn away. She chides me, saying it isn't the time...but I already know it never will be. What did I give up for this cold, snake of a woman?

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It's difficult to describe the setting. It felt deep, vivid, almost reality-sharp without any lucidity.

It's night, I'm outside a familiar house in the country. There are two important people meeting here, one is considered a villain while the other is a hero. The villain looks familiar but I can't place him, and the 'hero' is actually just an ally of the true hero, she looks like Paige from Scorpion. They agreed to meet here on neutral ground to discuss terms, at least that's what it seemed. Really, they were drawn here despite their different motives, the man already knows why but he needs her to understand that their meeting is destiny and for that to strike home for her, they need to meet without any sort of threat. So far he's been a rumor to her.
They approach each other in the dark, the grass crunching under foot. When they get close, sound waves being to resonate around them, for her it's yellow, for him it's green.
"I knew we would resonate." He says, offering her his hand.
"Why is this happening?" She sounds awed instead of afraid and reaches out to touch her fingers to his and the waves and circles become a single pulse of light at the contact.
I don't find out the rest of the story.

There's a lapse.
I'm at work, the racking is painted beige instead of grey and the aisles are much wider and taller. I am in front of the Millwork desk, it's very early in the morning and the lights are still low. I see Wayne, a co-worker, who was stuck working a night shift and I start to tell him it must be nice that his shift will end soon when mine is just beginning.
"Well it would, if my shift had ended." He says.
"What do you mean?"
Then I see all the people, other associates, all carrying boxes on their shoulders or pushing flat carts piled high. My heart sinks and I wonder when if I should help sort the freight or just wait until my shifts starts to throw it all. I turn to tell him how sorry I am that he has to stay but he's gone. I move down a few aisles and see a squat and wide ladder piled high with two stacks of boxes, the outer pile leans dangerously, balanced by a beam on the other side of the aisle. I know it's the quickest way to get it off the floor but it doesn't look particularly safe.

There's a lapse. I see the front of the Millwork desk but...the row of aisles are no longer store interior but a line of store fronts on a downtown street at night with soft yellow streetlights. There was more before this, something about a group of women who were considered witches, one of them climbed to the top of the scaffolding where workers hung a giant red-lettered neon sign from cables and poles. She jumped and hurt herself seriously, I'm talking to one of the witches about it. I'm worried, but she won't tell me if the woman died or not. I climb up to the top of the scaffolding though the sign is in ruin on the sidewalk below. I stumble and make it look like I'm jumping down, following the other woman's steps. I land badly and my socked feet do not do well on the crushed glass. The city feels restless, chaotic in a sleepy way, like people are just learning that maybe right now would be the time to panic. The lights flicker, die, and then return. The witch starts to leave without me, I limp after her. We feel a low, ominous rumble. The witch whips around to exchange a concerned look with me as a chunk of yellow rock falls from the tunnel wall ahead of us and shatters to bits. Is it to be an earthquake? Or a flood? I suppose we'll find out.
I follow the woman into a trench outside the city walls, and from here I can see everything. There's a long bridge? Or a monorail overhead. It's dark so it's hard to tell. To my left is the dark ocean, there's a thin line of shop fronts and sidewalks, the back end of the street I started on.

We hear screams ring out in the night and cries cut short, we hear people yell about the water rising. A flood, then. The witch bolts ahead of me and I limp down the trench, so intent on escape. I don't know if I'll be able to run. Someone stumbles past me and I ask them what's happening.
"It's the ocean..."
"What about it? How high are the flood waters?"
"It's freezing!" She yells, and runs away. Then I see what she means firsthand. Torrents of water rush haltingly toward me. It fills the trench behind me and seconds after filling, it freezes solid. It laps the earth, layering it slowly at first and then larger rushes of water follow also freezing solid immediately. I try to stay ahead of it, I don't quite remember if I did...I'm worried my foot will get caught that I won't be nimble enough....

The tower walls had a hollow metal ring to them, and stretched to unknown heights and depths. There were concrete platforms jutting from walls out of the void at irregular intervals. I flee from platform to platform, unsure where I'm going. I figure the only way out is up. I come to a swaying dark gray pillar, it looks to be climbable, but when I launch myself at it, I scrabble helplessly at the sides which are soft. I realize then that the pillar is all mattresses. The platform I'm on is also mattresses and jumping off has knocked many off the top. So if I don't climb the taller pillar then I will fall. I start to panic, seeming to hang in mid air. Then a hand seizes my wrist. It is a hand I know as well as my own.
Liam.
He doesn't so much pull me up, as make sure I have a hand hold before releasing me and moving away. I clamber over the edge. There's a set of pillows under a two foot high window that runs the width of the bed. I get a good look at my rescuer.
This is the weirdest thing ever, okay. This has never happened to me before and I don't fully understand why it happened at all.
My savior is a woman. She feels like Liam, though, and has all his physical markers. The angular features, red hair, blue eyes (though faded and icy). She is not quite his height or breadth. My heart catches in my throat. I can't believe he's here. I am not in awe, because he is a veiled avatar, but neither can I speak freely. I edge closer to...her. Fascinated.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, voice a whisper.
She flicks her eyes in my direction then averts her gaze, callous. “Did I say you could touch me?” I realize then how close I've gotten. The words seem more like “Who said you had the right to do this?”. I hastily retreat and sit back on my heels.
She won't look at me, suddenly intent on the dirt under her fingernails. From this angle she is male, clearly Liam. Hard-faced and bitter. Each word is distasteful, quick, bitten off. “It's...clear you aren't coming home. I know that now. I know you can't.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, he doesn't answer it directly. "How do you know?"
“Sometimes I wish you had just died with the others we helped.”
This one sentence changes what I know of our story. In my version I assumed that we ventured into the Between as incorporeal beings, broke the Serpent into pieces and then killed ourselves or each other to absorb the pieces and carry them here within us to this aether-dead world. In this story, Saja and the others left their bodies behind, having sent their souls onward through the veil.
He makes it sound like those who stayed behind, people outside the groups Wolf created, helped with the killing. I see him from the point of view of a young man, Liam's dressed in a loose white shirt, eyes flashing, mouth twisting with disgust for the task as he raises his arms overhead. His hands are quick, stabbing a thin straight blade down into the man's chest.
The image is lightning-quick and stuns me. I know then that having anyone on the outside of our group helping was a mistake. They were killed in the Between like Saja and the others, but their cords snapped almost immediately, ensuring that those sacrificed that way died within weeks.
“You...helped them?”
Still he doesn't look at me. “But you didn't. You won't. You...persist. Living endlessly despite the lack of sustenance. So I'll never be able to let you go.”
He's the woman again. I touch his knee, unsure if I can comfort him. Or even if I should try. I want to ask him if he still loves me, but you don't tell someone you love that you wish they were dead.
Then it became horrifying. I was trying to dig for information while I had him in front of me, despite what he had just said. We were running out of time. There's a flash, I'm distracted, and when I turn back she is laying back on the pillows as though dead. She becomes younger before my eyes, becoming a tiny infant, and when her age stops decreasing, the crown of her head shrinks from a grapefruit to the size of a golf ball. Then the top erupts liquid all over the pillow. Sick, I stare down at her. What now?



I tossed recklessly, before falling back to sleep. I am at work, but the layout of the building is kind of crazy. One end of the vast building is a restaurant on a beach, with an open patio overlooking the water. All the trim is bright white.

I only remember a few parts. Someone sends me to the middle of the store from Flooring to tell a man that we aren't sure about the price on a rug. As I'm running it occurs to me that I should have scanned the tag before listening to the associate who sent me. He's sitting at a table at the center of the store. This area is like a dining area, enclosed, with doors on each wall leading through narrow halls that go to every department.
“We couldn't find the price for it, I'm sorry. It isn't usually priced by the square foot....” My voice comes out with a Hispanic accent, even though I have no accent in life. His mouth quirks up in an unkind way. I narrow my eyes at him, suddenly feeling sassy.
“Of course you couldn't, look again?”
“I could go back and scan the tag...”
“Are you sure you can read it? Do you even speak English?”
I concentrate for a moment and my voice comes out normal, unaccented and cold. “I assure you that I do. Maybe if you weren't such an asshole, we'd be more willing to help you.”
He got up and left.

There's a blond man and a little Indian guy at the table. There's a phone booth on one side of the table and we hear a girl I work with telling a friend about a guy she met in California. She's bragging about how smart and successful he his. The two men think she's lying and start mocking her. I'm extremely offended and with a surge of protectiveness I tell them to shut their stupid faces, that it isn't fair for them to treat her this way just because they think she's a whore.

There was another instance with the two men but I don't remember it very well. I felt like they were mocking me.

A man tells me to check out the new attraction, because he's the leader of a Freak Show. There's a wide stable, the floors covered in straw. There are horses of many colors, they're all beautiful. I see the one he's talking about though. It is a large dray mare, a coat color they call 'fleabitten'. She's large and beautiful...until she turns to to the side and I see an extra horse head protruding from each flank. And then from the shoulders are two human arms above the horse legs. I'm fascinated and a little disgusted. Especially when I realize the horse is male...? Ish? And that it wants a hug. It speaks to me with a sudden human head and grabs me, making me really uncomfortable....

I honestly don't remember, but I felt truly rested when I woke. It felt fantastic, I'd been having nightmares, fragments and broken sleep for months it seems. I slept so deeply that I was confused by the annoying sound coming from underneath my pillow, and when I realized it was my alarm I couldn't remember why I had set it.

I might have dreamed about being off of work, or not having to go in. I think it had something to do with Constantine, but I was just editing my previous entry so I can't be sure if I really had another Constantine dream or what.

Oh, night before last I had trouble falling asleep but I was working up to a lucid dream. Something about leaving work, the building didn't have a roof and the aisles were like walls in a maze, I was running toward the service road and the vestiges of non-lucid limb heaviness were falling away---
...then my boyfriend came into the room and woke me up. I couldn't get back to sleep for an hour after that =/