Carabas

Napping on the couch during the night: A nightmare of the vague, unseen, menacing, I'd-call-it-demonic-except-the-demons-in-this-dream-are-on-my-side variety starts to take hold. Since I think of this as associated with darkness, I summon 'the golden light of Apollo' which lights me up from inside for a moment and this does the trick, but Amon and the other demons around me look rather hurt/betrayed that I would do such a thing, calling on some light god instead of relying on them.

Fragments from 8 and 10:19 wakeups, having gone to bed at 7 am:

A man with a phobia of the upper class he's trying to join; the name Benjamin.

An immortal man offering another a light for his cigarette and saying "Here. Rachel's mother couldn't stand (this brand), could she? Now it's the scent of (a three-syllable name of a town in China, a place associated with another woman)."

My new wife, Julia, has drawn me away from my potion-brewing for the night, and as I carry her up the tower steps to her bedroom, she quotes, "And it was better that the beloved behold the tainted cities of Mephisto dreaming."

(Woke up at 10:19, and shortly afterward my neighbor started to play the drums. After half an hour I called him. Back to bed at 11, though I didn't get back to sleep for at least another 20 minutes.)

I'm riding in a car with my IRL sisters, and I notice that I can see the grand houses we're driving past even though my eyes are closed. I keep them closed for a while to be sure of it. I suspect I'm dreaming. I take out my sketchpad and start drawing what I see with my eyes closed - the inside of the car, I considered drawing the scenery but better to go with something that isn't passing so fast - but I find that although I can see both car interior and sketchpad, my drawing isn't enough to prove anything. We stop at a hotel and I've run out of drawing paper, and I go through an old sketchbook and find it's full of paintings from Shadow Hearts.

Dream briefly switches to Shadow Hearts scenes featuring two Alices, one 'real', the other either dead or the result of time travel shenanigans or a figment of Yuri's mind or some combination of the above. It's this potentially imaginary Alice who more closely resembles the version from the game.

Back to the hotel - my father's current IRL girlfriend comes to the hotel room to tell me to hurry up, Dad's in the car and waiting. I'm surprised since I thought I was the one waiting, all I have to do is stick my sketchpad back in my backpack and I'm good to go - but no, I see my sisters are already at the door too. My bad. I grab my things and go after them -

After I walk through that door there's a memory gap, but I wind up lucid, floating up and down through the levels of the hotel through a convenient octagonal hole in the floors leading up to a skylight. I stop floating around and look for a door to go through to change to a more interesting scene, but as I pass through the door I get a sense of danger, and immediately look for another door. I pass through a series of rooms this way, most of them halls filled with marble statues and skylights or balconies opening onto clear blue skies, but still with that sense of something wrong, until finally I open a door to a public bath filled with attractive people making out with each other. I have no particular desire to join in but it makes for pleasant scenery and the sense of danger is gone, so I strip and get into the water.

I seem to have gotten my timing wrong, most people are getting out of the water and getting dressed, but I'm not bothered by this. The doors on the far side of the baths are so large the view is almost entirely brilliant blue sky. Someone offers me a tab of acid, and I take one and offer one to another before handing the rest back to him, which he's surprised by. I wonder if it'll have any effect in a dream, and as I wonder this I decide to find a robe to put on. I remember the summoning-by-putting-your-hand-behind-you trick and decide to try summoning a robe - which doesn't work, but I walk past a stack of towels, and then a stack of clothes, and this seems to be the dream's response to my request. The clothes are slightly too large for me but I put them on anyway, listening to the conversations around me.

(Woke up just before 12:30. Resigned myself to a bit of sleep deprivation.)