dream fragment

A voice saying "The demonic lovers, burnt out in the darkness," and an image of same: a beautiful woman, a witch, in profile, breathing out smoke, cigarette holder in her right hand, and as implied by the voice, she looks burnt out. Her left arm is cradling the severed head of a blond man, her husband. It's still alive, and in pain, and can't die. The things they did out of love led to this.

A man I know has come to my apartment to ask for my help. He looks like he needs it - pale, strung out, in a stained and rumpled suit. He wants me to draw or paint my visions, specifically the one I just saw, the witch with the severed head. He's still in the hall, I'm leaning against the door frame with my arms folded, I'm not letting him in because while I'd like to help, I don't believe I can do anything for him. I'm sure I can't paint/draw well enough to capture that image, not the way he needs.

Wrote a fragment down earlier tonight as "Talent, innate vs. developed" - no memory of that dream anymore but seems like a related theme. Other fragments were all very dull - a woman with tiger-striped hair, a game that summons pieces of different cities, walking in the rain and thinking about someone, the word 'mirror' in my notes with no memory of what that was about.

Fragment: "So the little girl had a last (something) request."

Buffy setting. Angel has a son (not Connor), and someone is threatening to turn that son into a vampire. The vampire's trying to convince Angel that this would be a good thing - not trying too hard, he intends to do this for Angel's own good whether Angel wants it or not - and Angel's trying to show him why it's a bad idea. He calls out a kid vampire he'd made himself, Angel's holding him by the shoulders and the kid says he died when he was 8, looks older but not by much, and then says "I'm good with math, but facial recognition..." The point is that the brain stops developing before its time.

There were some earlier fragments in that same setting - talking about once-in-a-lifetime perfect happiness vs. just plain everyday happiness, and watching Buffy walking down a sidewalk past a brick wall.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Reading about Josephine Baker, a sister who'd died and a mother she'd admired.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Forever Knight setting. As Nicolas, I'm with some humans in a public place, in a hurry, when just for a moment I spot LaCroix and Janette in the crowd with someone else, a woman either I or Janette turned relatively recently, within the past century or so - I desperately want to be with them. I'd been cut off from them. I can't just abandon my humans here, but I have to at least get a message to them. I make my excuses and head back to where I saw them. (I'd seen them dressed as they did in the 1940s - symbolic for happier times together. Also a connection to a kid vampire, so this dream was probably partially inspired by the Angel one.)

In a hallway. LaCroix was here a moment ago, sitting in a chair at the end of the hall, and I'm looking at a telegram that was on the table next to him. I wonder if that bit about text in dreams changing when you look away is true. I focus on an 8; I look again, and it's a 58; then 8 again, then a Cyrillic н. I guess it's true. (As I was expecting it to change, this seems a bit pointless.) I then resume looking for LaCroix.

I'm riding in a truck with a man who spots a pair of coyotes and stops the truck to shoot them. I knock the gun off target.

With that same man, I'm standing over a pair of bucks who are lying on the ground with several arrows in their sides, suffering because I knocked the killing shot off course.

I'm with someone else, a guy from the city, and watching that man pull into his driveway with the body of a horse in the back of his truck. We're standing in front of his neighbor's house, a chubby, long-haired, middle-aged hippie who is burning something that looks like a sphere of hay the size of a beach ball. The fire spreads to the ground, and then to his neighbor's yard, burning in strange geometric shapes, circles and lines. I start clapping, seeing that man's property on fire. The hippie tells me about a protest he's about to go to, a bunch of people are going to jump off a clocktower, do we want to come? The guy standing with me isn't interested, but I'm up for it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A man and a woman with accordions warming up for a show in front of a mirror, the man comments on how beautiful the red of his accordion is.

I'm playing a piano duet with that man, and while his part is beautiful to listen to, my part has so little to do that I lose track of where we are and come in late, I play slow and haltingly. I wonder why he doesn't just play the whole piece himself, he could easily play my part with his left hand.

A machete being given to someone as a gift.

My IRL sister S. calls me and describes a place she stopped at as "a Twin Peaks diner." The use of Twin Peaks as an adjective makes no sense to me - what, do they have great pie with a side of prophetic dreams?

Twin Peaks setting, 3rd person, as a disembodied observer I'm looking at the trees along a mountain road, bare of leaves, small and spindly trees, so close together that none of them really had a chance to grow. A jeep comes down the road, driven by the sheriff, with Cooper in the passenger seat. Cooper's talking about how cold it's gotten, and he's pleasantly nervous about his date tonight.

There's an accident of some kind, an earthquake or a landslide, and the jeep gets stuck; the sheriff gets out of the jeep to walk along a footpath into the mountains. Cooper wants to take care of something in the jeep before he follows, something to calm him down before his date. The landslide or whatever it was that trapped the jeep has opened up a second path next to the usual footpath, and as a disembodied observer I think 'You are obviously being invited on a personal quest. Take it.' The sheriff doesn't take it. However, the usual path crumbles beneath his feet, and he lands on the second path anyway. At the moment the footpath crumbles beneath him, so does the road holding up the jeep, and it falls into a crevice with Cooper still inside.

A teenage girl who's recently begun to see strange things, people who look different to her than they do to everybody else, demonic, eyes in the wrong places or no mouths, and so on - she's thinking about one man in particular, a mentor or father figure, who now looks inhuman to her. She believes this is a delusion. But she's run across a woman who obliquely refers to herself as inhuman, clearly believing that they're both the same; and the woman goes on to talk about various creatures like them gathering, organized by that particular father figure, and about a 'sister' who that father figure favors, and weighing the pros and cons of killing that 'sister.' It's clear this girl is the 'sister' being talked about, though neither of them realize it.

This conversation had been happening at a food court in an airport while they were both waiting to meet other people, and eventually the girl put her head down on the table, folded her arms for a pillow and took a nap; when she woke up, another person was sitting next to her, a black-haired woman, talking to the first one, and when she sees the girl's waking up she tries to startle her. The girl doesn't get startled. The black-haired woman then says hello in a very odd, drawn-out tone.

(Woke up. That odd, drawn-out tone was the sound of a chainsaw next door. Back to sleep.)

Walking through mountains at night, talking about chocolate, and being followed by Gollum.

Going along with Buffy's friends on some scheme they've come up with, now that she's dead.

A small model of an obelisk, made out of salt.

I'm possessing a young man in college, and I'm doing a terrible job of mimicking his normal behavior, all his housemates suspect something's up with him.

Still in that college setting, a horror movie called 'Mandeathering' is recommended to me - I see a scene involving several creatures in a graveyard, one of them looking like Nosferatu and holding a child in his arms, described as a family that 'feeds on death,' and 'the weak ones' giving in to sadness or despair (though now I can't remember if 'the weak ones' were among the family or the ones they were feeding on). I google the movie, but think the guy recommending it must have gotten the title wrong, because none of the results I'm getting are for a horror movie; the first result is for a dream journal.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

On a ship, looking down at a human-shaped siren standing on an island and the man from my crew who's standing there with her. I'm thinking about going down there myself, but I'm also thinking about past experiences with things that call to you from the water, asking you to leave your ship. Never goes well.

Fragment of one person chasing another on horseback on that same island, something to do with a god.

Bela Lugosi as Dracula, waltzing with a woman in a long pale dress. I'm seeing them in black and white, like a movie.

A late-for-school dream - usually for me those are about feeling unprepared, but this one was much more positive. IRL setting, I'm outside when I see the bus pull up, and while most of my school supplies are inside, I have a few necessities with me, a notebook lying in the snow, so rather than go back inside for all my things and miss the bus for sure, I grab what I have and sprint for it. I miss it anyway, but the bus for the middle school pulls up behind it and they're heading in the same direction, so as it pulls away, I jump on the back and hold on, intending to switch to the high school bus when there's a chance. We hit a fork in the road and we lose the bus I want, but I'm confident I can meet up with it later.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Lady Liberty's torch being referred to poetically as the light of 2 things, one being the light of reason.

I'm John Constantine, in a bar, showing off by handing out predictions. It's a con, they're all just stuff I made up. But what I didn't know at the time was, by speaking predictions in that particular place, specifically by putting them in words, I was dooming them to come true. If I'd known, I would've come up with something nicer for myself. Made some (Hannibal-inspired) reference to a 'red dragon' I would have left out.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A separated or divorced couple, the ex-wife calls her ex-husband to ask if their oldest is with him. The dream 'camera' changes to show their youngest of 3, sleeping in a crib in the father's home; he's got a vestigial tail. They intend to have this surgically removed, but it hasn't been done yet. His paternal grandmother is standing over the cradle, thinking about that tail, and holding a gun in her hand. The father comes in then and stops her; the mother, still on the phone, hears enough to get an idea of what's going on, and she thinks, 'She's not wrong. Our species is a threat to yours.'

Hypnagogia: A woman's voice saying "Run!" over and over again. Disconcerting. Woke myself right back up.

Nightmare: I'm in a dark cave full of dangerous creatures. So I decide to summon up a pterosaur to kill them for me. I hide behind a door against the wall and listen to it move around; it won't be able to reach into that narrow space, so I'll be fine. Except I start doubting whether the space is small enough, and become aware that I'm not in a narrow space, I'm in the much more open space of my bed.

(Woke up at 5:30 am, half an hour after bed. Back to sleep.)

A connection between the Palin family and a family of actors, a law that makes it possible to win an election without gaining a majority of votes, and a great deal of anger at both these things, though I don't much mind myself.

Birds flying overhead in V formation above my IRL home, thinking about luring them down.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm the Doctor, the ninth, traveling with Rose, and trying to get into a building which is apparently strictly for the upper class and we don't look the part. The guard at the door stops us at first, then lets us in after I wave the psychic paper at him. After we're inside - looks like a casino - Rose asks if the paper made him see us as someone else, or in nicer clothes. I tell her it doesn't change the things people see, just the way they interpret them.

(Woke up. Suspect that last scene was inspired by the 'Run!' hypnagogia. Back to sleep.)

A little dark-haired girl, a relative, who hides behind the furniture and speaks quietly, tells me I should have listened to my visions. I'd just agreed to something, and I probably shouldn't have.

Withnail & I, in which '& I' has an audition he's nearly missing, wrapped up in a sheet on the floor of the apartment and brooding. I, disembodied observer, am noting that no matter how badly off you are, looking at these two will make you feel better.

Hannibal, in which Will is in Hannibal's room, examining the things hanging on the walls and feeling wary and suspicious.

A prehistoric bat-like underwater creature.

ElfQuest, in which I've just come back to the Wolfriders after a long time away, centuries, things have changed a great deal while I was gone. They have new rules for staying hidden - 'new' being relative, these rules are old and well-established for them, to the point that they don't always remember this is all new to me, and both I and the people who were away with me mess up from time to time. It's been a strange readjustment in a lot of ways. I'm up in the treetops, looking out over the forest to a place where a river and a road meet, a road that was never there before, and I think even the river's moved. I'm thinking about how drastically the humans have changed while I was gone, and how my people have had to change along with them.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragments of a few related scenes, not sure what order I dreamed then in. Pretty clearly influenced by Hannibal. Switches back and forth between 1st and 3rd person, following a man who does some very strange job for the FBI:

Walking down a sidewalk in DC with a black-haired woman with an upturned nose, her with a cup of coffee in her hand, none for me, I don't drink coffee - we have some professional relationship, we work very different jobs but we talk outside of work, we're old friends, with occasional attempts at being more than friends but the timing's always been wrong.

A different woman, my partner, talking to our boss about his faith in us on some very strange case he's given us.

My partner again, we're on assignment in some small town, been here for a few days, and right now we're not working, she's fooling around uploading photos of me to some social network site that her mother is on. I've met her mother, I like and respect the woman, and my partner's teasing me about posting something inappropriate. I try to see what photos she's uploading and she keeps shooing me away.

Same small town, been here longer now, I'm talking to a police officer I've gotten to know a little just as we're wrapping up for the day, he says it's good that I'm dating, "even if you do fight a lot." I have no idea what he's talking about, I think maybe he misinterpreted something about me and my partner teasing each other - we do fight a lot when we're filling out paperwork - then I turn around and see that other woman from before has come to pick me up, and she's dressed for a night out, stunning, the dream 'camera' does this slow pan up her legs, black dress, done something fancy with her hair - I'd known we were going out for dinner but this I was not expecting. I'm thinking it's something to do with being out in the middle of nowhere like this, the people around me aren't content to let me keep holding them at a distance. It's not a good thought.

Last fragment before I woke up, more obvious symbolism than the rest, 3rd person for all of it - he's at dinner with that woman, not at a fancy restaurant but at a place with some activity that keeps them on their feet. She's eating ribs, messy, sauce smeared on her face. It looks like blood. So mostly I'm left with this image of her crouching with blood on her face, and I, the disembodied observer, hear TdV's Sarah's line in my head: "Blut, Liebling. Leck es ab." She hands him a rib, and he, obligingly, eats, just as his phone rings, work-related, so that when he answers his phone he also appears to have blood on his mouth.

The lights in my IRL home won't turn on. None of them will, and I think of the darkness as a danger, which makes me wonder if this is a nightmare. I start to head down the stairs, by floating, head first. Yes, this is definitely a dream. I start to do my light-of-Apollo anti-nightmare trick, which after 2 uses appears to be my go-to way of avoiding nightmares now, but then it occurs to me that while I'm here, I could enjoy some lucid dreaming instead. I decide that there is no ceiling, so that when I look up, I'll see the night sky and be able to float up into it - and then I turn over and am pleased to see that this is so. After I've floated up into the stars, I look down to the house again to put the roof back on, and then, as if it was just a task I'd briefly delayed and had to get to now, I start up the anti-nightmare trick, and wake myself up in the process.

(5:08 am, just half an hour after bed. As I was trying to get back to sleep, it occurred to me - this has happened a few times now, nightmares with this timing and on the theme of darkness - I'm starting to suspect this is the result of trying to sleep before dawn. Possibly on some level I'm aware that it's much darker than when I usually sleep, and my dream interprets that as something wrong. Reliable way of getting lucid, though, so that's not really a problem. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: "Ancient papers, and an age a fraction of that."

I'm discussing an upcoming ball with a young woman I'm acquainted with, leaning against her desk while she goes over the invitation, pointing out the bit where they encourage everyone to dress colorfully, and she, thinking herself quite clever and looking for me to praise her, tells me about the black outfit she's planning, so that she'll stand out in a sea of bright colors, and she asks what I think. I tell her I expect that's exactly what the people throwing the ball are planning themselves, so perhaps take that into account. She reconsiders, and asks what I'll be going with, as she can't picture me in anything but black. I say not at all, my basilisk coat is blue, isn't it? - it's entirely black except for the basilisk design but that's enough, and I think about the feel of that dark blue color, the warmth of that creature's image on my back. As I think about that coat I either am or am referencing The Etched City's Gwynn.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

OUAT's Belle is binding Rumpelstiltskin in a contract without realizing it. She was speaking in metaphors and he's got to abide by them literally. While the two of them were attempting to patch things up between them after a fight, she asked him to pretend she's the mistress and he the servant in their deal. He, sitting on the side of her bed, is thinking that they've done this before, thinking of a particular scene in which Julia was a princess and I was her servant, and how utterly beyond my reach she'd been then. (A scene from a dream I had years ago, accurately remembered as far as it goes, though he left out the unflattering parts.) He's been silent too long, and when Belle says something, he jumps up and makes a game out of it, addressing her as milady, going to her window and throwing the curtains open, asking what she'd like for her meal. And although she didn't at all mean that he should literally treat her as his mistress, only that she wanted him to think about things from her perspective for a moment, she's not surprised by the game and she takes it as a sign that all's well between them again, so she gets up to make breakfast herself.

As she leaves the room, she finds a strange object in a corner of the hall - a statue of a unicorn that she hadn't noticed before, with what looks like a real horn. She knows Rumpelstiltskin's been after such horns, so she's wondering why he leaves one just lying around here - unless this is what he makes out of them. She thinks it's odd, and goes on about her chores, when she finds another one, smaller, in a window sill. She knows that wasn't there before, and she calls to Rumpelstiltskin, and turns to see that he's already found the first one, and is looking at it with obvious displeasure. This is something that shouldn't be in the castle.

(Woke up. That last one was almost certainly influenced by watching Legend the other day.)

I'm evacuating a place where True Blood's Eric and Bill had been staying; Bill's already gone, but Eric's chained to a chair, and I have no intention of freeing him. I'm going to carry him out in the chair. Despite this, I have nothing against him, and I'm asking him if he wants me to bring any of the belongings he's kept in these rooms. I'm kneeling in front of the chair as I speak to him, and I say that I may need him to carry something of Bill's in exchange, to which he consents. Aside from 2 belongings which needed no discussion, he says he doesn't need anything else. It seems a shame, the rooms are full of things he's collected over his lifetime. I pick up a sword he has on display with a hilt that looks like carved ivory or bone, and I say sure, you may not need anything else, but it's better if it can come, isn't it? I put it on the chair with him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: a mention of Louis, a king.

I've heard about a gathering of people I'm thinking of as 'the British' tonight - there's a connotation of a specific politically subversive group in my mind - and I intend to arrange a meeting with the queen, although I'm not as close to her in this reality as I have been in past iterations; I've spent too much time focusing on other contacts this time through. I sit down beside the queen at her mirror. Her daughter, Antoinette, is here as well, standing by the window; she's beautiful but spoiled, self-centered. That's largely my fault - in other versions of this reality I'd devoted more time to her and she'd developed into a very sweet girl. This time around, we're not particularly close, and she notes only that she owes her name to me. In French, I ask the queen her plans for this evening after the party. I don't speak to her in a particularly deferential manner. She seems wary, suspicious, but I think I have enough influence with her to pull this off.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I need to kill a giant snake, but I can't find a weapon. Finally, a woman produces a long knife and beheads the snake herself. But I tell her that it's still alive, you need to destroy the brain, otherwise beheading it is just slow death by suffocation, it's cruel. I point to its eyes, which are still moving; I tell her it's suffering. She doesn't care. It's harmless now, that's all she cared about. I can't believe this. But I do my best to put it out of its misery without a weapon, until finally its eyes stop moving and its skull is crushed. I pick up head and body and carry them outside.

When I reach the door, the storyline changes - at first I was still aware I was carrying something and needed to get rid of it, but I forgot about it quickly and so the snake disappeared. I was distracted by the sight of colorful glowing orbs floating down the river, just through the trees. There's a festival going on all this week, and tonight is the children's celebration. I walk past the women handing out colored orbs for the children to light candles inside and carry down to the water, and as I walk I see a couple kids carrying their lights the wrong way, down to the sea instead of the launching place at the river. Some adults are trying to point them the right way, but the oldest kid says something about their father's ship out at sea.

I'm in a maze full of doors that lead to other worlds. The people with me have decided to take a door that leads out onto a snow-covered wasteland, they think this is going to lead them to our ultimate destination, but I have my doubts. I'm sure they're just going to wind up back here with a lot of wasted effort. So I let them go while I stay in the maze. After the door's shut behind them, I open it again, just to get another look, and while I can see them, the dream briefly switches to their perspective, showing that they can't see me or the doorway; our realities are out of sync.

In the maze, I try to take a path roughly in line with the path they're taking through the wasteland, so that we can meet up again when they inevitably wind up back here. I check through doors once in a while to make sure we're still going the same way. But eventually I run across other people in the maze, and I discover people are gravitating towards a set of locked double doors with two keyholes to either side. This is the door my group's been looking for. But we don't have a key, and neither do any of the people clustered around. Hera approaches me in the form of an incredibly tall and slightly muscular woman, with long red hair and a peacock blue dress that clings to her body. She's looking for something too, but not a key, and she asks me why I'm looking for one. I explain to her that like the others I'd joined up with, I'd simply woken up alone in a vast, seemingly empty room, so big I couldn't see the walls or the ceiling, and eventually I'd worked my way here. As we're talking I realize that she's Roman, not Greek. She tells me she can get me through the door.

As we go through the door I'm starting to focus on how attractive she is, and I hear a warning, something I think of as a quote, about the risk for dealing with gods "to become not ascension but craving." I acknowledge this but decide to go with craving anyway, she's very attractive. On the other side of the door we're in my IRL home. However, although I didn't notice anything odd at the time, once I took her out of the maze setting the DC stopped showing any personality; I carried her to the couch, but when we sat down she disappeared entirely. The dream storyline switched to a visit from my IRL father who starts 'getting the trees ready for winter' which involves ropes and makes me feel lazy for not doing it myself, and a sitcom involving two elderly men teasing their sullen young relative about just ignoring what you don't want to hear.

(Woke up. Felt like those last scenes, my father and the sitcom, were both about me making the wrong decision with Hera. Back to sleep.)

I'm Roman from Hemlock Grove. Olivia's lying on the stairs and I've had a taste of her blood, and it's put me in something of a trance. I'm thinking about the difference between love and lust. Peter knocking at the door snaps me out of it, but I watch Olivia stand up and walk up the stairs before I answer the door. I make tea, though he doesn't want any. He's picked up one of Olivia's shoes off the rack by the door and is fiddling with it, pacing around the kitchen.

Fragments:

I'm a teenage boy who gets into fights too often, trying to explain to a girl the reason why.

I'm in a setting that looks based on the 1800's, getting into my uncle's carriage, although my uncle's surprised I want to come and warns me against it - I lie about the reason I want a ride, saying something about the walking path along the way. He accepts the lie and offers me a bulb of garlic.

There's some flyers warning about the invisible people from the community just outside of town, causing trouble. I'm annoyed at the whole us vs. them attitude people always have when they talk about those guys, just going to make things worse between us. But as I walk down towards main street, where a parade is going on, I see a few people from that community outside of town, except they're painted with this strange dark camouflage, makes them look like an oil slick. They're trashing the cars parked along the street. No one else notices. My perspective switches to third person - they're invisible. No one else can see them, the cars seem to just break on their own. Back to my perspective - in the parade, two horses are walking past us, and a camouflaged guy jumps onto one of them and digs his hands into its skull until it cracks and blood runs down. The dream switches to third person, so the guy is invisible, and the dream's focus follows the horse as it rears and falls, and the panicking people around it.

Memory gap, but with the impression that things got increasingly nightmarish from there, a fragment about a cabin with a door leading out onto darkness, until at some point I do the light-of-Apollo trick, thinking that it worked last time I had a nightmare so might as well try it again, and that clears things up, but also wakes me up.

(It had only been half an hour since I went to bed. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: OUAT's Mad Hatter chatting with "Joker," a similar Mad Hatter type character but with a playing card style red-and-black costume.

A man riding in the back of a limo is yelling at his driver to turn around. The driver isn't listening. Finally, the driver does turn the car around, and then stops it - not because of the man's threats, but because they've reached their destination. The man in the back of the limo jumps out of the car, but then realizes he recognizes the place where they've stopped.

He's at the gate to a mansion, a place he's been before. The owner of the mansion is just driving up opposite, and when the owner sees this man standing outside his home, he stops the car and gets out, pissed off. The guy who'd been in the limo has made a few comments in the past about the mansion owner's "perfect wife" which were meant innocently but were taken badly, and also a comment about how he thinks he's going to die in that mansion, which the mansion owner interpreted as an intent to buy/steal that mansion away from him. The owner only recently acquired this mansion, and this wealth.

As he's yelling, I, as a disembodied observer, am noting that he isn't looking good. His eyes are paler, he's looking a little scruffy, and in general, increasingly devil-ish - right on schedule. The rider in the limo certainly thinks of him as the Devil, exactly as we wanted, but the man himself isn't aware of the way he's being manipulated and transformed due to the Faustian bargains he's made, he's completely unaware of any supernatural influence.

A truck driving past crashes into the side of the Devil-figure's car and breaks the mirror. Attention caught, the Devil-in-the-making turns away from the guy with the limo, reaches into the truck and grabs the guy inside - a tall, skinny man with curly red hair, and a strong smell of coal. The cab is littered with cigarette butts and many, many matchbooks from the place where the Devil-figure's wife works.

Fragment: A father paying his daughter to take the boat out at a certain time, the creation of an alibi.

A setting based on ancient Rome, I'm looking up at several criminals being punished. This is my fault; I encouraged them to break a rule I thought of as minor, without thinking about what the consequences might be for them. One of them is praying, and a man with me, a foreigner, catches a variation on the word 'august' in the prayer, and he asks me in his own language, "'Augustina' - means honored, right?" He's quite enchanted by the lady Augustina, a mutual acquaintance. The man praying is being offered a deal - 30 years of imprisonment, in other words the rest of his life, but this torture will end. As this is being explained to him, I go to the others being tortured and try to convince them of a better option. Let them break your legs, then wander the world for 7 years, and at the end of this time you will be permitted to return and be forgiven.

Fragments: stumbling across a Forever Knight tie-in novel with 'amber' in the title; and a visit from a people-shy cat who IRL died when I was a kid.

A man talking about an opponent: "He had fallen on the might of (something), and he himself had fallen back and disappeared." The 'he' in question is described to me as "one of Fate's creatures," Fate being our enemy, but this guy is on a completely different level from those we've been fighting up until now. The man speaking is trying to get through to me just how serious a threat this guy is. He says this guy participated in "sanguinary" interstellar wars (that's the second time this month I've had dreams emphasize war with blood-related adjectives; seems redundant, but the dream seems to think that changes the meaning significantly), and in "civilized eras" he attached himself to prison transports, weapons transports, and managed to gain influence through this.

(Woke up, back to sleep.)

The queen of this country is always seen accompanied by three men attending her in robes, one red, one blue, one gold, all intricately embroidered in white, and I worked hard to become one of those men, but now that I've gained the position of the blue, I just feel chained down. Once we leave the Queen's presence, we're instructed by an aide to remove the robes, and with them the role we played. Such a role exists only in the Queen's presence, and it seems to me as if she exists in her own bubble, reality shifting with her presence or absence, so that she never touches the real world.

Fragments:

My roommate's watching a surreal horror movie called Repo Man starring Nic Cage and Meg Ryan. I comment that I had a dream about those two starring in a vampire movie the other night. (Which is true, I did.) I wanted to watch something else, though.

Something about David Bowie and outer space.

I'm saying "Where is all this going?" and in response the scene changes to show me and the people I'd been talking to sailing off into the sunset on a yacht.

Trying to read a document with errors in the font. When I go to change the font, I scroll past a font called 'lucid dreaming.'

A woman who used to work with some kind of 'private security company' - which in this case appears to be a euphemism for something not entirely legal - who left that job a while ago and is now a manager at a hotel, currently talking with an old friend, a woman still working at that 'security company,' about how much faster emergency services respond when there's gunfire reported.

Vague fragments involving combat, next scene I remember clearly the combat's over and that hotel manager's picking up her dog, Max, from the dog daycare service - but both dog and daycare service had been involved in that combat scene and the woman running the daycare now refuses to allow Max to come back there again. The hotel manager protests, saying that "We're doing really well," and the daycare woman hesitates over that 'we', highlighting the parallel between dog and owner here, then stresses 'he' - he, Max (and by extension his owner), may seem like he's doing well on the surface, but he has these undercurrents, things that are always going to come back to the surface eventually, and because of that she can't have him around. The friend from the 'security company' is there throughout this scene, petting Max and not saying anything.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: "Covered in ashes, the boy king Yuuma."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: A party at my IRL home, some people have passed out, someone suggests putting on a Terminator movie and asks whether I've seen them. I point out that the last thing I need is to see those movies again after dreaming about them for a month straight. (That's actually true, except IRL it was 2 months.)

A man, a professor, is having an affair. He'd planned to meet his mistress today and finally leave his wife - but at the last minute he's realized this was all a terrible mistake, and he's confessed everything to his wife, Julia, who already knew. (Despite the name, the wife here is not the same as my recurring DC Julia.) She insists on meeting the mistress, and he agrees, taking her to the place where he and the mistress had planned to meet for lunch.

As they park across the street, the mistress is just leaving the building, and he points her out to Julia. At first Julia doesn't believe him. She'd expected some silly college student, the midlife crisis cliche. The woman across the street is beautiful as a movie star, long blond hair and dressed smartly and conservatively in all black, poised and polished, everything about her indicates power. Julia suspects her husband just pointed out a pretty woman in the crowd to throw her off from meeting the real mistress, it's so unbelievable that her husband could be with this woman - but he's gotten out of the car and ducked into the woman's taxi, talking to her. He points back to his wife, and the mistress, confused, looks right through her, saying, "Where?" She saw Julia and immediately dismissed her as someone this man would be with. (Julia is thinking of herself as a plain middle-aged housewife in comparison to the mistress, but in actuality she's quite stunning herself. Short curly red hair, wrapped in a white fur coat and gold jewelry.)

The professor goes back to his car and the scene switches to follow the mistress as she arrives at her destination and gets out of the taxi. The professor stops her in the parking lot - he followed her taxi. He says to her, "Maybe I slept with the body of the garden, but the meat of it hardly tasted." He means by this that throughout their affair he never really got to know anything about her beyond the surface, and that he'd like to. Nonetheless, he's going back to his wife. He doesn't like the way he's dressed, in the nice suit and white scarf he'd put on to meet his mistress, as if to keep up with her pace; he feels quite ridiculous. Rain is beading on the top of their umbrellas, but it's red, and I, disembodied observer, wonder whether that's the rain itself or a trick of the light, a reflection of something I can't see.

Near Dark, back when Homer's actual age was close to his apparent age. He and Jesse are in a motel room with a guy who appears to be a friend - not like them, exactly, but not someone they intend to kill either. This guy's offering to teach Homer to play poker, and Homer says he already knows, but it's no fun because he has to give Jesse all the money he wins afterward.

(Woke up at 5:51 am, after going to bed at 4:30. Back to sleep.)

A young man has somehow traveled to another world, one populated almost entirely by vampires. They subsist off each other's subpar blood, donations are required and a vital part of the economy. Unaware of any of this, the guy from another world has walked into a store run by this world's equivalent of a friend of his, the magician who sent him here. She isn't a magician in this reality, and can't help him. It takes her a while to realize that he's human, they're so rare and unexpected, but she can smell his blood and when she figures it out, she has him in a trance before he realizes he's in danger. At that moment, her equivalent in his reality pulls him back to his own world - but the vampire follows him.

(Woke at 7:37. Back to sleep.)

A fragment of a scene involving Dracula, theater, and mythogenesis, using that term specifically.

A woman genetically engineered as a mate for a certain clone. The clone leads a double life, with a job and a wife who is unaware that he's anything other than a normal human, but he's also in close contact with the doctor who created both him and his 'brother', who he is somewhat obsessed with, and he suspects his genetically-engineered mate is secretly in love with that 'brother' - the brother is entirely unaware of any of this and believes himself a perfectly normal human, although the genetically engineered woman has recently appeared in his life and dropped some cryptic hints. The clone pulls the genetically engineered woman into his lap, which she tolerates, and demands that she tell him why she likes him, him specifically, "not the other one." She, with a charming accent I can't place, says it doesn't matter, and it's clear she's bored with his insecurity and instability.

(Woke at 9:40. Back to sleep.)

Three people whose lives are connected, although only one of them realizes it.

The first: A young man who recently beat cancer, legal guardian of his two younger sisters. One of them's been acting out in school recently and he's jokingly threatened her with calling in his biological mother, a woman who works with delinquents. But he is seriously wondering whether he should arrange for them to get together casually and talk - he doesn't mind her skipping classes but he's worried about what's going on in her mind.

The second: A teenage girl in a cancer ward, the same place where that man had been treated. Her death has been predicted to fall within the range of (the note said either Apr. or Aug., I couldn't tell which) 10-24. She has nightmares where this death is accompanied by a swarm of wasps. She doesn't fear death, but she hates wasps.

The third, and the one who is aware of the connection: A man who visits the hospital and watches the girl and the angel who lives there. The angel's voice can shatter glass, and it's going to kill this man someday - but it won't do anything until after that girl's death.

(Woke at 12:10.)

A fragment of dialogue: "And you will be trusted with it. Again."

(Woke up at 7:50 am, after getting to bed at 4:30 am. Back to sleep.)

I'm reading a multi-volume autobiography. This particular chapter is describing a vision the author had at a young age, and what he thought about that - not about the content of the vision, but the act of having one.

A man is being held captive by a coyote god, or rather a coyote spirit which has temporarily become a god, taking on a human but coyote-headed physical form. They're surrounded by baby spiders acting as helpful servants. This man had been searching for his wife, refusing to believe the reports of her death, and his search led him here.

As Haruka/Onikui, I'm chained in a cell, with Minamoto Raikou standing over me with the keys.

(Woke at 9:04. Back to sleep.)

"They had more passion, ordinary things; and it didn't do to tempt the passions of ordinary things in passing." The thoughts of a woman who had a man over to eat together with her mother and her daughter, flirting and enjoying it, but with this thought in her head.

(Woke at 10:28. Back to sleep - but I woke up roughly every half hour after that, and I kept running into that problem where, half-awake, I think about writing a dream down and mistake that thought for having actually done it, and so forget the dream. Nonetheless I wound up with two more pages of notes, mostly too dull to bother writing out in detail.)

Very dull dreams from the rest of the night included discussions of my control issues, a man taking the shape of a three-eyed bat with a green-and-gold mask, watching the sunset, farm work, bear hunting, anatomy studies, a vampire movie starring Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan, the death of Mickey Mouse while he was nobly saving Donald Duck, my IRL civilian sister as a military police officer in training, a werewolf-hunting father and daughter giving a werewolf shelter in their home, and a sitcom about hobbits with fangs.