Carabas

I'm lying on the ground next to the road beside the IRL swamp near where I grew up. Down the road, a truck reaches the peak of a small hill and then seems to continue rising into the air until it disappears into the sky. I think that's odd and that it must be some odd optical illusion, and I watch to see if it happens again so I can figure out what's causing the illusion. I turn to comment on this to my IRL sister, S.

But I'm distracted when I catch sight of a ball of blue flame hovering nearby in the swamp. I think of this as foxfire. It happens sometimes. I'm thinking about how foxfire works, and how it's usually safe, with some exceptions. The foxfire then turns from blue to the usual red/orange fire in reaction to our presence - that's the exception I was just thinking about. It approaches us, and we have to run to avoid getting burned.

When we get inside, we're no longer me and S., we're two young brothers. I, the older brother, realize that the foxfire's too close behind us, and so when my brother escapes into the inner room, I close the door behind him, allowing the fire to catch me but keeping him safe. When the foxfire catches me, it takes on my form, so that for a moment there are two of us.

Fragmentary memory for a bit. Next clear scene - I'm Satan, using that older brother's form and talking to the younger brother. The kid's fully aware that I'm not his real brother. I've just now been able to return to earth after being sealed away for a long time, and I'm curious about all the new things here. I'm looking at an instrument in the kid's room; I'm mentally comparing it to a harp, but it's a stringed instrument that lies flat on the ground when you play it, like a koto. It's something kids are required to learn in school, so the kid's not very interested in it, but I fiddle around with it until I get the hang of it - it really is a lot like a harp, just turned on its side - and I improvise a pretty little tune. I'm vaguely hoping the kid will get the idea that the instrument can be used for more than just the dull melodies he learns in school, but he doesn't seem interested - it's a dull instrument to him, and that is that. I then go and look through his movies, picking up one written in a pictographic alphabet - birds, reeds. I recognize it as Arabic, and I'm delighted by the changes in this form of writing since I've been gone. The movie involves the issue of unity and diversity - people questioning whether it's better to preserve the cultures of individual tribes or to think of themselves as a single nation, and whether it's possible to do both.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a small fishing village. As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking of everyone here as an analogue for someone else in the distant past or another world or something along those lines. There are two in particular who I think of as analogues for "the prince" and "the Judas figure." At the moment, the prince's girlfriend (who doesn't appear to have an analogue, or at least I wasn't thinking about one for her) is talking to the Judas figure, trying to convince him to give her a ride somewhere, but not wanting to tell him why she needs that ride - the prince is involved somehow. She names somewhere else nearby as her destination instead, but he's not fooled at all. He suggests she just tell him where she really wants to go, it'll save time for both of them. As he's saying this, I as a disembodied observer am focusing on a long, thin scar slanting to the right, down the back of the woman's neck.

False awakening, during which I tried to write down that dream on my skin, for lack of anything else to write on.