Carabas

As FK's Nicholas, I saw an image of a vase of white roses, bleeding a few trails of red blood - I believed that this was a hallucination, thinking of it as "a bit of silliness" - and then I saw a mental image of Janette lying on a white couch, looking unwell, somehow connected with those roses. Now I'm sitting on that couch, and Janette's lying on her side with her head resting against my thigh, my hand in her hair. We're talking about a particular time in the past when things had been better between the three of us. As we talk, I'm thinking about how easily I revert to this version of myself when I'm around them - without thinking, my body language, my speech patterns change automatically. It's like taking off a mask.

POV shifts to show LaCroix. He's at some kind of charity event. At the moment he's talking to a man near a buffet table, a man he knows in some professional capacity, and a moment comes when he has to either eat or make some excuse. Without hesitating, he puts some item of food in his mouth. As a disembodied observer/Nicholas, I'm incredibly jealous of his ability to do that without flinching. It would make my life so much easier if I could pretend to eat - socialization revolves almost entirely around food and drink, so just imagine how much easier it would be to blend in. After a moment, LaCroix makes a displeased face, reaches for a napkin, and removes the thing in his mouth. He makes some comment about the poor quality of the food this year compared to previous years, and the man he's talking to agrees. LaCroix's posing as a gourmet, picky about what he eats - it's his usual trick, insulting the food wherever he goes. They make a joke about not being able to trust the food in a place that has such skinny staff, and then the man LaCroix's talking to complains that this event has gone downhill in general - disappointing for such a worthy charity. LaCroix makes a comment about the decline of morality as time goes by. He manages to say this with a straight face.

A woman who's been flirting with me - neither of us seriously - is taking my hand under the pretext of palm reading, turning it this way and that. She'd been joking around, but as she's 'reading' my palm, she notices the tiny raised circle on the tip of my thumb that holds a retracted needle and she stops smiling, though she doesn't understand what she's looking at.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've been sitting in a lounge room in the McKittrick. There's a host and a microphone, allowing the guests to listen in on his internal thoughts as we eat and drink. He's been sitting in the booth next to mine, having a conversation with a woman, another resident of the hotel. But when she leaves, he comes and sits across from me. He's bewildered as to why I've spent so much time here tonight. Of course the guests are all free to enjoy our stay at the hotel in any way we choose, there's no wrong way to go about it, and if I want to just sit here and watch his story unfold, that's fine - but my stay is half over already. Why don't I go out and see the show?

I'm thinking that I'll come back another time to enjoy the show - but nonetheless I leave the lounge and walk up to the next floor, which is in complete chaos thanks to the work of the three witches. Fragmentary memory here - I remember seeing the boy witch in passing and being annoyed with him, but no context beyond that. In a small room, I came across a woman who I realized has been/will be the next bald witch - right now she's another lost soul who came here on a mission but wound up getting drawn into Hecate's world. By the end of the night she has/will have shaved her head and altered her body language completely, transforming into one of the three witches for the next night.

The last of the three witches and the people under her sway are surrounded by sexual images. I only saw her briefly in passing as she led a young prince off down one of the halls. But instead I come across the naked prophetess who'll be taking this witch's role for the next night, currently in the process of transforming into that role. She puts her hands on my shoulders and pushes me to my knees in front of her, and I'm thinking that it's always a man she chooses for this part of the performance - the other guests in the room with me are all women, and they remain standing, pressing in close around us, watching her with a look of worship. She has a woman standing guard next to her during this dance, making sure none of the guests attempt to touch her without her permission. One of those women watching laughs off this restriction, and to show how ridiculous she thinks it is, she reaches out and puts her hand on the prophetess/witch's thigh with a familiar attitude. The performance comes to a complete stop. In the trouble that follows, I move away from the crowd and into the staff-only halls of the hotel.

There's a woman who's been unknowingly designated to play the role of Mary. (A reference to Mary Vetsera and/or Mary Kelly - the point is that she was remembered for her death, and that a certain amount of time has passed since, so it's time for events to repeat themselves.) She'd been running from a stranger with a knife, found a friend of hers to help her, and they've wound up barricading themselves inside a room. Due to a struggle at the door, the stranger's knife wound up on the floor inside the room with them. But the stranger wasn't the threat here - he was trying to help her. I'm in the POV of the thing possessing her friend, though possession in this case means only a certain amount of influence over his thoughts - he's the one fated to kill her.

There's a man, a servant, who I made immortal a long time ago. He came to resent me, so I sent him away to the household of a woman I'm close with. From her letters, I believe that's worked out well for them both. I'm staying with her at the moment, and he's showing me something I hadn't realized before - the wounds he had when I made him immortal never healed. The pain is very minor, but it never goes away.

There's a war going on between two factions working for two different higher powers - one called the Authority, the other called the Dark Ones. At the moment, I and two other people are untying a woman from a chair, she's been held captive. She's dressed like a candy striper. One of the people helping to untie her is a woman dressed in an old nurse's uniform; the other one is a man I've been working with. I'm explaining something that this man and I recently discovered - the Authority and the Dark Ones are the same entities. They're not divided at all, it's the exact same entities appearing to us under different names, playing us against each other. It's my intention to end the war by eliminating their influence over us.

The woman in the nurse's uniform has this look of hate as I'm talking about all this. In the end she says, "I hope you win," but it sounds like a curse. She runs out into the street and throws herself backward onto a spiked iron fence, impaling herself. The woman we'd been untying screams "Laura!", the nurse's name. People come rushing out of the building next door, calling emergency services.

Disembodied, I'm looking at a woman standing on a pier some two hundred or so years ago, facing away from me, looking out to sea. She makes a striking image, her black hair and her long dark skirt in stark contrast against the bright grey of the clouded-over sky and sea. There's music being played badly. The men she's been staying with or traveling with are having a going-away party for her, but she's stepped away from it for a moment.

The scene changes to the place she's headed - a man's riding a horse recklessly fast over hilly terrain, playing what he refers to as a game of tag with her.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After a few other dream scenes, I'm back to that woman on the pier. This time she's turned around, talking to one of the men from the party. He has a going-away present for her, two small dark objects that he presses into her hands, something that I think of as 'artifacts.'

I'm someone playing cards with three other guys, and one of them mentions the (some surname beginning with T) manuscript. It's this anonymous collection of old medical notes. A few copies have been made of it, but it was never published, so it's very rare. I tell them a bit about that manuscript - I love having the chance to do so, I enjoy sharing stories from the past a great deal.

During the war, it was an open secret that T. was seeing a certain woman. He always used a nickname when he mentioned her to others, but everyone knew. (As I'm saying this, I'm seeing an image of myself playing cards with T. in the past, much like the scene with these men now, both of us in uniform; and then an image of that woman walking down a street.) And she'd often go to his room to make use of his typewriter. (I'm seeing a typewriter that doesn't actually make sense for this time period.) For whatever reason, when he left to return to England those notes she'd been working on were mixed in with his typewriter and his other things. He didn't make it back to England of course, and when his things were eventually recovered, that anonymous manuscript was naturally associated with him. But the identity of the author of the T. manuscript is Florence Nightingale.

This doesn't get the reaction from the other card players that I'd been hoping for - I get some odd looks but mostly they just seem bored. They change the subject, talking about pharmaceuticals. I'm disappointed - I'm reasonably certain Florence is still a household name, recent enough and well-known enough that I'd thought they would find this interesting, even though they were all born well after her death. It's always an isolating feeling when this happens - no one much cares about old dramas. But at least they only see it as the eccentricity of a history buff, and I don't have to worry about them seeing me as a threat.

Three boys at a boarding school have smuggled in a canister containing what they think is going to be a harmless prank. They're wrong. They're in much more serious trouble than they expected, and one of the three boys immediately runs from the room, cluing the authorities in to their guilt. The other two try to explain that they're not at fault, they didn't mean to hurt anyone, it's the person who gave them the canister who caused this, and the third boy's gone off to fetch something that will prove it - but he'll be too late, that evidence will be gone.

Two guys have shown up at my IRL home with a dead girl in the backseat of their car. She won't stay in the ground. They're telling me she needs to be put to rest. I say yeah, she sure does - but not in my yard. Get her out of here. I go back to bed.

After going through a portal, I'm briefly disoriented, looking at this immense black hole in front of me - then I realize I'm still in the void, the portal I just went through only shifted my position within it. I'm floating before this vast swirling dark mass. It's something like a cloud if a cloud had long spines that curl and move, and something like a great tornado seen from above with a black eye at its center, and something like a nest framed with this curling mass of spines. It's unimaginably vast. The hole at the center is many, many times my height, and it's only like the pupil in a great eye; I can't begin to describe the size of the thing itself. I try to look to my left, to get my bearings in the void, but when I try to look away from the thing, static noise fills my head, getting worse the farther away I turn. I swim through the air to that black hole.

On the other side, I'm disoriented again - I'm underwater and I have a hard time figuring out which way is up, and there's too many colors after the void. I eventually work out I'm in the cabin of a sunken ship, tipped so the prow's pointing straight down - I quickly make my way out and shoot right up to the surface. I'm in a great cave filled with several such shipwrecks, with sun shining in through holes far above.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There are two women, lovers, relaxing in a small pool surrounded by Greek-looking ruins in a green field, with plants around the pool for privacy. This planet has been uninhabited for a long time, people only visit it now as a place to relax. An older, beautiful woman approaches the pool. The others dislike the interruption and the loss of their privacy, but it can't be helped; everyone's friendly and polite, and the women in the pool shift over to make room for her.

The scene changes: one of those two women is sobbing on the shoulder of a friend. Her lover's dead - that older woman killed her.

I got on an elevator expecting it to go up, this being the ground floor - there's only one floor above us, and only arrows instead of floor numbers. But it went down. I wonder how many basement levels there are. I reach to press the up arrow, saying something about my mistake to the woman still on the elevator with me. I'm new to this building. We talk about the company a bit as the elevator continues down, about finding your way around the various floors, and various luxuries that are provided for employees. I mention soul-selling and Satan, meaning it as a joke, but she talks about Satan fondly. We reach her floor, and she leaves.

My point of view switches to follow her - she walks down a hallway into a club. Her brother who goes by the name of Beelzebub - a fake name, it's really Samael - is lounging around with a cocktail glass in his hand, some glowing blue drink inside. He's a pretty man with long dreadlocks, wearing something black covered in stylized eyes in red. The woman's removed the pale coat she was wearing on the elevator, and the dress she's wearing underneath matches her brother, black and covered in stylized eyes in red. They consult about someone he describes as "a friend and a most simple prize."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's this swirling black mass of many colors, like an oil slick, lit up from within like lightning seen from above. I'm eager to dive in immediately - it's a portal - but I'm also thinking I should stop and go lucid first. As I'm torn between these two desires which are apparently conflicting, I wake up.

(Side note: that last was a reaction to trying reality checks. As a rule I'm not interested in them, but I have a lot of false awakenings that I tend to just spend dream journaling and I thought I could put reality checks to use there. So today I tried a reality check as I wrote that first dream up, and apparently this sort of thinking is the immediate result - associating lucidity with stopping what I'm doing to perform an action. Nuisance.)

A young woman stands downstage center, facing the audience; she never turns around. She's performing a simple, faltering version of the whirling, intricate dance going on behind her - contemporary ballet, the entire troupe on stage behind her. Everyone is in black and silver and painfully beautiful. This is her dream we're seeing play out behind her, her ideal. But the music is melancholy, nostalgic even - it's a waltz in a minor key, reminds me of Dvorak. Starts with just a music-box-like piano, but the music swells as the dancers behind her become the focus, all strings. I get swept up in the overwhelming sound of it and the movement of the dancers, until in the end it gradually fades away again to those music-box-like piano notes. A woman's voice from offstage calls to her to come to bed, the sun has risen. I focus on her profile as she turns to look offstage, towards that voice; when I look behind her again, the dancers have vanished. She leaves the stage.

I'm at a strategy meeting, impatient about it - I'm so tired of this cluster of timelines. Everyone here at this meeting is suspicious of each other, and convincing them to work together all over again every time I go through these events is getting really old. So I've stopped trying to juggle everyone's egos and am taking the lead here, and predictably, Astra winds up deciding to put me in my place. She mentally reaches into my head. I've been through so many timelines with her, though, I've learned to resist this, so I shove her right back out again. She's shocked. The rest of the room quietly clears out - no one wants to get involved in this. Everyone else has always been afraid of her. I hate that, the way they fear her. She puts up a pretense of being more mature than she really is, since she's possessed so many adults and seen so many of their memories, but she's still just a kid. I'm thinking, please let me find a way to keep her alive this time around.

This kid of no particular gender has just gotten a lift to a particular town, saying "Here's fine," to the person who gave them a ride. They walk into a diner. As they walk up to the counter I'm thinking how feminine they look, in contrast to some previous appearance. They know the waitress, and they greet her in a familiar way; the waitress looks them over but doesn't recognize them and asks if she should know them. They say no. They're happy that she didn't recognize them even after they sort of clued her in that she should.

As they leave the diner, they pass their father coming in. Their father doesn't recognize them either. He mistakes them for being part of some group of out-of-towners who are currently passing through, people he resents, and he complains about that to the waitress when he gets to the counter. The waitress asks if he knew that person leaving, he says no. The waitress says it looks like they knew him - they're still standing outside, looking through the window, staring at the back of his head right now.

Outside, the kid walks past a car. The two guys in the car say something to each other about how that person's too pretty for their own safety, and needs someone to ugly them up a bit - a threat.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man I'm meant to capture - I'm holding a small box which I'm meant to store him in. He's trying to convince me to turn against the people I'm working for, the Head Office. He mentions that they put him in a 7-color-prison - a shield of a particular 'color' prevents the power used by that 'color' from passing through; a 7-color-prison would normally be considered overkill. He mentions this as part of describing to me the cruel way he was treated by the Head Office, trying to convince me that they have to be stopped. But it has the opposite effect; I believe that if he was judged so dangerous as to require a 7-color-prison, I can't trust his words. I put him in the box. His sister was watching this whole thing, but although she's upset there's nothing she can do to stop me - she's an innocent, she's got no power of her own. I hand over the box to a guy from the Head Office who's waiting outside - he's new, young, and looks afraid of the box even as he takes it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've walked into a bath house. This place belongs to a group that I think of with a word that at the time I believed meant the young men of the city protected by Apollo (but the word I actually used was 'lemures,' the restless dead). It's empty and unused, and there are exposed pipes that are turning black. As I look around, I think that this explains the abandoned building next door.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's this kid, high school age, who set out to change himself, improve himself somehow, and I - as a disembodied voice - am asking him what his goal had been when he'd started. He'd wanted to be able to take care of his aging father. He's lost track of that along the way.

The scene changes from a hill outdoors to a classroom - he's popular, admired. This is a recent development, one of the things he's changed about himself. But he doesn't seem happy with the people around him - he seems arrogant, he looks down on them. And he forgets to spend time with his father. I see him with his father at a small table - they joke around with each other and talk the way people who are close sometimes do, with so many in-jokes and understood references to past events that it's effectively their own language. His father doesn't mind that he's so busy. But the kid recognizes that he's lost track of his original goal, and he has to correct his course. He goes to the house that he's been using to change himself, a place that grants wishes of a sort.

Inside the house, which is a Victorian, old and mostly empty except for portraits on the walls, he's greeted by three men. The one who talks to him is short, maybe 5 feet at the most, plain, and with curly red hair. The men ask him to stay and eat and drink himself into a coma with them again. He refuses. They say it's better than the alternative, but let him go on up the stairs. Every time he's come here to change himself, he's had to go a little deeper into this house. The first time, eating and drinking with them was enough.

Upstairs, a creature with a helmet that hides its face and with long metal hooks for hands emerges from the wall. The kid's met this creature before too, and knows how to deal with it. There's a sequence where I see various creatures and people emerge from the wall one by one, and it's implied that the kid deals with each of them in turn, but there's no need to actually watch the process play out since this has all happened before, and how to deal with each one of them is already known. The last one to emerge from the wall is a dashing man, blonde, cheerful, sort of an Errol Flynn-type character, as if he's just stepped out of a swashbuckling flick. They've met before, and they talk for a bit. This man will go up the next set of stairs on the kid's behalf, and arrange for him to get his wish. Other people have done this for the kid before, a different person every time he's visited this place.

My point of view switches to follow the Errol Flynn-type at this point while the kid stays downstairs. In the room at the top of the stairs is a portrait of a little girl - the kid's met her before. The two of them talk, and she emerges from the portrait. Long straight dark hair, a long white dress, and pink satin slippers with rosebuds. She quickly drops the personality that the kid would have been familiar with, and the Errol Flynn-type winds up on the floor in front of her, kissing her feet - fear, not devotion. She states that she collects "shades of the Ampha Berra family" - she opens a panel in her dress, displaying many different shades of bloodstains on the fabric underneath. The Errol Flynn-type won't survive, and she'll change the kid as he asked.

(Yesterday.)

I'm a man trying to calm a situation down so that I won't wind up in a cell. It would be for a minor charge, but my situation's complicated. There's this woman I made a deal with a long time ago - I brought her to this world ('this world' is for all intents and purposes the same as IRL), and she freed me from the curse that had locked me up back in our own world. But there's a catch - if I'm locked up in a cell even for one night, that old curse will find me again, I'll be trapped again. I think of that as her 'winning' - we help each other often but I don't like her much. I'm afraid of being trapped, but I'm also afraid because if I'm trapped I won't be able to keep up the illusion that makes me look human.

(Today.)

A woman and I had been standing in the middle of a road surrounded by trees, discussing something - a car comes, the driver sees us, he swerves, he crashes. I'm irritated at the interruption, but I go over to the car so I can get a meal out of this before emergency services arrives. The scene changes abruptly - one moment I'm walking towards the car, the next moment time has passed, emergency services have already come and there's a crowd of people around. The woman and I leave and transform into a cloud of bats. In all my vampire dreams this has never happened before, and I pause to enjoy the novelty and absurdity. My perception's different. The sky is a brilliant saturated blue with something shimmering about it, and the air gives me the impression of containing new angles, like unseen tunnels.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I and a group of other people, all of us foreigners in this place, had been talking to a group of women on a small 'island' - just a heap of stones really. We're very frustrated. We're trying to get them to do something for their own good, and they're not cooperating. They end negotiations and vanish into thin air.

Still as the POV character from that last scene, I'm walking around the grounds of some large estate on a hill, with a gated entrance visible not too far away. I'm speaking to a woman all in pale gold - everything's pale gold, her robes, her hair, her skin, the mask that she wears that covers her whole face something like a welder's mask, only revealing one eye. She has her own issues with the people from that 'island' - she's saying they're against her and her plan simply because of her mental illness. She resents them.

I'm sitting on a wooden throne and talking to a man who's going through a bout of existential despair, and he's asking me about coping with vast spaces of time, with immortality - how do you do it? I find this hilariously awful - you're asking me?

Talking to someone about "the 40." They're a group of heroes in Scotland, technically real historical figures but their story's become more like a legend, involved in a conflict with the English. Although they're regarded as heroes, I'm thinking that their story was crucial in creating a bad future for Scotland.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm digging through a drawer filled with various small objects and papers, searching for something. I'm talking to myself out loud, saying "She'll turn this too into one of her charms." Charm as in talisman. There's a woman - the owner of the things I'm searching through - who suffered some setback, as a result of which some object that belongs to her is temporarily in my hands. I meant that she was going to turn that separation itself into her advantage. As I search through the drawer, I uncover a small skeleton of a creature with sharp teeth, no larger than my thumbnail. Another one of her charms. I'm thinking she was likely told this was some wondrous creature - it isn't.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm in a mountain forest with Dieter. He's holding some large dark-furred animal he's killed - we've caught three of them in a row - and we're talking about the quality of the hunting here since the humans abandoned their village. You'd think that would only improve the hunting, but there's something I'm worried about. When we mention the village I see an image of it, on a hillside with a large body of water in the distance, and I think about something that's been bothering me ever since a conversation I'd had with someone in that village. I say to Dieter now, times have changed - we haven't changed with them. We should. I should have set him free centuries ago and set him up with whatever he wanted. I've been selfish, not thinking. He ignores this and tries to steer me back onto the topic of hunting.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Semi-lucid - aware this is a dream but not enough to affect my actions - I'm approaching a certain building by a narrow path between two hedges out back by the gardens. There's somewhere else I was heading, but a little boy intercepts me and tells me there's some message for me in the house.

(A memory gap.)

On the grounds of that same estate, right at a tall hedge that serves as an important border between here and the next place, there's a little girl crouching on the ground and a woman next to her. The woman's plain and tired-looking, with brown hair that looks darker because it hasn't been washed. The little girl is blonde and sort of bossing the woman around in some game they're playing. She wants to join in on something going on beyond the hedge, but she's not allowed, so she's playing here and waiting for her chance. I immediately recognize the girl as Julia's daughter, she resembles her so closely, and I ask the woman some questions to try to confirm that hunch without asking about Julia directly. The woman says to something I ask about the girl's mother, "You don't have to tell me that," mistaking my question for rhetorical and irritated about it, irritated at the mother's behavior. This makes me realize that while yes, the girl's mother is Julia, this woman is also the girl's mother - she's Julia's wife. I'd assumed she was a nursemaid, I'm deeply embarrassed.

A man's telling me something about Alice in Wonderland when he's attacked and killed by these enormous crows. We're in his apartment. One of the crows lands on my shoulder and looks at me, and I'm feeling very exasperated with it.

I'm the same man I was in the previous scene but now with a head like a crow - which I definitely didn't have in the previous scene - and I'm standing in front of an older crow-headed man who's sitting on the floor in these elaborate robes. He's telling me he can't help me, and says something about "the 40 visions."

(And this last one is one from two weeks ago that I didn't bother to write out properly. The pen & paper dream journal fell open to it just now and the Alice in Wonderland theme caught my eye.) There's a scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice is trapped inside the mouth of a crocodile. A boy pulls its tail to make it open its mouth, and she runs out. Now someone's tried to recreate that scene, but the girl playing the role of Alice was too scared and wouldn't move. I shove my way through the kids to get her out, and somebody gets their arm bitten off. (I wrote down who, but I can't read my own writing.)

I'm a man traveling together with an old friend and several people I've met more recently - we're on a mountain road covered in snow, leading horses. A few red berries on the branch we're passing underneath caught my eye, everything else is bare. I'm thinking about the place we've just been turned away from, feeling annoyed. We were counting on this letter written by the head of a monastery to convince the master of some estate or something along those lines to let us stay there until the snow melts, but there was some trouble with the man the letter was addressed to. Right now I'm walking next to a blonde woman dressed in red who's worried about food. I cheer up as I talk to her, and I'm saying that food won't be a problem for tonight, "Dieter and I found a veritable mountain of-"

After going lucid and abandoning the storyline I'd been in, I'm walking to a simple full-length mirror leaning against a wall. I focus on my intended destination - the rose garden, a meeting place. As I place my hands through the glass, I lose all visuals. My hands sink into the glass as far as my wrists, but no further. The 'hole' beyond the surface of the mirror that acts as a portal isn't open enough. I can feel jagged edges against my right wrist, as opposed to the heavy liquid-like feeling of the portal. It's like I've broken open a hole in a frozen lake. I stay focused on the destination and mentally dig at those edges until they give.

I can feel a wall of thorns all around me so that I can't move. I still have no visuals, I think of this as between scenes. I'm annoyed at myself - this is the barrier around the garden, I shouldn't have had to deal with this at all. It was an error in focus, thinking about roses and sharp edges. I try to correct my focus but find myself waking up. (Though it wound up being a false awakening. Visuals returned when I 'woke up.')