Carabas

Started out based on the Mulan musical that played in Tokyo a few years back, but the storyline started following the general, who no longer looks anything like the actress who played him, and now the dream has lost any theatre aspect. Now the general is the emperor's son, and has a name which translates to "divine," and has been summoned before the emperor. The emperor is blind, and from his eye sockets there are two strange things - flat, rectangular, worm-like things, something parasitic or symbiotic. Each has a small, white circle with a mark in the shape of ᛣ, and the general is aware that those marks can open and extend something that latches onto eyeballs and rips them from their sockets, he's seen it done before. The dream had been in 3rd person ever since I lost track of the theatre framing, but as I examined the things I shift to 1st person, the pov of the general, who is disgusted and afraid of the things.

When his father dismisses him, he indicates that he should leave through a door beside the throne instead of the way he came. It's a small opening, extremely low to the ground, so that a man would have to crawl to get through it; it's designed to shame people, to stress rank and obedience. The general gets down on his knees before it, then hesitates and says "Father" - at which the emperor lurches forward, placing the parasite-things close to the general's face. It's not a threat, just an attempt to get a 'look' at him using the parasite's senses, which 'taste' the air, but it's an inhuman-looking motion, and the general drops whatever he was going to say in favor of getting away as quickly as possible. But he/I have a difficult time moving through the door as quickly as I'd like, and I realize it's because I'm becoming aware of my body lying motionless in bed.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm leading some team climbing a mountain covered in snow, explorers, the first to climb this mountain in history. But the men keep seeing something, some shadow figure, and insist there's someone already here. I dismiss this as nonsense. But now that the peak itself is in sight, I can clearly see there's somebody up there.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

For the past few dream scenes, I've been in a car with my IRL sister S. and two women, a couple, witches; and we've been lost. We were lost on the road, we were lost driving through water, we were lost and mistakenly in the wrong house, we were lost and running from that house's owner, and now we're lost and we've stumbled across a street where every house seems to be having a party, spilling out into the street, blocking our way. They invite us to join the party, and while I want to just get back to the road, the others want to stay. I spot someone in the crowd, some minor celebrity, and I'm intrigued enough to agree, we check out the party. I talk to the minor celebrity briefly and find him disappointing.

Later, inside one of the houses where the party's going on, not much liking the company and wanting to get a move on, I've been cornered by some guy who's much taller and larger than I am and who seems to have mistaken me for a woman. He asks me if I believe in promises, and starts hinting very strongly that he believes we knew each other in a past life and are destined to be together. Yikes. I manage to shake him off and go find my sister in the kitchen, tell her that it's time we leave; the witch couple we were driving with join us and say "Um, we should go. Now." The lady of the house is in the kitchen with us and at this point she probably thinks we stole the silver, but we get out of there - through a window that opens onto the porch on the side of the house, rather than going back through that party to get to the door. As we're climbing out the window, one of the witches says something explaining to me and my sister why we've got to leave in such a hurry, something involving some guy who'd introduced himself as 'Psych', and I suspect it's that same creep.

Out on the porch, one of the witches looks behind us and gets a horrified look on her face. My sister asks what it is, and the other witch says oh, she just saw Ben - her ex, who's dead - don't look, just go, get off the porch, now. The porch is narrow enough that we have to go single file, I'm the last, and as each one gets off the porch and onto the street and looks back, they look increasingly horrified - Ben's a minor nuisance, their expressions indicate Ben was just a symptom of something more going on here. I feel something strange on my back, at the base of my spine, and my motions seem too slow; I become aware that it's because I'm waking up.

There's this guy running from some gang. It's about the patent for something he invented. He can't believe his invention is something anyone would be willing to kill him over, but I remind him it's not the invention they want to kill him over, it's the money. He's got some legal document - not the patent itself, but related to it, possibly he hasn't filed for it yet - which is what everyone's after, and after I get him to reveal it to me, a man who is my brother appears and snatches both the guy and the document away and runs into the forest, just as the gang catches up to us. This was our plan, the woods are my brother's territory. I act like I'm on the gang's side, or at least as if I want to catch that guy as much as they do - they were already aware from past interactions that I have an interest in the guy with the patent, and they've assumed I want the document for my own reasons. So they follow me when I lead the chase into the forest, into my brother's traps.

The path into the forest that I lead them on - and which my brother appears to be on, we catch glimpses of him now and then, though I'm aware he won't stick to the path - curves back and forth in strange ways, it's disorienting. I see an odd bullet coming - dark green like a beetle's wing - and I make sure I'm out of its path, that it picks off one of the gang as intended. It was fired by one of three men who work for/with my brother, people I know well. Time seems to have slowed down, and when one of the gang starts grumbling about the strangeness of it, a man emerges from the woods, the second of my brother's men. He explains that it's the insect-birds. They're insects which mimic birds and sing constantly, disorienting the birds and causing them to mistake night for day, and for us, creating an illusion of time slowing. They prevent violence being done in my brother's forest. But "their element is in possessing one," he says; that is, the insect enters and controls a single bird.

Dune-based, a Fremen leader has just died and everyone's chanting the name of someone they're choosing for the new Naib, a well-respected middle-aged man known for being level-headed. But they're interrupted by Paul and Jessica, performing some Bene Gesserit trick with light that makes them appear god-like, a move to take power over the Fremen. It works. I find it extremely distasteful.

My IRL mother weighing a desire to give up physical possessions against the potential uses for the land she owns, and considering an apiary.

A wrong number from an angry woman looking for a Melissa. (Not the one from the myths specifically, but still presumably inspired by the apiary bit.)

I'm looking at a digital folder labeled 'Eric'; none of the files inside have anything to do with him.

An earlier, lower-budget movie version of Barbarella.

A variety of nautical references: ornaments shaped like ships, a trip to the beach and a mention of pirates.

A painting of pale, black-haired elves with ravens on their shoulders, in a park.

Two homeless men, one with a dog, the other a preacher standing on a wooden crate, arguing about Jesus and whether or not he spent a lifetime as a cat.

"So ever shall be considered the gardens of Biblios."

I'm standing in front of a row of elevators with reflective gold-colored doors, and in a sort of voiceover I'm hearing what sounds like an article about a scientific study of reflections. There's a lot of information that sounded reasonable at the time but didn't actually translate to waking life - for example, your eyes perceive this angle of motion and expect an impact that never comes, causing tension, and resulting in your attention focusing on this or that minor detail. As I get into the elevator, the article is saying something about there being two different ways to think of reflections which both carry different benefits, and it goes on to explain the two ways. I find this interesting and decide to experiment with switching to the other way of thinking, which is viewing your reflection as a separate person, even expecting it to talk. Acting on the article's advice, I address my reflection on the mirrored elevator wall. My reflection's a great deal taller than me, and completely covered by a hooded cloak. I find I like him - or it - a great deal.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Some vague fragment involving briefly passing through an exhibit to do with planets, and something about Artemis.

There's a woman who's determined to hold onto the hand of some monstrously deformed figure who keeps trying to shy away. She's thinking about how she's been through some kinds of transformations in the past herself, so it takes more than some monstrous appearance to frighten her off. The monstrous one's thinking something about Cain, and something about two angels, one in favor of allowing the other's creations - humans - to develop variations of themselves (which is to say, to have children); the one who created them was opposed; and now he's found his downfall in a relationship with a human, which wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for that decision, allowing the humans to develop into new variations.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man who's been running through the halls of a house and now reaches a dead end, a study with a portrait, which I briefly thought was a mirror. A man who's been following him at a walking pace comes into the room and starts talking about the portrait, and about the history of the man in the painting, who was - is? - a vampire. He says, "They forgive him the very thing he (something)," and then something about "fell." Meanwhile the man who'd been running is stumbling around the room with his hand over his stomach like he's been injured, saying "Please!" There's a resemblance between him and the portrait.

Friday: A mountain "full of fog, 'wolves' and 'sheep'", where a woman who'll wind up becoming a historical figure is setting out to show the other side that some of their 'wolves' have deserted and are now helping her guard the 'sheep.'

Today: A guy in space, traveling toward Earth along with many, many other ships in some kind of race, the ship he's in seems made up of many different old parts, pieces are falling off along the way but he seems to have expected that. He's full of rage. There was something to do with lots being drawn, and his younger sister had been one of the winners, which would have meant she was safe and wouldn't have to take her chances in the race with the rest of them, but her parents (from whom he's estranged) had convinced her to give up her slot, that she must live or die and "become ashes" with them, so that they wouldn't be separated in the next life and lose her forever. She told him about this as he was looking over her ship for her, and he found something wrong with it, something that had been sabotaged, that would prevent him from communicating with her after the journey even if they both survived. He fixes it, and is furious.

Still the same storyline - there's a woman somewhere "left behind", the place all the people in the race and the lottery were abandoning. She wakes up with a gun next to her - not hers - and sees someone who says something to her. She, outraged by what he said, says "I don't look like a nice person to you?", and shoots him. Her logic being that if he couldn't recognize a good person when he saw one, he must be a bad person. As she shoots him, her face changes in some subtle way, something to do with her teeth, and I'm aware that in this place, now, people physically change to reflect their actions, and this is part of what the others were escaping from.

A conversation between a man and a woman in a bedroom as she's tying sheets together into a ladder, preparing to escape:
He: "I thought you might have missed it."
She: "Missed what?"
He: "The window."
She: "I can't miss the window. You're my destiny - war."

After an incident with a robot - it appeared human and was programmed to act as a caregiver to a group of four kids, something had gone wrong with it and put the kids in danger. Now someone's complaining to someone else about it - one's in law enforcement, the other's in politics, not sure which one is which. The one listening to the complaint responds, "I believe I oversaw the (something). And (something) to call in some backup." But when she says 'backup', she's not talking about something official. I see an image of two guys, not in any kind of uniform, one's scrawny and one's a little overweight, they have some connection to photography, possibly the press - they're the 'backup' she was referring to.

Just a name: Sven Odinson.

I've got some government job in which I'm part of a team of people in suits protecting someone, and we're currently in a hospital, when I pass a room where a team of people in red uniforms, EMTs maybe, are preparing for something. Something about them catches my attention as odd, and I mention to a coworker the possibility of a disguised threat. She agrees with me.

Something about political opposition to dances in cathedrals by night.

A zombie apocalypse setting, in which someone was approaching the house I was holed up in and we nearly shot each other, wrongly assuming each other to be zombies. She tries to convince me to come with her to some camp and I agree only because I'm fairly confident about being able to escape her along the way if it seems necessary, whereas if I start a confrontation with her here and now I'm fairly confident she'll shoot me. She's traveling with someone who joins her then and gives me a checkup, and she takes a very long time to find my pulse. When she finally says "Found it," I say, "Look at that, I have a heart. That's one for the books."

A little girl saying "(something) to read hearts, death to solve the mystery." A choice between two different goals, reminding us to match the approach to the goal. This is a girl who I and the people I'm traveling with met a long time ago, and at the time she just seemed like a tragic figure, sole survivor of some massacre in which she watched the deaths of everyone else in her castle and the surrounding village. When I'm thinking about this, I see a memory of one of the people I'm traveling with standing in a pool of water with her, up to his neck in the blood and gore surrounding this girl. The journey we're on somehow involves the spirit of a certain place - either we're searching for it or it's opposing us or something - and we met this girl fairly early in that journey, but now that we've met her again, we realize she's more than she seems; the tragic figure we met originally was at least partially an act, and I strongly suspect she is that spirit.

Now she's saying, "Sure you shouldn't just make perception your goal?" That's following on the death-to-solve-the-mystery thing she said just before. One of the guys I'm traveling with says, "Sorry, our goal is to take the cat out of the box." A Schrodinger's Cat metaphor; we don't want to just find the answers for ourselves, we want to eliminate the mystery completely.

I'm using a tea cup to catch rain that contains some kind of power.

There's a very important (possibly sacred) torch that I was meant to do something with (I have a vague impression of something involving the sky) but, while standing at the edge of a cliff, I've managed to drop the torch, and I'm watching it fall into the waves and go out. "Oops."

A group of five people in a car, on a road trip. They stop at a sushi place and one of them goes off to try to pick up a woman he saw outside. Two of the others say something, sheepish, about how they've been hitting the 'family' note a little too much on this trip, it must have freaked him out, and now he's proving to himself how unattached to them he is. They don't mind.

There's a portrait, tall and very narrow, of a woman standing in front of a Buddhist grave marker. The woman who was the subject of the portrait is standing in front of the painting, looking at it. A strange reptile-like creature steps out of the painting of the grave, and I know this is her dead son.

There's a memory gap - next fragment I remember clearly is in a dark space with three exits, an entrance to an afterlife, and the woman's talking with her son, who now looks more or less as he did in life - human - although there are shadows clinging to him in a shape suggesting a tail, and he's standing halfway in one of those three exits, with flames around his feet. They'd been saying something about how that exit's not for her, after she tried to hug him and he stopped her. She says, "Mommas hurt, darling. Men die." Then she vanishes.

Fragments: Something composed of metal loops that I take for an art piece, believing it's something to do with male and female; instead I'm told it's a spell for godhood. A scene with a teacher and student. A reference to 'maenad.'

Classic movie monsters. The dream was in black and white, and featured Bela Lugosi's Dracula and Lon Chaney Jr's Wolfman. Through some plan of Dracula's, Talbot winds up becoming a vampire, while Drac becomes the wolfman instead, and essentially human when it's not a full moon. Talbot's not thrilled with any of this. There's a scene in which Dracula springs Talbot from an asylum through the window, before the monster-type switch; and afterward, a confrontation in a swamp in which Dracula is talking about world domination, and how the ability to appear human was required.

I'd been talking to someone about a career change I was considering, when I realize I'm still wearing a change of clothes I acquired earlier in a dream. At first, I think it a marvel, a thing in a dream that carried over into real life - but later on, as I'm sitting around a dinner table having a boring conversation, I realize that actually it must be an indication that I'm still dreaming. I become lucid and immediately start floating in the air; I stopped paying attention to the other characters in the room and didn't see them after this point. Initially I intended to go outside and continue flying, but then I decide to try something new this time. I decide to summon a god - Apollo, since summoning his light for an anti-nightmare technique has been very effective, but he's yet to show up in person. I'm also thinking his association with trance states might carry over into lucid dreaming. I close my eyes so that I can't see the room, and I focus on him, call him. Nothing happens. I eventually give up, open my eyes again. I think a little more structure may be helpful, and I should probably keep my eyes open; I remember a time when a dream fell apart completely after I stopped focusing on visuals.

I go to a mirror, but instead of calling Apollo again, this time I decide to call up an image of my ideal future self (possibly related to the non-lucid talk of career changes earlier). Several options appear one at a time, and I reject each of them. Many of them bear very little physical resemblance to me, and most are wearing glasses (which I don't need). Eventually I settle on one that I approve of (though why I approved of this particular one, I don't know); he looks like something out of the 1700s. When I turn away from the mirror, he's standing next to me. He seems a little confused by this, but he's just here for me to get a more detailed look at him. But while he's here anyway, we decide to fuck. Eventually I remember my original intention to summon a god and I decide that's more interesting than what is essentially dream masturbation, so I leave him on the floor by the mirror and go back to the table. I sit down, then remember I didn't bother to get dressed again; I decide I'd rather have clothes on for this. I try to summon clothing by just deciding I am wearing clothes, but this doesn't work; I think perhaps it doesn't work only because I can clearly see and feel myself not wearing clothes, so I'm trying to overrule the evidence of my senses. My shirt's by the table, but my pants are all the way across the room, so I just pick up the shirt and try to extend it, to use it as a source of materials to create something new. This seems to be working, but very slowly. I don't care to wait; I give up and just walk back across the room for my pants, and start thinking about the 'rules' of dreams - thinking that perhaps it's better to work with what's already in the environment rather than try to create new things from scratch all the time; less wasteful, less effort. I become aware that I'm starting to wake up.

There's a woman having a sort of Cinderella transformation - rags to ballgown - but she doesn't seem in the least bit impressed by it. I'm vaguely annoyed at her lack of reaction, but on with the show. She enters a throne room and asks something of the king, who says "But first answer me this. When did you become the Evil Queen?" She doesn't know what to make of this. She says, "I'm not a queen." "Your father is dead," says the king - her father was also a ruler, she became queen the moment he died. The king here holds out a collection of brown papers. He says it's something her father had been putting together the night he died - last night - something urgent, something for her, since she'd been away on this mission.

I'm looking at a book containing a moving image representing En - a small boat on a river, stylized lotus flowers, a lot of gold paint. The color's faded and chipped in places, but still beautiful.

A musician's writing a letter to a friend of his, trying to comfort his friend, and he's thinking about how limited words are, how it can't replicate the sort of things he'd do if he was there in person, even the simple act of putting on a familiar tune. He goes to the gramophone and puts on the tune he was thinking of, and sits to listen to it before he continues writing, thinking that perhaps the feeling he gets from this song will come across in his words.

A couple. A blonde woman is laying out cards on the floor in five columns, representing the guy's past relationships; he's lying on his back next to her, not looking. She observes that his two longest relationships followed the exact same pattern: lasted the same amount of time, ended the same way, with the same warning signs beforehand. She says based on that pattern, if (event) happens at (time into relationship), he might as well bail immediately.

One of the shorter columns is unique in that every card represents things going well, and she wonders why he'd split up with that guy. Privately, she's realizing that he ended things shortly after he'd had some non-romantic encounter with her, and she's wondering if she was the reason for the split. But out loud she just points out how odd it looks that they broke it off considering it seemed to be going so well. He teases her, saying "yeah, I'm starting to miss a bit of swordplay" - part of the joke here is that the guy in question also did something involving literal swords - and she hits him, lightly, on the arm; then she puts the cards down and straddles him, and says something along the lines of "Not like that. I mean, you had a different dynamic than you did with anyone else. Not in a good way. I mean, I liked him, when he was alive - oh, god." He's laughing at her. What she'd been trying to say by 'not in a good way' was that although the two of them clearly got along, they hadn't seemed really emotionally attached, but she's stumbling over this conversation. He assures her, yes, the guy in question had indeed been great when he was alive - teasing her about her reluctance to sound disrespectful of the dead - he was lovely and wonderful and all that, and she's also lovely and wonderful and all that. There's a lot of laughing from both of them over how ridiculous this conversation is.

A fragment in which I'm waiting for someone in a subway station and meet an android, though they've been banned. She looks human except for her eyes: they're filled with a constantly-moving white light, and her eyelids are covered in jewels.

Utena's dueling someone, and her clothing's changing as she does so. Other duelists are running up the stairs and arrive just in time to see her win, and Touga says something complementing her on her confidence, that she could trust that the changes going on around her would serve her.

He goes on to say something about those changes reflecting past eras, which transitions into images with some vague connections - something about a limousine, and then something about flight patterns with an image of a witch flying on a broom, which leads into the next scene:

A guy who's just now become a witch is looking out the window at the approaching dawn, and he wants to go flying and feel the world wake up around him; but he has responsibilities to attend to, keeping him here.

I'm reading a book. In it, the main character is looking at a river and thinking "The mare of time." The river surface usually looks calm, but it's been disturbed due to the ongoing combat. There's a thought that it's only humanocentrism that makes him see the 'calm' river as better/more natural than the 'disturbed' river. There's a reference to a distant place he's been searching for, or came from, or that otherwise has been referenced frequently in the story before now; from this point in the story onward, that place will no longer be a major part of the story. There will be a few minor finds, items from that place, fruits, henna - accompanied by the line "It was a good henna, but not enough to sit in front of the Skillet-mirror" - but the place itself will never appear in the story again, which gives the story as a whole a sort of surreal feeling, with storylines that go nowhere and scenes that don't quite match up, aside from always containing the same main character; a focus on imagery rather than plot. It reminds me of a less surreal Maldoror, or a more surreal Gormenghast, and I start thinking about the surreal in my own writing.

There's a Lost Boys tv show, currently showing the Boys versus some vampire skinheads.

A doctor who is giving up his practice and moving to an isolated island, moving in with the couple he loves. He's talking to his mother (a relatively young woman who insists he refers to her as his sister in public) about his intent to stop practicing medicine. They're standing on a small wooden hanging bridge high over a river, surrounded by tropical plants with broad leaves and looking out over the sea; it's very beautiful.

I'm in a marketplace filled with angry people. They don't like being guarded by off-worlders like us, and we're trying to arrange things so we can get at least half the guard duty covered by their own people. One of our guys in uniform is saying something about how surveys indicate the majority of locals don't mind having some off-worlder presence, and we're trying to find the best solution for everyone here, and more research is going to have to be done. I'm not joining in the discussion, I'm sitting in the dirt at the edge of the marketplace, out of uniform, just listening and watching. There'd been a chance of a riot here, but the danger seems to have passed. Now that things seem to have calmed down, the kid who alerted me to the situation and led me here reaches out and picks up the chips - money - that I left beside me on the ground. I put it there for him, but he seemed unsure if it was really okay for him to take it. When he sees me looking at him, he looks scared and smiles at me; I nod, and he grabs the money and runs off.

Someone with a different face than usual is explaining to a horrified listener that he's learned to shapeshift. The listener asks who he can shapeshift into; the answer is something along the lines of "oh, people I've eaten, people I've physically bonded with, anyone really." The listener wonders, but doesn't ask out loud, what physically bonded means exactly; he's wondering if just seeing someone is enough. "Objects, even." The listener, horrified by all this, asks, "What happens to your personhood?" The shapeshifter says he's removed a piece of himself and keeps it separate in this box, which he's now asking the listener to deliver to his aunt for him for safekeeping. It looks ordinary, and the listener asks if this shouldn't be labeled in some way. The shifter mocks the idea. It's not necessary to know something's significance to keep it safe; often it's the opposite, it's simpler and safer if they don't know.

A pair of time-travelers who've recently reunited are stopping by a football game they've been to before. They kept meaning to get around to changing this one little moment in time, and now they've got the chance. There's a guy who's been meaning to propose to his girlfriend, and they're about to be featured on the big screen; the first time around, neither of them had noticed they were on camera, and something unfortunate happened afterward. This time around, the time-travelers are sitting just behind the couple, and they poke them and draw their attention to the camera. The guy takes the moment to propose, the girl accepts - but they both seem rather awkward and uncomfortable with all the attention.

I've been living in a foreign country, working as a live-in tutor, but this is the end of my last day and I'm about to leave. I'm packing up the last of my things and then head downstairs. Downstairs appears to be the house I grew up in, but I'm thinking to myself that this stuff isn't really here, I'm dreaming, and this is only being used as a convenient background, so there's no need to pack it all. Despite this thought, I don't become very lucid; I just focus on sorting out which things only seem to be here because it's a dream, and which things I actually need to pack.

Julie's patting a big, shaggy old dog, in a room with four guys behind her, talking to her, though I can't make out what's being said. I'm using magic to check in on her from a distance and I don't have a very good connection in this room. She gets up and goes into the corridor, where I can't see her at all, but I recognize the sound of her sister's voice. I realize they're heading outside, which is convenient, there's tons of running water out there I can use. I switch the spell to a bit of water running down the side of the wall, and see that they've gone out into the courtyard and are sitting down on the benches around the fountain - even better. As I move the spell, I remember seeing a post here on DV with a title about learning to control the elements in dreams, which I hadn't read, since thinking of the elements as something you have to learn to use sounded counterproductive. I'm thinking about how helpful water spirits have always been. Again, I don't go lucid; the spell's POV has been moved, and I go back to focusing on the view. They're in the courtyard of a building made of large sand-colored stones, surrounded by potted and hanging plants, and from the fountain I'm looking up at Julie's sister, a woman with long black hair, wearing a black dress. She's saying something about "outlanders."

I'm with a group of people crossing a desert, when a girl - Julia - arrives in our camp on foot. She'd been following us after we left town, refusing to take her with us. She's an English woman, dressed in Victorian clothing; she looks as if she must be very hot in those clothes, but she's kept struggling along. Then a scene change, just a quick image: Julia walking in the desert on foot, while I and a woman sitting behind me are riding a horse, far ahead of her.

A fragment: an image of cities and towers in domes surrounded by wilderness, one of which has been heavily decayed, but which appears to rebuild itself as I'm watching; it's related to the breaking of a Sleeping Beauty-style curse.

I'm at my mother's house, and she's putting 9 red beans in the snow behind the house. I ask her why, and she's astonished that I don't know. "Beans for Martin," she says. It's a reference to Redwall, which isn't just a story but a legend, or a fairy tale, something with customs attached - specifically in this case, leaving out nine red beans. "Ever since I was a little girl, they've always had nine at Christmas."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragment to do with immortals whose modern clothing preferences tend to gravitate towards those most similar to the eras they grew up in; and later, getting a blood snack from my boyfriend's fridge, talking about indulgence and temptation.

My IRL neighbor momentarily mistook me for a ghost he was looking for. I'm out looking for my IRL cat, to bring her inside, but I see two identical cats and am not sure which is her. (Noteworthy: doppelgangers are a common nightmare theme for me, and this time it's not a nightmare.) I catch them both, and as I'm holding them and explaining the dilemma to my neighbor, I become sure that my cat's the one on the right. Even though they're identical there's a different 'feel.' I'm pleased I was able to recognize the difference. But my neighbor insists that my cat is actually the one on the left; even after I discover some difference between them, he continues to insist on the wrong choice.

Belle and Rumpelstiltskin are having an argument. He's looking very small and confused; he'd been wearing a coat covered in sharp quills like a porcupine's, and while normally he likes it, right now he doesn't have the show-off body language needed for it; he's managed to stick himself with it, twice. She's saying that he's mistaken about why she's unhappy, and that for all the nice things at the castle, she'd opt for a plain thatched house with ordinary things, with someone who does ordinary things, "something that matters." She means blacksmiths or farmers and similar - someone who's part of the community. Rumpelstiltskin's annoyed by this. "Well, you got me."

Fragments: IRL sister S. and her friend P. help me with car trouble; and I tell someone to find me based on the imagery in a dream I made for them.

ASOIAF-based. Jaime's face is covered in burn scars on one side, recently healed; Cersei's pale and has something wrong with her skin, grey spiderweb patterns in small patches on the sides of her face, wearing widow's black with a high collar. Jaime's sitting down next to his uncle - whose face is also scarred, on the opposite side from Jaime, from a cut from a weapon that left a permanent hole through his cheek - and he's saying "Look at us. Three grotesques." He's not including his uncle in that; he means the three siblings, specifically in their role as Tywin's heirs.

He folds his hands on his chest, and something strikes me as odd about this; I focus on his fingers and feel like there's too many of them. (For reasons that were obvious once I woke up.) He says, "We remember (name of some famous military tactician)" - and then says some quote relevant to their current situation; as a disembodied observer, I'm less interested in the quote and more interested in why Jaime's saying it. I'm thinking that this time period, immediately after all three Lannister siblings had become disfigured, ended up being when they really started to come into their own; that Jaime specifically became serious about various responsibilities that he'd had little interest in up until now, became more philosophical, and wound up distinguishing himself as a tactician.

Jaime's still talking - he's just mentioned a prophecy which includes a mention of monogamy, and he sneers at the reference, and says something along the lines of 'if only I could get me a good prybar' - he's stuck in an engagement he desperately wishes he could get out of, but which he's resigned to.

I'm leaning against a wooden fence, wearing a heavy fur coat and digging a bullet out of my side with my fingers, blood all over my hands. It can't kill me, but it's unpleasant. I'm saying to someone, "Wish you hadn't come." Didn't want them to see this.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragments: A photo of a small island containing 6 towers arranged in a hexagon, with a wall around them so that they can't be seen from the water; the photo's accompanied by a note mentioning Florida and Puerto Rico. A girl with a shapeshifter for a brother. The word supranatural. Song lyrics: "Feed on the sickness." Dialogue: "You're familiar. I'm just glad to see familiar-"

Five teenagers heading to an abandoned playground; three of them are aliens in human form, and they need to go somewhere isolated to temporarily drop the disguise. The other two are humans, their girlfriends, in on the secret. One of them has seen this before, but for the other, Laurie, this is new; although she knew her guy was alien, actually seeing it is a shock. She sits down on a bench attached to a picnic table, and she's thinking about when she slept with him. The other girl, the one who's seen this before, is watching her and feeling sympathetic. The boyfriend comes back over to her and asks what's the matter, except English isn't really compatible with his mouth in this form - he's something vaguely like a very large spider - so "What's the matter, Laurie?" sounds more like "Wassama'ar? Lau-rie?" The other girl comes over and puts her hands on Laurie's shoulders.

Rumpelstiltskin/Gold has a daughter. She's building a snowman in a park with her mother, along with a large group of other parents and children doing the same thing; Gold's not there, but he's using magic to talk with her from a distance, now and then. She's named her snowman Lefty. It has 3 left arms, one of them with a hook. But while she's not paying attention, one of the other mothers breaks Lefty and uses it as materials for her own kid's snowman. This doesn't come as a surprise. Gold's daughter isn't treated well in this town, she's always ostracized. Gold, hearing about this, starts to encourage her to (do something I no longer remember.)

While he's encouraging her, Rumpelstiltskin has a flashback: in his castle, with Regina in full Evil Queen mode. He's ranting about some Council which he blames for manipulating him into becoming the 'evil creature' he is today, and which he's now turning against. The rant has a reap-what-you-sow kind of theme. Regina had been on that Council up until very recently and is encouraging him in this; she's the one who informed him how he's been played.

A note from an earlier wakeup that I no longer remember: "Rescue mission. 2 people ready to bodily drag this guy away from the queen, not realizing he has his own plan."

I become lucid. (I no longer remember what was happening before this, if anything.) I'm standing at the bottom of a short flight of steps leading up out of a shop, onto a street, and there's two guys I'm with who are heading up the stairs, and if I want to follow the storyline of this dream I should head up those stairs with them. But given that I've just become lucid, I'm not sure the lucidity is stable enough to last through a scene-changing doorway, so I decide to abandon the storyline. I look around the shop instead, looking at the wooden pillars and ceiling, wondering what I'd like to do. There's a guy working the register who's grumbling, in a bad mood, and we start talking. He's attractive.

The scene changes; we're elsewhere, having sex, and I can feel everything I do to him as if it were being done to me. He's aware of the sudden scene change, and he's confused, but up for it. His appearance gradually changes, and I become aware that without consciously deciding to do so, I'm changing him to better suit my tastes; now that I've noticed I'm doing it, I consciously encourage specific changes. Everything I change alters gradually, but then suddenly his whole appearance changes in an instant, now a goth/punk look, pale and with half his head shaved; I hadn't intended to do that. I'm thinking that all the gradual changes I was making must have pushed him to some tipping point, and I'm a little annoyed with myself. He's now becoming distressed; I don't think he's aware that he used to look very different, but he's aware something's off. The dream disappears, and I'm in darkness, no visuals, no body, thinking over what went wrong.

I become aware that I'm lying in bed. (False awakening.) I open my eyes: I'm in a dorm, I think of this as a place associated with dreaming. The room's filled with many bunk beds, reminds me of hostels, and although I should have this room to myself, there are a bunch of people here now, new students who've arrived in the night. I try to go back to sleep, although they're very noisy, and I overhear something about framing someone for something as a joke, and something about cats and bad luck. Eventually I remember that I don't live in a dorm anymore, therefore none of this is real and I don't have to be here, so I get up to leave. One of the students tries to stop me, referencing cats and bad luck again, and I get really, irrationally, over-the-top irritated by this - by the idea of a DC standing in my way and wasting my time. I put my hand around his throat - my hand has long claws as I do so - move him out of my way, and walk out the door. (And then woke up.)

Part of a castle has been blocked off to the public for a photoshoot I'm working on. There's a woman hanging around just outside the blocked off area, watching us; she's very pretty, with long red hair under a hat. It starts raining a little and we take a break, and I go over to smoke by the entrance. That woman comes over to me and we start talking. After a while, she tells me she's the daughter of someone I know, someone I watched die in hospital just yesterday. Thing is, in the present, that daughter is just a young child; I have a mental image of seeing her, as a child, in the hospital. There's something to do with timelines or the dead going on. I don't believe her. She tells me she's wanted to see me, and implies that in her own time, I'm dead. Some other people from the photoshoot come over then and distract me for a moment, and then the woman is no longer there.

I can't get a couple light switches to work, and realize this is a dream. (Noteworthy: that's a common dream sign for me, but up until now, it only happened if I went to sleep so early that it was still dark IRL, usually around 5 AM. This time I went to sleep at a normal hour, after sunrise.) I have a false awakening: I'm in my IRL bed, but am fairly sure I'm still dreaming. I wonder what to do with this - I look up at the ceiling and consider removing it and going flying. However, I'm distracted by the sound of a crash, and I see my computer (an old desktop model which I don't actually own IRL) has fallen over and broken. I forget about dreaming and get irrationally stressed about having to replace the computer. (I suspect there may have been an actual noise IRL that affected the dream.)

Based on F/SN, a bunch of photos showing the future of various timelines. I focus on one showing Saber in a park by a lake, with skyscrapers in the background, and it becomes the setting of the dream; someone who I at first mistake for Archer is teasing her, and he winds up falling in the lake. He's wearing some sort of uniform that I associate with the Mage's Association, and which I think of as being 'Saber's colors' (it's blue and gold), marking them as partners; then I realize he's an older Shirou, not a version of Archer.

I'm approaching a dance in the woods together with someone I know, and I recognize the song playing - Bottom of the River, Delta Rae. We walk over to three woman sitting around a fire, to speak with them. I think of the Fates and the Graces.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm Shirou, and Tohsaka's just walked away from those three women from the previous scene, and before I follow her, one of those women says to me, "Nothing like that to make your magic full of fear." I'm thinking that I have just enough awareness of Archer's memories to know there's something I don't want to remember; remembering it would cause me to repeat the same choices he made, and that's not what this timeline's for.

I'm reading an article about genius, stating that long-term caffeine use has disruptive effects on the brain.

I'm trying to buy something but I've upset the woman working the counter somehow and she's refusing to ring me up, or any of the other customers for that matter. She goes so far as to call the police. I literally offer her the shirt off my back - a basketball jersey, something that's worth something to her. We strike up a conversation, and she winds up being friendly.