lucid

There's a girl walking up a narrow attic staircase that she very much doesn't want to go up. There's something that looks like a child at the base of the stairs, forcing her to go up and see 'mother.' 'Mother' is something that this girl has fed people to before, but she's never gone up the stairs herself. Now she's failed the pair somehow. Whatever's at the top of the stairs feels nightmarish enough that I decide I don't want to see this, and take just enough control to back out of the scene. There was some resistance, and it felt like a race against time, whether I could get out before the girl got to the top of the stairs.

I'm standing somewhere airy, white walkways, a few white walls, mostly open space. There are a few pages on the ground, a story I was reading, but I feel too on edge to focus on it. I put my back to a wall, that helps.

The Magician on a city street with a little girl. He's saying, "Countless thousands of worlds, or (something, along the lines of 'a few') worlds and those you know." She asks what he means, and he says nevermind, but he's talking about the price for what he's about to do for her; something's going to be lost. He doesn't want her to feel guilty over it, so he doesn't explain the details. He raises his staff and these gold shapes form in the air around them - flat, curved, with sharp points, something like a tribal tattoo come to life, I have vague associations with wings and clockwork (they do resemble stylized wings, but no clue what the clockwork association's from) - and then their surroundings seem to shatter, taking them somewhere 'between worlds.'

Memory gaps and vague fragments after that: those same two characters standing in front of images like holograms, representing people that little girl knew, but the images are fragmentary, like they've had pieces digitally erased, leaving a bit of hair or a corner of a dress hanging in midair, but never any faces. Something to do with the importance of the little girl remembering "Rose," but there's a trick to it - she knew someone who was called Rose, but who also used another name, and it's that other name she really has to remember. Four knights, two in red and two in blue, male and female, and the man in blue has some message to do with the kid's father and something about a doll.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm playing some kind of game based on Middle-earth - there's no sense of me physically playing a video game or the like, I seem to physically be there and it seems to be a real place, but I think of it as a game. At the moment I'm trading in some weapon and given a new selection to choose from. It's mostly swords and daggers. I choose a staff. This alters the way the game is played, although I hadn't realized it when I made that choice; it removes me from the fighting and instead allows me to travel freely, flying over the countryside, exploring the world, unlocking all the elven settlements that were otherwise hidden. I won't be able to continue the storyline this way, but it has its appeal.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A movie about robots, filmed in first person POV, full of scenes designed to make you feel sympathy for the robots, even while the robots themselves remind you that they're just tools and there's no need to feel concerned.

Belle and a newly-human, rather fragile-looking Rumpelstiltskin have been traveling somewhere and are now in some dimly-lit house where they're finally meeting with Rumpelstiltskin's son. (His personality's so different from Bae's that I hesitate to use the same name for this dream version.) Belle and the son talk while Rumpelstiltskin's sort of collapsed in a chair, Belle's next to him, the son's on the second floor and looking down at them over a railing; she seems suspicious of him. It seems they've met before, in a shared dream, and something that she saw in that dream is making her suspicious of him now. He warns her not to take shared dreams too literally, as other associations tend to leak in.

I'm in a house which contains a dollhouse which is an exact model of the house, even containing a miniature version of the dollhouse itself, which in turn is a perfect model with its own miniature dollhouse inside, and so on; the dream camera zooms in through what seems to be an infinite series of nested houses, and I say "It's recursive."

Inside one of these levels of houses, I can hear a woman's voice singing, not a recording or anything professional, it's the way someone might sing to themselves around the house, going "la la la" instead of words. I'm in a hall, passing by a woman's bedroom where there are a few cardboard boxes open on the floor, one with old Victorian clothes spilling out, and a mirror in a gold frame. The mirror catches my attention and I go lucid. I'd been thinking earlier (while awake) that mirrors are often linked with magic and summoning in my dreams and I'd intended to try using that deliberately the next time I had a lucid dream, so I look at this one now and try to summon Julia, who I'd expect to be the easiest character for my mind to summon. After a moment I see a woman moving in the mirror in the distance, too far away to see much, but it's not Julia. I start to try again with a slightly different approach, but then think that I'm a little too close to waking up for this. I lose visuals.

I 'wake up' in bed and reach for a pen to jot this down, but I drop it and have to get out of bed to look for it. I'm irritated by this, thinking I'm going to forget the dream - then I wake up again.

I'm looking at some kind of travel ad with a picture of a bridge and a quote calling it magical. A woman's complaining about the misuse of the quote - apparently it's a line from the end of a long poem about a more literal variety of magic, and the way the ad is using it is going completely against the spirit of the poem. She summarizes the poem, saying something along the lines of 'magic's one and only purpose: getting us outta here.'

As I think about what that means, I become lucid. I'm floating above the bridge from the image in that ad, high over a river, surrounded by trees; I fly along the road, over the trees, flying higher until I can see that this is an island, and I fly out over the water. It's all very beautiful, but I'm still thinking about what that woman had said, and I associate it with a quote from Tolkien in defense of escapism. (The quote: Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?) Thinking about Tolkien, I think that while I'm lucid, I'll go find some elves. But suddenly I feel a desperate need to, as the woman said, get outta here - rather than flying peacefully over the water, now I'm thinking of the sky as a barrier I have to break through; I'm very worked up about it. I fail completely.

When I stop trying to break through the sky, I find I'm now flying outside my IRL home. I land in a tree. My IRL neighbor's on the steps outside with some people I think of as her cousins, and she sees me. I feel embarrassed, a grown man climbing trees. The branch I'm sitting on breaks with a very loud crack, and although I don't fall very far at all, they run over to me. She scolds me for climbing trees when people are trying to sleep. We go inside. I'm still vaguely aware that I'm dreaming, but I'm thinking that I'll have to wait for these people to leave before I can do anything very interesting.

I 'wake up' on a bus. I think about the lucid dream I just had, but am distracted when Danica Patrick starts making out with the woman sitting next to me. (And yet it doesn't occur to me that I might still be dreaming...)

I'm in an office, talking to someone about the android I've been monitoring. The guy I'm talking to is the same model, and I'm asking him about some of the skills he was programmed with; I think there might be something wrong with the one I've been observing, she seems to have let some of her skills decay. He hints that maybe I've got an ulterior motive here, and he's right, but I insist I'm only concerned about my employer (their manufacturer)'s reputation. I'm thinking I'm going to have to download a training program so I can pose as a servant and infiltrate her owner's household.

(Woke up. Had an unusually difficult time getting back to sleep, I was up for at least an hour.)

There's two men sitting in front of a fireplace, a young man and an old one. The young man's saying, "Don't you want to help me?" There's a long pause. The young man isn't aware of it, but the person he's speaking to is his father-in-law; his wife, the old man's daughter, has recently passed away, and for some reason the old man thinks it's to his benefit to keep that connection secret. Now the old man says, "Your wife... Very sweet creature."

(Woke up. Back to sleep without difficulty this time.)

I'm on a train named after a greek goddess; I've just changed from a train called Autehna (which is meant to be Athena - my dreams have mixed up that name in a similar way before, again pronouncing it with a 't' instead of 'th'), and I'm thinking of the naming of the two trains as pleasantly symbolically appropriate. I'm writing in a journal. As I write, I see an image of what I'm writing about: a very powerful and morally dubious man offered me a position, and I turned him down, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. In the journal, I write that I must have learned in another life to refuse to get tangled up with the wicked and powerful.

Continuing as the same character from the train, I find my wife and children asleep around/under the Christmas tree.

Still the same character, I'm standing on a dock next to a rowboat full of men in red uniforms, casting off. I'm in the same uniform, as is the man beside me, but the two of us aren't going back to the ship with the rest. I'm thinking about that position I'd turned down, and the possible ill will resulting from that refusal, and I start to feel suspicious about the guy next to me. When I look at him, he takes off running down the dock, reaching for a rope. I reach for the weapon I've concealed in my false leg, and as I remove it I hear someone say "mon dieu!" I'm thinking about the various bits and pieces of myself that I've left behind.

(Woke up, once again couldn't get back to sleep and eventually gave up on it, even though I'd gotten only about 5 hours of sleep. Unusual.)

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.

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.

I'm standing by a light switch in pitch black darkness, and the lights won't turn on. I question whether this is a dream, doubt it at first, but then realize yes, it is. I have a sort of false awakening in which I still realize I'm dreaming, but now I become aware that I'm lying on my back in a bed in the guest room of my father's house (no resemblance to anywhere he's lived IRL), with his cat curled up against my legs - nothing's changed visually, it's still pitch black. I look up at where the ceiling would be and think about stars, and about a previous lucid dream where I removed the roof and floated up into the sky, and debate whether to do that again. I feel like there's something else I want to do here first. I can hear my father and his girlfriend watching TV in the next room and talking to each other. As I listen to them I forget that this is a dream.

Memory gap - some time later I'm standing in a different room, again trying and failing to get the light switch to work. I hear the sound of my stepbrother coming home and going straight to his own room. This light switch has several different switches and dials that I can't see in the dark, and this time I wind up taking out my ipod and holding it up as a flashlight. I can see the switches and dials now, but I still can't get them to work, and then I remember that this is a dream.

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

I'm going to visit someone I owe thanks, bringing a guitar to play for them. One of the strings snaps.

At my father's house, some guy is trying to talk to my sister S., he's angry and seems obsessed, and while they're arguing he picks up a knife - not to threaten with, but it's the last straw, me and my father kick him out.

At my mother's house, one of her former students is at the door with some friends, and he's talking to her about some technique that's recently become a fad. Everyone's very impressed by his expertise, and it's driving me nuts because this technique is just a cheap knockoff version of something I've been doing for years that no one's ever taken seriously, and this popular version is much less effective. We get into a really idiotic argument which leaves me feeling frustrated even after I woke up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm lying in bed in the wrong house, and some boy shakes me awake to tell me I have to go. I apologize and try to explain that I'm not there to do anything bad, I just got the wrong place, but I can't remember the word for 'place' in Japanese and have to fumble around trying to find a different way to say it. He gets the point but doesn't really care, he didn't seem particularly threatened by a stranger in his house to begin with, he just wants me gone before his mother wakes up. I walk out a back door that, aside from a little ledge, opens directly onto the river. The kid tries to correct me, pull me back inside so I can use the front door and actually leave, but I just step out onto the river and stand on top of the water, which is a normal thing for a witch like me to do. The kid's surprised, the water and the light are really vivid, it's all very pleasant. As I'm appreciating the vividness, I become aware that I'm thinking of this as a dream.

I walk a few steps into the sky and start floating, heading somewhere specific. As I float above the river, I pass various people, and I start to hear a song, people are singing it. I pass two brothers sitting in chairs having some fashionable procedure done, a row of string sewn above their lip, to me it looks like they're having their mouths sewn closed. It strikes me as odd, but I remind myself that this isn't my time period so I don't have the full context, not for me to judge.

I reach a roller coaster, and there's a man and a woman riding it, the people I've been looking for. They're also singing that song that's been going on, and the lyrics tell me a little about their history. She has (or possibly had, up until very recently) a life-threatening heart condition. Their song is about the possibility of fixing a heart only to get hit by a bus or something similar, and the way people think they have time. The guy, singing in English with an Irish accent, sings a verse about how if (some name, some guy he knows) died he'd be singing a toast to him.

Song's over. Now that we've all met up in a dream, as planned, the guy asks whether we should wake up now. I'm inclined to agree, mission complete, but I think it's a little ridiculous to waste a lucid dream, there ought to be some fun we could have before we go. The guy leaves anyway, the girl stays. She says to me, "I have questions." I say to her, "I... probably don't have answers." She starts to say something else, but I become aware that I'm consciously thinking up her next dialogue for her, and that I'm waking up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Forever Knight-based setting, I'm Nicholas, and I'm being posed a question: between Janette, LaCroix, and an apple which represents my hope for humanity, I can only save one. What's my first instinct? I dismiss the apple completely but can't decide between the other two, which is annoying since the entire point of this exercise was only to see which came to mind first, without overthinking it.

Scene changes to an Umineko setting - Beatrice, who'd posed the question, is annoyed with the way I've spoiled it, and she retreats into the other room with aunt Eva. She says something to Eva that I can hear through the door, something about how the only hope is the "good key (name of key)."

3rd person, I'm looking down at a wide stone staircase in a castle, and descending the stairs there's this woman wearing buckskin who I think of as some kind of hunter, she's talking with the king. She's saying the words "-get our answers."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm taking my IRL youngest sister, L., to the sands to get her first dragon. (Relevant to upcoming IRL event today, sans dragons.) (Edit: Nevermind, the IRL event actually did wind up involving dragons. Or the word 'dragon', anyway.) I was talking with a few older relatives about the dragons, and L. kept trying to hurry us up, anxious about getting there in time to see the dragons hatch; but for the rest of us this is all old hat, so we wasted time talking, and now we're running late. We keep telling L. that it's fine, we'll make it on time, and even if we miss the hatching you've still got a window of a few hours after the dragons hatch to bond with them. But when we get down to the sand, the eggs are already gone. We have to catch up with the hatchlings in the barn instead.

Before we leave for the barn, I see what I think of as a king cobra in the sand - it's huge, as wide as a person, which I think of as normal for king cobras. I pick L. up and there's a chase sequence that ends with me tossing the snake over a wall, but then I notice a scratch on my finger. It must have bit me.

I can tell I'm starting to pass out. I go inside a house and find my IRL sister S. with a friend of hers, and I tell them about the snake bite and ask them to call the hospital or treat it somehow. The friend takes my hand with the bite and looks at the veins, which look broad and red and cloudy, like they've swollen or burst under the skin, and she gets me some cream to put on my skin. I recognize it as some ordinary skin cream that's not going to help, and I try to convince S. to take me to the hospital before I pass out.

(Woke up with my hand hurting where the snake bit it - turns out I really do have a tiny scratch there IRL, might be a papercut. Just after I finished writing this down, I got a phone call from S, letting me know she'd been taken to the hospital on account of almost passing out from unknown causes. A few hours and a not-too-serious diagnosis later, I tried to get a little more sleep.)

I'm lying in bed in some mansion, with a few of S's friends around bothering me until I get up and go somewhere with them. As I walk through a doorway into the hall, I realize this is a dream. It's not as vivid as I'd like - I can see everything fine, but it doesn't feel quite real, more like watching something on a screen - so I try a mantra to make it more vivid. Instead, everything disappears. (In retrospect, that seems obvious. I was focusing on the words instead of the surroundings.)

Next scene I remember is a woman using the family name Gale, returning to a Spanish-style house on the west coast, overlooking the sea. She's lived here a few times over the years, and for a moment I see it in sepia tones and with flowers in the windows, as she's remembering an old photograph from when she'd first lived here with her two daughters, before she became immortal. She's thinking that even though she's coming back earlier than expected this time - something on her mind about trouble on the east coast - she was still gone long enough that she can pass herself off as her own cousin.

I become fully lucid while doing my Apollo trick, and lose all visuals in the process - I have a sense of having a body, but there's no setting. (The Apollo trick is meant to get me out of nightmares, but I have no memory of any dream scene before this, except the thought that I 'lost' visuals.) I start floating close to the 'ground', although there's no ground, and a setting starts to form: the road outside my IRL home.

Memory gap. Next thing I remember is a non-lucid dream in a different setting, involving accidentally upsetting my IRL sister (my recall for this was quite long and detailed). Woke up at 5:37 AM, less than an hour after getting to bed.

Recall for the rest of the day was terrible. Vague fragments of dreams set in Being Human and Lost Boys, with a possible false awakening after the Being Human one - I don't remember 'waking', but I spent a dream scene trying to describe that previous dream. The only details I managed to remember: as Mitchell, needing a werewolf to briefly hold me down under the surface of a river, and the one I've got on hand doesn't live up to George in any way.

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.

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.)

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm playing the role of a blonde woman with some kind of investigative background, now working with some kind of crime boss. People keep describing this as "a deal with the devil," me as "the devil's instrument," and so on, though I think of him as basically a decent guy. I meet up with him in a storeroom full of stolen goods waiting to be sold - small scale, everyday objects - and he tells me he doesn't mind if folks think of him as the Devil, it works out to his advantage, because after all, this way, "I am not real." I'm aware there's a double meaning there, it's a metaphor meaning I'm the person who deals with the world directly while he gets to stay in the background, like a ghost, never to be caught; but it's also a reminder that none of this scene is real. Since it's not real, I decide to stop wasting my time here and wake up.

Earlier fragments: following a truck transporting exotic animals; working on a farm picking berries, and getting annoyed at a coworker's spiel on northerner-vs-southerner work ethics; googling for references to Janette DuCharme, under that alias specifically; browsing a Halloween forum.

3rd person following a woman, and I'm aware this scene is about to become a nightmare, something involving a husband who came back from outer space wrong, carrying something inside him that will manifest in the house in strange ways, killing him and trapping her here. It's already starting to feel like a nightmare, so I take over and steer her toward the front door to change the scene. It takes two doors to leave the nightmare/house.

Outside, I'm my IRL self, and I'm walking out of the mansion I'm temporarily staying at, walking down to the road to see if my IRL sisters have arrived yet. I follow the road toward town, and I pass Tilda Swinton walking the other way and rubberneck shamelessly, walking backwards until she's out of sight. Eventually I come to a fair, where a few people are in costume, including myself, something patriotic-themed. I spot my sisters in the crowd but don't want them to recognize me while I'm in costume. The crowds push me into one of the tents showing various curiosities, and one of them, something about a man who fell from the skies, switches the scene to something more stable.

3rd person following a man who observed that if you trace every human interaction you've had throughout your life, and all the interactions those people had and so on, it creates a fractal pattern which he used to warp time and space around himself, condensing it all into a single point with himself at the center, the God of this world. The ground loops over his head to meet itself in a single vividly-colored sphere. Although he's the only creature that can exist in this sphere, there's a door through which he can watch or enter the old world at any point in time or space. The world's been completely transformed by his actions, all throughout its timeline. At the moment he's observing the writing systems that are developing. He's been translating the various markings that he's seen through the door, images made by different cultures throughout time and space, but as far as he can tell, none of them are using a written alphabet. All the markings translate into numbers.

He walks through the door into the same point in time/space that he'd originally lived, modern times. The place has been through something like an apocalypse as a result of his actions, but it's mostly recovered now. He seeks out a friend who'd tried to stop him, and they talk about the changes in the world, and about what's happened to his older brother's estate since the funeral. 'For a madman, he was alright,' the other man says.