Carabas

I'm walking home after a storm, a few trees and power lines have been knocked down. But there are also a lot of trees that look as if they were cut down, and I'm thinking it's as if the town tried to get into the woods to clean up something after the storm, and they simply cut down anything in their way.

I have to walk over a downed power line to get to my property, I stop at the mailbox, and as I pick up the newspaper I/Quincey think about Mina and how calm and still she's been, and I think - in words, as if this were something I was writing out - "that's when you really have to stay with people. But I couldn't."

Mina's sitting on the sofa, perfectly straight and upright and with her hands folded in her lap, and when I drop the newspaper beside her she doesn't move, only smiles a little. I'm reluctant to disturb her further but there's something I have to show her, something I've learned about the way we think, her and I and anyone else caught in this transition; it will upset her, but all information we can gain from our condition is something that can be used as a weapon. I fetch a white sheet and silver hand mirror and I shove them at her, apologizing as I do so; I hold the sheet up behind her and ask her to take up the mirror. I/the dreamer as disembodied observer wonder what I/Quincey am planning to show her with those - surely not just our lack of reflection, that can't be new information. No, I/Quincey am thinking something about pattern or texture.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A man who's risen to political or religious power - either way, a man who's gained sway over a small community, virtually overnight. His collaborator is disgusted with him.

A girl yells after Freddy Krueger as he's forced by something else to retreat into the woods, "You're a real (some insult)!"

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I wake up sitting in a chair in a hospital waiting room, I note the time as "sometime between 2300 and 0800." I had a friend do an autopsy on a case I'm working, off the record. The victim had a demon eye transplant in his forehead, and sometimes those things go bad. But my friend at the hospital found no more than the usual amount of decay around the eye. I'm looking out the window at the billboards you can see around the city, there's one with an image of a guy with a demon eye, another one directly across from the hospital with a picture of a woman on it, and I'm wondering exactly how large these things are in terms of a percentage of your field of vision; most of the time I hardly consciously notice them, but how much of an impact are they really having on people? I'm remembering a line from a book, about a woman who'd just arrived in the modern age and was pleased by the sense of desire everywhere. (Accurately remembered line, the book was Clive Barker's Weaveworld.)

The zombie boy from the American Horror Story series is sitting on the floor, focusing on the burnt, hollowed-out eye sockets of his rapist's body. He fits the head back into place, then looks up at the witch girl who brought him back to life, who looks sickened, and he says, cheerfully, "Doctor!", like he's calling her to go to work and pull off another resurrection.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A young woman sitting with a book is talking to another woman sitting in a curtained bed, saying "Gonna wave you in. Stop me if (something)." The one in bed acknowledges this, and the one with the book passes her hand over the other woman's face, then starts reading a series of words from the book that sound random to me - "If, old, some..." As she speaks, the one in bed gets purple-tinted flashes of another person/place, too brief to make out anything but getting longer and more stable with every word spoken from the book.

I'm standing at a crossroads of a low-income neighborhood out on the edge of the city, reading a sign that says Cheese Road (or Lane or Street or something), and pleased to have found the place from that vision in the last scene. A car drives up to the stop sign very slowly, I find it suspicious, but it drives off in the other direction.