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    Nightmares

    1. A phone number and a street in winter

      by , 08-31-2016 at 06:16 AM
      (Dreaming hasn't been a focus lately, but: )

      I'm floating in a void full of clouds and stars, and recognize that I'm lucid. A destination comes to mind - not one I'd planned in advance, it's an impulse. With that thought, I have the impression I've changed direction, moving closer to the earth - slightly negative connotations here; not bad, just frivolous.

      I'm in a bar; it serves as a front room for my actual destination. There's conversation, people sitting around at tables; the bartender's a heavyset and balding man. Asks what I want to drink. I believe I'm not physical enough here to either drink or pay for anything, but refusing to order anything isn't acceptable, so I ask for a water. I'm thinking about the unusual vividness of this scene. The man to my right, clearly a regular, starts talking to me and the bartender, talking about the guy who owns this place (the person I came here to see) and the way things are done here; I'm going to have to set up a tab before I can order anything, even water. The bartender asks to see my phone in order to give me the owner's number. I take it out, but the screen's showing what I think of as the real world, in contrast to this place. I'm concerned about the bartender seeing that and recognizing that I'm out of place here. I hand him the phone anyway. He programs the number in without seeing anything out of the ordinary and hands my phone back.

      The image on the phone, my 'real' world, is showing a woman with dirty blonde hair, winter clothing, knit hat, walking on a narrow street at night, the outskirts of a small city maybe, lots of greenery around on this particular street but the sense that there's a much more heavily built up area within walking distance. She's talking to someone, male, a friend or a sibling. The scene shifts so I'm there with them. They walk, they talk, they're being followed by something other than me.
      There's a sense of the dream becoming a nightmare.

      As they entered an apartment building, I made the mistake of reacting to the other thing following them, thus letting it realize I was aware of it and attracting its attention. It attempted to latch onto me instead, and in the next scene it's taken on the role of my younger sibling (not one of my actual IRL ones), inserting itself into a role in my dream the same way it had been playing a role in that woman's dream.
      There was a brief moment where I accepted it as my sibling, before I remembered. It was very shocked when I hurt it in the process of removing it. "Ow, ow, you're hurting me!" "Get off of me, then." It did, and I woke up.

      Updated 08-31-2016 at 06:18 AM by 64691

      Categories
      lucid , nightmare
    2. Sharing meals, making wine, washing a nightmare

      by , 02-11-2015 at 10:25 PM
      Somewhere in South Asia some centuries ago where I'm visibly a foreigner, I'm leaving the docks after making some arrangements for my departure. Thinking about how to dispose of the belongings that I don't want to bring with me, I've just offered to give some rare type of food to the man who's walking with me, a human who works for me. He's shocked - he completely refuses. It's important that he and I don't share meals, and apparently this is close enough to count. I apologize, but point out to him that we've shared more than that. He asks me not to talk about this in public.

      Talking about differing customs as we walk, we get onto the subject of my own homeland. I describe it as very far to the north, very isolated from the rest of the world, not a place he's likely to have heard of. I'm being deliberately evasive, obscuring how long ago it was that I left, among other things. I have a mental image of a place that's always covered in snow, and a need to retreat.

      Thinking of my people causes me to mentally tune in to two of them who are relatively nearby, a man and a woman who I think of as something like a brother and sister to me. Her, I keep in close contact with through letters on a regular basis. Mentally brushing against her now feels sort of like a friendly wave from a distance. Him, on the other hand - last I heard from him, he'd been doing his best to ignore my existence entirely. By accidentally tuning in to him now, I'm surprised to find he was already aware of my presence in this region and has secretly been keeping tabs on me. I'm amused, particularly since he's now pretending not to notice this mental contact.

      I get lost in thought for a bit about connections and different eras, and the scene changes. I'm in Europe, speaking Spanish with a woman in the 1700s or so - I think of her as being in a sort of religious seclusion, though my speaking with her now isn't a problem. She's telling me how much she enjoyed the piece Dieter published recently about winemaking techniques, and I tell her I'll pass that along. The observer side of me considers whether or not this short scene is something to bother recording for when I wake up.

      In my IRL home, a demon's joined me in the shower. She's in the form of a beautiful naked woman and she's talking to me like we're old friends, but the scene has the feel of a nightmare. She's talking about working together in a way that I'd probably be interested in discussing under other circumstances. But with that nightmare feel, I'm only thinking about avoiding being controlled by others.

      I give her the fuck-off-out-of-my-dream variety of exorcism. This doesn't work; if anything, the feel of a nightmare intensifies with the sense of a contest of wills. She's still trying to convince me to come work with her.

      Second try: I take a look at the demon's name. It begins and ends with A, so I cover up the middle portion, rewrite it as Athena, and chant an invocation, intending to remove the nightmare by transforming the demon into a goddess. Her features shift, but then shift back. We go back and forth a little bit, but eventually I give up on this method too. She's stopped trying to convince me to come work with her and is now just enjoying this contest for its own sake.

      Being as we're in the shower, I take a look at the soap and think of cleansing/purification methods of exorcism. Worth a shot. I start washing her, starting at the top and working my way down. She's intrigued - she clearly doesn't consider this a threat, and the contact is pleasant and similar enough to sexual that she considers this a form of me giving in to her. I'm curious myself whether this scene will end up following her sexual expectations or my cleansing intention. When I kneel down before her, I kiss her just below her navel, and she makes it clear how she expects this to play out from there; but I just move on to washing her legs. When I've finished her second foot, kissing the top of it before putting it down, the sense of nightmare is completely gone. I'm able to cause the scene to transition, continuing with a series of IRL-based scenes.
    3. Sandman, storm, black dog

      by , 08-15-2014 at 08:07 AM
      A nightmare involving a creature called the Sandman whose facial features are fluid, constantly slowly changing; and then a false awakening in which the Sandman creature is approaching my POV character's bed.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm walking around the grounds of a mansion where I've been staying. Talking to someone, he's looking at something behind me and says, "Look at that, straight out of a painting." I turn around to look. The sky in the distance is yellow-tinged and nearly completely covered by these two dark slabs of storm clouds, like solid walls. The opening between them makes me think of the parting of the seas. The water beneath those clouds is being tossed up in such a way that it's revealed an old and famous shipwreck, it's been pulled out of the depths. Another ship, a modern one, is thrown out of the sea by the winds, and it crashes straight through one of the massive floor-to-ceiling windows of the mansion.

      (A false awakening mostly about trying to describe that last scene, then actually woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm looking after an enormous, shaggy black 'dog' - more like an enormous wolf - that belongs to my neighbor. Most of the dream revolves around playing with him and petting him. When I go to feed him, his water is kept in a intricately curved copper tube, almost like a French horn.
    4. A window over water

      by , 04-08-2014 at 06:03 PM
      I went semi-lucid during a nightmare - a scene involving IRL characters - and wanted to change the scene in order to get away from the nightmare. I had a false awakening - possibly two, memory's vague on this point - either way, I eventually wound up in my IRL bedroom, lucid (now unsure on whether or not I lost lucidity in between).

      The room's dark, and I'm frustrated, feeling trapped. I've got the impression I'm stuck in some in-between state, not dreaming properly (whatever that means) and not able to wake myself up, and I'm trying to escape this state. I'm thinking about lack of control, and I look at an object in my hand and turn it into a sword, thinking of this as somewhat pointless, and thinking something about the way the dim light affects this. I find myself moving along the ceiling, as if I'm held up there against my will. There are two windows, and I manage to claw my way over to one while avoiding being pulled toward the other. I slide it open and tear out the screen (I was thinking something I can't recall in detail, something about the way the window responds to my actions by opening or not opening due to it being a part of a dream rather than a physical window), and with great effort manage to crawl through the window.

      On the other side, I'm floating over water, surrounded by cliffs and hills covered in snow. It's night. There are wooden buildings and people outside, dressed in clothes from at least a few centuries ago. My perspective is moving, but I'm still partway in the window; when I look behind me, I can see the window hovering in midair. I'm moving toward the town center, and I can hear people talking - not a language I understand, but from some of the words I catch I believe it to be German, or some variant of it. There's some event about to take place, I believe it's something religious, some ritual.

      I enter a building. Memory goes spotty here again, but eventually I wound up speaking with an old woman who gave an impression of beauty and power. To her left was a woman sitting asleep in a throne, dressed in a costume that could have been straight from the LotR movie elves - I specifically compared it to a costume while I was looking at her. I wondered if she was Julia. (It's unusual that it's something I wondered about, as opposed to just knowing.) The old woman was telling me about her plans, including something she was going to discard, and I requested that she give me that thing. She was surprised but amused and granted my request, but afterward I thought of this as a missed opportunity - I became distracted by the thing she gave me, I should have just listened and followed along with her.
    5. Wings and clockwork

      by , 01-27-2014 at 11:44 PM
      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.

      Updated 01-27-2014 at 11:50 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid , nightmare , lucid
    6. Various dreams from the past week

      by , 11-18-2013 at 01:56 AM
      Monday: Forced into playing some game in order to save my father's life, using mandrake led to victory. People raiding a house, breaking things or stripping things from the walls and carrying them away. The words "los soños del amos." A dance performance featuring various actors - Biehn, Paxton, Goldstein (as Diamondback), Henriksen showing up later offstage - arranged by a woman trying to use this performance to prove her worth; an old money type applauds the performance, technically a success, but succeeding here just means she's got the chance to fork over even more money than she already has, she's being used.

      Tuesday: A young girl who'd been in some kind of trouble runs into a reporter named Nicholas who promises to help her, but when she sees him in sunlight his eyes resemble a snake's. He tells her that if she succeeds in becoming human, he'll lose interest in her struggles, and then he'd probably kill her. A religion based on Alice 19th. A woman arrives from another world; I've seen this play out before, but in that version of events there was a man with her, this time she's alone; knowing what's coming, I kneel before her, ask her to spare my life, which doesn't seem likely to work until I point out how little she knows about this world, and promise to guide her to the halls of power; she relents and accepts. Elijah speaking to Rebekah, telling her he has plans to meet someone in a dream at sun-up, which amuses him since he's just now become capable of walking in the light and yet is going to spend the time sleeping anyway.

      Wednesday: A large wolf in the woods, my cat cuddling up to it. A very small man is sent to pick a fight with a woman at a bar. He fails miserably. She talks to him about his daughter, says she couldn't believe what had happened, when the girl had turned out to be a witch after all and was snatched away by her mother - a 'good witch', who uses a different variety of magic than these two at the bar. It's implied the daughter's been taken to be used as a tool. She offers her help for a rescue mission, but he suspects she'd like to use his daughter as a tool, too.

      Thursday: A young woman and a friend, trapped in a maze of rooms cluttered with objects - statues, tapestries, things you'd expect in a museum - searching for one that holds a specific design which is her only means of escape, but it's a needle in a haystack situation. She picks up a statue and reminisces about when her mother used to fill her home with things like this - as she thinks that, she finally spots the design she's looking for, a tile set into the floor. The mirror above it ripples, and she's aware that she'll be leaving her friend behind here, but she doesn't have time to wait for him, she escapes through the mirror, back into the real world. Once on the other side, the mirror breaks. She says to someone on the other side that her friend is still trapped there, but this person tells her "Abby, all your life there's been no one there" - no one else in the real world has any memories of that person she believed to have been her lifelong friend.

      Friday: Meeting Olivia Atta Clemens for the first time at a party in Rome. NBC's version of Dracula is having an argument with someone referred to as his master, regarding the use of the phrase "your majesty," and people going missing.

      Saturday: Nightmare in which some creature embodying darkness is crouched above me, dispelled with Apollo trick, after which the dream ceased being a nightmare but I become concerned that the creature had simply moved on to the nearest target. I'm chasing someone and run into a cop along the way, and at first ask for his help but then decide there's no point, we're in a country where cops don't carry guns. A guy explaining Kaballah annoys me by making cryptic comments about me and fallen angels.

      Today:

      I'm stowing some papers in a hiding place on the roof; I'm thinking that Lydia (mental connotations of an odd mentor/student relationship with her) will pass through here later, and I'm positioning the papers where she'll be sure to see them, but trapping them in such a way that she won't be able to retrieve them in the little time she'll have up here. A scene with Lydia and I entering a small room where I've been holding Boone, her husband, captive; I sit down while she talks to him, take off my hat and smooth down my hair - I've got blond hair here. A scene with Lydia in a room crowded with empty picture frames, which used to hold pictures of her - she's aware they belong to (either my character or her husband, I can't remember which).

      A setting based on ancient Rome, I've been having a dispute with someone over a slave, one of my charioteers, and I'm thinking about this dispute as I watch the race. Something about one of the chariots or racers catches my eye, seems odd - then there's an 'accident.' Afterwards, I'm standing over a slave who broke several bones in that accident.

      A series of underground tunnels, and a group of vampire hunters. I've found a dead-end tunnel directly underneath their current camp, and I'm crouching on the ceiling, listening to them. One, I believe he's the leader, has been threatening one of the others, but the one being threatened has just walked away from the argument, and from the camp, saying he's going off to eat. I'm slightly concerned that he'll come down into this tunnel - since it's a dead end, there would be no way to avoid meeting him - but I don't think it's very likely. The ones who stayed are still talking about him, and from what they're saying I realize that he also eats people, but that he's in some sense still human. The others are concerned that they may have to kill him one day.
    7. Photos in Italy

      by , 10-12-2013 at 07:11 PM
      A brief nightmare - I'm at my mother's IRL house, the lights won't turn on, and this is dangerous. I consider whether this is a dream, but decide it isn't. I'm thinking that dreams and waking life feel different, and while dreams might feel real, you can't mistake waking life for a dream. So I don't do any reality checks. I do, however, do my anti-nightmare Apollo trick, but I feel a bit self-conscious about it, since I'm awake, and in my mother's home, and she'll be able to hear me. Afterwards I realize it was just one burned out light bulb, and there's no danger. Outside, it's incredibly bright, even though it's night - the sky is clouded over, and I wonder whether it's a full moon, but it seems too bright even for that. There are incredible gusts of wind, very inviting. My mother comes down to the front door where I'm standing and asks if something has flooded - there are occasional waves splashing over the wall at the edge of her yard. She says she used the incorrect settings on something, and it's caused things to get out of alignment, putting stress on the whole house that will eventually break it down. She needs to go outside and correct the settings. There's a ram standing in the street, looking at us; I point it out, and she says they always come in pairs. A herd walks down the street, from the same direction the waves came from.

      I'm online, reading a conversation between several people, with one of them promising to scan some information about Renfield.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm taking a train from Rome to Boston, going over a map and coordinating plans.

      There's a guy on his way home from a war, making what he thinks of as a 'deal' with whoever's listening, God or whatever else - he just wants his childhood neighborhood to have survived unscathed. If that place was bombed, what was the point to any of this?

      That same guy is at a party, there's talk about political factions, blaming the faction that 'has the princess's ear.' Although this guy doesn't realize it, the princess in question is there at the party, disguised.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      A rich family is discussing inheritance issues after their father's death. His illegitimate daughter from one of his many affairs, a very sweet girl, is the source of a lot of jealousy.

      I'm walking down a street, and through the cracks in a fence I can see statues and ancient temples. I find a way through the fence and walk around, admiring them, wishing I had my camera with me; then I remember the camera on my phone and start taking pictures.

      I walk into a building with a walkway overlooking vast, dark spaces, and I take pictures of those, lighting them up, resulting in beautiful abstract images made up of points of light. One of the spaces overlooks an opera company rehearsing, and there are a few people sitting around here watching, they don't welcome my presence but they don't stop me from taking pictures either. Another space contains a field of snow, and there's a beautiful woman lying there, dead or unconscious, beside some broken wooden boards. As I'm taking photos of her, I say "Nostradamus" - the name of the opera being performed. A woman next to me, one of the ones who'd been watching the opera, asks me how I knew its name; I say I hadn't known until I said it. The woman lying in the snow wakes up, and climbs up onto the walkway. I offer her my arm if she needs it, she looks unsteady - I sound overeager to myself. She doesn't take my arm.

      Outside, the woman asks me how long I'll be staying in town. I'm thinking that I'm stuck here until I can find my portal home; out loud, I say it'll be a few days and I let her know what part of town I'm staying in. She reminds me of a promise I'd made to her, something involving her uncle, and she walks away.

      I go to see her uncle, walking through the streets of a city in Italy, old alleys where cars are off-limits. I want to find a place to stop and go through my phone, delete some photos, make room for more, but most places are closing at this time of day. Finally I find a bookstore that's still open and I sit down. On my phone, I'm looking at a menu for creating shortcuts on your phone, arranged in the shape of a stylized butterfly.

      Updated 10-12-2013 at 07:16 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid , nightmare
    8. Locking a door to end a nightmare, tunnels and cranes and spirits

      by , 09-30-2013 at 08:44 PM
      A nightmare from over the weekend:

      I'm watching a TV show involving something supernatural, and the character in the show is looking at a TV screen with some monster/demon/spirit/etc on the other side of the screen, coming closer, intending to break through. It looks like a white-skinned (literal colorless white) woman with brilliantly red hair and this blazing sparking moving light where its eyes should be. I notice that I can see it not just on my TV but on all the reflective surfaces in the room, and I know it's really trying to break through into the real world. I try holding it back with various protective symbols and calling on various things (not Apollo, curiously, as that's been my go-to nightmare cure recently; possibly it's because this one's not on the theme of darkness like all the others were) but they're not very effective, I have the feeling it's only a matter of time. At the same time, the door at the far end of the hall is open - I came through it earlier - and through it I can see a woman laughing, different from the woman in the screen but I have the feeling they're related. Feeling like I don't have much time, I sprint across the hall, slam the door and lock it. The dream 'camera' zooms in on that image of the lock turning, and closely focuses on the feel of it - and then the scene isn't a nightmare anymore. The thing on the screen is gone, now it's showing the main character saying to his sister, "It's you and me, we're all we've got now."

      At some point while I was watching the show (I can't remember whether it was before or after the nightmare part), I thought to myself that watching creepy things every week might impact your dreams.

      (Woke up around 5:30, an hour after bed, with a high-pitched ringing in my ears that reminds me a little of TV static, so that was presumably the cause of this. Recall for the rest of the day was terrible.)

      Tonight's dreams:

      People living in tunnels who have to move due to some imminent danger.

      I'm walking through this vast room, mostly filled with a pool of water, cranes are standing in it, and one of the people I'm with comments on the way one of the birds is holding its leg up out of the water, she says she bets it's pointing to something, we should investigate. I disagree, but investigate anyway just to prove the point. I float above the water, and pass various cranes pointing in different directions, meaningless. But at the far side of the room I meet a man, a traveler, who I start talking to and who decides to come with us; he's standing beside this curtained alcove, and through the white curtains I get a glimpse of this beautiful woman sitting on the stone floor in white robes, hair down to the floor, and at first I think she's wearing a mask, something representing the moon, and I think she must be a princess or a priestess. Then I realize that's not a mask, it's her face, beautiful and strange.

      3rd person, that traveler and the man who I was in the previous scene are walking down a flight of stairs with a little boy running ahead of them. There's a festival, a sending on of spirits, which are these floating pale lights filling the room, sending them on involves covering them with cloth, and the boy reaches for one of them, but it's acting differently than the others. The traveler says that because this one had been killed, it would be wrong to send her on in that form. The light takes on the image of the little girl it had been, and starts talking to the little boy, calling him Koya, saying he's gotten older. He tells her he's not Koya, sounding frustrated, but one of the older men says quietly to him that she needs him to be the person she's waiting for.

      Updated 10-10-2013 at 08:49 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid , nightmare
    9. Fragments, Palin, and Doctor Who

      by , 09-07-2013 at 07:39 PM
      Hypnagogia: A woman's voice saying "Run!" over and over again. Disconcerting. Woke myself right back up.

      Nightmare: I'm in a dark cave full of dangerous creatures. So I decide to summon up a pterosaur to kill them for me. I hide behind a door against the wall and listen to it move around; it won't be able to reach into that narrow space, so I'll be fine. Except I start doubting whether the space is small enough, and become aware that I'm not in a narrow space, I'm in the much more open space of my bed.

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

      A connection between the Palin family and a family of actors, a law that makes it possible to win an election without gaining a majority of votes, and a great deal of anger at both these things, though I don't much mind myself.

      Birds flying overhead in V formation above my IRL home, thinking about luring them down.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      I'm the Doctor, the ninth, traveling with Rose, and trying to get into a building which is apparently strictly for the upper class and we don't look the part. The guard at the door stops us at first, then lets us in after I wave the psychic paper at him. After we're inside - looks like a casino - Rose asks if the paper made him see us as someone else, or in nicer clothes. I tell her it doesn't change the things people see, just the way they interpret them.

      (Woke up. Suspect that last scene was inspired by the 'Run!' hypnagogia. Back to sleep.)

      A little dark-haired girl, a relative, who hides behind the furniture and speaks quietly, tells me I should have listened to my visions. I'd just agreed to something, and I probably shouldn't have.
    10. Nightmare resulting in brief lucid, basilisk coat and unicorn horn.

      by , 09-05-2013 at 06:49 PM
      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.)
    11. A nightmare, a pair of Mad Hatters, and Faustian bargains.

      by , 09-02-2013 at 07:08 PM
      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.
    12. 'And it was better that the beloved behold the tainted cities of Mephisto dreaming.'

      by , 08-25-2013 at 07:30 PM
      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.)
    13. Fractal patterns and the things that come back from the skies.

      by , 08-06-2013 at 06:38 PM
      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.