non-lucid

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.

There's two women walking through a city. The taller and darker one says to the other, now that the two of them are on their 18th world, she's beginning to see the appeal of raising them (worlds, that is).

The short one finds this funny timing since they're currently walking through an area suffering severe poverty and in the middle of a recession. She says something sarcastic along the lines of oh joy, we get to watch people scrimp and save and hoard their resources, how very exciting.

The tall one acknowledges that sure, that's not very interesting to watch, but sooner or later the herd will thin out. And she likes the gambling ones with hopes for the future.

The short one asks if she'd like to make a bet herself. The tall one is delighted and instantly agrees, she's very excited. The short one asks what they should gamble with. The tall one thinks about it and offers: if the short one wins, the tall one will let her uncover a whole bunch of dinosaur skeletons - by which she means allowing the humans to find the bones. The short one isn't interested in the bones themselves, she just loves seeing what humans do with new things.

A false awakening during which I tried to write down the previous dream. The dream I was writing down was a Rumpelstiltskin POV, and I'd written that in Belle's version of their shared dream there had been no corresponding scene with Bae. When Rumpelstiltskin found this out from her, he had a sort of bitter "aha!" reaction to it, as if this proved him right in doubting something. But now that I was 'awake' and writing this down, I thought he was mistaken in that reaction. There was more I wanted to write, but my pen ran out of ink. I went to fetch another and was distracted by various things.

(Woke up for real. Back to sleep.)

There are four servants in a mansion, one who's getting ready to serve guests. The other three have to stay out of sight of the guests, and two of them have stepped out a back door to talk about something.

The other one of those three servants, the only woman among them, finds those two standing around the open door and is very upset at them for leaving it open. They have some reason for it - but while doors are open, the spell that freezes time inside the mansion weakens. Allowing a few minutes to pass here and there means very little to them, but that fourth servant, the one currently serving the guests, is human. He only has so many minutes in his lifetime. She wants to preserve that limited life of his for as long as she can, even if it's only a few centuries. She's furious at them for allowing any of it to slip away.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A car crashes out of a portal onto a hill. The woman inside is unconscious, and when she wakes up, she gives the name of a flight that crashed with her and her husband on it. She believes that she's just woken up after that plane crash; she doesn't remember the car or the portal. That plane crash happened days or weeks ago. But she's taken to the hospital where her husband is still staying.

When her husband sees her, he's shocked to see she looks much younger than before she disappeared. He takes out her compact mirror from her purse - he has all of her things that were found at the plane crash site - and hands it to her. As he does so, I see an image of her at three ages. Her appearance now is a young woman with strangely large eyes, blonde hair worn straight back under a headband, neatly dressed. But I'm also seeing a version of her several years older, with long wavy hair and a loose dress; and at the same time, a version of her that's about 5 years old. I realize that she became younger while she stayed in that place on the other side of the portal, and if she'd stayed longer she would have reverted to that 5 year old image.

I'm a man in a room full of people. A woman's being escorted into the room to pick out two of us for slaves. She's known for her harsh treatment of her people; she's got a shaved head and has two servants behind her. I'm standing a little apart from everyone else - there's something different about the way I got into this situation compared to how everyone else got here, most of them came from the same place. The woman looking us over is disappointed by us, says we don't begin to compare to the ones her settlers captured in the wild. We're a group of people selected by Dorothea, and this woman makes plain her distaste for Dorothea's preference for "pretty pets." She declares she doesn't want any of us and leaves again.

A man - or rather something that can look like a man - is a guest in this old couple's home, and he's just won some kind of friendly contest between them. As he's about to leave, the wife tells her husband to go fetch something in particular from the attic, something to give to the guest as a sort of trophy for winning that contest. The husband produces a scarf that he believes has several hairs from a certain genius musician woven into it. It was given to him in Paris long ago in recognition of something, and it's very precious to him, so it's a worthy gift. The guest takes the scarf but sees that the hairs woven into it actually come from a cat. The wife was aware of this. By forcing him to accept this bogus gift, she's tilted the contest in their favor in the end. The guest acknowledges that it's her win, without letting the husband know.

As the guest leaves, he's thinking about the rematch they'll have when he returns to this place in 83 years. The people he'll be having a rematch with are that couple's descendants, but he doesn't understand the difference between a person's descendants and the person themself.

The magician's been having a conversation with a girl he thinks of as a dreamer. Long wavy blonde hair, long loose dress, bare feet, floating in the air. She's not physically here, and they can only meet like this because at least one of them is asleep. Just now he's sitting down at a small white wrought iron table where a woman is going to bring them tea, and he's looking up at the sky. It's starting to rain. He's wondering out loud why he doesn't feel the rain in this place - he starts to speculate about the magical properties of this region. She says no - it's because he's sitting down and relaxing that the rain here can't touch him.

As Kang Chi in modern times, I meet Yeo Wool. She remembers me. We're both shocked. I have a false awakening in which I try to tell IRL friend S. about that dream, and then go on to a few IRL-based scenes - trying to find a place to park in NYC, and trying to form words out of a jumble of letters.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

In the past. Kang Chi and Yeo Wool are meeting up in this hut in the mountains outside of town. They have to separate, and they're being very loudly upset about it. It's just before dawn, and as a 3rd person observer, I'm thinking they must be waking people up in town, they're so loud.

Kang Chi's lying on his back in that town at night, looking up at the full moon. It looks massive, taking up most of my field of vision. He's meant to be meeting Yeo Wool soon and traveling somewhere together, but he's convinced himself she won't come anyway - there's something that's happened between them or something she's involved in that's on his mind, but he's not thinking about it directly. He's talking to himself out loud, convincing himself that she won't come and he should just leave on his own.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Kang Chi's delirious, standing outside somewhere on the edge of that same town and calling for someone he calls brother - not a literal brother. Yeo Wool's trying to get him to move, but as he starts talking like this, she remembers a time in the past when they were in trouble in this same place and Wol Ryung had helped them. He and Kang Chi had called each other brother sometimes - it's partially a reference to being the same species, and partially acknowledging each other as close while sidestepping the complicated family issue. So she realizes that, delirious, Kang Chi's calling Wol Ryung for help. Wol Ryung's dead.

Kang Chi and Yeo Wool are traveling together in a very distant place. Yeo Wool's wearing modern clothes - no one else is. They're surrounded by soldiers carrying spears and a froglike nobleman on horseback - not a human being. The two of them raise daggers to their own throats, threatening to kill themselves rather than let the froglike man capture them alive.

As Kang Chi, I'm outside and looking through a window at Yeo Wool. There's a luna moth on the window.

And then two IRL-based scenes - catching and releasing an insect, and a visit from an IRL sister's friend.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

In modern times, Kang Chi's at a studio where they're filming a movie or a show, and a woman is talking to him, sounding very irritated. Without naming any names, she makes it clear there's been rumors going around about someone who works here being viewed as violent, potentially dangerous. Kang Chi's thinking this is about Yeo Wool - she's recently become nonhuman, and the adjustment period can be rough. Which makes this his responsibility. Without specifically naming names, Kang Chi tries to get the woman to confirm that it's Yeo Wool she's talking about. But Yeo Wool's just appeared at the end of the hall, and the woman says to ask her himself and stalks off.

And then an IRL-based scene involving studying Agamemnon.

I'm walking through a desert at night, heading south. I was traveling with someone before, and we're meant to be meeting up again later, but she's driving and I'm on foot, and there's a lot of territory between here and where we're going. We've been heading south along the west coast, and I'm thinking of the area I'm in now as Butte County, and also the northern edge of the desert in California. This desert is incredibly beautiful by night, and there are walkways cutting through it, no roads. I come to the top of a little hill and see a large city in the distance; the walkway splits to run north and south around the edge of the city. There are a few other people walking here, and I'm putting serious thought into just walking along these paths forever. (Similar theme came up in an earlier dream this week - a girl impatiently waiting for me to wander the world on foot with her, me pointing out the reasons I couldn't just drop everything and start walking this instant.)

Yeo-Wool's blindfolded herself with this white cloth I think of as a veil - it's transparent, but it's folded over and over so she can't see through it. She's sworn to wear this until (a certain thing I can't remember is accomplished). She and some guy she travels with are stopping at this fortress, and in the halls they meet a man, someone important. Kang Chi's with the important man - Yeo-Wool, blindfolded, isn't aware he's here. Without letting her know it's him, one or the other of them (can't remember which) says something to establish that it's still not time to take the veil off yet, much as they'd like to. He's smiling as he watches her - the majority of the dream just consisted of me, 3rd person, looking at her. I wondered something about the school - it was clear she wasn't associated with it at the moment - and the dream switched over to show Gon eating in his room at the school, which he's inherited from her father.

I'm with a group of people looking around the ruins of this small castle or fortress. I'm trying to track someone down - I don't expect her to be here, but I know she was here sometime in the past.

Switching to third person view, there's a hidden room in the ruins somewhere below us. There's a kid inside, a little boy, the son of the person I was trying to track down. He's been a kid for 170 years. The spell or curse or whatever it is that keeps him frozen in time also means he can only speak for one day in each year. He's listening to us move around over his head, and thinking about how he's saved that one day of speech so he can give us a message now.

That same boy is walking down a suburban street, and he's spotted and recognized by a young woman in a passing car. She tells the driver to pull over, and he does. Her name's Giselle, and though she's a vampire she's never killed anyone - she's been kept away from people by the man driving the car and his wife, her sort of self-appointed guardians. They feel some kind of personal responsibility for her, but they're very nervous around her. They're looking particularly nervous right now, as she gets out and talks to the kid. She's very friendly, she's delighted to see him, but without really thinking about it, when she gets close enough she bites his throat. She can't help it. As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking that she's going to wind up serving as a sort of adopted mother to the kid, and it'll work out well for both of them as far as that goes. But I'm also thinking that this is a sign that our - her, me, the kid, the kid's mother, some other people - our window of opportunity to become human is closing for this timeline. Once we've missed that opportunity, we'll inevitably wind up dying off one by one - the timeline wrapping up loose ends.

Near Dark-based, I'm enjoying watching Diamondback as this motel desk clerk tries to fight her off. She's just come around behind the counter, and she takes out her knife and stabs the desk clerk straight through the back of the hand, pinning his hand to the desk.

FMA-based, Ed's automail arm's bothering him while he's staying in a sort of underground village, and he's talking to Al. I'm briefly wondering why Al has a human body at this point in time, but then I remember that he retrieved his body very early in their journey, and then spent the rest of the time trying to retrieve something along the lines of his mind or memories or soul.

I've just entered into some wealthy household, and the lady of the house is greeting me. She uses formal greetings that trick me into responding in a way that formally declares us to be on friendly terms. By doing this, she's effectively prevented me from being able to bring up past grievances. This is very irritating. I'm thinking about how this way of manipulating words is something that she taught her husband, and it's the main thing that allowed him to make his fortune - that and the skill of building false walls that she also taught him, both things that she learned in her time working for a kind of illusionist or something similar, before she married. As I'm thinking about this I'm seeing an image of a false wall in their house which they use to spy on visitors, and then a scene of her visiting the court of a nobleman. She's raising a glass and saying "To the ruler of the land, Sho Haoon!" Calling him the ruler of the land is sort of overstating things - it's a position that's in question. She's been flattering him a great deal in order to get what she wants.

I'm lying on the ground next to the road beside the IRL swamp near where I grew up. Down the road, a truck reaches the peak of a small hill and then seems to continue rising into the air until it disappears into the sky. I think that's odd and that it must be some odd optical illusion, and I watch to see if it happens again so I can figure out what's causing the illusion. I turn to comment on this to my IRL sister, S.

But I'm distracted when I catch sight of a ball of blue flame hovering nearby in the swamp. I think of this as foxfire. It happens sometimes. I'm thinking about how foxfire works, and how it's usually safe, with some exceptions. The foxfire then turns from blue to the usual red/orange fire in reaction to our presence - that's the exception I was just thinking about. It approaches us, and we have to run to avoid getting burned.

When we get inside, we're no longer me and S., we're two young brothers. I, the older brother, realize that the foxfire's too close behind us, and so when my brother escapes into the inner room, I close the door behind him, allowing the fire to catch me but keeping him safe. When the foxfire catches me, it takes on my form, so that for a moment there are two of us.

Fragmentary memory for a bit. Next clear scene - I'm Satan, using that older brother's form and talking to the younger brother. The kid's fully aware that I'm not his real brother. I've just now been able to return to earth after being sealed away for a long time, and I'm curious about all the new things here. I'm looking at an instrument in the kid's room; I'm mentally comparing it to a harp, but it's a stringed instrument that lies flat on the ground when you play it, like a koto. It's something kids are required to learn in school, so the kid's not very interested in it, but I fiddle around with it until I get the hang of it - it really is a lot like a harp, just turned on its side - and I improvise a pretty little tune. I'm vaguely hoping the kid will get the idea that the instrument can be used for more than just the dull melodies he learns in school, but he doesn't seem interested - it's a dull instrument to him, and that is that. I then go and look through his movies, picking up one written in a pictographic alphabet - birds, reeds. I recognize it as Arabic, and I'm delighted by the changes in this form of writing since I've been gone. The movie involves the issue of unity and diversity - people questioning whether it's better to preserve the cultures of individual tribes or to think of themselves as a single nation, and whether it's possible to do both.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a small fishing village. As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking of everyone here as an analogue for someone else in the distant past or another world or something along those lines. There are two in particular who I think of as analogues for "the prince" and "the Judas figure." At the moment, the prince's girlfriend (who doesn't appear to have an analogue, or at least I wasn't thinking about one for her) is talking to the Judas figure, trying to convince him to give her a ride somewhere, but not wanting to tell him why she needs that ride - the prince is involved somehow. She names somewhere else nearby as her destination instead, but he's not fooled at all. He suggests she just tell him where she really wants to go, it'll save time for both of them. As he's saying this, I as a disembodied observer am focusing on a long, thin scar slanting to the right, down the back of the woman's neck.

False awakening, during which I tried to write down that dream on my skin, for lack of anything else to write on.

Someone's been describing a group of people to me, and he's just moved on to describe two partners who are separate from all the others in some way. His description focuses on one of these two, but my memory only really picks up when he moves on to the second one by saying "Another one, always in darkness." (Or shadows, or something with a similar meaning). I see an image of him as a tall hooded figure. I like him instantly. The guy describing him says that unlike all the others, this one exists in "both long time and short time." I see him in modern clothing now, living and working at an isolated shrine. By "exists in long time," it means that this guy's forced to go through time the long way around, living through each day one at a time (that is, the way time usually works), waiting for the others to reappear. That seems tragic. I'm thinking that he must be immortal in some fashion, to be able to wait for the others' timelines to intersect with his over centuries. The guy talking references "the swords that take the end of each user's life."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm sitting on a bus waiting at an intersection, looking out the window. One of the other passengers says we've reached Las Vegas now. I see a sign on a building that includes Las Vegas in the name, but the road we're on now is in a small neighborhood, small town atmosphere. The bus is just across from a small store, and there's a guy standing by the door playing a guitar. I'm enjoying the music. So is the girl sitting on the seat next to me. There's an old man sitting across the aisle who looks over at us to make sure we're paying attention to the music. He talks about the importance of paying attention and enjoying what's going on around you, something about being open to messages from the universe and synchronicity and all that. I'm bored with this conversation, but then I think that I've been hearing that sort of thing so often lately, between work and now this guy, it's a synchronicity in itself. (Except since it's turned out to be a dream, that's no longer true. Dreaming about things from work isn't exactly synchronicitous.)

An earlier semi-lucid fragment - I'd been riding in a car someone else was driving, they took a turn much too fast and swung wildly into the next lane, and I was thinking to myself with some annoyance about how ridiculous dream driving can be sometimes.

There's two women locked up in a circular stone room with no apparent doors and a ceiling so high it can't be seen, like a well or a small tower. I get the impression they're a couple. They're both blonde, one with darker hair and wearing purple, the other with hair so light it's almost white. Hovering around the one in purple is this sort of little glowing gold ball; she's leaning towards the other one, who's unconscious, but who starts to softly glow when that glowing ball gets close to her. They're rescued by people who break through the wall - an old woman and several people I think of as Hunters who've been doing something with a fountain in the center of the room on the other side of the wall. The old woman looks at the hovering glowing ball and calls to the Hunters. "Got one more for you - two!" she adds when she sees that the unconscious woman is also glowing. As they get both the women free, the woman lifts this fancy white horn and says to the woman in purple, "It's yours." And then she quotes a riddle or poem or something similar that led them to this horn - "With the wit, the way." Wit turns out to have been a pun on wet, something to do with that fountain in the other room, and it's those two women locked up who'd figured it out.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man trapped inside something like an enormous hourglass, tied to a chair in the bottom half. It's slowly filling with this black liquid. I'm following this from the POV of a man outside the hourglass, watching. This is something like a form of brainwashing - the man in the hourglass is on the other side of some conflict, and a serious threat, and we're turning him to our side. But as a 3rd person observer, I'm aware this is going to backfire; we seriously underestimated how insane that man was to begin with, so making him loyal to us doesn't actually mean he won't still be a threat to us.

Still as that same character who'd been watching the hourglass, I leave the room and go to meet a woman I work with for lunch. But just before we start eating, someone bursts in and stops us - the food's been drugged, something connected to that man I'd left in the hourglass. We leave with that person who burst in, and as we walk he's saying, "We all talk about the war, but does anyone remember what it was about?" We don't. He explains something to do with Skins - the gold or silver markings on our skin that remind the 3rd person observer side of me a little of circuits. Mine are gold, the woman I'm working with has silver; in earlier times, we'd have been on opposite sides of the war. We find this an uncomfortable concept.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm a young man walking around our castle at night with a girl from a visiting family. We're supposed to get married sometime in the next year or so if negotiations keep going well. Neither of us are supposed to be out of bed right now, but we both were sneaking around on our own and happened to meet up. Right now we're hiding behind a door, watching the leaders of our families talking in the next room. I'm thinking that the colors they're wearing make them both look like they're part of the same family; my family's colors are red, gold and black, but right now our patriarch's only wearing black, except for the sword pin at his throat, which I think of as "hardly red at all" - a dark red, nearly black.

There are two women sneaking around a castle at night. They'd been intending to escape and then come back when the vampires are asleep and destroy them, but they've just now realized that the vampires never sleep; and on top of that, they've just realized that one of the vampire women here is the exact same woman written about in Quincey's journal. Reading this journal is the thing that made them realize their hosts were some kind of monsters - they don't know very much about vampires at all except what they've read in this journal. So it's a shock to discover that the women in this castle don't age or die, and the idea that the monster in Quincey's journal still exists makes them feel like they can't win. At some point Ephesia is mentioned, a woman's name, though I can't remember whose. One of them suggests giving up on their plan, since it seems hopeless, and tries to convince herself that becoming one of them wouldn't be so bad.

I'm a young boy walking into a room which contains a sort of glass bubble, small, like a snowglobe or a paperweight, and through the glass I can see a girl the same age on the other side, who I think of as 'the princess,' a nickname. I'm aware the glass represents a barrier between worlds that we can't cross anymore, we can only meet here in between. The glass bubble now appears to be larger than me, and I walk up to it with my arms held out in front of me, as if I'm holding something like a tray - I'm thinking about bringing the princess something, though visually my hands are empty. I pass through the glass. Inside, it seems to be a little round room, and the princess is sitting at a desk; she sees me and gets up and says "Rell!", which seems to be my name; she sounds happily surprised.

I'm standing outside my IRL local library with two women. One of them needs to get something from inside the building, without getting caught. There's only one person inside to avoid being seen by, that and hiding her face from the cameras, so it seems fairly simple, but she's still worried, and she's standing around working out various plans. This seems to be something she intends to do on her own, she's not asking either of us for help, and the other woman with us is just waiting impatiently off to the side, but it seems to me this would go a lot easier and faster if I just went ahead and took care of it myself. After all, unlike her, I don't show up on video, and it'll be much easier for me to avoid that person inside - they're mostly walking around the main area near the door, so I'll just go around to the side of the building instead and walk through the wall.

The section of wall I phased through comes out in the fantasy section, off in the corner of the library and out of sight. I'm looking around at the fantasy books, and thinking about how I used to eat this stuff up, and about how much more difficult it is for me to get lost in a book now. I'm aware that the quality of the books hasn't changed, it's my own mindset - but I somehow feel sure that if I look at one of these books, now I'll find one I can get absorbed in. I pick one up and flip through. The paragraph I'm looking at now involves characters named Maedhros and Fingon - I recognize the names from Tolkien, and I note this as odd, since this isn't a Tolkien book. These aren't meant to be the same characters either; the author seems to have just stolen the names for his own characters.

The dream scene changes to a scene from that book. One character is explaining three weapons to another, and he's making a big deal out of a knife that secretly contains some kind of poison. He says there are two options with this - a whole dose inside will kill instantly, but "a thousand light touches... well, depends on how you define death." The scene changes; he's meeting a small group of people in a forest, one of them a queen, and they're coming to some agreement. He secretly places small doses from that poison in each of their drinks, which will give him some power over them - to his mind, this is simply making sure that they don't back out of the deal they've made. After they drink, they instantly realize what's happened and regret making this deal, but it's too late now.