non-lucid

Kuroshitsuji-based. I'm looking at a sort of frozen image of two people - as a disembodied observer, I can move around and look at this scene from different angles, but time isn't moving. Two figures in heavy fur-lined coats that cover them completely. I can't see their faces, but I'm aware the tall one in black is Sebastian, and the small one in white that he's carrying is Ciel and also myself. I'm focusing on the hood of Ciel/my coat - the opening for the face is completely in shadow, and something about the deepness and the blackness of that opening and the fact that the face can't be seen makes me feel sure he's a demon.

I'm about to enter a temple, together with three or four friends and family. We're standing around an outdoor sink where you wash your hands before entering the temple, and I'm looking around and thinking about the beauty of the entrance. Over to the left there's a separate building that's also part of the temple compound, but not sacred, and when I realize the others haven't been there before, I insist we go see it first. There's a line to purchase entrance - which is very expensive - and they don't understand what this other place is, so I explain it to them while we're waiting in line. This building, the McKittrick, was built by an eccentric rich man who filled it with all manner of strange collections over his life. After he died, it was bought by a woman who- (My memory's vague about what I said that woman did, but it was something to do with folklore. Elves were specifically mentioned, prompting a scene change.)

Third person, outside that building, it's night now. Three strange-looking figures that I think of as elves are standing around, agitated about something, waiting to execute some plan.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A friend of mine introduces me to a woman he's in love with - who turns out to be a living weapon sent to kill me. But she herself hadn't realized that; she was a sleeper agent, some kind of machine, programmed to become a weapon again the moment she saw me. It's painful to watch her personality disappear. I'm angry at the people who created her, and also blaming myself for involving both her and my friend. I try to take care of the situation without my friend finding out what's happening.

This ultimately ends in a chase scene where I'm running from that friend. I go semi-lucid while flying to avoid him. There's a small stand of trees at the edge of the property, and as I reach them, I decide to change scenes; I stop among the trees and focus on the feel of the branches around me, trying to change the scene to a dense forest. When I stop focusing on the feel and look around again, I'm not in a forest, but the grass is much taller and the buildings around have vanished, and the friend I was running from flies over my head without seeing me.

I'm a guy sitting at the counter in a bar. I'm here a lot, I live nearby, maybe in the same building. I'm talking with a younger woman who's sitting to my right - brown ponytail, in her 20s maybe, someone I rely on. I say to her, "You weren't there (meaning Hell), but you know I was there. That's comforting to someone who (don't remember the exact wording for this next bit, but it amounts to trying to stay out of the nuthouse. Implication being that otherwise he'd start doubting his sanity, think his past was a delusion.)" She cuts me off by kissing me. It's a first, it takes me completely off guard.

Over her shoulder, I see my wife (widow, rather - his wife from before he'd died) sitting a few stools down with her boyfriend or fiance or whatever he is. She doesn't know me - or rather, she 'knows' me, casually, as the false identity I've been using since I came back from Hell; she doesn't realize who I was before I died, to most people I look like a completely different person. But even without knowing me, she's looking at us now and looking disgusted. She and the guy she's with get up and leave.

This guy's telling me about his cremation plans, saying that in a distant future, they're going to be able to revive people using their ashes - or rather, something about the carbon - on a specific distant planet or star or location in space he refers to as "G" followed by a short series of maybe three numbers. Seeing that place, I'm looking at vast stairs in the air, green, made of some vaguely moss-like material. Examining it, I see that it's made up of small, incredibly thin squares stacked on top of each other. The guy talking about cremation is still talking - he's saying these can be stacked so as to seem thick or thin, and they're used here in the perfect ratio to create a true geometric stairway to heaven. ("Heaven" used here to indicate something like perfection rather than afterlife.)

I'm on a green, grassy hill with two friends and a large crowd of other people waiting for some event, standing near our car. To the right, there's a great view of mountains below us, very green. I'm looking down at a town of mostly red buildings and can make out the steeple of a church; I'm aware this is somewhere in South America. There are a few other people around here enjoying the view, but among them, there's a man beating a young boy, presumably his kid. I jump in and stop him, and as we're fighting I demand what he thinks he's doing. His wife's standing here now, among other people watching, and as an answer, the man produces some letter he'd written. It talks about not being human. The wife sympathizes with him, but I'm outraged by this response, and since I'm not human either, I take personal exception to him using that to justify his behavior. We start fighting again.

Scene transitions during the fight, focusing on the blood on my wings which had come out during the fight. Now I'm in a motel room with a girl who's helping fix the feathers. A guy, a friend, comes in then and says "You two are (something about the fight and something we're looking for). I found the (thing we were looking for)." He holds up something that looks like a map, and I get up to go look at it. The girl with me is seriously upset with this guy, related to the fight, or more specifically the way I was fighting and the way he encourages me. She tells him that the guy I'd been fighting had swallowed my heart, and she'd watched me take it back from his throat with talons - she demands of the guy with the map, "That's better?!" As she says this, I remember how it had felt, though it hadn't been part of the dream before.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Setting's a sort of fantasy version of Korea, 16th century-ish. This guy has been working for an organization that's just had some great victory, completely defeated this opponent that they've been working against for a long time. Now he's just returned to their base and is alone with their leader, a tall foreign woman with this elaborately painted face like a mask and gold ornaments in her hair. But as she's congratulating him on this great success, he becomes suspicious - something's off about her. She sees this suspicion, and attacks him.

In actuality, this isn't his leader at all. 'She' is revealed to be the man who he thought they'd just killed, using an illusion (in addition to the physical costume and makeup - the illusion itself has been dropped now, the rest remains) to impersonate the leader. The enemy complains that he went to the trouble of portraying his own defeat just so the POV character would finally let his guard down, and it still didn't work! How frustrating! It goes unsaid, but they're both aware that since the POV character isn't human, he's impossible to kill unless he lets his guard down.

Two other people burst in there, an old man and a young servant, who tell their 'leader' that the POV character - who has now disappeared from the room, and I've switched to 3rd person - has knocked out two of the guards and used some kind of gas to put everyone else to sleep. One of them says that he had just been starting to like/trust that guy. The enemy in his disguise as the leader keeps one hand raised over his mouth to prevent them from noticing his identity. They move out of the room.

In the hallway, I see the shadow of a hand with long claws reaching down from the ceiling, just above the 'leader'/enemy's head; then it retreats. It's the former POV character on the ceiling. He generally tries to behave like a human being, and killing the enemy in that way would go against that effort, tempting as it is. So he loses the claws, drops down into the now-empty hall and looks around.

There are these people with some psychic skills ranked on a 1-10 scale, where 10s are considered essentially monsters and hardly ever exist. A message has gone out to all these people to stay indoors tonight. One of them's being hunted down by a 10-ranked kid, and anyone else going outside now would just get mixed up in the hunt. This kid's treated like a living weapon, kept locked up aside from the rare outings like this, but he's just a kid; there's a feeling here like being let off a leash. Now he's levitating around outdoors - it's night, so he's not worried about being seen. I'm fond of the kid, and I'm aware that later he'll get away from the place that keeps him locked up, and that'll be good for him. The woman he's hunting calls her home to ask for help, but the woman who answers the phone has already got the message not to go outside tonight, and she's torn.

Sarah Connor's been running from something together with this guy who can't run anymore, and she can't carry him. She's trying to convince herself to just leave him and go, but when she tries, she only gets three feet before her knees give out. I'm aware it's because she's fighting her own desire to stay and help him. She's thinking to herself that she should have done something every day to train herself to do things she doesn't want to do.

Gwendolen Chant's sitting in her room at Chrestomanci Castle, writing. She's just gotten back from another world - she's looking for one to move to, and she's just crossed this last one off her list of potentials. She'd had an unpleasant encounter with a girl there, and she'd wound up enchanting the girl into some monstrous form. Gwen led the girl to believe she'd be trapped in that form forever, but she's thinking that actually it'll wear off on its own in about a century. And about another century after that, it'll slowly start to grow back again - Gwen's thinking the girl's reaction when that starts should be hilarious.

Fragment involving Odin and Thor. And later a fragment involving Persephone, which referenced an older dream where the McKittrick had been a journey to the Underworld.

I'm hanging from a tree, holding onto a branch with both hands, dangling above rows of spears planted in the ground. I believe I've been slipping in and out of a dreamworld, and I need to get back, there's something there I need to accomplish. I consider that this place might also be a dream - but whether it is or not, I still believe I need to get back to that other dreamworld.

Below me, just beyond the rows of spears, there's a woman who reminds me in some fashion of a lizard. If she'll do me a favor that will help me get back to that dreamworld, I promise her a jar of three peaches. Someone else has promised her two peaches to do something different - that someone else is a good friend of mine, but we haven't been able to consult with each other recently, so we've accidentally wound up getting in each other's way. Now the lizard-woman's torn, deciding between the two offers, but I'm thinking it'll work out well for her whichever way she goes.

I'm looking at an image of a woman wrapped in this dress made of blue cloth; the cloth also wraps up her neck and over some kind of tall headgear in a way that reminds me of a nun, or some medieval headdresses. The only skin visible is her face - or it would be, except that in this image, she has the head of an elephant. I'm aware this is specifically something added to this image, it's not literally her face. It's representing something to do with the shape. I briefly see a second, similar image, using the head of an anteater instead of an elephant, reinforcing the point about shape.

Scene change. That woman, with her own human face now - or at least, a woman in that same dress - standing in an immense room. A man's come to consult her. His skin has cracks running through it in a way that reminds me of magma. He's aware, as he approaches her, that this isn't the woman he's come to consult - she's a stand-in, a decoy, to protect the real one. He can smell the difference between them. He's about to say something about this, but he's distracted by noticing a different scent in the room. There's a dead body of a man lying on the floor a little way away, and now he walks back to that body and bends down to look at a circular metal medallion on the corpse's chest. He can smell two other people who were here earlier. One is his sister. The other, he asks the woman in blue about - a man he describes out loud only as "a writer," and his voice sounds annoyed. In his mind, he's thinking that this writer left for America years ago, and shouldn't be here now.

Then I have the impression that I'm looking at one in a series of scenes showing an alternate past, of what would have happened if that writer hadn't traveled to America back then, but I only actually see one scene - a group of people, mostly adults, celebrating the 8th birthday of that previously mentioned sister, Julie.

(From yesterday.) There's a girl on the grounds of some large estate, talking to a boy. She's been chosen to play some role in some tradition or game or something - it's something of an honor, but she's refusing to have anything to do with it. He's trying to convince her - not with any particular effort, just an aw-c'mon kind of way.

Scene change - elsewhere on that same estate, there's a different girl, wearing a rather old-fashioned maid's uniform (this is a roughly modern setting), and she's standing against a tree. I have the impression she's tied there, but I don't see ropes. This is the role that the other girl had originally been chosen for. There's a group of people who've just found her - searching is part of the game, or tradition, or whatever it is. She's got an oval metal ornament on her forehead, covering her eyes, engraved with some scene. A boy reaches out to remove it - this is also part of the game/tradition/whatever. The 'dream camera' angle changes then, so I can't see the girl's face, but I'm aware that - and this isn't part of the tradition - it will turn out the ornament has a long, thin spike underneath, and the girl is dead. I have a brief image of blood around her eyes, or possibly eye sockets - from the angle I'm standing now, off to one side, I'm not sure which.

A man's just finished examining the crime scene, though he's not anyone official. He's feeling outraged about something else he'd found, some belonging of hers that had been put on display, hung from a tree with ropes. Standing behind him is the owner of the estate, and that's who the outrage is directed towards. Highlander-inspired then: the man doing the examining takes out a sword - it had been concealed under the grey trenchcoat he's wearing - and formally introduces himself to the owner of the estate, who also has a sword, and who simply says "Yeah" - the implication being that his name's already known.

A woman has another woman tied to a tree, and is spreading caviar on her face to attract animals to eat her. She's interrupted by some panic among the people she's working with. People are transforming into creatures - from what they're shouting, I have the impression that it's mostly insects, but when I switch to first person, the only transformation I actually see is a bird emerging from a woman's shoulder and flying away. Mostly I just see panicked people running away.

I'm leaving too, with several others, at a calmer pace. I look down at my bare feet, and notice that the girl whose body I'm possessing has decorated her toenails in Satanic symbols - not just painting them, but actually growing them into horn-like shapes. I comment on this to one of the people I'm walking with, although I'm careful to phrase it as if I'm the real owner of this body, not something possessing her.

Still in that body, I'm at a club with a woman named Pepper. I'm wearing sunglasses - it's night, but I need them to protect myself from the electric lights. I'll take them off when we're outside. We're leaving, waiting by a coat check or something similar, when we're approached by two men, one of them hitting on Pepper, the other hanging back. At first I'm irritated, but then I remember that I'm using a female body at the moment, and I realize the other guy is playing wingman. I'm amused. Since Pepper seems interested enough, we all leave together.

We briefly stop by my IRL house, and when I look in a mirror, I see my IRL self, although my reflection isn't mirroring my actions. Pepper calls for me to hurry up, calling the name of the girl whose body I'm possessing for the first time - Julie. Outside, it's dawn, the clouds are starting to change colors, so I put my sunglasses back on. There's a large car parked outside - wingman's in the driver's seat, Pepper and the other guy are in the back. I get into the passenger seat.

We drive past several rundown-looking houses, and the guy in the back seat asks me if they're haunted, this being my neighborhood. I say sure, a house that looks like that has to have a few ghosts around. I'm not being serious, just humoring him. He goes on and on about the dead, and he's beginning to irritate me - he's attempting to show off his knowledge, but it's not particularly impressive. He says that he can speak to the dead more easily than others because he still has all his canine teeth - I have an image of one tooth behind another, like adult teeth behind baby teeth, though he's an adult. He says they make a point of telling you that they're dead. And he asks me something about dead and dreams - I didn't catch most of the question, too much background noise, but I assumed he was asking me if I'd ever been visited by the dead in my dreams. I say, sure - I may not know much about talking to dead people, but dreams I can do.

Wingman calls my attention away, asking for directions - left or right here? It's not even really a fork in the road, the road we're on just curves right and another road splits away, but I guess it might look confusing if you're not used to it; I tell him to bear right. The guy in the backseat offers me and Pepper beers from a cooler, and asks if we find him creepy, with all that talk about dead people. I say no, the talk about dead people's fine, it's the way you talk about getting me and Pepper to drink that's creepy. Pepper agrees, but she's laughing about it. I was only half joking. Even the wingman agrees - the guy's phrasing is odd, as if he's trying to get us incapacitated. We hit a bump in the road and he spills some of his own beer on the upholstery; I tell him he better clean that up, although I'm not at all sure who owns this car. I'm certain it's not him.

A setting based on the early 1900s. I'm sitting at a dinner table, with my POV character's mother sitting somewhere to my right, and a woman who I'm having an intense argument with to my left, at the foot of the table. We argue frequently, I enjoy it; and I realize that although we're stating how much we hate each other, we're using words usually associated with passion or love.

Dinner's over, the woman is gone, but my mother and I are still in the same room, standing now. I'm talking about breaking my engagement to someone else. I've never met the girl I'm engaged to - she lives in (either New York or Boston, can't remember which - I thought of it as far away), and our fathers had arranged it between themselves, before my father died. My mother is warning me about possible consequences. She describes the girl's father as "the power behind the throne."

I'm tied up in a chair, and this guy who was interrogating me is now struggling with another guy who wants to get me out. The guy on the rescue mission was carrying a needle, and during the struggle, the contents of the needle wind up getting sprayed into the air - they're behind me at the time, so I don't see it, but I can feel the spray, and I don't hear them fighting anymore.

The guy on the rescue mission's been captured. It turns out he got a small dose of the contents himself during the fight. This will cause something that we refer to as 'hunger', and he believes this is something he'll be able to use, to focus on his enemies. Having experienced it myself in the past, I know he's mistaken, and that it'll make it more difficult for him to think clearly.

We're both taken out of the building. Outside, we're in a junkyard, and there are a few men with guns escorting us. The guy on the failed rescue mission is starting to have a hard time walking, and one of the guards is shouting at him about it. I'm remembering a time in the past when I'd been out of it and he'd carried me. I'm aware I should do the same for him now, but I don't. I don't want to be associated with him.

Switching to third person, there's a kid watching us from a distance, out of sight. He leaves, gets on a computer and reports what he saw to a woman who I think of as the mother of my POV character, though she looks too young for it - long brown hair, upper-class British accent. In the kid's report to her, he mentions a "guy that you call the Judge" who's holed up in the woods nearby.

There's a frozen lake with a hole in the center of the ice, and a school building at the bottom that's an exact duplicate of a building on land. As Dean, I'm remembering fighting Sam in this lake sometime in the past, when he was trying to stop me from taking something out of it - I'd been filling a canteen from something at the bottom of the lake. Now we've come back to that same lake, and I'm thinking out loud about the "misfortune" that "follows" people who steal from this place. I point out that we didn't take anything back then. Sam pulls out that canteen, revealing that he'd secretly kept it. There's blood inside it - I'd gathered it for him - and it's a neverending supply, so if he relies on that canteen, he doesn't need to take it from anyone else. But it's still cursed. So he says to me, I might as well go ahead and steal what I need from the lake; the misfortune has already been following us anyway.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man talking to a woman just outside the door of a church, saying "What have you done to your hair?" He knew her in the past, but she's meeting him for the first time in her lifetime. I see images of him as one of six brothers who'd been cursed lifetimes ago. The images are like photos moving against a black background; he and his brothers give me an impression of being arrogant, self-centered, maybe not deliberately cruel but thoughtless, a vague association of violence. But the modern version of him had been very different, and I'm thinking about that change in him while I walk up my IRL street, into my IRL home, and start making tea. Standing over the stove, I'm thinking, "the debt has been paid" - the man suffering now has little in common with the brothers that the curse was originally placed on.

Shortly after passing a man whose head is a snake, three creatures are presented as things I'm meant to fight. But they seem harmless, and when I walk up to them, they disappear. Past them, I walk into a hidden door set into a tree, and spend some time walking through a series of rooms. The passageway I'm walking through makes a large circle, and when I get back to the start (there were a lot of scene changes along the way, so this "start" wasn't actually the same place as the tree-passage from before), I notice a flight of stairs heading down that I hadn't seen before, with small, glowing blue arrows hovering just above the floor, pointing down.

The stairs lead down into an enormous room filled with books and a portrait of a man I recognize as someone infamous named Corvo - he's someone I've heard of often, in the context of being a doctor or a researcher or something similar, responsible for some tragedy or some sinister event; but I personally think of him positively, even though I know very little about him - mostly I feel curious. I realize this was his room, and these are his records.

I'm standing in a city street in Corvo's POV, sort of - I'm aware that this is me going through his records, his reflections on the past. At this moment in time, he'd been disgraced, along with some other man who I'd also heard of, someone who's walking away from him right now. I have some mental connotation between this man and violence but also think of him as a better person than Corvo, someone who dislikes Corvo intensely but works more closely with him than anyone else, I have the impression Corvo somehow forced him or manipulated him into carrying out a lot of dirty work for him. Now Corvo's looking at the open gates to the city, looking at the crowds of people entering, aware that they're unknowingly carrying some danger that others refuse to listen to him about, and feeling powerless. With the knowledge that this is a flashback, he's feeling an incredible amount of pain over this moment in the past and whatever it eventually led to, and I feel that same emotion so intensely that I have a false awakening or something similar and spend it looking for some space to just calm down from that scene.

There's a girl dancing at my shrine, a little marker in the woods that's rarely visited. I'm paying attention but I have a hard time understanding what she's communicating with some of the moves of the dance. I'm wondering why she keeps changing the form of it when she comes here; it would be much easier to understand her if she'd stop changing it.

I shift to 3rd person (although the pov character was also disembodied, so there's not that much of a change) and realize that it wasn't actually one girl who comes to dance, it's actually different girls who came over many generations; the god/spirit of the shrine didn't really understand the difference, or didn't see the difference as important. On top of that, the moves of the ritual they perform weren't always passed down directly; some of them learned at least parts of it from writings and illustrations, without anyone to correct them.

I'm lying in my IRL bed, looking out into the hall, and I seem to see movement, as if there are several small creatures on the floor. It's too dark to be sure my eyes aren't playing tricks on me. I reach for the lamp - as I do so, I think I see one of the maybe-creatures-maybe-tricks-of-the-eyes come into the room and look up at me - but the lamp won't turn on. Although I'm aware the bulb could just be out, I suspect this is a dream.

To test it, I will myself to float up into the air, but nothing happens. I close my eyes to test whether I can see through them anyway, and I can't (in fact, after closing my eyes here, there were no more visuals for the rest of the dream). But I'm still convinced this is a dream. As one more test, I reach up and touch the ceiling, sure that it won't be solid. I encounter solid material, but it's spongy, my finger sinks into it, creating a depression, and then reaching some limit - the material breaks, creating a small hole. For a second I consider whether this might not be a dream and I've really poked a hole in the ceiling. But I keep digging at it until I create a larger hole, large enough for me to pass through, and I climb up into it. As I pass through, I find I'm now moving downward, not upward - and this makes me wonder if opening up this hole was really a good idea. I have a vague thought about moving down into a basement which stores unpleasant things. But once on the other side, I become aware that I'm lying in bed, and that I've woken up.

Fragments from later (insomnia's been killing me this past week and my recall's a mess):

A desert in a futuristic setting. I'm talking to my wife about some intrigue going on within an elite group of all-female guards who work for us. They're slaves, and I'm thinking about the tensions created by relying on people while keeping them in slavery.

Different scene, same POV character. I'm in a small spaceship, with the pilot - a good friend who works for me - to my left, and a boy whom I'm kind of mentoring sitting behind us. I'm explaining to the boy about a weapon I'm expecting our enemies to use, something that increases the heat of a star. It's related to the lifespan of the star, and the boy deduces that since the star in this system is very young, the effect will be very great. He sounds horrified, but I'm not feeling particularly concerned; it's just one more thing to take into account.

A fragment where a character was referred to first as Silverhand, and then specifically as Airgetlám.

An army and civilian followers are camped around a castle they're allied with, south of their home. Their next ruler is with them, but he hadn't officially taken the throne yet. Now, someone still in their home country is making his own move for the throne; in response to that, the one with the army is standing up in front of his people and officially declaring himself king. This gets a mixed response - some people ask, by what right? Even though they were already following him, you still can't just crown yourself.

A woman's sitting on the outskirts of that crowd listening to his speech, by the top of a cliff, with three gnome-like creatures. She seems amused by the speech. One of the gnome-things distracts her from it by making too much noise - she casually kicks it off the cliff. One of the other gnome-things then grabs her by the foot and does the same to her, much to her surprise.