non-lucid

I'm about to open a portal for someone, and I'm trying to explain the difficulties of this type of teleportation to them. I'm saying, no, it doesn't have to be a place I've been to before, but I have to be able to keep the precise location I 'feel' in mind. Things like direction or distance from here to there, those matter - what the place looks like doesn't.

As Rumpelstiltskin, I'm using magic to sort of scan someone for some information, together with Belle, and Belle is able to feel it - she's surprised by the feel of it. It seems like it's happy; she didn't expect it to have a mind of its own. And it worries her that it seems happy, when the person we're scanning is sick. I'm thinking, the magic doesn't care about the person being sick one way or the other, it doesn't really understand what people or sickness are, it's just happy about the way it's being used - it's got a life of its own to a degree but it's not that sentient.

I'm outside my IRL home at dawn, and there are all these beautiful birds. A great horned owl on a tree stump, a snowy egret walking across the lawn, a variety of smaller birds that I don't recognize in the trees, and four peacocks that show absolutely no fear of humans, I'm standing right next to one and it's not bothered, I'm thinking the peacocks must have been tame.

There are two guys climbing up a rock - they think of it as a mountain, but it's barely a hill - carrying a radio and a guitar. A musician they like died here, and one of them has insisted on making a sort of pilgrimage, to play his music at the place he "breathed his last breath." At the top of the rock they turn on the radio. A female vocalist sings "At last the time fell-" The guys brought their own instruments and are joining in. One of them is on the guitar, but the one who insisted on this trip has some small metal instrument that looks vaguely like a comb, played with the thumb.

Dean and Sam are trapped inside a house they were investigating, something to do with a piano and a song that was being worked on at the time of the composer's death. As Dean, I'd been calling someone on my phone the moment the house trapped us inside, a woman we've worked with before. She'd been having lunch when I called her, and after a while the phone is taken by some guy she was eating with, someone who doesn't understand anything about what's going on and who tells me off for being rude, insists I should "use sir and ma'am" or else he'll hang up. So I call him "sir and ma'am" and piss him off. Thankfully the woman from before takes the phone back. I have the impression that if I hadn't been on the phone already, if I hadn't already had a connection established, the house would have prevented the phones from connecting; if this call ends, we won't be able to contact the outside world at all.

I've got a creature perched on my finger that's something like a crow and something like a bat - it's furry rather than feathered, but it's got a beak. The feeling of its talons around my finger is odd - not exactly discomfort, it reminds me of holding a mouse in your hands. I raise my hand and launch it into the sky.

There are two little girls, elementary school age, who are carrying out some illegal deal, weapons or something similar, something stored in the trunk of a car. They have some mentor who usually does this, he doesn't realize that they're here in his stead, he would have stopped them if he knew about it. This meeting with the customer was supposed to be an initial negotiation, a sample, but one of the girls declares that they're going to do the deal now. The customer reacts badly. The other girl gets shot, the one who'd declared they were doing the deal now takes a gun out of the trunk and shoots the customer, the cops come, they're all put in handcuffs, and the customer is bewildered, he was a good customer and doesn't understand why they tried to change things. The girls escape, go home, and try to cut the chains around their wrists with their father's tools.

An old man and a young man have just gone through a portal to another world, chasing someone who's stolen something. The old man asks around after him, but the description he gives, which would have been very unique in the world they're coming from, is almost useless in this one: they're looking for a man about 6 feet tall, dressed "like a warrior." The majority of the men they're talking to here are wearing armor, so that's not very helpful. Bit of a memory gap then, something involving a woman they know and the young man getting into trouble.

The young man's in jail, where another man from another world - not the one they were looking for - is being kept separate, a big blond Viking-looking guy in a large cell full of straw, who seems a little lost and confused. He's being questioned by the jailer, who's talking about that woman who came up earlier; she has a very long series of names, ending with Williams. She's married to someone very respectable, and she's denied that she knows the man in the cell. The jailer is telling him this to try to get him to admit that his story about knowing her was a lie and confess what's really going on, but the man in the cell is completely bewildered. The young man, on the other hand, is aware that there are three versions of Williams, the one that belongs to this world, the one from his, and the one that loves this man in the cell.

Williams arrives in the jail then - the young man believes she's the version from his world. She refers to the young man as Zachary, and she's carrying a fox - when I look at the fox, I'm aware that Zachary is a shapeshifter, and there's some connection to this particular fox. Williams goes to the man in the cell and she calls him "Tin Man," which is a sort of code name, and she's using it to reassure him of who she is and that she really knows him. Zachary believes that the Williams from his world has been posing as the version from this other guy's world in order to get some information out of him. She has him let out of the cell, and when he goes to her, their eyes - the fox's as well - start glowing green, and I have the feeling this means they're about to move between worlds. She looks to Zachary and says something apologetic, and he suddenly realizes that this is both his Williams and the one this guy loves, and that the fox is him - he's looking at their future.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Just fragments for the rest of the day:

An intelligent species of birds that are dying out after losing all their females to some disaster, giving some other species advice in the hopes of avoiding that same disaster.

Walking down a street, four dancers appear in front of us, concealing an assassin among them.

Something to do with prison and hooded figures "finding their own way."

Describing the story of the King in Yellow to someone.

I'm trying to catch a bus, but the station I've found turns out to be the wrong place - it's a place for repairs only. I sit around the station anyway. There's a guy who I initially thought worked there, turns out to be just another person waiting like me, who tells a story about a dead body that was left unburied. There's a girl listening to the story who slips and falls, hurts herself, and I pick her up and carry her somewhere. She works for my family, who owns most of this town, and she's worried that slipping like that might get her fired - her job involves athletic skill. She's not wrong.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After an IRL-based scene and a memory gap, I'm lying in a bed, watching a dream image form; I have an impression of gold and light and a woman's face, but it's blurred and I'm thinking that I can influence it too easily, I decide I'm not asleep enough for this, it's more imagination than dream. I decide to just let myself wake up instead, and let the image disappear, so there's no visuals. I open my eyes. I'm in a dorm, I'm a high school kid at either a boarding school or a very fancy camp or something, rooming with two other guys, and we go out to the lake and have some competition that winds up accidentally involving other people and getting us in trouble. I fall on top of the rotting body of a snake in the water, and a bit of it gets stuck under one of my fingernails. The teacher or counselor or whoever it is that tells us off for causing trouble mostly just seems amused by us; he refers to us as Vision house, and says it's all valuable experience.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm traveling with two other people, looking for something or someone, and right now I'm making a deal with an old woman I associate with trolls, to allow us to pass. She's sitting on a rock in some canyon, dry earth without any plants, and there's a cloud of dust over some footprints that appear and disappear as if there were invisible people moving around just in front of her. I associate those footprints with whoever/whatever we're looking for, it's why I'm talking to the troll-woman. She agrees to a deal: three for three. She'll allow the three of us to pass if we can win three fights against her people.

The scene changes: we're at an indoor pool, facing the first of her people. Although the two guys I was traveling with are still here, they're standing aside; I have the impression they'll stop the guy we have to beat if he moves towards them, but otherwise, I'm the one handling this. I'm in the water, and I become aware that I have a long fin on my back like a lancetfish, that there's something off, fish-like, about my hands and skin and eyes as well. The guy and I both follow the same pattern of engaging only to immediately back off, until eventually I get him into the water and hold him under. Once this is done, I look at him and think that he looked malnourished. I recognize him as someone who'd been on death row 'before we all came here.'

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.

A Takarazuka production of Elisabeth with a new scene, in which Death is kneeling before young Elisabeth on the throne, kissing the underside of her wrist. Both of them are dressed in red; at the beginning of the scene, Death had been disguised in long red robes.

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

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

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

I'm reading a scientific news article. There's a video of a man with a fox, and the fox is crying - as in, shedding tears. Through the use of some frequency, the man is able to induce "conscience." Reading this, it's causing me to rethink the nature of violence in the wild and morality.

Two extremely elegant women I'd been sitting with at a restaurant have gotten up to tango. I remain at our table, enjoying the view. They were the only two dancing at first, but a few other couples join in as the song goes on. The couple from the table just to my right gets up and goes to the dance floor, and they choose to place themselves directly between myself and the women I came with, blocking my view of my companions. I consider this rude.

Extremely long and detailed recall for the most mundane pair of dreams imaginable: cooling my heels in a lobby while waiting to speak to someone currently in a meeting (getting a drink of water, idly eavesdropping on the couple who came in towards the end, considering getting out my phone just to have something to look at, looking at the clocks - which displayed two different times, that's something at least), and then one about a drive with IRL family & friends (looking for a place to park so we could switch drivers, fetching tissues out of the luggage for L.S. who had a cold, shuffling our belongings so that one bag could be used for trash) ...just overwhelmingly mundane and in long and excruciating detail.

Normally I don't bother to digitally record dreams that bore me, but these were so boring as to be remarkable for it. I'd prefer nightmares.

Several fragments based on Tolkien, involving hooded figures, the statement that "No (name of hooded figures) will survive Aragorn" which has some vague association with atheism, and a few scenes in which Aragorn is either fighting the hooded figures alongside one or two other humans, or calmly talking to them, and either way shown to be in complete control.

As Rumpelstiltskin, I'm stopping by the door of one of the storerooms. Belle's inside, talking. The room's mostly filled with straw, but it also holds a mirror, and she's using it to speak with the image of an old woman sitting in a chair and knitting, a woman I know. The woman's giving her advice. I'm pleased - partially at seeing the two of them get along well, but mostly at seeing Belle making use of my magic. They stop talking and Belle turns around and sees me watching them, and I feign disinterest.

As FK's Nick, I'm stretched out on the floor of my apartment, talking to someone and using a laptop on a low table to search for something; the side of me that's a disembodied observer associates this with the semi-lucid search techniques used in other recent dreams.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A vampire watching a woman turn, which at this stage mostly consists of becoming more physical, much like the old movies - not sexual specifically, just more aware of the senses. He's saying something about how there's no need to believe in a divine plan to explain the way they find each other again and again.

Mina and Grayson are talking in a train car; she says she loves him, and the moment she does, he's flung by some invisible force out of the car, into the next, which is filling rapidly with water, up to the ceiling. He's thinking something regretful about Lucy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's a man coming down from his room to breakfast at an inn, somewhere expensive and in the mountains, there's snow visible outside, the place looks like a ski lodge. The woman he checked in with is sitting at a table, and he's surprised to see that she's still here, he half expected her to have left during the night. He goes and sits down with her, starts talking with her, but he's distracted, noticing that the innkeeper and his husband are watching them, not being at all subtle about it. This woman is someone in the public eye, and she's married or engaged to someone else, and the innkeeper looked a little scandalized when they checked in together last night.

He says to the woman now, "That... Well, it wasn't an accident. And will you just leave?" By 'that', he's referring to something that happened between them at dinner last night that made it clear he wants her - but it's something small, like a touch on the cheek or the leg; they aren't having an affair, despite the impression they've been giving people. He stands up and as he leaves he gives her this sort of very slight bow, and says "Sleep tight, Sonja."

There's a set of boxes which, when arranged properly, will display a poem by Rumi; it's a game, a puzzle. Each box is engraved with a few lines, the trick is in figuring out the proper order, and there are hints, such as do not separate the loved ones, send the child to school, don't leave him to wander the shore with the mermaid and her knife. The last part is easy enough - one box ends with a line about water spirits, another box starts with a line about a child, I'll just be sure not to connect those two; but there are quite a few different lines that could be interpreted as 'loved ones.'

A woman is sending a message to her employers, as a result of which the building she's in will be locked down and everyone inside will be killed, including herself and her two assistants. Her assistants are artificially-created humans, and display no emotion, but I'm thinking that the loss of their lives is just as important as any other life.

A woman has just been teleported into a castle, somewhere very dangerous, by someone named Anna, and she's very annoyed about this. Although Anna isn't here, the woman yells about it anyway, on the assumption that Anna will be watching her with magic. It's not just the danger that's upset her; at any other time she would have killed to be able to get into this castle, but right now, she'd been in the middle of something urgent, and she really needs to get back to it, so she looks for the way out. A hooded figure appears and reveals a passage to her, a passage that seems to violate the laws of physics and which is filled with a seemingly endless line of graves, and he tries to speak to her, to guide her into that passage, but she ignores him - she's spotted the main doors. As she walks away from the graves and towards the exit, she passes a box with some marking on it that makes her think about dragons, thinking of them as the product of elemental spirits that gathered together and festered.

There's a crowd of people leaving a castle - although the castle looks historical/fantasy-ish, the clothes the people are wearing are futuristic, as is the glass-enclosed walkway they're leaving through. A woman who works for the castle as a kind of hostess is escorting a small group of people at the head of the crowd, congratulating them for winning a spot on some vessel, and then she says to the rest of the people following them, "Good luck in the race!" By which she means - these people are following the winners because they intend to take their spots by force, and the moment they're beyond the castle's protection it'll be every man for himself.

At the end of the glass walkway, the hostess leaves them, and the people pass through some barrier. The people in the walkway had seemed, not necessarily good-looking, but like people who put a lot of effort into their appearance: well-dressed, well-groomed. Once they pass through the barrier, this changes: they're naked, they look like they haven't bathed or shaved in months, more fat, less muscle. The castle was a kind of retreat, but everything it provided was an illusion; now that they've left, the illusions disappear. The people's reactions vary - most of them are shocked, but there's an old man who seems to have expected this with a sort of I-told-you-so attitude about it. There's a teenage boy with a bad knee who's particularly horrified, as he'd believed his knee had been fixed by the castle; he's complaining to his parents that they might as well have stayed home, at least at home they had servants. The castle had its guests doing a variety of chores, citing the spiritual benefits; now it's clear that was a scam.

A woman's saying, "It must not have been a good reality for Vanessa and Vilya." 'Vanessa' is an alternate version of herself. As she's speaking, I see the two people she's talking about, sitting before a very large fireplace. Vilya suddenly leaps up, as if he's just been hit by some stroke of inspiration, and he rushes to a table set up with a variety of alchemical instruments.

Three people in an underground room, grey stone walls lined with bookshelves. A woman and an old man who she's close to, and a young-looking man who made some kind of deal with them - I'm a disembodied observer, but I recognize him from my most recent lucid dream, as the 'future version of myself' who doesn't actually resemble me at all and who looks more like he's from the past. They've barred the doors in the hopes of giving themselves a little more time before someone arrives to stop them - guards or police or military, something along those lines, they're expecting some specific group and they know it's just a matter of time. But they've come to this room to find something specific, and there are hundreds or thousands of books here and no obvious organization to them. The woman's saying "Wherever (something) it'll take us forever to find it." The young-looking man had been sitting down with his eyes closed; now he opens them. They're glowing yellow, which startles the woman. He says, "I have found it. He has used the Britannica articles-" He continues talking, but I've become distracted by curiosity about that locating technique he just used; I associate it with a search technique I'd used in yesterday's dream.

My IRL father and I are having a conversation. We're both aware this is a dream. (But I'm not really lucid, or at least not very - 'this is a dream' is just part of the plot.) We're talking about recurring dreams I've been having of falling. (IRL, I can't remember ever having dreamed of falling.) He's concerned about it, doesn't like the idea of me repeatedly splattering myself on the ground. I assure him that I hardly ever splatter on the ground.

As we're talking, the scene shifts, and now I'm falling from a great height - but I land lightly on my feet on the ground, demonstrating my point. I've landed somewhere near an airport. Near where I've landed, there's what I think of as another version of myself from another fall - but rather than being me, it's a woman with long red hair, lying on the ground, bending backwards at an awkward but not fatal angle, and motionless, because she's not really here, she's just an image, like a three-dimensional photograph. Looking at her, I remember various dreams where I watched other characters fall and was unable to stop them, and I acknowledge my father's point, that sometimes the falls don't go so well.

A woman I seem to know very well is waiting for me when I walk away from the airport, and we go to meet back up with my father and his girlfriend. (No resemblance to his IRL one.) We come to a street where we'd meant to meet with them, but we don't see them. I call out "Dad! Ada!" but there's no response. There's a bit of a crowd, people talking to each other, one guy handing out flyers, I get the impression there's a festival going on somewhere nearby. The end of this street is a dream boundary; if we cross it, the dream will change. But the festival is on the other side, and we're wondering if my father went on ahead, through the boundary. The character version of me starts to head for the boundary, but the part of me that's a disembodied observer zooms out and takes a look around, and spots my father and his girlfriend sitting on a bench under an overhang. They'd been blocked from my view by the crowd around the guy handing out flyers. So I cause the character version of me to have doubts about crossing the boundary, reminding him that it'll be hard to get back to this same scene if I'm wrong about my father going on ahead. Character!me turns around.

I tell the woman I'm with that I want to take one last look around, and I go and find a bench to sit down on. I hold my palm up in front of me, and speak to it as if to a computer, "Run search." Two glowing screens appear above my palm, one vertical, one horizontal - I think of it as a way I've created to execute dream programs. I give it more commands to run a scan of the area and locate my father and his girlfriend. Meanwhile, as a disembodied observer, I find this a neat trick, and make a note to try it sometime when I'm actually lucid; I'm wondering if it would still work. The dream scan finishes and has successfully located them, very close to the bench where I'm sitting.

I walk over to them. They seem a little out of it, as if they're high. Apparently they'd heard me calling, but it didn't occur to him that by 'Dad', I meant him. I say to him, "What did you expect me to call you? Paul?" (His name isn't Paul.) Some passerby who's clearly enjoying the festival overhears this and sticks out his hand to my father to introduce himself, saying "Hi, Paul!" My father and I tell him to buzz off, which his girlfriend objects to, as the random passerby seemed nice. By nice, she means good-looking.

There's a vampire who looks like a kid, who'd been having some kind of serious problems, but is assuring a friend of his that he's past them now. He's also discovered that, as a result of those problems, he can eat solid food now, and he's trying to stay off blood. He's optimistic about it. "I've been having some sickness, but-" His friend laughs, patronizingly. As a 3rd person observer, I side with the friend - this is a bad idea.

There's a woman working at some kind of community center, and a man who seems to be drunk outside, holding a knife. She's saying to him through the door, "Go home, Ray! You're sick! You need help!" Afterwards she starts thinking about fated events, and timing.

I'm working with a team of bounty hunters to catch two people, allowing one of them to lead us to the other without letting him realize he's being followed. We catch up to them in the woods, and they're both here, but they're unconscious, and surrounded by two "Wraths" - some semi-divine role, working for Ares. They're waiting for their master, who arrives just after we do.

Three people discussing a conversation they just had with a police captain who hired them. One of them uses the slang term "NeuTrooL", a pun on "new" and "true" and "neutral", which means information given by someone who mistakenly believes their view is an objective truth, completely neutral, when in fact it's influenced by their own bias.

A woman's telling me about her dreams, with a large cast of recurring characters and ongoing storylines. She's telling me her most recent one, about "the Prince and the Magician", and says that the Prince is captive but still playing an active role in events. As she talks, I see the prince sitting in a room that has something crystalline about it; he's a fae-looking thing, and he's sitting in front of a mirror with a spell on it, talking to someone at a distance. The creature in the mirror is very large, and has fur. The woman telling the story mentions the name Ba'alrael.