non-lucid

A psychiatrist talking to another doctor about music and musicians, saying this is the type of personality that in these days uses hypnosis to tell themselves "this is my fanciful, flighty dream, that no one lets die." In other words: treating a wild dream as a practical career path, and being convinced to abandon a dream, are both viewed as mistakes.

There's a group of women in a small village, they all wear black and cover their hair, and a while ago they summoned up the Devil. Now he can't leave until a certain thing happens - he's trying to cause that thing to happen, the women are trying to prevent it. The women are talking about another, younger woman, who's either new in the village or has been away, and so isn't aware that this thing must be prevented.

The scene changes to show that Devil, who's been posing as a human man in that village, and at the moment is trying to get home without being caught by the sun and without being seen by his wife, who believes him to be human. He gets out of the building he'd been in by crawling down the side of the wall head first, and sneaks into his own home through the kitchen window, just before his wife enters the room. She finds him there casually drinking a glass of wine, and he mocks her for some supposed addiction problem of hers.

Someone's playing a waltz, I'm looking at LaCroix dancing with a blonde woman. I don't know him (I'm not playing Nick's role this time, though I'm not myself either), but something about seeing him gives me the sense that I'm seeing a path not taken. As I'm watching him and the woman he's dancing with, I become aware that this is Underhill, and a dream; and possibly those are synonyms. (This wasn't lucid at all - the character I was at the time was thinking of this scene as his own dream, not mine.)

A woman's talking to some kind of spirit in a mirror, something that's teaching her magic. Watching this, it strikes me that the stories about vampires and mirrors come from the same place as this creature.

Based on AHS, 3 witches (including the supreme and her daughter), the daughter's blind, the other two are each missing one eye. Someone makes a blind-leading-the-blind joke. I'm thinking about the Graeae passing an eye between them.

Partners looking for a serial killer had three suspects in mind, but tracking them down has ruled each of them out. One of detectives is approached by a woman who believes her husband, Darryl, may be the killer. The detective ignores her, having heard many claims like this; but ignoring this one is a mistake, the woman's claim is true.

Four teenage girls have barricaded themselves in a room, two of them trying to protect the other two. There's some form of cult that's taken root in the town, there's an image of a girl in a bathtub covered in blood related to this; and the cult's summoning these two girls now, but they need the girls to come to them, they can't enter the room themselves. A girl from the cult appears outside the door as a sort of delegate, to talk.

Dorian Gray is talking to someone about the house he wants to leave, and the way memories seem have ingrained themselves in the very walls: the scent of a decomposing body even though he's long since disposed of it, the sound of music on the stairs although the musician's gone.

I'm standing by a light switch in pitch black darkness, and the lights won't turn on. I question whether this is a dream, doubt it at first, but then realize yes, it is. I have a sort of false awakening in which I still realize I'm dreaming, but now I become aware that I'm lying on my back in a bed in the guest room of my father's house (no resemblance to anywhere he's lived IRL), with his cat curled up against my legs - nothing's changed visually, it's still pitch black. I look up at where the ceiling would be and think about stars, and about a previous lucid dream where I removed the roof and floated up into the sky, and debate whether to do that again. I feel like there's something else I want to do here first. I can hear my father and his girlfriend watching TV in the next room and talking to each other. As I listen to them I forget that this is a dream.

Memory gap - some time later I'm standing in a different room, again trying and failing to get the light switch to work. I hear the sound of my stepbrother coming home and going straight to his own room. This light switch has several different switches and dials that I can't see in the dark, and this time I wind up taking out my ipod and holding it up as a flashlight. I can see the switches and dials now, but I still can't get them to work, and then I remember that this is a dream.

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

I'm going to visit someone I owe thanks, bringing a guitar to play for them. One of the strings snaps.

At my father's house, some guy is trying to talk to my sister S., he's angry and seems obsessed, and while they're arguing he picks up a knife - not to threaten with, but it's the last straw, me and my father kick him out.

At my mother's house, one of her former students is at the door with some friends, and he's talking to her about some technique that's recently become a fad. Everyone's very impressed by his expertise, and it's driving me nuts because this technique is just a cheap knockoff version of something I've been doing for years that no one's ever taken seriously, and this popular version is much less effective. We get into a really idiotic argument which leaves me feeling frustrated even after I woke up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm lying in bed in the wrong house, and some boy shakes me awake to tell me I have to go. I apologize and try to explain that I'm not there to do anything bad, I just got the wrong place, but I can't remember the word for 'place' in Japanese and have to fumble around trying to find a different way to say it. He gets the point but doesn't really care, he didn't seem particularly threatened by a stranger in his house to begin with, he just wants me gone before his mother wakes up. I walk out a back door that, aside from a little ledge, opens directly onto the river. The kid tries to correct me, pull me back inside so I can use the front door and actually leave, but I just step out onto the river and stand on top of the water, which is a normal thing for a witch like me to do. The kid's surprised, the water and the light are really vivid, it's all very pleasant. As I'm appreciating the vividness, I become aware that I'm thinking of this as a dream.

I walk a few steps into the sky and start floating, heading somewhere specific. As I float above the river, I pass various people, and I start to hear a song, people are singing it. I pass two brothers sitting in chairs having some fashionable procedure done, a row of string sewn above their lip, to me it looks like they're having their mouths sewn closed. It strikes me as odd, but I remind myself that this isn't my time period so I don't have the full context, not for me to judge.

I reach a roller coaster, and there's a man and a woman riding it, the people I've been looking for. They're also singing that song that's been going on, and the lyrics tell me a little about their history. She has (or possibly had, up until very recently) a life-threatening heart condition. Their song is about the possibility of fixing a heart only to get hit by a bus or something similar, and the way people think they have time. The guy, singing in English with an Irish accent, sings a verse about how if (some name, some guy he knows) died he'd be singing a toast to him.

Song's over. Now that we've all met up in a dream, as planned, the guy asks whether we should wake up now. I'm inclined to agree, mission complete, but I think it's a little ridiculous to waste a lucid dream, there ought to be some fun we could have before we go. The guy leaves anyway, the girl stays. She says to me, "I have questions." I say to her, "I... probably don't have answers." She starts to say something else, but I become aware that I'm consciously thinking up her next dialogue for her, and that I'm waking up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Forever Knight-based setting, I'm Nicholas, and I'm being posed a question: between Janette, LaCroix, and an apple which represents my hope for humanity, I can only save one. What's my first instinct? I dismiss the apple completely but can't decide between the other two, which is annoying since the entire point of this exercise was only to see which came to mind first, without overthinking it.

Scene changes to an Umineko setting - Beatrice, who'd posed the question, is annoyed with the way I've spoiled it, and she retreats into the other room with aunt Eva. She says something to Eva that I can hear through the door, something about how the only hope is the "good key (name of key)."

3rd person, I'm looking down at a wide stone staircase in a castle, and descending the stairs there's this woman wearing buckskin who I think of as some kind of hunter, she's talking with the king. She's saying the words "-get our answers."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm taking my IRL youngest sister, L., to the sands to get her first dragon. (Relevant to upcoming IRL event today, sans dragons.) (Edit: Nevermind, the IRL event actually did wind up involving dragons. Or the word 'dragon', anyway.) I was talking with a few older relatives about the dragons, and L. kept trying to hurry us up, anxious about getting there in time to see the dragons hatch; but for the rest of us this is all old hat, so we wasted time talking, and now we're running late. We keep telling L. that it's fine, we'll make it on time, and even if we miss the hatching you've still got a window of a few hours after the dragons hatch to bond with them. But when we get down to the sand, the eggs are already gone. We have to catch up with the hatchlings in the barn instead.

Before we leave for the barn, I see what I think of as a king cobra in the sand - it's huge, as wide as a person, which I think of as normal for king cobras. I pick L. up and there's a chase sequence that ends with me tossing the snake over a wall, but then I notice a scratch on my finger. It must have bit me.

I can tell I'm starting to pass out. I go inside a house and find my IRL sister S. with a friend of hers, and I tell them about the snake bite and ask them to call the hospital or treat it somehow. The friend takes my hand with the bite and looks at the veins, which look broad and red and cloudy, like they've swollen or burst under the skin, and she gets me some cream to put on my skin. I recognize it as some ordinary skin cream that's not going to help, and I try to convince S. to take me to the hospital before I pass out.

(Woke up with my hand hurting where the snake bit it - turns out I really do have a tiny scratch there IRL, might be a papercut. Just after I finished writing this down, I got a phone call from S, letting me know she'd been taken to the hospital on account of almost passing out from unknown causes. A few hours and a not-too-serious diagnosis later, I tried to get a little more sleep.)

I'm lying in bed in some mansion, with a few of S's friends around bothering me until I get up and go somewhere with them. As I walk through a doorway into the hall, I realize this is a dream. It's not as vivid as I'd like - I can see everything fine, but it doesn't feel quite real, more like watching something on a screen - so I try a mantra to make it more vivid. Instead, everything disappears. (In retrospect, that seems obvious. I was focusing on the words instead of the surroundings.)

Next scene I remember is a woman using the family name Gale, returning to a Spanish-style house on the west coast, overlooking the sea. She's lived here a few times over the years, and for a moment I see it in sepia tones and with flowers in the windows, as she's remembering an old photograph from when she'd first lived here with her two daughters, before she became immortal. She's thinking that even though she's coming back earlier than expected this time - something on her mind about trouble on the east coast - she was still gone long enough that she can pass herself off as her own cousin.

Fragments: A guy preparing to move on, saying "Can I borrow this map?"; a gallery/cafe belonging to an art group called The Future People or something similar; a runway show based on Sleep No More; a newly-made vampire using mantras to learn dreamwalking, using it to watch over a friend, another vampire, who's being held hostage.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm with a group of people stealing some huge metal sphere, but as we're driving off with it, we lose it, and we circle back and argue over where it could be. I catch sight of myself in the rear view mirror and realize one of my front teeth is loose, to the point of falling out. I'm thinking I'm going to have to see a dentist, which annoys me. I notice all the teeth on that side are loose.

I 'wake up' in my IRL home and go to the bathroom mirror to check my teeth after that dream. I spit out long strings of gritty, bloody material, textured like sand. I'm thinking it's good to get that out.

This werewolf kid in human form is sitting in a car, tied up, with blood covering his face. There's a blond girl in the seat behind him who didn't believe his stories about werewolves until just now, as a werewolf in wolf form leans in through the door, right into the kid's face. The girl starts screaming.

I'm dropping off that same werewolf kid at this mansion, and there are three men standing on the steps out front to meet us. I'm saying to them, "Are you all Adrian's?" Adrian's the wolf kid's name, I'm asking if he turned them, which I'm hoping is not the case. And it isn't; they introduce themselves to me, and it turns out the house holds some organization of witches or magicians or something of that variety. They're all very friendly. One of them, this heavyset old queen, mentions that he's single, and I'm amused. When I introduce myself, I add, "And I'd have to be invited in," just so we're all clear.

Fragment of a previous scene involved a boy covered in words and strange designs related to a demon (or demons). Now, elsewhere, his father's poured something over himself which causes his flesh to melt and transform him into the image of a demon. Another man speaking to him says "Why did you do it?" "Because! I wanted to know his pain!" 'Him' referring to his son. The other man says something to the effect that this was a very foolish thing to do.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

The words "If you could know, wouldn't you?" and a paramedic getting annoyed at a woman who keeps trying to kill herself.

I'm standing in front of a checkout counter, looking at the rows of rock candy, picking one out and talking about nostalgia with the woman behind the cash register, the vampire who made me. I ask her how far back her memory goes, and she says she still remembers her mother. Talking about some other vampires, we agree that their method is much more sensible than ours, them being able to make more than one vampire, which is something we can't do unless the previous one dies; we can't support more than one at a time.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Something about a 'Lazarus Door' for resurrection, and fog and some kind of danger.

A car that won't turn off. The owner's already taken the key out of the ignition, and for a moment I wonder how it's still running, but then I wonder why I thought keys in the ignition have anything to do with turning a car on or off. We take the car into the woods.

A fragment involving two teenage kids in the woods transitions into a sort of flashback showing the parents of one of those kids, back when they were still alive. They're both some kind of doctors or scientists, the wife has this mass of curly hair, and they're sitting at a table in some kind of office or lab and going over a file acquired by the husband's brother, while he stands across the table from them. The brother is "not like others," which is related to whatever the husband and wife are working on, and he's frustrated by working together with them, he's used to his freedom.

On the file they're looking at, there's a stylized drawing of two humanoid figures, one with the head of a bird, the other the head of a wolf, and although the husband and wife don't realize this, I'm aware that image represents the two teenagers from the previous scene, who are "not like others" in the same way as the brother. The wife is saying, "But what's really (some word meaning something like 'strange' or 'unusual' or 'notable' or 'attention-grabbing') here is that the bird has a Double Hartford rank, ten pages in. I can't open it up."

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

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

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

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

A teenage girl with long red hair is standing in a field at the foot of a mountain. The image changes to show her standing in this same field when she was younger, standing under a tree while her father spoke to her with his hands on her shoulders, while the rest of the family walked away into the woods and left her there. She was known as something like a witch. She shouts after her family not to leave her, and when she tries to calm herself down some sympathetic man - also present in the scenes where she's a teenager - tells her no, go ahead and shout that if it's what you feel, call what you see, refuse to be quiet, make it your power.

She's older now, and as a disembodied observer I'm watching her walk across that field towards the mountain, watching her from behind and I'm struck by the vivid colors of her now compared to when she was younger - the red hair in a thick braid now and down to her legs, the vivid blue skirts. She's walking past a wooden house with something going on in the woods on her mind, something urgent, possibly dangerous, her thoughts feel very determined and she's intercepting a group of people walking across the field towards that house - I think of them as the Freyhella (name taken from Wraeththu, but the resemblance stops at the name). As she walks towards them she takes a knife and cuts off her hair, right to the scalp. "With shorn hair," she says to them, the first words of a ritualized phrase, citing her right to be heard as one of them, as their neighbor, and as a 'witness' - a reference to whatever it is that's going on in the woods that she was thinking about earlier, and that she needs their recognition for. She ends by saying "Turn, and you can't yield to this," and she gets this hard expression I fall in love with.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Her again, in the woods, walking a path around some people at a distance far enough that she won't be seen, forming a protective symbol around them.

I'm walking along a road and find a dog walking around on its own, separated from its owner. I read the owner's name on the collar, and I bring the dog back into town with me, ask around after the owner and almost immediately find her apartment building. I ring the buzzer and ask her to come down.

When she comes down, she gives me some water to carry. The plotline's changed: there's no dog, we're going somewhere together, two distinct groups traveling together, I'm in one group, she's in the other. I can feel the added weight of the water in my backpack and am annoyed at having to carry more than I'd originally packed. Some of the people in the other group stop to get some water from a stream, and most of the people in my group find this disgusting. My IRL sister L., with my group, says there's nothing wrong with it, running water is clean; the rest of us disagree with her, saying that's not exactly wrong but not exactly true either, and then saying that it's a matter of belief. IRL sister S. says that's why she and her friends have agreed to stop believing in anything, it affects too much.

There's this strange, vaguely canine creature with a head almost completely covered in bony ridges, giving the impression that it has a skull for a head. It changes shape, sometimes looking insect-like, a vast serpent thing with many legs, and very rarely, it takes the form of a woman. It serves a certain human man who found it on a cliff, and the first time it changes into a woman it freaks him out immensely - he's wondered if maybe the creature is actually a person under a curse, but he's not at all sure which is the true form. At the moment, he's thinking "(creature's name) is the answer" - the moment he thinks that, something else bursts into the room and the creature leaps up to fight it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A narrator of a play saying "Young Romeo spies the young witch Barathia in the woods, but..."

A person I know IRL is annoyed at me over a misunderstanding, and posting passive aggressive messages about it online. I wonder whether I should correct the misunderstanding or just leave it alone.

I'm standing on a street corner with someone, waiting for the light to change, when I see two people walking towards us, including that IRL person from the previous scene. The light changes just then, and I know I should probably wait for her to catch up, but I hurry across the street instead. I follow the guy I'm walking with down onto the railway tracks, and there's something I really enjoy about walking along the tracks at night. A train goes past.

Still walking with that same guy, we've reached the trailer where his mother lives. When he knocks on the door, this guy he dislikes answers, some bigot his mother's dated in the past, but last he knew it was over between them, he wasn't expecting him to be here. They say something to each other I can't hear, I can just tell the guy in the door looks angry, and then the guy I'd been walking with turns around and leaves. He's really upset. I tell him to come back with me, we can go spend the holiday at my mother's place, she'll like having us over. At one point he decides to go back and kick that guy out of his mother's house and I physically hold him back.

A cop who'd reported various odd cases passes a strange, monstrous-looking guy driving in the other direction.

There's a car crash. This werewolf kid had been running along the road, with a couple guys from school following behind him in a car, shouting at him and trying to catch up. This happens a lot - usually the guys in the car give up, he can run a lot faster than they can drive; and usually when they give up one of them sends him some insulting text message instead. But this time, as he was running, he passed that monstrous-looking guy the cop saw, this is someone he knows and someone who shouldn't be in town; and although he's lost sight of the guys from school, there's no insulting text message this time. He's worried. He turns around and heads back, and finds the car that the guys from school were driving has been run off the road into a field, flipped upside down.

A witch, the werewolf kid's mother, walks up to the car. One of the boys who'd been driving it is dead. The other one's been transformed into a fox. She picks up the fox and talks to him a bit, and tells him she isn't going to restore him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm setting dreams out on a stall in two rows, they're things that look like something between a bubble and a crystal ball. I call to this guy I recognize, I call them unregulated dreams, or unprocessed, unauthorized, some word like that - the point is there's some official approval process dreams are supposed to go through before they can be sold legally, and these ones haven't been through that process. I say to him that I know he wants them for his store. He says something positive but looks conflicted, and he looks over to Rumpelstiltskin, the guy who brought me here and helped me set up the stall.

3rd person, Julia's fighting something from a distance and thinking that at this rate she'll run out of supplies. She's thinking about trying to start a dialogue.

Loosely FMA-based: I/Mustang am skimming a file Julia/Hawkeye wrote, something private or at least not intended for me to read. The text's very small and I don't bother reading it in detail, but it has to do with problems she saw in the military. There's photos with it, mostly pictures of us and someone else who'd joined up with us when we were younger; the last picture is of our whole unit on a train, out of uniform. Unlike the text, they're all positive images.

On that train, when that last photo was taken. I'm waking up and realizing me and Winry fell asleep sitting up, she's wound up leaning against me, the table in front of us is covered in papers, diagrams, there's a bowl of something next to me that's gone cold. Switches to 3rd person, showing us and the rest of the unit, some other people who've been working with us, and Julia/Hawkeye sitting a little apart. She's looking around at all of us and feeling fond but conflicted: she's always had to stay a little aloof, because she can't let us find out she's working against us.

I'm saying "Amen," the end of an exorcism. I'd been dealing with a demon and got in over my head, and I'm conflicted about whether exorcising it is the right thing to do - seems rude, you can't go around summoning people up and then flipping out at them - but either way it's been kicked out now, laughing as it leaves, which is never a good sign. I float back down the hall to bed, observing the lack of footsteps, and then get into bed, surprising the cat.

(Woke up, about half an hour after going to sleep. The cat had curled up at the foot of the bed while I was asleep.)

A fragment with a character who's king of a small people who don't necessarily want him - he's traveling.

A guy who runs a tavern screwed up a recipe, using potato instead of sweet potato, and his house elf tried to help by offering some spices to cover the taste, so the master blames it all on the house elf, starts yelling at it, then hitting it. I'm seeing this as I'm walking past the door, and I'm thinking that this is a particularly ugly house elf, only one eye and covered in bruises - but then house elves always look a little suspicious. Which makes me think - they're also very traditional, and use the term 'Dark Lord' rather than 'You Know Who,' so I wonder if maybe I could entrust it with a certain thing I need taken care of - but when I start to talk to it, it gets scared and disappears off to wherever it is house elves go.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragment of a scene involving a teenage guy talking to a vampire woman carrying a sword. Now he's home and sitting down on the couch, and the dream switches to 3rd person to focus on his father's husband, who'd been at his desk in the same room but goes to the door now to accept a delivery.

The guy at the door is a friend, or a professional contact anyway, someone who's personally delivering a book he'd requested. It's a living book. His friend delivering it warns him that he'll need it back tomorrow, someone else had reserved it. The man says that's fine, he just needed to speak with her - the spirit in the book - tonight. Although he doesn't say it out loud, there's something going on tomorrow that he's worried about, and he wants to talk it over with her. He's also thinking about a new room that's being built. The man who delivered the book says she's been reading sheet music lately; although he doesn't need to say it out loud, it's an implied request for the guy borrowing the book to provide her with some sheet music when he's done talking with her, as she doesn't like being left alone with nothing to read.

The first of several gods is watching the first humans age, and aging himself to match the oldest of them.

I'm walking past a shrine on a holiday, and hearing kids sing a song that I recognize as being part of a game like tag or hide and seek. There's a cloud of something floating in the air, I can't tell if it's tiny petals or some kind of dust, but it floats through the shrine gate and where it gathers I see a brief image of some great horned creature.

There's some futuristic family watching a concert, wearing shoes that let them fly, but the youngest girl can't get hers to work right, can't sit still, keeps flying off in different directions. Finally her mother catches her and makes her turn the shoes off, angry with her.

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

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

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

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

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

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

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

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

3rd person, Rumpelstiltskin visiting Belle in a dream, he's smiling and she's saying, "I know you, don't I?" She doesn't remember him, and when she wakes up from these dreams she usually doesn't remember dreaming them; even when she does, she believes he's just an imaginary character in her dream.

She wakes up, and for him that dream had been like taking a break; now it's back to business. He's creating a dream to send to someone else, a red-haired man; he creates it by narrating it out loud as he walks through the woods, following an image of Bae which is part of his own dream. Rumpelstiltskin can't enter the waking world himself right now, so he needs this man to act as a go-between for him; he doesn't bother meeting the man in his dreams directly, he just creates dreams in advance and leaves them behind as messages. Right now, Rumpelstiltskin's not happy with the go-between, he's screwed up one of the previous instructions, so he's making sure this dream will make him wake up crying. As he's narrating the dream and following Bae through the trees, I start hearing music, with the lyrics "After you forget."

I'm inside a mental simulation of a memory from my past, allowing two people to go through the contents of my memory, a man and a woman. I'm lying down on the bed while the woman goes into the next room to look around.

Will Graham standing in a room, alone, but with mental images of many people moving around, he's piecing together what happened here in the past. He's watching the phantom images move, but he's mostly thinking about Hannibal and the increasing inevitability of consulting him on this case. This whole image is replaced by written words in white: "The Kingdom".

I'm a man who's been doing research into my own unknown ancestry, and turned up some info that my father was a cult leader. And while my mother's still a mystery, I'm complaining to someone that at this rate she'll probably turn out to be a goat. It's a reference to an image of goat-headed Baphomet that was connected to the cult.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm watching three women try to recreate images from old photos of other people, dressing up like them and trying to copy their poses exactly, in order to figure out something that happened in the past, something about a girl with some sense of guilt towards another woman. Copying the photos requires one of the women to adopt some really uncomfortable looking poses, she's dressed up in a wedding gown and the angle she's holding her neck at looks like it should be fatal.

There's this guy who killed someone, and I told him over the phone 'I'm not going to come for you' unless he does something about the body himself. When I get there, I look out the back window into his yard, and see a few of those big black trash bags full of fallen leaves, and I note that there are a couple more bags now than were there when I left. I note that he split it up into several bags instead of just one.

I'm in the yard of some huge mansion with a few white tables and chairs set up for a party, abandoned now; I'm out at the very edge of the yard, near a river, standing over someone who's been shot, and I'm saying to Hannibal, "One person, you could have saved one person!" He says something disagreeing with me. I'm thinking about Abigail.

I'm standing in my IRL shower, and there's a spider in here, well out of the way of the water; but I accidentally drip some on it and it slips down into the tub, gets caught in the water and washed down the drain before I can catch it. I feel guilt about that. I didn't want to drown it. But then an insect crawls up out of the drain - a huge winged ant, and then another one - and I feel sure the spider will be able to make it back up too.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm meeting some people in a dream. A woman and I have just arrived on a beach, bright sunny day, clear blue-green water, and we've got these dark fragments of void-stuff hanging around us from our arrival, dissipating like smoke. She's telling me about the guy she's going to introduce me to, who's supposed to guide me through something specific. He appears in a puff of darkness like we did, but standing on the water a little bit away, dark-haired guy wearing a suit, and he jogs across the water to meet us on the sand. He apologizes for taking so long to get here, and I'm thinking to myself that it only took him so long because he's accepting limitations that are unnecessary in a dream, not really a promising start. I expect him to say something else but he doesn't, they've both gone silent and stopped moving, and I realize that we've lost the connection and I'm waking up.