non-lucid

3rd person, this image of vast blue sky and white clouds, even on the ground, which is perfectly flat and reflective, reminds me of salt flats, and in the distance there's a bed with a body lying on it, and a figure walking towards it. The dream zooms in to follow the figure, a middle-aged man here to return his lover's soul to his body, the man in the bed, 20's/30's ish, curly blonde hair. There's a second body on the bed, a naked woman, and unexpectedly, when the man revives and sits up, the woman sits up too.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

While reading an article on the internet, I start thinking about the symbolism of owls as messengers or representatives of wisdom, and that the information they deliver is always reliable even without knowing the source. After some more internet browsing, ending up looking at TV listings, I decide I need to get away from the tv/internet, I should go meditate, clear my head. (Disappointed I didn't actually get around to meditating before I woke up, I'm curious how that would have gone.)

Someone who's just finished drawing a picture of 10 priests, then a picture of me, offers to draw a picture of Andromache; in the dream I believed that was the name of a goetic demon.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a witch I put under an enchanted sleep a long time ago, but a girl's come to warn me that she's started to wake up. There are rhymes and charms meant to keep her asleep, but when I see they're not going to work I run for the nearest doorway, to put a few realities between us. The doors I pass through repeatedly change the scene until I wind up in a tiny square room, just large enough for me, with only the one entrance; I get rid of the roof and start flying.

I'm with a group of people in what looks like some underground stone temple, talking to a guy who emerged from a tunnel in the floor, and I'm noting that he looks just like his ancestor. We're returning his ancestor's sword to him, although now it's just a sword - there had been something else attached to it, something we used. As I'm thinking about this I notice that the tunnel has a carving of the Monkey King's head set above it.

A cardinal arrives at the top of the stairs leading down to the temple, followed by attendants in red and gold brocade. He's been our enemy before, hunting us down, although that's been resolved; still, we're not exactly pleased to see him, and his attendants start to run forward to put themselves between him and us. But he holds up a hand to tell them to stay back. He's brought us a satchel full of papers granting us certain privileges in recognition of our service to (something or other) - none of the privileges granted are actually very useful, this is just a symbolic gesture. I mention to one of the guys with me that I'd rather have another of those papers claiming we were acting with his permission and authority.

In what looks like a morgue, there's a live man lying down on a slab being examined by a guy in a wheelchair, along with a goon in a suit standing behind the chair, and a man in a white coat standing over the slab. The guy in the chair is looking for someone who's had plastic surgery, and he's thinking the guy on the slab might be him. He's wrong. He's also thinking about peeling back the skin of the face to get a look at the underlying bone structure. The guy on the slab has got the wrong idea about what's going on, he was brought here by the man in the white coat under false pretenses, and he's saying, "So you recognized me on account of my face?" The man in the wheelchair had been gripping him by the chin. Now he starts to reach toward the guy's bare chest, thinking about the heart, and the guy says "Hey, I thought you weren't gonna take anything too-" He looks at the guy in the white coat, who is looking up at the ceiling and moving his lips silently, maybe praying.

A nightmare from over the weekend:

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

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

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

Tonight's dreams:

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

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

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

All the stars are falling. At first it's just a few shooting stars; then the sky's full of them, as if every star in the sky is moving, and there are more stars than I've ever seen. It's incredibly beautiful. I'm thinking it must be the Pleiades (I'm reasonably certain the dream got that mixed up and actually meant the Perseids), and thinking about how in previous meteor showers the sky was always clouded over, so this is my first time seeing the whole of the 'Pleiades.' I see the image of a ringed planet form in the motion of the stars, filling up the sky.

I try to get someone, a woman, to come and look at the stars with me, calling it the greatest sky show or light show, and she says she's seen plenty of light shows, local fireworks displays, and doesn't need to see any more.

3rd person, there are two people looking down at a body lying face down in the mud, in the woods, pine trees, not a lot of underbrush. They're just barely out of sight of the road, although it's night and it's raining so no one's likely to see them anyway, and they're both wearing dark rain ponchos; the body on the ground, a middle-aged man, isn't dressed for the rain. They're talking to each other, the one talking right now's a woman, saying something about a bike, and about getting his fingerprints on the shovel. There's another body deeper in the woods, and they're making sure this guy will be blamed for that murder.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

HP, as Draco, fragments mostly - the new DADA teacher is suspicious (how unusual); running into Snape in the hall and feeling relieved; overhearing Weasley complaining about feeling 'used' by Potter, I'm surprised and pleased.

I'm someone who's just moved to America, or possibly just temporarily staying there; either way, my parents have a somewhat distorted idea of what that entails, they seem to be expecting a great deal more muggings and car chases than are actually happening, their letters keep giving me advice on same.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A man who's been traveling for a long, long time and wants to rest is given a mission which is described both as a task and a reward for him, saying he'll be "the Copernicus of" the place he's going. The actual Copernicus also appears on the scene, except 'actual' Copernicus is a woman disguised as a man, and also from outer space.

Fragment involving Ben Affleck and people complaining about a Fantastic Four movie.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

X-Men fragment involving Erik and Charles (as played by McKellan and Stewart) having an argument about something involving a young man, a mutant who lives with them; one of them leaves with the young man. Scene changes so that this is a movie I'm watching, I'm explaining to someone who just came in that this was the last time they saw each other for 9 years. On screen, it's now some kind of opening credits for the Avengers showing various backstories, some actual Avengers characters (Loki, Banner, "Hawkguy", deliberately misspelled - nothing for Iron Man though he shows up later for the fight sequence), mostly characters made up for the dream, one guy with a Buddhist hell motif, leading into a fight sequence in New York, complete with a very dramatic soundtrack featuring classical singers.

Scene changes, ditches the TV framing. Dream's now following a man in a suit who's standing on a New York street, looking up at the Avengers flying around fighting each other, when this woman says to him, "But do they care a touch for the wedding of the moor folk?" Moor here meaning the type of land, moor folk meaning faerie folk. They hold each other's gaze for a moment, she grins, he laughs, low and strange. She continues, "You weren't thinking, were you?" She's a red-haired woman with an Irish accent, wearing a veil, though the wedding she mentioned isn't hers, and looking very out of place on the streets of New York with a bunch of flying lunatics duking it out in the background.

(Woke up. Reflected that this was obviously inspired by a conversation yesterday, about the spin-off show starting today and how I still haven't gotten around to seeing the Avengers movie, and how that must have made me subconsciously remember the X-men movie that I also haven't gotten around to seeing - completely forgetting at the time about the Affleck dream which seems to have actually kickstarted this whole superhero thing. Although I haven't seen the latest Batman either, so I guess that still fits the theme. Anyway - decided to finally get around to watching that movie before the spin-off airs, went back to sleep, and making that decision seemed to do the trick, no more superhero dreams tonight.)

Fragment involving driving to the beach with IRL acquaintances and seeing Iolaus on the side of the road, looking out over a river.

False awakening - don't remember the actual waking up part, but I was in my IRL home talking about the previous dream scene as a dream, and went on to talk about skinny dipping and Xena (separate topics). Over-steeped the tea while I was talking and went to toss it out, outside.

Outside I'm on a city street, and the trash can I use is right in front of a bookshop. Looking over the books in the window display, I start thinking about idolizing people and forgetting that they're only human, and eventually seeing their flaws and feeling let down, although you're the one who put them on a pedestal in the first place. Thinking about viewing the work and the writer separately as a balancing act, being able to see a writer's flaws as a person and to love their stories without the one contradicting the other. And the flip side of that, thinking about the stress on people who are idolized.

As I walk back to my apartment, I pass a cafe where a writer I know (a DC, no resemblance to any IRL writers I'm aware of) is sitting at a table with two women young enough to be his daughters or granddaughters. I stop to talk, and I say to him something along the lines of, yeah, you're idolized and you're only human, but the way you use your young, impressionable groupies is seriously creepy. One of the women gets up and leaves. The other stays.

But when I'm back in my apartment (which no longer bears any resemblance to IRL) and making a fresh cup of tea, I turn around and find that the woman who'd stayed is now sitting in my kitchen. I offer her a cup, she says no. She tells me haltingly that she's thinking about getting a job to support herself - maybe working for a political campaign, maybe going back to college, getting a degree and working in publishing - instead of relying on her writing.

A newly-made vampire is sitting in a car parked in a garage early in the morning, and is refusing to get out of the car because he's afraid of the patches of sunlight in the garage, he's sure he won't be able to avoid touching them. He's a full-grown man, blonde, bearded, looks Scandinavian in ancestry. The driver, his maker, a dark-haired woman, is calling him a big baby and telling him he'll just have to take his chances.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

IRL friend S. is working with a theater company connected to a shop, which stocks videos of their shows although those videos are out of the way and most customers don't realize the shop and the theater company are connected. They're talking about having to close down (not sure if this refers to the theater company or the shop or both).

A traveling woman reporter is commenting on some serial killer with an MO related to books, and observing that his trail coincidentally matches up with her travel patterns, she's joking about being suspected herself.

A man and his daughter in a forest, the man had some oath with a bird, representative of the forest, and now there's a deer leg wrapped in parcel paper lying on the ground by their camp, violating that oath. He didn't kill or butcher the deer, that was someone else, but the parcel paper was his, borrowed, and this is going to lead to misunderstanding and enmity between him and the bird. The man and his daughter are leaving, she's objecting because it's not their fault but he insists that they don't argue, just go.

I'm in my IRL mother's home, and ranting to her about that previous scene, which is now thought of as a Bible story. I'm opposed to its message - the final moral and point of the story is different, but this scene here, designating man as something separate from nature, is something I'm deeply frustrated by and I don't care that it's not the focus, I consider it irresponsible storytelling.

My mother's deeply religious Christian IRL neighbor is visiting her with his two sons (the neighbor does have two sons IRL, but these two DCs bear no resemblance to them). Although he's not offended, he says that I should focus on the main message of the story instead. I had no intention of starting a religious debate and am happy to let the subject drop. His youngest son, on the other hand, has gotten angry and wants to prove the point to me. I find fanaticism attractive on him. I'm aware he's both attracted to and deeply uncomfortable with me, thoughts about queer issues and gender issues on my mind. He comes to the window where I've been standing and lifts a rock outside and throws it into a tree. (With his mind, apparently - there was some awareness that this was dream logic, and that if we'd been outside he would have just used his hands.)

The conversation moves on to safer topics but I pull him aside, ask him what that was meant to prove. We go outside so he can finish making his point. He leads me over to his father's yard and shows me a hedge covered in red berries concealing a small tunnel leading underground. He seems afraid, but he says he's determined to make me a believer. He's so worked up about this I don't have the heart to tell him I'm already a believer, just not his variety of believer - this isn't the atheism-vs-theism debate he thinks it is - but that's all right. I'm still thinking about queer/gender issues when I get into the tunnel ahead of him.

In the tunnel, I'm a girl (who, in the dream, I thought of as resembling the oldest Narnia girl - she doesn't particularly, but this scene reminds me of 80's fantasy movies in general) crawling on my hands and knees, while the boy with me is sitting on the grass outside, worrying. The dream 'camera' briefly switches to 3rd person, allowing me to see the boy, myself, and just around a bend in the tunnel, a door, open just a crack, showing a dimly lit room with a woman dancing inside, the Queen, and it's the inhumanly beautiful Queen I want to get a glimpse of, although the boy is convinced this is a bad idea. Back to 1st person, I reach the door, peer through and see an image as if the dream 'camera' has zoomed in, focused on the Queen's lips painted so dark they're nearly black, her throat, her decolletage, and an awareness of ornaments of frozen drops of water or tears, telling myself I must remember every detail of this.

There's either a false awakening or a partial-awakening where I'm lying in bed 'recording' this dream, only to realize that I'm not physically writing anything, after which I actually did wake up and 'continue' writing right where I'd 'left off', the part where the boy threw the rock.

I become fully lucid while doing my Apollo trick, and lose all visuals in the process - I have a sense of having a body, but there's no setting. (The Apollo trick is meant to get me out of nightmares, but I have no memory of any dream scene before this, except the thought that I 'lost' visuals.) I start floating close to the 'ground', although there's no ground, and a setting starts to form: the road outside my IRL home.

Memory gap. Next thing I remember is a non-lucid dream in a different setting, involving accidentally upsetting my IRL sister (my recall for this was quite long and detailed). Woke up at 5:37 AM, less than an hour after getting to bed.

Recall for the rest of the day was terrible. Vague fragments of dreams set in Being Human and Lost Boys, with a possible false awakening after the Being Human one - I don't remember 'waking', but I spent a dream scene trying to describe that previous dream. The only details I managed to remember: as Mitchell, needing a werewolf to briefly hold me down under the surface of a river, and the one I've got on hand doesn't live up to George in any way.

I'm at a shrine at the top of a hill, and this girl's just shoved me down onto the ground, so I'm lying on my back looking up at her as she's spraying this canister of salt into the air between me and the shrine gate.

There's these groups of vampires, many different factions, and I've joined up with this one - on the one hand, I'm a little annoyed at myself for not checking out all the others first and just going with the first ones I found, but on the other hand, I'm certain this is the group I would've picked anyway. But there are so many rules I keep breaking, mostly because I don't know what they are - at one point I found a list in my contract, but having a copy of my contract is also against the rules. (Although I understood the contract, the text wasn't written in a real language and seemed like it had too many consonants.) Outside, under a bridge made of bones, I met a little girl looking like something out of Alice in Wonderland, who seems much more at home here than I am.

The word "Vendetta" being sung.

3rd person following 3 people traveling through time, one woman and two men. One of the men, Billy, winds up being left behind, the other two have to abandon him in a place where he's "condemned by the powers to a life of battles." But they've just now encountered him again, as the 9th "killer" they have to face in a place of challenges, carrying a sword. A great deal of time has passed from his perspective and he's almost unrecognizable, cold and intimidating.

They've returned to their own time, in the hotel rooms they were in before all the time travel started. Due to timeline shenanigans, the woman runs into a 'past' version of Billy in the hall, a version who hasn't done any time traveling at all yet, smiling as usual.

The 'killer' version of Billy is talking about the souls left "there," abandoned by her. The other man who'd traveled with them questions that phrasing, 'souls' - "Are there really any souls in hell now?" Due to timeline shenanigans, is the implication - before Billy'd been abandoned, the two of them had a longstanding debate on what happens to the people in erased timelines, whether they still exist in any form. Billy's smiling, which is not a good thing, and saying they can finally conclude that debate.

I'm floating in the sea with a small oxygen tank and no other equipment. The water's clear and empty - I'm wishing I could be snorkeling on a reef (unusually, there's no visual image to go with this thought; it was blatantly inspired by this site, though) and thinking about freediving (this thought did have images to go with it). Back on the shore, I get into a hot spring with some IRL acquaintances who are talking about drinking, and about a storm coming.

'Julia' has reshaped herself into 'Jules' and I'm meeting him at a university cafe. He tells me he led a rebellion. They all died. Now he's lost his taste for bloodshed, except in the comfort of our own bed. I tell him he's much better at this than I am - whenever I've tried being female I've wound up overcompensating with strange obsessions for guns or fast cars.

OUAT's Rumpelstiltskin, Belle, and three fairies are sitting around a cramped table discussing storming-the-castle plans, theoretically - but the conversation defaults to the fairies badmouthing him for screwing things up in their absence. Belle leaves to go speak to two people locked up in a dungeon, at least one of whom she'd put there herself after he tried to attack her, and her attitude towards him has an odd lack of awareness of being locked up as a bad thing; she's spent so much time locked up in one way or another herself she sees it as normal.

Setsuna/Alexiel speaking to Sara/Belle, saying that after freeing her from 'beyond the end of time,' why do you think of death.

A vague fragment about the three main characters of Zelda leads into me being told by a girl (presumably representing C., this dream is blatantly inspired by her, I've never played this series) that normally she'd recommend someone start with a different game, but for me, the characters and storyline in this one are perfect. On screen, the villain closely resembles Rothbart. The game so far has been one long cutscene, to the point that my IRL sister watching with us (who presumably appeared because of Rothbart - I associate that movie with both her and C.) is surprised to be told it's a game and not a movie. When I look back to the screen again, it looks like a Disney movie.

I'm standing in a clearing filled with men in armor and horses, near some trees. The guy I'm talking to is psyching himself up, saying he can't get excited about fighting unless it's (the particular people we're about to fight) - with anyone else, why bother? I refer to Alexander, the man we're following, as "the undiminished king."

A woman in a modern setting believes she's being punished, looking up at the sky and addressing her father the storm god, "What have I done?" - but what she saw as a punishment was meant as a message, about a friend who she's separated from.

1st person, as a wolf, a woman stroking my jaw and debating out loud whether to leave me in that form.

A teenage boy having guilt-induced hallucinations about a man he'd hurt, seeing him with a face burnt black and empty holes for eyes, I can see the wall behind him through the holes.

A book with an illustration of a red circle covered in black markings has gotten soaked and the markings are washing away, and the boy who damaged it is apologizing, but the girl who owns it is saying it wasn't the real deal after all, if it would run.

I'm walking up the steps to a graveyard. I'm a teenager or young man who lives and/or works in a temple or shrine or similar attached to this graveyard. In the previous dream scene I'd been talking to friends at the foot of the stairs to the temple about hard times their families had been through, and I'd been thinking that I couldn't really relate, my family never having been through anything like that, and I'd removed myself from the conversation - but now I'm thinking about the hard things in my life I couldn't tell them, specifically I'm thinking about an old man buried here whose death I couldn't tell them about. I float over to his grave.

But there's a guy here waiting for me. He attacks me - though I just float away from that - while blaming me for causing that man's death by convincing him to expose us to the media. He'd been one of something secret, supernatural or not quite human. But it wasn't like that - I hadn't been the one to convince him at all, and I'm frustrated by this mistaken rumor; it had been some pretty girl who'd talked him into it, I'd been completely against it, and I'd hated that he could throw away a lifelong belief in secrecy so quickly.

I'm sitting outside what looks like a very small cave entrance, too small for a person to get through, and I'm talking with several very small spirits, and a much larger, much older one in the cave. We're having a disagreement about a course of action, and finally the spirit inside the cave decides to force the issue by possessing me and taking control of my body. In doing so, he forces out the much smaller, relatively harmless spirit that usually possesses me, and it's quite shocked by this; it tries to get back in, but there's this glowing blue crescent on my forehead, like a closed eye, which acts like a lock.

I'm standing on a city street near a warehouse, surrounded by government vehicles, and talking to my boss, who works for the FBI. He wants me to see what's going on inside the warehouse, but I can't do that. I'm tired. The thing possessing me doesn't understand why this is an issue, takes over and answers easily - his answer has something to do with drugs - he speaks using his own accent, very different from mine, some variety of English, but if the boss notices he chooses to ignore it.

Hypnagogia: A man's voice laughing, deeply unpleasant.

A man and a woman in what looks like an interrogation room, although he is technically free to go at any time, and the organization this woman belongs to isn't exactly law enforcement. There's a woman, not human, something else, something dangerous, who's coming for this man - she's not a danger to him, but she is to everyone else - and the people here need to know his story before she gets there. He says to the human woman in the room with him, "And the bounty? P.Big's?" P.Big being the name of the larger of the two bounties he'd recently turned in - these people had confiscated his reward money, along with the rest of his belongings. That's the main reason he's still here. She says, "You can have it back. In exchange for the war story."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A man waiting for a tow truck finally hears a vehicle pull up outside, goes to the window to look. There's a woman in a firefighter's uniform entering the house through the back door, without him noticing, and she watches as the man is killed by a wire around his throat. The two men who killed him pick up his body, standing right next to her but not looking at her or acknowledging her in any way.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a boy with an older woman - possibly his grandmother, though relatively young for it, someone who doesn't live with him but who stopped by today - he's crouching in a corner with a weapon, listening to what he believes is someone with a gun in his home. He's eager to face them. Footsteps approach the door, the door opens - it's the gardener/maid, and she's carrying a leaf blower, not a rifle. She makes the usual small talk and walks on. His grandmother says to him that she is not going to ask what he was thinking, she is not going to dignify this by discussing it, but she wants him to think about what just happened.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Last dream was just fragments, but had similar themes from the earlier dreams: something about a boy, an older woman who knows better than him, and a war.

PSoH setting, following Leon. He puts out messages searching for D. Meets up with fellow 'searchers' - for various things - some of them more useful, or sane, than others. He's sleeping with one of them, and at the moment sitting up in bed next to her, saying "don't look at me."

A boy who leaves something broken with friends or family and is surprised to find they've fixed it when he returns, he hadn't asked them to do that.

A wrong turn leads to a dirt road, and then to a moss-covered graveyard, where I get out to walk. My IRL sister L. and I find ourselves stuck with a tour group.