non-lucid

I've broken into a building for a specific purpose, but it's not been going well. I killed someone while trying to stop him from raising the alarm, I hadn't intended that. Still standing over him, to my right there's a room with three men in 19th century dress uniform speaking. They're the reason I came here, and I'm certain I won't be able to finish what I came here to do now that they've seen this - but they're not reacting. On further examination, there's some manner of barrier between that room and this one, invisible from this side but seemingly solid from theirs. I lean through for a moment while those men are facing the other way, feeling no resistance, and find that from their side, it looks as if I'm leaning through a mirrored wall. Interesting setup; I'm thinking about why the owner of this home would need such a thing.

Then I focus on the men speaking on the other side, the reason I'm here. One is saying, "What do we do about Shaw?" Another replies, "Escaping-"

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Revisiting that one-way-mirror setup, there's a vivid yellow tint to the air on this side of the mirror, and I'm looking at an image of a white rabbit hanging from a noose held in a man's hand. I'm hearing a man I think of as some kind of instructor saying to me, "...exists in the past."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man I recognize from a previous dream leading a group of people out of some tunnels onto the surface. There's only a narrow ledge to stand on here, the top of a cliff, and it's raining, windy. Last time I'd described him as pale; this time there's something wrong with his skin, but I'm not focusing on it. I'm looking at his eyes; there's a red ring filling the outer half of his iris, that's new. Someone's saying in response to a question he just asked, "Perhaps we could talk on the way there," like they're in a hurry to get away from here.

Earlier, he'd been having a conversation with another man in those tunnels, taller, with white hair that's mostly fallen out. This man's arguing against him leaving with that group of people and going back to civilization, saying that either he'll spread corruption like a disease, or else he won't but he'll be blamed for doing so anyway. Previously, they'd unknowingly allowed some kind of corruption to spread before their own symptoms started to show, not realizing they were the cause.

I'm coming out of a mine with a box a man gave me. Sitting down at a table across from a woman I know who's eating lunch, I open up the box and we have a look at the books inside. There's a two-volume set on healing magic that catches my attention; I've seen the first one before but the second is completely new to me, I'm very pleased. The woman asks me for a demonstration, and I laugh, saying I've barely got any understanding of it - it's not something you can learn from books, they're just for pointing you in the right direction, it takes time and work to actually put into practice. She's disappointed and leaves. As I look through the book, I call up a blue healing light that plays around my hand. Reading, the book is saying that it's impossible to progress further without "the Lady's smile."

I see an image of said Lady, a woman in a void. She's aware of my attention, though her eyes don't focus on me; she talks as if this is a visit from an old friend, sounding surprised and pleased, saying that I've come earlier this week than expected, and calls me by a name that starts "Shari-" But she cuts off partway through that name, and gives the impression of focusing on me, though still not with her eyes. She says then, "Isfael? Is that you?"

The observer side of me splits off, recognizing that this Lady and Shari-whoever are figures that often appear in stories together under various identities. When she correctly called me Isfael, I realized that Isfael is one of those identities, a specific young version of Shari-whoever without knowledge of his older self.

I've convinced a man to throw himself on the king's mercy. A friend had been offering to get him to safety, he knew some people who could help with that, and the man had been considering it; but I'd spoken to the king and I promised him it would work out, so he stayed.

But now that we're actually standing before the throne, the king decides to have him executed. This was not the deal. This brat, spoiling things on a whim; part of me is furious, but part of me just finds this whole situation ridiculous, that these humans allow themselves to be ruled by a man like him. I imagine speaking out, see an image of it, but in reality I say nothing, just wait for the audience to end. Now I'll have to try to sneak the man out. I should have just let him run while he could.

Talking with others, there's something we need from the palace which we haven't been able to locate. Someone points out that there's a private wing that contains the royal suite, but also other rooms of unknown purpose - process of elimination, what we need must be there. We agree to make that private wing our destination for now, and someone makes a joke about how we can wave at the timeline of our original plan as it passes us by, we've gotten so far off course.

A woman's coming out of my workroom, which she'd stepped into to give herself some space, taking a break from our conversation. The things I've been telling her have been disturbing her. There's another man here who'd tried to get me to tone it down, break it to her more gently if at all, he didn't understand why I was pushing her like this; but I'd ignored him.

Now that she's back, I see she's taken something from my workroom, two long dull knives which are smeared with a kind of colorless substance. I'm alarmed. I assume she must know what they are or she wouldn't have taken them, but I can't believe she'd be holding them like that if she really understood - I tell her, "This is the substance you - the real you - uses to mark her new bodies, don't-"

She uses the substance to mark the skin of her forearms. She's saying something about why she's doing this, some kind of statement of defiance, but I'm not really listening - I'm horrified, I got to my feet and grabbed her by the shoulders as if I could stop her, but that's pointless; I just need to make her understand this thing that she's done, trapping herself in a single body, how wrong and unnatural this is. The body still won't age, but someday it will fail, and she'll still be tied to it, and she'll die - not just this small version of her who doesn't remember what she is, but the real her will die, something that should never have happened. The death of something that should have existed always. I can't begin to explain to her how horrific this is, the shock and sense of loss; in the end I'm just repeating, "This will kill you, this will kill you, you will die from this," as though if I just emphasize it enough she'll understand the significance of it. She doesn't understand, but she's beginning to see just how horrified I am.

Mazikeen's picking up a crow for me, telling it that it's not going to get out of our deal. There's always an excuse.

"What excuse?" says the crow. "I'm not trying anything. I'm just pointing out I've got mouths to feed."

Many people do. But she counts the children in the nest, six of them. She initially seems not to care, saying something about distributing its belongings; but then she says something about giving them time to "grow into it." The crow's got one more year.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A group of people sitting around a round table, while I'm standing. There's a woman who is composed of three women superimposed over each other, two living, one dead and decayed but still conscious due to her connection to the other two. I'm speaking to one of the living ones, Lily, the one who belongs to this reality, and offering a way to separate her from the other two. She has doubts. The other two are in favor of it. They ultimately agree.

Later, I'm reading an account of the deaths of that group who'd been sitting around the table, a kind of organization I'd led. I'd made a deal on behalf of those three women, and to hold up my end of the deal, I was away for a long time; I think of this as abandoning that group. There was a fire. I'm reading a note to the effect that the group itself will reappear in some form or another, but the people I'd abandoned are dead.

A man flies into a church in a hurry, and runs across an old friend he hasn't seen for a long time. He's excited to see his friend's still alive, but concerned to see he's not wearing his armor - he's in jeans and a t-shirt, and there's a sense that this means he's rejected a role, walked away from something. And there's a small scar by the corner of his mouth, that's new.

Unfortunately, there's no time to talk, he's running from something - he asks his friend for help, and his friend agrees, opening a portal for him. As he's about to pass through it, however, a group of people fly into the room, wearing armor like the kind his old friend used to have, shouting for him to stop - they're acting like both the portal and his old friend are a threat. From my 3rd person perspective's location, I can't see where that portal would lead.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm fighting someone, but I've stolen his weapons and made them my own - his cloud of mist, his glowing light. I feel a snap. I'm surprised to find he dies as easily as anyone else without his toys. Three of us who'd been fighting him together drive off, leaving someone behind to clean up.

I apologize to the man driving the car, someone I've been with for years now. That whole situation had been my fault - I'm saying I couldn't just follow instructions when I should have, and "Let it get too loud." He says, "And then it didn't anymore."

A woman's landing a griffon. People come to meet her, and as she talks to one of them she's going to her bag and attending to her armor, getting out gloves and a helmet that weren't practical to wear while she was riding. She's talking about the things that need doing, acknowledging that some of them might be impossible at a small outpost like this, without the easy access to resources you get in the cities. And there's an animal strapped to the back of the griffon, restrained to keep it from hurting itself during the ride, in need of medical attention. They're next to the stables, but the griffon's too large for that - once everything's unloaded, it curls up on the ground like a cat, beside a tall fence.

That woman and the man she'd been talking to are walking past me into a circle of armed enemies. Someone in the crowd says, "It is the corruption against the corruption." They sound surprised. I'm ostensibly on the crowd's side, but I arranged to bring these two here tonight, and I expect them to kill the man who leads this little group, currently sitting on a kind of throne. Although I say nothing, I see him watching me and I can tell he understands my intention - or more likely he's imagining some grand paranoid plan; but my plan here is very straightforward, just his death. I'm aware he and I are a minor nuisance for these people I've brought here, just something to be dealt with on their way to something else - I have a vague association with the moon - not at all the grand schemes he's been imagining.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm traveling through a city and taking the opportunity to meet with an old friend who was reassigned here recently, a promotion. She works in a form of law enforcement. She's talking about the changes on the island where we last saw each other, talking about the ongoing conflict there. She says the forest has been burned down, so they'll have no more place to hide. There's no more way to get past the patrols skating over the water - I have a mental image of a ring, a platform floating on the water, encircling the whole island, with the port itself as the only opening.

She describes all this as if they're good things. Time was, she'd be helping me get my people out of places like that. She's met the man who leads the people in that forest - his people aren't mine, but their situation is nearly identical. But I'm thinking, I shouldn't be surprised - the last time she helped me, something happened that frightened her. It's why she stopped working with me. My people weren't at fault, but I'm not surprised that she'd take that fear out on them. But listening to her now, talking as if my people should be locked up, it's like she's forgotten I'm one of them.

A place based on the Heian era, a woman's emerging from behind a curtain that partitions off an inner room and moving between two wooden tables where a couple other women, her friends, are eating and talking. She's dusting the tables as she talks with them. I'm standing off to one side and watching her, feeling fond but bemused. I've just noticed the wrinkles she's developed, and I wonder how long it's been since we first met. When she gets to the end of the table, I stop her and ask why she's dusting - she knows this place is an illusion I'm creating for her, she doesn't need to clean it. She says she's probably being silly, laughing, and she hands me the thing she was using to dust. I'm feeling vaguely sad about this.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm walking across the moors, heading towards a building I think of as haunted - then I mentally correct myself, it's not haunted, it's a dream of a haunted place. This distinction matters to me; something deliberately created to present a certain experience.

I'm walking through the basement of a tower, grey stone walls. There's some kind of chaos going on on the main floors above me, a distraction while I was taking care of something in the dungeon on the next floor down - but now that it's time to go, I want to avoid getting caught in whatever's happening on the main level.

There's two people waiting for me with two different escape routes - neither of them knows exactly what I was doing here, neither of them knows me personally, and neither them knows about the other. There's a person I work with who'd arranged for a man to meet me by the stairs up to the main floors, but I'm having second thoughts about trusting him. And there's a woman waiting by a wooden door that leads elsewhere; she's not involved at all, she just wants to escape whatever's going on upstairs and is willing to take me with her, recognizing me as a friend of a friend. I believe she would be more sympathetic to what I was doing here, if it came out.

Deciding to go with that woman at the wooden door, I'm doubling back, passing by the stairs leading down to the dungeon. I debate whether I have time to go back down there - there had been something else I'd wanted to look into down there, though it's not a priority. I start down those steps, but it becomes so dark I can't see, and I have a vague impression of massive chains. I can hear a woman's voice crying. I decide I don't have time to be fumbling around in the dark, and I head back up the stairs.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A man is looking at a wall recently painted green in an attempt to emulate some other place, and talking to someone about a man he knows, saying that while he wasn't looking, the man went and got married to people so unsuited - people, plural, meaning both the wife and the stepkids - people he'll have to keep secrets from.

I'm watching light play over the features of the man in question in an interesting way. He's looking at a signet ring with an image of a rose, which he's just removed from a hiding place in the base of a lamp. I'm hearing a kind of tinkling sound like a music box repeating a single measure over and over again.

I'm in a hospital, speaking to a doctor. There was some information I'd wanted to get from him, but he's assumed I'm here about something else, a person who's been checked into the hospital with a specific condition. I hide my surprise and go with his assumption, only expressing my surprise that he'd known about this patient, since the ward they're in isn't his responsibility - has he kept an eye out for this condition since the last time we met? I'm privately thinking that if that person's developed that condition, then this both simplifies my job and complicates it; I no longer need the information I'd come here for originally.

I'm discussing this development with three other people in an empty hospital room - a man with a shaved head, a teenage girl, and a person whose gender I'm not completely sure of but I'm going to go with 'she'. Black hair, ragged like she cut it herself, short in the back and long in the front; pale with bad skin; and a grey hoodie zipped up, making her look heavier than she is.

Talking about that patient's condition, the guy with the shaved head had just been saying something about how dreamers have it rough. Talks about how badly things can go wrong just from being interrupted at the wrong moment; talks about people traveling through a dream being dumped back into reality wherever they happen to be at the moment, and hoping you're lucky enough not to be overlapping some physical object at the time; and that's just the passengers, the dreamers themselves get it worse.

The person in the hoodie shrugs this off, says at least if you can heal people, no one cares what nastiness you've got going on; they're content to leave you be in your swamp.

The guy with the shaved head is disgusted by this, says yeah, you enjoy making yourself the worst person you can be.

She says to him that she learned in prison, "There's no such thing as letting go of vanity, Wade."

In some small early 20th century village, I'm the youngest in a family of three sons, and for years now it's been expected that I'll marry the neighbor's youngest daughter when we grow up - we've always been good friends. In the previous scene we'd all been sitting around my family's dinner table; now I've gone to meet her down by the river, which is so full of plants it gives the impression you could walk across them like a bridge. The girl's here waiting, but before I go to meet her, I'm distracted by another girl, a stranger, standing in the center of the river. The observer side of me thinks, I have to remember this.

Her hair is probably blonde, but it's so matted and dirty that it's hard to tell. She's dressed in old-fashioned men's clothes, a shapeless and colorless coat over a blue velvet waistcoat with a pattern of rosebuds. Then I realize that while I've been focusing on remembering the details of her appearance, I've been missing the conversation the character side of me is having with her. I drop back to focus on what the character side of me is doing.

Years later, but near that same river. One of my brothers is handing me a silver pocket watch that belongs to our father, and telling me that he's in Madrid - they've known this all along, apparently. My brothers got me to come back here on the pretense that our father's missing - I'm annoyed but not surprised to find that was a lie. There's a woman here, somehow connected to that girl in the river but not the same person, and something about biting down on a chain, and her little fangs.

I'm carrying one end of a wooden box through what looks like an abandoned house, with that woman holding the other end - it's not particularly large or heavy, just large enough to be awkward for one person. I'm looking at our hands on the box, close enough to be nearly touching. Her nails look thick and discolored, greyish; there's blood ingrained around the nail, but I'm thinking that the blood's not what's causing the dark greyish appearance, since there's blood all over my hands too.

That woman is kissing me and holding me in place, not letting me turn my head to see what's going on, telling me not to move when I try to. Something is very wrong. There's other people here; the observer side of me recognizes this moment and I switch to third person to avoid it. The scene still continues in front of me, they kill her, but I don't see much of it, focusing on remembering the earlier scenes.

There's a woman who is retrieving a certain object for me, while I watch in third person. The object is in a cave, in the possession of this large, strange creature who she's speaking to now - she's got two or three people with her. He's willing to make a deal. But after discussing terms for a while, the woman ultimately refuses; she isn't willing to agree to his terms. He accepts this, clearly believing she'll be back eventually - she has no other choice, she needs that object.

She and the others start to leave, but one of the others evidently has their own plan - another woman starts playing a strange kind of music that puts the creature into a kind of trance. She encourages the leader of their group to simply take the object. The leader is conflicted, so the woman with the music does it herself. The creature's trance is deep enough to allow her to get close to the object, but it snaps out of it once it recognizes that they're stealing from it. They run.

The cave is in the center of a sort of maze of tunnels, but although it looks confusing, the tunnels are all interconnected; as long as they keep running in the same general direction, it doesn't matter which tunnel they choose, they'll get out eventually.

They come out of the tunnels into a place that I think of as a certain type of dream, a sort of desert-like place, barren brown rock, with various dreamers here and there like landmarks. In one dream, there's a family in a yard where grapevines are growing; two heavyset old men who are brothers, and two grandchildren playing a little distance away. One brother leans in to say something to the other in a language I don't recognize, and the eyes of the one listening turn all black, which I recognize as an outward sign of the usual effect of staying in this particular type of dream too long. He's the dreamer here, these others are illusions. They see the group passing near the edges of the dream and just watch them.

The group comes across a dreamer they know, a man who the leader of this group is in love with. The others hang back on a ledge overlooking his dream, but she approaches him. He's sitting in front of the ruins of a small house - it's meant to be their house, his and hers, though they've never actually lived together outside of this dream. There's dead bodies lying around outside, things he killed, but too late to save this place from them. When he sees her there, he says, "I tried," with a sort of smile, as if this was inevitable and the only surprising thing was that he tried to save this place at all.

Then he sees the object she's stolen, and there's a shift - he stops paying attention to the storyline of the dream he's in. He asks her why she went to all the trouble of finding that thing, when there's no guarantee that the man she got it for will be grateful for it. There's an association here with trying to help a scorpion - the story of the scorpion and the frog, doing what's in your nature rather than what's in your best interest. She agrees with him, there's no guarantee that this will have the result she wants, but she wants to help the 'scorpion' anyway. She makes a joke about having a weakness for older men - lifetimes older, in this case. Her man doesn't find this funny.

I'm standing in a place covered in snow that I think of as "at the edge of all things" - although all I can see is snow to the horizon, I'm thinking of this place as a kind of boundary line. I'm with a woman wearing a black fur hat, and below it some strands of her hair have come loose, the wind keeps blowing them into her face.

I've just said something half-joking to her to the effect of, it's fine, I'm used to traveling. I'm thinking about the way I arrived in this reality in the first place, tracking her.

She, entirely serious, says something to the effect of but if you do this now, you won't ever be able to stop.

I'm walking out of a large red tent in the woods. In the previous scene I'd been having some kind of argument with two guards who work for me, but we were interrupted by a man who's now following me out of the tent, someone who I have some kind of deal with. He'd mentioned my son. I want to continue the conversation more privately.

Deeper in the woods, there's no underbrush, and the ground's covered in old fallen leaves. I drop the illusion I'd been using. I've been borrowing the identity of the man those guards used to work for, some kind of ruler, dead now. Without that illusion, there's a sort of shadow over my skin, like a photo overlaid by an image of something else - I (correctly) remember that I've used that specific comparison before in another dream; though I don't remember the details until after I wake up, I'm aware the parallel's intentional.

I'm dismissing whatever the other man has just said, angry. I tell him, "I swore to make this journey a thousand times, but you - you didn't uphold your part, did you?"

I'm wading through icy water, tracking someone down. It's dark, the water looks black, and there's this mist in the air, I can't see very far. There's bodies floating in the water, wrapped in cloth. There's another man here with me, he calls me by the name of Logan. I'm focused on the dampness in the air - it caused problems earlier when we couldn't get a fire to catch.

Thinking about fire makes me see another time, standing in a large stone hall, standing off to the left of the woman presiding over some ceremony, having to remain still throughout her speech, wearing armor, uncomfortable. There were rows of people arranged in front of us, and as she called each of them up she'd hand them a lit candle, symbolic, but I was looking at those candles and thinking of them as never enough to hold off the chill.

Back in the icy water, we've found the person we were looking for in a little area surrounded by bare trees. He's standing off to one side and watching an old woman perform some kind of ceremony, something like a funeral for the old ruler here - I have a vague impression of something strung up among the trees, either the last ruler's bones themselves or at least something representing them. She knows who we are. She tells me that just because I've killed the old ruler, that doesn't make this place mine. The territory is passed down through the blood, and there's still someone with the elf blood to inherit it - the man we've been tracking down. He's not related to the old ruler, and he's more human than anything else, as is she, but that doesn't matter; this territory will remain in the hands of his people, not mine.

The man in question objects to this - this is a situation being forced on him. He tells me he's sorry. The guy who'd tracked him down with me makes some sarcastic comment, telling him to quit the humble act; but I believe him, this isn't something he'd wanted. Nonetheless, the old woman's in the right; there's nothing I can do here, we've lost. I tell him it's all right. It's only when I speak and hear the tone in my voice that I (the dreamer side of me) realize he and I (the character side of me) had been sleeping together; we're most likely going to have to end that now.

The old woman resumes her ceremony, now involving him. It doesn't take long, just a few words. There's a wreath of pale yellow flowers which he accepts from her; as soon as the ceremony's done he drops it and it falls apart in the water. I'm thinking of the moment I first met him, when he'd been locked up in a cell.