non-lucid

A woman and I have been tracking some thieves who stole the animals that her people raise - creatures like elephants but smaller, and with a sort of moss-like fur that grows on their backs and the top of their heads. Now the trail I've been leading her through ends at a beach. We're too late. Their ship is gone. But I'm able to pick up a mental impression of it and relay it to her - the tigers that they stole are in cages, but those other creatures have already been killed. The thieves only wanted their pelts. She sits down in the sand and starts to cry.

As we make our way back the way we came, over a mountain path, I'm attacked by some creature - it happens fairly often in this region and I take care of it easily, hitting it over the head with my staff and expecting it to run off again. She'd been hanging back before, but when she sees this she comes rushing over, though I don't think of that as necessary; she starts beating the creature, far beyond what's necessary. I stand back and watch.

I'm a demon - the long sharp teeth and writhing cloud of darkness make it hard to miss - but as we make our way down the other side of the mountain, I'm watching her and thinking that the people who tell stories about today will take one look at her and assume that two demons came down from this mountain.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm traveling through a dream with her, but at the moment we've come across an image of myself in the distant past, before I became a demon. I'd been speaking to a man dressed in armor standing in front of a sacred building, and that past version of me is saying something to the effect of, yes, I'd very much like to learn more about our people. It had been a rare opportunity - it was rare enough to meet another of my kind at all, but this was far beyond that, I'd jumped at the chance. I watch that past version of me follow the man in armor into the building.

This isn't what I brought her here to show her, it's just one of my memories intruding on the dream. I intend to continue down the road we're on, to take her to our actual goal here - but she wants to see more of this memory. So that's what we do. We follow that past version of me into the building.

Inside we're in a stone corridor; there's no sign of that past version of me or the man in armor. While the outside of the building had looked the way it had when it was new, the inside is a ruin from much later in my memories. But there's a few objects out of place, things that had been looted by the time it got to this point. I kneel down before one of them, a mirror made of bronze. I say to her, "It's a gate-"

As Constantine, I'm strapped to a chair again while a man in a suit - a different one from last time, older - is loading a film strip into a projector. When he turns it on, it shows an external shot of Ravenscar. I remember this moment in time, this guy with the projector - this is when I was sealed off from magic. It wound up only being temporary, but the observer side of me is terrified of getting caught in the start of that without being able to stick around long enough to come out the other side. I don't want those mental associations getting into my head. I bail out of Constantine's perspective.

I'm on a small boat, the size of a rowboat but moving under its own power, taking me and several others in their own boats across a lake. It's surrounded by walls, artificially made, rounded so that the lake as a whole is circular - I associate this with the moon. The walls are composed of several giant slabs of pale stone, many of them carved with some message in hieroglyphics. Once I notice this, I have the boat back up to the first stone with carvings on it. It starts with the name of the artist and a short line in praise of the king who commissioned this work. The next panel includes two jackals, along with a lot of hieroglyphics I can't read, and I wonder whether the jackals are Wepwawet or someone else - there's nothing that looks like a name or a title, even among the hieroglyphics I can't read. In fact, I'm not sure I should call them hieroglyphics at all - aside from that first panel with the artist's name, the rest of this represents concepts, not words. The symbols I can recognize on the third panel include two rattles and a woman kneeling. This represents music and dance. It becomes clear to me that this entire series of symbols is depicting a prayer ritual - not just depicting it; the walls themselves are a prayer given physical form.

There's a woman who's been running from a very powerful man, and I've agreed to bring her back to him. But the powerful man isn't the one I'm doing this for - the woman's uncle is the one who made a deal with me. For the sake of the rest of his family, he needs to stay in that powerful man's good graces. Now that woman's standing on some platform above me, I'm on the ladder below. She's pointing to two objects on that platform just out of my line of sight, saying, "This is that gun you've been waving around, and this-" But I don't stop to hear the second part - I reach up and knock that gun off the platform, out of both of our reach. She tries to stop me, holding a knife, but she reacts too slowly, the gun's already gone. She shouldn't have wasted time trying to talk with me. We struggle over the knife for a bit, and I manage to turn it so it winds up embedded in the wooden platform instead of in me, but she recovers from that and quickly escapes before I can climb up the ladder.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

My partner and I are breaking a group of men out of a jail or dungeon or something similar. The men insist on taking the time to steal water from this place before they leave - they don't believe me when I tell them the place we're going will have plenty of water. It's faster to let them do it than to try to convince them - but for crying out loud, could you at least stick to the relatively sanitary stuff? Finally we get them moving, and we head up a flight of stairs, my partner leading them, me hanging behind to make sure we're not followed. I wind up falling further behind than I intended; at the top of the flight of stairs, we cross a long hallway with paintings on the walls, and then head down another flight of stairs. By this point I've fallen so far behind that I've lost them.

At the bottom of the flight of stairs, I'm in a place that's something like an airport lounge for travel between worlds, a transportation hub. The people here are speaking French, and I talk to one of them to confirm that I've arrived in the location we'd intended. Through a floor-to-ceiling glass window, there's a great view of the ocean and several green islands. It also overlooks several other glass corridors running through this place, and I see my partner leading the men from the jailbreak through one of them. They look completely bewildered. One of them sees me and gestures, clearly wondering how I managed to get over there. I should join them, but honestly, no one's chasing us, my partner's got the babysitting side of things covered, and that ocean looks really inviting.

After flying over the ocean for a while enjoying the view, I come across an area where a few people are swimming. I drop down into the water and join them. The further I go, the more crowded it becomes - it's beginning to get irritating. I try to talk with someone who seems interesting, but there's a woman right next to us showing off some kind of athletic feat who's talking constantly and difficult to hear over. I comment, "She's very loud, isn't she?" She immediately gets louder, ridiculously loud, and I remember that narrative versus command thing I'd been thinking about yesterday. Whoops. "Be quiet, please," I tell her, and while that's a command, she immediately goes back to a normal volume. Deciding to use the narrative to clear a little more space, I close my eyes, lose visuals, and describe the space clearing out - but while it does feel like I've got a little more space to move, when I open my eyes again, I find I'm opening my real ones.

Circumstances have caused a woman to temporarily move in with me; we're not romantically entangled in any way. At the moment I'm cooking breakfast and she's sitting at the table - she's asked for eggs benedict. I'm mentioning some gadget that was around in the 50s for cooking breakfast that I'd liked, I don't know why they don't make that one anymore.

As we're talking, at some point I make a reference to something else that had happened in the 50s, and she gets the reference and responds as if she was also there. The character side of me doesn't take notice of this, but the dreamer side of me finds it odd that she got that reference - I take this as an indication that she's also, if not immortal, at least significantly older than her appearance. It's also clear that she knows I'm not human, though the character side of me doesn't know she knows.

When I bring the food to the table, I say something to her and she responds with yes, father, and then immediately looks embarrassed. The character side of me takes it as a joke in response to what I'd just said to her - but the dreamer side of me is thinking, that explains it.

I'm dancing with a different woman in my apartment. She's got short black hair in this 20s finger wave look, deliberately trying to recreate that look from the past, but this is the 1990s, and she's mortal. The dreamer side of me thinks of the song we're listening to as 'bland, inoffensive 90s romance music.' She's describing some kind of dull pain that lasts for weeks on end, and asks if I can imagine living like that, expecting the answer to be no. I have, actually. I try to describe the actual sensation without being specific about the setting, but she figures it out immediately and gets excited: "The Inquisition? You were there?" She always gets excited about these big name historical events she's read about, and they're never the parts worth remembering.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Someone of no immediately identifiable gender, who has been on the road for a very long time, parks their truck outside my IRL home and starts to eat lunch, clearly believing that no one is around here during the daytime. When they see me watching them from the window they start to leave, but I stop them, telling them I don't mind them stopping here.

Unfortunately, the dream apparently took that as an open invitation. While I'm outside talking to them, a great deal of people walk into the house - a married couple under the misimpression that it's theirs now and all their relatives. When I confront them they quickly accept that an error has been made, but they still keep standing around in the house. Telling them to get out does nothing.

So I rephrase, framing it as a narrative instead of a command. "And the people walked out of the house."

And giving no indication that they've heard me, as if it's their own idea, they all turn and start making their way out of the house. I'm pleased by how easy and effective that was compared to trying to control through commands - admittedly I hadn't put any mental force behind the command here, but there wasn't any mental effort involved in the narrative approach either. They're moving more slowly than I'd like, so I continue narrating. "It's a beautiful day, so they all decided to go outside." I'm curious whether the weather will respond to that - it doesn't seem to, but then it was decent weather to begin with. They're all outside now, but they're milling around outside the door. "They all decided to go to the park to catch up with their relatives." They start moving toward the road, and the women closest to me have started discussing some cousin they haven't seen in a while. This is really wonderfully effective, I'll have to remember that in the future.

Somewhere in South Asia some centuries ago where I'm visibly a foreigner, I'm leaving the docks after making some arrangements for my departure. Thinking about how to dispose of the belongings that I don't want to bring with me, I've just offered to give some rare type of food to the man who's walking with me, a human who works for me. He's shocked - he completely refuses. It's important that he and I don't share meals, and apparently this is close enough to count. I apologize, but point out to him that we've shared more than that. He asks me not to talk about this in public.

Talking about differing customs as we walk, we get onto the subject of my own homeland. I describe it as very far to the north, very isolated from the rest of the world, not a place he's likely to have heard of. I'm being deliberately evasive, obscuring how long ago it was that I left, among other things. I have a mental image of a place that's always covered in snow, and a need to retreat.

Thinking of my people causes me to mentally tune in to two of them who are relatively nearby, a man and a woman who I think of as something like a brother and sister to me. Her, I keep in close contact with through letters on a regular basis. Mentally brushing against her now feels sort of like a friendly wave from a distance. Him, on the other hand - last I heard from him, he'd been doing his best to ignore my existence entirely. By accidentally tuning in to him now, I'm surprised to find he was already aware of my presence in this region and has secretly been keeping tabs on me. I'm amused, particularly since he's now pretending not to notice this mental contact.

I get lost in thought for a bit about connections and different eras, and the scene changes. I'm in Europe, speaking Spanish with a woman in the 1700s or so - I think of her as being in a sort of religious seclusion, though my speaking with her now isn't a problem. She's telling me how much she enjoyed the piece Dieter published recently about winemaking techniques, and I tell her I'll pass that along. The observer side of me considers whether or not this short scene is something to bother recording for when I wake up.

In my IRL home, a demon's joined me in the shower. She's in the form of a beautiful naked woman and she's talking to me like we're old friends, but the scene has the feel of a nightmare. She's talking about working together in a way that I'd probably be interested in discussing under other circumstances. But with that nightmare feel, I'm only thinking about avoiding being controlled by others.

I give her the fuck-off-out-of-my-dream variety of exorcism. This doesn't work; if anything, the feel of a nightmare intensifies with the sense of a contest of wills. She's still trying to convince me to come work with her.

Second try: I take a look at the demon's name. It begins and ends with A, so I cover up the middle portion, rewrite it as Athena, and chant an invocation, intending to remove the nightmare by transforming the demon into a goddess. Her features shift, but then shift back. We go back and forth a little bit, but eventually I give up on this method too. She's stopped trying to convince me to come work with her and is now just enjoying this contest for its own sake.

Being as we're in the shower, I take a look at the soap and think of cleansing/purification methods of exorcism. Worth a shot. I start washing her, starting at the top and working my way down. She's intrigued - she clearly doesn't consider this a threat, and the contact is pleasant and similar enough to sexual that she considers this a form of me giving in to her. I'm curious myself whether this scene will end up following her sexual expectations or my cleansing intention. When I kneel down before her, I kiss her just below her navel, and she makes it clear how she expects this to play out from there; but I just move on to washing her legs. When I've finished her second foot, kissing the top of it before putting it down, the sense of nightmare is completely gone. I'm able to cause the scene to transition, continuing with a series of IRL-based scenes.

FMA. I/Mustang left the military a while ago; right now I'm looking out a door at the rain. I see a memory of similarly looking out another doorway at the rain, standing at the door to a balcony on a tall tower, and then retreating back inside to adjust my plans. In the present, I put on a hat with a wide, floppy brim and head out into the rain.

As I'm walking up a mountain road in that rain, I pass an old man driving his truck down the road. We wave to each other like we do every day. I'm thinking, as a soldier who was for all intents and purposes an embodiment of fire, I was useless in the rain, so it held a different significance. But as a person - I'm thinking of both me and the old man in the truck - you just put on a hat and go to work, rain or not.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm in the same mountain range from yesterday, traveling alone at the moment, standing just inside the entrance to a cave. I've come to a very old friend to ask him for his help. He's not happy to see me. He's sitting in a sort of stone throne and saying slowly, emphasizing every word, "I am not well."

I can see that. He wears this silver circlet that sort of glows, a contrast to his dark hair and coat; looking at how faint that glow is, I'm thinking that there's barely anything left of him. Nonetheless, there's enough of him left to do what I need done.

I'm traveling with a woman who most recently has been climbing these giant stairs cut into the mountains, leading a very large group of people, guided by her visions and signs. Now she's reached an old shrine that's of great personal importance to her. But that's not what she was looking for - she thought her visions were guiding her to a place where all these people could be safe. Now it seems it was just something personal. She believes she's led them all this way for nothing.

I'm extremely frustrated by all this, because the place I've been trying to guide her to with those visions I've sent her is still further on - I wanted her to see this shrine first for personal reasons, because I like her and I thought she deserved to know this part of her past, but it's not our final destination. Unfortunately, the stairs end here; there's no easy path after this point. How am I going to convince her to keep going now that she's doubting the visions? I'm almost tempted to just suggest scouting ahead myself and then conveniently 'finding' the place - but I need her to be the one to discover it, not me. I'll think of something, but I need to talk to her privately, and there haven't been many opportunities for that on this pilgrimage.

Right now she's busy talking with a priest I dislike - I'm not fond of priests on general principle, but this one in particular irritates me. She's apologizing. She's saying she shouldn't have rejected the idea of divine guidance - maybe if she'd believed, she wouldn't have gotten them lost like this. The priest reassures her, saying, "You delivered what would not be prayerful."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Still in that same mountain range, but this time I'm working separately from the main group, it's just me and a couple of her soldiers. I'm talking with a slave trader - he's got a group of people I've been looking for and I need him to release them. He says he can't possibly do that, they're an extremely sought-after species. He shows me a cage with a human man and woman instead, and a falcon that comes with the woman, and says that he'll give me one of them as a sign of good faith - he'll even trade me all three, the two humans and the falcon, if I'd be willing to give him one of my soldiers. He has a buyer who likes that specific shade of skin. Incredulous, I tell him this isn't a negotiation. He's going to release the people I came for, I'm not going to give him anything, and I don't care about his humans or whatever else he's selling.

But then he takes the hood off the human woman - white hair and a young face. I know her. I'm shocked, and she looks just as shocked to see me - I'd thought she was dead. Last time I saw her, she'd sacrificed me to her people's gods. It didn't work obviously, I can't die that way, but there was no way she could have known that. When my 'death' didn't stick, her people reacted very badly. I'd seen them holding a funeral for her later, but I'd been watching from a distance - they must have held the ceremony without a body. I'd just assumed they'd killed her. I'd liked her a great deal, sacrifice aside.

I'd been accused of a crime I didn't commit. The charges have been dropped now, but people have formed their own opinions about my guilt or innocence. On the sidewalk I'm confronted by a group of men in dress uniform, most of them middle-aged. They call me monster, and disgusting, and one of them says, "He saw what you did," indicating a younger member of their group.

A liar, that's interesting. I wonder at first whether this is the actual criminal and if he'd been trying to frame me, or whether he's just someone who heard about the case and was trying to get in on the limelight. But he looks genuinely afraid of me, to such a degree that I realize what must have happened - he must have seen me eating. But in this era, accusing me of being a vampire would be too ridiculous, he wouldn't be taken seriously. So he came up with something more believable to accuse me of, to get me locked up. It wasn't a bad idea, I've been considering burning this identity since this mess started.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm running along a mountain path, mentally shouting Nadja's name. She came to us under a false identity, and then she disappeared in order to avoid being found out. But there was no need for her to disappear like that. I've tracked her to these mountains based on rumors of "the witch of the crags," and once I sensed traces of her, I started calling first the assumed name we knew her by, then her real one, Nadja. Following her mental trail, I reach a cliff. Without hesitating, I jump over the edge.

Snow-covered mountain peaks far below me, as far as the eye can see. I pause to check if I'm still asleep enough to take control of the flight for a while - yes, I am. Forgetting about Nadja, I turn upward, enjoying the view for as long as it lasts.

I'm looking over the meat at a butcher's stall in an outdoor market, examining it very closely. The butcher's explaining something to me, but I'm not really listening - I've come to the conclusion that this isn't what I'm looking for. I duck underneath where some of his larger cuts are hanging and into the alley on the other side. I can hear him shouting at me, and Dieter saying something to him, but I'm not paying attention. The trail of what I'm looking for is much clearer now.

I walk into a house. On the floor beside the bed there's the dead body of a very large man, with rats swarming over him. The rats' behavior is unusual but familiar to me. They scatter when I come closer. Behind me Dieter asks, "Is it plague?" Plague wouldn't affect either of us directly, but it's still something to be concerned about. He came in too late to see the unusual way the rats were swarming. I don't answer him - I'm focused on something I can feel hidden in this room, somewhere in the chest of drawers. I make some comment about how the dead man had had a family, and "Three charms. One for each."

There's a teenage girl who's come to me to learn her futures. I've spread them out like cards on the table, and as I hold my hand over one depicting a man she could be married to, she says she wouldn't mind that one so much, that wouldn't be so bad. I have the impression that she doesn't feel she has a choice in any of this - she might want to know what the options are, and she might have her own preferences, but someone else will be making the decision, not her.

With that in mind, I move to one of the futures on the outside edge, the more unlikely options. It's labeled Dreamer. I see her lying on a couch with an arm thrown over her head, looking at the ceiling, wasting away. Her clothes are glowing green like an absinthe advertisement. Since I think of her as wasting away here, I conclude that this is a future she wouldn't want and start to move my hand away, but that vision version of her stops me. She sings, "I listened to my dreams." This is important to her. It's not something she regrets. "They taught me how to feel." Behind her there's a glass window opening onto a balcony, from which I can see a river and the stars. There's a whale swimming through the clouds, adding to the fantastical nature of her possible future.

A human wandered into our territory and due to an accident, got stuck here. He's spent the past few days trying to figure out a way out of this, but right now he's relaxing with us. He's taken some of the things out of his luggage and has been showing us how they work, and now he's putting on a demonstration. He's a performer, a dancer, and he's showing us what he'd been working on before the accident got him stuck here. A woman's joining him, he gave her a costume to wear, a white dress. The man directly to my left is in charge of starting the music at his signal; he's been spending more time with this guy than any of the rest of us except the woman he's dancing with, so he's learned how to make records work. The rest of us are sitting around on the rocks in a circle, watching.

In the center of the clearing below us, he and the woman take each other's hands as if starting a formal dance. He repositions her closer to him, and she 'laughs' and 'says' that they're going to be dancing right on top of each other this way - in quotes because we don't use sound to 'talk,' though the laughing expression/gesture is the same.

He starts to lead her through the dance. The dreamer side of me recognizes this as a sort of mix of an old court dance with modern sensibilities; the same could be said for the dress he gave her to wear, a sort of fantasy version of medieval clothes, very much a costume. From this perspective, it's clear that this was a dance designed for a specific performance, but the dream character side of me is under the vague misimpression that this is just how his people dance to celebrate things. Either way, I'm enjoying watching.

His actions are oddly tentative, uncertain, more so than hers though he's the one teaching. I find that hesitation fun to watch, too. I'm also aware that this is the moment when he started to doubt whether he wanted to leave at all - so of course his immediate reaction was to become even more determined to get out as soon as possible.

(The next two dreams after waking up and going back to sleep were also on the subject of dances and concerts.)

I'm at a formal party midway through the 20th century, and everyone's talking about the mysterious disappearance of the leading lady during intermission tonight. I'm as baffled as anyone, though in a slightly different way - I killed her, but I left the body in her dressing room. Someone else removed the body, and I need to find out who and why.

We pair off and start to dance, and I focus on a man who's not dancing, just watching the rest of us - he's in some position of authority in the theatre. I switch to third person, and now I see the scene as he does - he 'saw' that leading lady emerge from between two of the dancing couples, a pale woman dressed in red, black hair pulled back tight to her head, with a haughty and sort of mocking look on her face. That attitude doesn't square with the way I remember her at all; it's clear to me that the version of her he's seeing is his own hallucination, not an actual visit from her spirit.

She puts a hand on his shoulder and begins to dance along to the song with the rest of us, though he's not moving with her. She circles around him, saying that she knew from the start that this wouldn't work. She sings along to the music: "-won't let me leave you, but amore, that's to blame."

A man came across a woman seemingly sleeping in the forest, but when he approached her she spoke quietly, asking him to kill her quickly and to leave her mother alive, so that her mother could continue to feed the others. He's shocked by this, but that's because he's under the impression she's human. She's a wolf, she only looks human. She knows he came there to hunt them.

She's speaking to her mother, also human-appearing, and says she wants her next lesson to be that lesson - the implication is she's decided to marry that hunter.

The hunter speaking with two other men, also hunters, one of them saying, "You can't stay married to that madwoman."

The hunter sitting in the forest, chanting a prayer or a spell that talks about the eyes of the wolves. Although the rest of the dream had been in English, he's speaking Spanish here. As he chants, the forest around him seems to change - the shadows become darker, the moonlight becomes brighter, patches of glowing fungi appear around him. He's amazed and enchanted by all of this. He's not aware of this, but from my disembodied perspective, he himself also looks different - his eyes are faintly glowing gold, and there's a sort of shadow over him, as if looking at a photograph of him overlaid with a photo of something else. Behind him, a pile of vines and undergrowth heaves upward into the form of some great beast - he's delighted by everything now but I'm sure he'll be afraid when he sees this.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm talking with a wizard from another world over tea. He's brought some of his people here as a sort of emergency hideout, and he's concerned about them picking up bad habits while they're here, to the extent that he's got them camped out at the bottom of the hill instead of in the house with me. He describes my form of magic as 'lax' and not something he wants spread to his people, which I find ridiculous for all sorts of reasons - for starters, when we'd first met he'd been seeking my help with some murderous wannabe dark lord type. I'd put a compulsion on the man to prevent him from taking human lives, which seemed such an obvious solution, I can't believe he couldn't manage it on his own. And really, as far as I can tell his world's form of magic just requires you to say the right nonsense words in the right order to express what you want, so if you're going to talk about laxness and discipline, that seems lax as hell to me.

But in any case, while we're talking about the arrangements for his people, two guys from my world come into the room. They're trying to avoid getting into trouble with their boss - they'd claimed to be unable to carry out some duty on account of being busy elsewhere, which was a lie. Now their boss is on his way to the house and will certainly sense their presence, and since I've already got a portal open, I wouldn't mind if they ducked through until the coast is clear again, would I? Fine, fine, I wave them through. That wizard objects strongly, but for crying out loud, those two aren't going to corrupt your world's magic system in a few hours, it'll be fine.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

In the American western desert, me and an older man are standing next to a car, watching a group of police vehicles pull up. We're going over a few last details before we talk to them. At the moment I'm telling him about a body I'd left floating in a pool of a private home. I see a mental image of it as I describe it, struck by the way his legs had stayed bent underneath him even as he started to float in the water. That older man says he already knew about that one. That's everything then.

He says there's a saying, "The liar does two steps worse." Do I know why that is?

I say I don't know, but then I look where he's looking. His family's just gotten out of one of those police cars - his wife, his daughter, and the daughter's boyfriend. They're looking around, haven't seen us yet with all the confusion around the scene downhill. It's clear to me they're the meaning of that saying. Lie to the people you care about and you lose them even if you're still physically present - you've separated part of yourself from them.

A woman is standing in my home - I'm not physically present at the moment - and looking into a mirror that's showing her various visions. Currently it's showing her the man she loves with a very beautiful young servant standing underneath a tree, carrying out an affair. This isn't a surprise - she was already aware of it.

The scene in the mirror changes, showing her an image of herself in a shop. There's no sound but the shop owner seems to be repeatedly asking her something that she refuses to respond to. When he approaches her, she throws out a hand to tell him to back off, but her nails brush his throat and cut it open, covering her with his blood. She looks shocked, but quickly recovers and hurries out of the shop.

This second vision reminds her of my instructions to her. She has to eat a human heart tonight if that young and beautiful body I gave her is going to become hers permanently. And regularly after that, but that's not important, that's just basic dietary needs - the important part is this first time, making a deliberate decision.

She steps through a portal back into her world, the courtyard of her own home. But as she looks around things look strange to her - most notably, the sky is covered with grey clouds that seem unnatural to her. It's as if she's seeing both her world and mine at the same time, and she wonders if this is how I see her world all the time. I'm thinking, you're getting a bit mixed up about which world is yours now.

I'm giving a woman a ride somewhere in a carriage, and when she's gotten settled I knock on the wall twice and we start moving. I go to lower the curtains on the windows, and as I do I catch sight of her fiance out on the street, obviously looking for her. She's already made it clear she doesn't want to be found at this moment. As I'm looking at him I'm struck again by how incredibly dull he seems. I say to her, "On God's green earth, what do you see in him?" I gave up my chance with her so I have no right to judge the man she chose, but still - him?

She says, "On God's green earth, I won't let you steal my plan. I can't." Either she has drastically changed the subject or else I've drastically misunderstood their relationship - either way, I have no idea what she's talking about.

Just then, her fiance spots us - I should have lowered that curtain - and he shouts her name, Ephigenia. He is being ridiculously overdramatic, people will think I'm kidnapping her.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Disembodied, I'm watching my son be interrogated by a pair of policemen. We don't have any legal ties under my present identity, at his insistence - he's old enough now that we look the same age, so adopting him again wouldn't have been practical, but I'd wanted to arrange something, and he'd refused. I'm particularly annoyed about that now, when a legal connection would come in handy.

They've accused him and his sister - his biological sister, I didn't raise her, hadn't known she was alive until just now - of murder, and he's been repeatedly telling them he's innocent, but they've just produced an audio recording of what is clearly his voice stating that "we" - he and his sister - have been waiting for this since he was nine years old. As I hear the recording, I see a mental image of him at the moment he spoke those words, with a man tied up in front of them. Up until this moment I'd believed he was innocent. Back in the interrogation room, he's insisting that the voice on the recorder isn't his, but he's clearly fooling no one. They've been letting him tell his story, knowing he was lying the entire time.

I've heard enough. I remove my awareness from the interrogation room. Back in my body, I'm standing in my son's apartment - a tiny studio with a mattress on the floor, cluttered with random piles of clothes and other things. He wasn't doing well. I'm extremely annoyed about this situation - he'd betrayed me, he'd made it clear he was going to cause trouble for me, but for him to simply be removed from the situation like this by unrelated people, that doesn't sit right with me.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm running - as fast as I can manage, which isn't very - along a snow-covered mountain path, trying to hold my throat closed as much as possible. I'm wearing black leather gloves, the blood blends in very well. This isn't the first time I've had my throat slit, so at least this time I know my voice will come back eventually - just the memory of how frightening it had been the first time I had my throat slit still makes me uncomfortable. It's still incredibly inconvenient until it heals. One of my least favorite ways to 'die.' I'm thinking about the man who 'killed' me - a soldier on the same side I am. I don't know why he did this - he enjoys violence in general, so I'm hoping it was just something personal and not something larger I'd have to worry about.

Thinking about that man's possible motivations prompts a scene change. I'm peeling an orange as a visitor goes upstairs to meet with that man who'll slit my throat. I can hear the sound of an opera recording on the phonograph, and I warned the visitor that it's best not to interrupt while he's listening to his music - I didn't say this, but I'm pretty sure opera is the only thing that man loves aside from violence - but the visitor ignored me. Shortly later I hear the visitor scream.

I'm looking at a painting with the artist beside me. St. George and the dragon - I recognize that the dragon is meant to be myself. After noticing that, I recognize who St. George is meant to represent too. I say to her, very slowly and deliberately, "George can't save you." Whether I can do anything for her either isn't certain, but "George" definitely can't, despite what he believes.

A production of Faust, I'm going over a written list of the scenery needed for each scene. One scene is described as the Altar of Hell, and I have a mental image of Faust being pinned to a circular stone by two demons; that's the contract signing scene. The next scene is set in a field surrounded by trees, and my perspective changes so I see this as the audience would.

Curtain rises on Marguerite and women of the chorus in the field; shortly afterward Faust enters from the right. In response to what the women had been singing, he sings something satirical about the dangers of love and the unfortunate fools who are caught up in it. This annoys Marguerite, and she turns away and pointedly ignores him. The women of the chorus exit, and Faust realizes how angry Marguerite is, so he jokes around in the hopes of getting back in her good graces, teasing her by singing a humorous song that starts with a verse about roosters and hens. She forgives him easily, and by the time he gets to the chorus she's joined in the song, flirting right back at him. The second verse is about deer and hunters, and she playfully leads him on a chase around the stage. As they exit, laughing, Mephistopheles strolls by in the background, keeping an eye on how things are playing out.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There are four men, or people who were once men and are now weapons, kept chained up in their sleep. Two 'chains,' really - the collars around their throats, but also something much deeper that's never meant to be removed. I'm removing that second 'chain' from each of them. They wake up as I do so, and their first reaction is to moan about the pain, but gradually they regain a sort of awareness. It's interesting to watch - they're becoming aware of how much of their personality has been stripped away from them, but without actually regaining that personality they lost. Their master arrives then, and I expect them to attack him in revenge - that's the whole reason I freed them - but instead they cower in the corner, just looking at the pair of us.

Memory gap. Next thing I remember, I've gone semi-lucid in order to pursue that master of theirs. He's closed himself off inside a tower where I shouldn't be able to follow, with an irritatingly arrogant attitude about it - he's essentially the god of this place, it won't allow me entrance if it goes against his will. Or at least it's not supposed to. The tower's a sort of futuristic art deco confection, lots of spheres and glowing purple lights, and I'm flying around it, demanding that it create an opening. With my next pass around the tower, I find an entrance has been created, opening onto a single room containing an elevator. It signifies that this place is as willing to depose its 'god' as I am. I take the elevator up to that man's private sanctuary - the elevator doors open to show me a vast pool lined with twisted white trees without leaves, and quite a lot of statues, including some of himself. This guy is unbelievable. There's a mansion at the far end of the pool, and I expect his mental trail to lead me there, but instead it leads me off to the right, to another body of water, and I focus on a light at the end of a pier.