non-lucid

Scotland sometime in the 1700s, I'm in the stables brushing a horse and speaking with a young man I've just been riding with. He's about to inherit some position from his father and he's extremely uncomfortable about it, particularly about how little education he's had - less for its own sake, and more to do with how others will see him. The conversation's wandered around a bit on the subject of education, and I've just mentioned Jim, a servant I grew up with in the American colonies who's devoted to learning, more so than anyone I ever knew. Brilliant man. The man I'm talking to asks how much schooling he'd had - none. I feel vaguely ashamed about that, for my home and for myself for not thinking about this when we were younger - Jim certainly would have wanted to go to school and it had never occurred to me to think about that. If he'd been white, he'd almost certainly have gone to a college.

Two dull scenes I'm noting for the character who appears in both - at the end of the previous scene I went to sleep and "dreamed" of a long-haired old man who was a teacher in a modern classroom, who said that the two times are only nine steps apart, so it's silly to make such a fuss. At this point I was fully aware the classroom scene was a dream and had modern memories, but didn't believe the Scotland scene was a dream - I considered the classroom dream a way of communicating with this man while I was in the past. Woke up (really), went back to sleep, and some scenes later I was forging a series of swords - masterpieces. The same old man appeared, this time as the master of the forge, and was so impressed that he insisted I destroy one of them by peeling back layers of metal so he could see the core, see what I'd done.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm reading a letter from an old friend. She's telling me she's spent the last six years in Vienna, and that she's devoting this lifetime (meaning however long this particular identity lasts her) to the study of music. She uses a word that specifically means playing instruments rather than singing, and she says she's giving her voice a break after "those swan songs" in Canada. She's studying the piano, which reminds her of me - she asks if I remember the old spinet I used to play for them.

Scene changes when I think about when and where that had been. There's an image of a little room, dark for just a second, then lit up with this golden light in shapes created by a lantern - this incredibly intricate fantasy scene, silhouettes of people and leaves, and an impression of bars, as if inside a birdcage.

Speaking with Jareth, I end a sentence with "god!" A general exclamation, but that's not how he takes it. He replies, entirely serious, "Don't call me that." I didn't, but good to know your arrogance has some limits.

I'm singing the title role of Don Giovanni, wearing a mask that covers my entire face, even my mouth. Reminds me of the McKittrick. While on stage, I switch places with someone else, identically dressed.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm swimming in a pool with a woman who's offered to grant me a wish. To do so, she tells me I must go to Thailand and walk into the jungle in a certain place until I reach an abandoned building. Here, I must draw one of two specific symbols in the dirt. It doesn't matter which one I choose, what matters is the reasoning behind my choice. Whichever I choose, she'll draw the other. She'll stand at my back, using those two symbols in some way, during which time I must not turn to look at her or communicate with her in any way. Success depends on her understanding why I made the choice I did.

A young man runs out of a house, pursued by several women wearing black and red. Shortly afterward, inside that building, I come across three young men, and I ask, "Which one of you sprinted out of here looking like Orpheus with the Bacchae on his heels?"

I'm looking over some photos of the new cast at the McKittrick. (Side note - last time I dreamed of Orpheus, he was in the McKittrick-as-underworld.) A new storyline has been added in. The photo I'm looking at now shows the woman at the center of that new storyline, sitting on a stool at a diner counter - sad expression, short wavy blonde wig, purple dress, purple purse on the counter. The character's female but always played by a male actor. In the background behind her, there's a man in a suit slouched in one of the booths, watching her. He's a sort of sycophant character, sleazy, untrustworthy, but entirely loyal to her in his own way.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Edwardian England, there's a heavyset, motherly woman gently pushing a sick young woman back down into her bed, over the young woman's protests - she's feeling much better but she's having a hard time thinking straight enough to make herself understood. At this point she's just saying, "No, no." The light from the window is hurting her head, it's much too bright. I'm sympathetic about that, but mostly I'm relieved to be able to see her like this at all, relieved that she's all right and that the connection that lets us see what the other's doing is now working. I haven't seen her in some time.

I see images representing all the other people I have those connections with, with an image representing this woman now added to the end of the line. There are maybe two dozen images here, older connections as I look back farther. The most recent image, aside from that Edwardian scene, represents someone I just saw recently in person, pleasant feelings. As I look farther back, there's one image that instantly brings up feelings of irritation - we don't keep in touch, we've never been able to understand each other, and just this brief visual reminder of her brings up that old frustration. There's a few places where an image should be there but isn't - the woman whose death I dreamed of recently, the roses that turned to ash. And at the other end of the line, the very first two: the first, a woman with a long red braid, a sword in her hand, standing in a snow-covered forest. The second, a more symbolic image - a variety of colorful butterflies hanging in the air against a dark background, two trees just barely visible in the darkness. And a little bit apart from the last of those images, a simple black image to represent me.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm lying on my back in a field hospital in 20th century China. There's a young woman treating me, wearing a uniform, with her hair tied up in two braids. I've been enjoying speaking with her. I haven't been enjoying whatever's in that IV. I'm thinking about the woman mentioned in that previous scene, with the roses turning to ash.

Still in China, I'm in a small boat that a middle-aged man is steering by pole. I've hired him to take me and an old woman back to her hometown, though it's been flooded and abandoned for a very long time. The old woman doesn't live in the present anymore. Her hometown is the place where I last saw that woman with the roses, though that was a long time ago and I don't know if I'll be able to find anything useful there. I haven't been back to this part of the world since before this area was flooded. I focus on the ruins of a building I recognize, as the boat passes underneath.

There's a man, some kind of ruler, lying in his sickbed, potentially his deathbed. He's speaking to two servants to either side of his bed. Circumstances are forcing him to return to a place he'd once tried to conquer many years ago, but had been forced to turn away from at the last minute. His servants think returning now will be a disaster, given his health. But he's inspired. He says that when he first marched on that place, he'd felt he was approaching the height of his power. As though if he'd reached that place, he also would have reached his dream of creating something that would change the world. I want to use the word 'technology' here, but that gives the impression of some new gadget - what the ruler is after is something as revolutionary as the invention of writing. His statement makes one of the servants focus on the symbol the ruler is wearing around his neck. It's a gold star with 14 rays, arranged much like a jack, the toy, or like a three-dimensional version of a compass rose. I, disembodied, think of alchemy.

There's a white horse and rider walking through a hall of the palace. An extremely agitated servant is trying to get them to leave, but the horse and rider brush him off. They walk through a pair of wooden double doors, into a room where the ruler who'd been in his sickbed is now up and in military uniform, going over maps. The setting looks significantly more modern than I'd thought in the previous scene, maybe as late as the 1800s.

The ruler reacts about as you'd expect when a stranger on a horse walks into your room. The rider asks, "Don't you recognize me?" And his face changes - now he's identical to the ruler. "Though when we last spoke, it was more..." And his face changes again, growing younger. Very little changes, really - skin's a bit tighter about the jawline, mostly. The rider reaches up to feel that jawline, and compliments the ruler on how well he's aged. Perhaps that's the result of easy living. This is sarcasm - an accusation. The rider says "we" expected greatness from the ruler - but what has he done with their gift in all this time?

The rider says, "We convene in the morning. I expect you there." And he leaves.

There's a woman being haunted by phantom images of a man who'd once hurt her in reality. (The dream reality, that is - no IRL-based characters here.) She's just started flailing around on her bed, surrounded by two or three images of him like white smoke, they merge and blend into each other. I rush in, expecting the phantom images to vanish when I touch them, but they don't. I hold her down to stop her from hurting herself, and I realize that since I'd been around when that man hurt her in reality and hadn't stopped him, of course she wouldn't see me as able to dispel his phantom now. But I persist, and gradually the phantoms disappear.

But she's still flailing around, thrashing her head from side to side. I realize it's my own presence she's reacting to now. Disturbed, I back off and call for one of the women in the house, and a woman in an apron immediately rushes in and holds her down. The moment I back away, those phantom images return. It doesn't seem to make much difference to the haunted woman either way.

A man's talking to a woman he's recently made immortal. She's very upset, talking about the moment when she'd thought she was about to die, and how she'd thought back on all these things in her life - her family, and the man she'd almost married. I see an image of that man lying in a pool of blood with her kneeling beside him - injured in the line of duty; he's a fed, she was a cop. He survived that. She's saying to the man who made her immortal that she doesn't expect him to be able to understand any of this - it's implied that she thinks of him as too inhuman. He's annoyed. He says to her, if she's so fixated on dying, go right ahead. If a year goes by and she's still feeling so "inconsistent," come tell him, and he'll kill her himself. He's entirely serious, but he believes that this won't be necessary - he believes that trying to make her focus on living will just drive her further into this self-destructive line of thought, but that if she spends time thoroughly thinking about death, she'll stop desiring it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

The soprano from the other night, looking a little younger here, is sitting in a room with another woman, both of them dressed all in white with long white gloves. There's a mirror on the wall behind them. This other woman is standing up and singing, holding sheet music in her left hand - it's light popular music; she sings prettily but not professionally. The door to the hall opens, and a third young woman says, complaining, "Cora, it's almost dawn."

I'm standing on an empty stage, going over some papers for the show currently in rehearsals. My soprano calls down to me from one of the boxes - she calls me Mr. Bevelle or Deville or something similar-sounding. She's got black hair done up like a Gibson girl, and an unusually high speaking voice, but in a way that I find pleasant. However, we're both aware her singing voice isn't going to last - she's only going to be able to perform in a few more shows. Because of that, she keeps coming to me like this with demands on how to run her last shows.

Scene changes to show her at rehearsal. I'm disembodied this time, without Deville's sense of background information, and I only catch three notes of her singing - lovely clear tones - but I recognize Lohengrin.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm disembodied and observing a setting based on China some centuries ago. Literally just observing the setting - I'm outside of the timeline. Nothing is moving, not even the waves, and the colors of everything are incredibly saturated. I'm on a path with the sea to my right after a long drop, a long single-story house directly in front of me on this path, and several two-story buildings off to my left, among green fields. Far off in the distance I can see the shine of a building decorated in gold. Following the path, it curves to the left of that long house, and off to my left there's a man and a woman standing in a field, embracing, yellow flower petals frozen in the air around them. I know of them, though I don't know them personally. There's something secret about their relationship.

I retrace my steps back to the entrance to that long house, where those two live. I look in briefly, noting the room where she stayed off to my right, with a window looking out to the sea. I leave the house again and circle around to the right, hovering over the sea, sticking closely to the side of the building. There's a door hidden here - she escaped through here, sometime after that embrace in the field among the flowers. It becomes difficult to cling to the side of the building. I float above the water, following the path she took, until I come to another building and look inside - there's a pallet on the floor where she stayed for a while. A doctor looked after her here.

I'm on a ship in a storm, approaching a whirlpool, almost certainly about to sink. None of this affects me, I'm only passing through, but I know one of the men on this ship. I talk to him, asking if he's familiar with a certain infamous pirate - I name a name. He doesn't recognize it. That's a pity - in actuality he's quite close with the woman I named, I was just trying to find out where I am in the timeline. If he doesn't recognize that name for her, that means we're so early in the timeline that she hasn't gone to sea yet. If this had just happened a little later, I could have brought her here to save him. But there's nothing I can do for him here and now. I step up onto the railing at the edge of the deck, looking for the portal in the storm.

As Rumpelstiltskin (in name and appearance at least - mentally, I'm still halfway the version of me from that storm scene), there's a small group of men who've retrieved the witch bottle in which I was trapped for a very long time. They've retrieved it from a point in the timeline when I was still inside it, so as I'm watching them from hiding, I catch sight of that past version of me inside the bottle. He looks so incredibly young to me, though I haven't physically aged since then. It's all the emotion on his face, the fear. I focus on the pebbled skin, new to him - I realize they've taken the bottle from almost immediately after I first lost human form.

When I realize that, I become agitated, anxious, a sort of coldness around my heart (such a strong emotion that it lasted a minute after I woke up - that hasn't happened in a while, I enjoyed that). The emotion is partially from forcibly remembering how it had felt when I'd been in that bottle myself, a sort of flashback feeling. There was something I'd been desperate to avert, but I'd been unable to do anything about it from inside that trap. But remembering isn't the only reason I'm so worked up - if I take that bottle now, there's a chance I could change how things unfold in his timeline, save his version of the person I'd wanted to save. Nothing that's happened since that time has mattered to me as much as this. But I hesitate to act - I'm terrified of how it could go wrong, of wasting this miraculous chance.

As I follow the men with the witch bottle - I'm walking on rooftops or listening from behind stone walls, out of sight - one of them is talking. He's not the leader of their little group, but he's the one who was able to retrieve the bottle from the past. They hadn't been aiming for the bottle specifically, they'd just been trying to capture me, and time can get a bit fuzzy when you're reaching between worlds. You have to be specific. He's saying, "It's the wrong time. He has little power now." It's the present me they wanted, or at least a version of me with a few more centuries behind him than that frightened thing in the bottle.

I'm flirting with this young woman. A while ago, me and Julia had this mission that required us to help her. I think of her as sort of coltish - she's got an unbelievable amount of power and no idea what to do with it, aside from awkwardly trying to help the people around her. Incredibly endearing to watch. Afterward we'd gone back to England, but now I'm back in America. Julia didn't come this time, and I said it's because she's busy with her music right now, which is true. But the main reason I'm here on my own is because our mission might require this girl's death. Julia doesn't know, and I don't want her to have to be involved - she likes this girl, we both do.

My driver's pulling the car over. He apologizes for this - stopping here instead of taking me home. It's on "her" request. (He didn't literally use the word "her," we're speaking Korean.) He'll of course be here to drive me home afterwards, if I don't decide to throw him out and drive myself (which has happened before.) He's bracing himself for a bad reaction - which he probably would have gotten, I'm pissed off and want him to explain himself, but then I'm distracted by the people outside the car. Among all the people on the sidewalk with black umbrellas, there's one umbrella in dull red. I know the woman carrying it. I get out of the car.

I recognize where we are now - there are stone steps set into the white stone wall that runs alongside the road, leading up to a cemetery at the top of the hill. Someone I knew was buried there not too long ago. There are several people here with the woman with the red umbrella - they're dressed trendily, and I think of them as very young though I'm only a few years older than them. They're acting like they're going to a celebration, loud and upbeat. The woman with the red umbrella hangs back and takes my arm, watching my reaction to them. They're a part of the life of the person who was buried in that cemetery, but it's a part of his life that's completely foreign to me, something I never saw when he was alive.

There's a monk who needs to buy a certain rare, extremely expensive book, and he intends to raise the money by selling off a different rare book. He can't do this himself, so he sends a fox demon to take care of it. She can't read the script it's written in, but she compares the characters he wrote down for her with the characters written on the covers of his books, and she eventually finds the right one and takes it to a fair that's going on. There are many specialists here who'd give her a good price for the book, but she goes to a bookseller she recognizes, a place she's been to many times. This man doesn't know the values of things, so he gives her very little for it - it's the equivalent of buying a book for a dollar when it should be worth millions.

The monk's disappointed - not in her, but because the book's gone and he'll have to start over in terms of raising the money. The fox demon gets annoyed at him for what she perceives as insulting the bookseller - she thinks the bookseller is a very good man, since he's sold her many novels for very little money. The monk is thinking about how much he looks forward to the end of his life, except that he's concerned about how she'll survive.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm speaking German with a man who'd promised to (acquire or translate or something similar) a certain book, but now he's fleeing and has to go back on his part of our deal. I don't really mind.

Two paired images of people on thrones. The first is a blonde woman dressed in gold robes, surrounded by abstract shapes woven out of gold wires, on a balcony overlooking beautiful green fields, rivers, wide blue sky. She's saying, amused, that although she was meant to be associated with style and worldliness, instead "I'm merely back in the desert, healing women at an oasis."

The second, a sad and tired-looking long-haired old man, first in a dark wooden room full of cabinets and herbs, then overlooking a mountain. A pair of ravens leave him and fly up the mountain over a trail, croaking - grey stone, grey skies.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Two fragments:

I'm trying to convince the radio to put out an important broadcast to keep people out of the (either Dallas or Houston) area, it's an emergency, but they refuse to disrupt the normal services.

A man saying to me, "You're afraid that this is the real world. It is. I trust you."

I'm walking in the garden, mentally composing a letter. When I'm ready to start putting it down, I go to where I've left my portable writing desk. There are a few bees hovering around it, interested in the vine I left it under. I'm thinking about moving it somewhere I won't disturb the bees, but then I see an envelope that's been left on top of it.

The letter inside is written in classical Chinese. I have no difficulty understanding it, but rather than actually reading the letter, I'm thinking about the woman who sent it - even without seeing her name, there's only one person who writes to me in this language. I'm seeing a mental image of the two of us walking through a rough stone tunnel next to water, with light reflecting off the water, rippling patterns reflected on our faces.

That was a memory, but the next image I see is the present, through her eyes, something that can sometimes happen when I'm thinking about her. She's looking at a painting of a woman I think of as a saint, with an image of a dragon behind her; then her vision moves up to the ceiling, as if she's falling back. I see an image of a pile of roses turning to ash, and my connection to her is gone - not just this vision, but the connection of our blood is gone. She's dead.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man who's been sent back in time, and now several other people who've gone back to rescue him. He'd been involved with the woman leading the rescue team. They've just met up now, and very nearly attacked each other - both of them sneaking around a fortress, trying to avoid being seen. Having sorted it out, it seems he's working together on a mission with a woman from this era, and fallen in love, and has no interest in going back to his original time period. He's just broken her out of a cell in this fortress. The woman who came back to rescue him is thinking it was foolish to chase his spirit into the past when she had his (something) in the present.

The scene transitions to a modern-day park; that man was brought back to the present against his wishes, but so was that woman from the past. They're spending time in the park with their infant son, distracted and unhappy.

My attention shifts to other people in the park, a group discussing magic, specifically one man mentioning a "listen and learn" spell with leaves, as a second step for those just starting to work with trees. He describes trees in general as "a bit froggy, though."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A private performance of a show based on Frankenstein. The 'bride' character speaks beautifully; the 'creation' character is silent, and his hands are bent backwards at the wrist as if they've been broken. When he'd been alive, he'd been the doctor's student or lover or something close.

A young woman's confronting this guy, a friend of hers, though she's annoyed at him at the moment. He's arranged things so as to create this sort of antichrist kid - it doesn't really have anything to do with her, but she's angry about it anyway, and is feeling tricked and betrayed by him in general. She asks him if he's Lucifer, expecting the answer to be yes.

"Nope. One of the major demons." He says it casually, he's smiling easily through this whole conversation. He's doing some kind of work in a manhole, and she's standing up on the surface with her arms crossed.

"What did you (word that means both infect and possess) my boyfriend with?"

"La'ulb. But it's clean, and I can take it off."


There's this young musician trying to get permission to leave a royal court - he wants to travel to a different country. He has to make a plea before the king, and he's deliberately trying to emulate the speech of an older man, a traveler passing through, who'd impressed him - as a disembodied observer, I'm amused, but I think it's a bad idea; it'll just make him sound artificial. He makes a comparison to a young bird having its wings clipped.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After a short scene in which I'm reminded that cheating on a god out of boredom is not the best of ideas, followed by a shapeshifting fox turning up at my IRL door, I've wound up in a bit of trouble.

I'm now heading for the rear exit of a theatre, trying to avoid being seen by the group of women - not humans - who are coming up behind me; but through the glass door, I can see a pair of fox demons approaching - a pair of women all in white, dripping in silver jewelry. After hesitating, I decide I'd rather take my chances with the fox demons. There's a crowd of people, mostly girls who work here, coming in through that door, but I don't feel very optimistic about my chances of getting lost in the crowd - until one of the girls quickly slips off the blue robe she'd been wearing over her clothes and wraps it around me, and someone else puts an arm around my shoulders, pushing my head down so my face can't be easily seen.

He pulls me over to a side hallway and gives instructions to one of the showgirls to fetch the change of clothing he'd arranged for with her earlier. I know him - he's vaguely sinister but not in a way that I consider a threat to me personally, and I generally admire his skill at getting things done. It's a bit like having Hannibal Lecter on your side.

Previous scene had been on the subject of breaking through layers - in a futuristic setting, there'd previously been a big struggle to break through (something, either the earth or a ship - either way, the important part is that it's the ground we stand on), and we'd thought that was the end of it; now we're discovering there's another layer to break through.

In that same setting, I'm part of a team of people in uniforms, rounding up some wild animals. But most of the scene is spent in disembodied 3rd person, following one of my partners. She's watching a boar - huge thing, at least twice my height - and a voice is saying to her through some communications device, "If (something), think how much could be got from a boar of that size under good conditions."

She asks, "Are these good conditions?" She's referring to the boar's behavior.

"Best I've ever seen," is the answer.

She's nervous, but she activates this sort of mechanical set of wings she's wearing; they glow green as they lift her into the air, and she starts rounding up the boar - chasing it down, frightening it, until finally a great green light bursts from inside the boar, creating this swirling transparent sphere around it, fragments rising and dispersing in the air. The light's invisible to the animal itself. She lands on it, clings to its side and uses a vial to collect that light. It's a kind of energy we use, given off by these creatures' heightened emotions - it's the same thing that's powering the weapons we're using to hunt them.

I've come to a group of buildings with many rooms, with people sleeping inside. I stick my head inside one, and the woman inside starts talking. I hear her voice distorted, like a phone call with a bad connection; her mouth isn't moving, she still looks asleep. I apologize for waking her up, I hadn't meant to, and when she stops talking I enter the room. I put my hand on her head, and I lose visuals and get an impression of many voices, very quiet. I'm aware this is an opportunity to listen in on her dream.

It seems to be morning now; for a moment I think I've just skipped over her dream entirely. I'm in her apartment, and her bed is empty; so's the bed where her roommate sleeps. I look out the window, and see her on her bike. She's late for class, and wondering why/how she slept so late. She sees me standing on the sidewalk, and tells me I better hurry too if I want to get to school on time. She thinks I'm one of her students.

I leave her and walk through a park near her school, watching a squirrel run along a branch. As I'm walking a woman sitting in one of the trees addresses me. She asks how to get close to a human. It's the usual, I tell her - you talk with them, you create shared experiences, you care about them.

I'm aware that woman's just altered this reality. I'm returning to a home where I live with various people, and that woman from the tree is there; she's a part of this 'family.' She's set things up so that everyone thinks she's this beautiful ideal; someone compares her to Quan Yin. The part of me that still recognizes that this is a scenario she created is amused. Setting yourself up as an ideal isn't a very realistic way to experience being part of a family, but whatever floats your boat. We eat a large dinner of various rare dishes, everyone contributing a different one, and I'm a little irritated because I know I'm not going to remember all these dishes when I wake up, there's too many of them to keep track of, and the dream goes through them too quickly. But when the meal's done, we're all sent out to hunt for some new rare dish to bring back to that woman from the tree. I and one of my 'sisters' wander through an arcade, looking for something rare.

As Rumpelstiltskin, I'm singing a verse of an old song from my son's childhood, quiet and bitter and angry. I'm in a room that looks like a private gym - not the sort with weight machines, a room for other kinds of training - and I've been talking with a woman about my son. After singing that one verse, I say that the only thing he'd ever wanted back then had been simple things we already had, things like the sound and feel of the wind through the trees.

The not-Rumpelstiltskin part of me wonders why I'm telling anything personal to this woman - as Rumpelstiltskin, I don't like her or trust her, though we're working together. But I'm so full of rage about my son and the people who've influenced him, and I can't take any sort of action about it right at this moment. I sing the next verse from that childhood song, and that woman puts her arms around my neck, leans her forehead against mine. I'm too focused on my rage and that song to pay much attention to what she does. I don't mind her getting that close to me, but I'm aware any expression of sympathy from her is just an act, not something she's really capable of, any more than I'm capable of feeling sympathy for her.