non-lucid

I'm walking in a garden with a young woman who's essentially an adopted daughter for legal purposes, but I think of her more as a student. I've just brought a woman into the household after finally convincing her to leave the increasingly dangerous situation in her own territory, and I'm explaining to my 'daughter' why this woman won't be staying in the women's quarters with her other two 'mothers' - two women who are legally my wives but who I've never had any kind of relationship with, sexual or otherwise; I just needed a legal way to allow them to stay in this household. She'll be relaying what I say to the other women, I'm aware.

I'm explaining that this third wife's faith compels her to spend her days in isolation until the (some word that means evening prayers - the point is that this story will explain why she's never seen in daylight). It's a custom that's not uncommon among her people, I claim. I'm thinking that the way religions dominate this place and time is as convenient as it is inconvenient.

The daughter finds this ridiculous, but she won't question that faith is the reason for it. She's not pleased with the situation in general though. I'm telling her that although this third wife won't be living in the women's quarters, nonetheless you must treat her as another mother - in other words, though she's new to the household she outranks the daughter. This is apparently the last straw for her - she says, "Oh, I am in the mountains of madness!"

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

As Rumpelstiltskin, I've been watching without saying anything while Belle had a sort of confrontation with a woman I'd been working with. I've got plans involving this woman, and Belle knows them, and she's just made it clear she won't be standing with me in this. She's leaving now, and as she turns away my perception changes - I see the three of us as we were in the other world. Seeing her like this, Belle's wearing this white hooded cloak lined in fur, a symbol of the Snow Queen. Several reactions to that - first, a sort of bitter sense of humor that of course the wife of the Dark One could only be the Snow Queen. But I also think of this as a reminder that she's not to be taken lightly.

However, the woman I'd been working with has just asked something to the effect of 'who are you,' and Belle's response is, "I'm the maid." This is, again, a way of stating that she's not my partner in this situation, she's not on my side; but it's also a rejection of the way I'm seeing her right now. By choosing to define herself as a maid rather than a queen, it should be as if she's giving up power, but instead I think of this as power that I admire - her ability to choose her own path and demand that others see her as she chooses.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's this massive tower of ice - a cylinder reaching up into the sky and down to the earth as far as I can see as I float in front of it, intensely detailed jagged edges much like a frozen waterfall. I/Rumpelstiltskin see an image of Belle standing with one arm raised as if she's holding something up, associated with this pillar, and I'm convinced the role of the queen is a burden she took on because of me - or if not because of me directly, it's a situation she wouldn't have been put in if it hadn't been for my involvement. I hate knowing that this will continue to affect her even in the other world.

I'm visiting someone, arriving in the yard behind her house, and I find two men doing yard work. I'm surprised, and when I talk to them, one of them complains about being summoned like this - straight out of bed, early on a Sunday morning. (Summoned in the magical sense of the word - he was asleep in bed, and then he was here being put to work.) I go into the house, calling out, "Babe?" There are a few other workers around, and they give me odd looks for the term babe. It occurs to me that the word may be outdated. Or it may be that the woman I'm meeting looks much older than me now, since her hair's white. You have to keep adjusting the way you address humans as they age - it's a headache to keep track of all this stuff.

I find her and ask her about all this work she's having done around the house, and when we step aside from the workers for a moment I point out to her that summoning people on a weekend is rude, and besides, we're supposed to be demonstrating that we're not cartoonish villains here. What does she think she's doing, summoning up people like this? We are supposed to be reformed, we don't get to keep minions anymore. She protests that her helpers aren't 'minions,' but they most certainly are.

I'm taking a little kid home to her family. Initially I'd tried to just send her home with the click-your-heels-three-times bit, but while we wound up somewhere familiar to her, it wasn't actually her family's house. So I'm flying her back the rest of the way - but the kid was so excited about flying, I gave in and kept flying around instead of just taking her straight home. It's a pleasant night flight - lasted a long time and there were so many beautiful views, I deliberately made an effort to remember all of what I was seeing so I wouldn't forget it when I woke up. But despite that, there's not much to describe - a lot of scenes of beautiful city lights seen from far above, and occasionally diving down low over traffic to amuse the kid. The lucid observer part of me wondered why the dream character part of me stuck to following the roads - I supposed it helped with navigation. At one point while we were diving low, we wound up passing underneath this large overhang at a trolley station, and I found it difficult to gain altitude again when shut in from above, so we landed in the trolley car.

A man who wore a heavy overcoat and hat to hide his appearance - though we eventually saw him out of it, and he's far from the strangest thing we've seen in this world - is currently talking to me about his trick with languages. He hears meanings, not words. And he's concerned because when we had been talking with those demons earlier, to his ears the demons were saying nothing at all. In other words, they were lying. I can't say I'm surprised.

Lestat and Claudia have been fighting on a ship - mostly verbally, but they're fairly serious. He'd gotten angry and taken her up into the air with him, and now she's broken away and run toward the prow of the ship. She turns and looks at me, and my image of her changes - I see a human girl, long brown hair under a white cap. She mouths, "Help me, Father."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A flashback to the 1930s or so. A movie's being rewritten to expand a starlet's part, and the leading man's being told this over the phone. He doesn't take it well. The movie's focus was on a struggle between two men, the romance subplot with the starlet's character had been relatively minor. He doesn't like people messing with the storyline just because they got a big name involved.

In the present - which is the 1950s or so - that former actor's talking with a man in an office, someone he thinks of as a servant in some sense. The actor's blackmailing him or something similar. A knock comes at the door, and that 'servant' hurriedly puts on a black suit coat and slouches. He looks greasy - part of the act. When the person who knocked comes in, the actor does all the talking but he treats that 'servant' as his boss, deferring to him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Two men and a woman are trying to figure out a plan to break someone out of a guarded cell. One of those men leaves and starts stirring up a great deal of trouble - getting on the loudspeaker, taunting the guards, bringing up the security camera image that shows a guard he'd killed earlier. Now that alarms are ringing, that woman who'd been planning with him earlier manages to get to him before security does. She asks, "What are you doing?!" He hadn't told them this earlier, but he's a known criminal - his face would have given them away on the way out. So he figured it's better if he puts that to use and acts as a distraction. She's incredibly exasperated with him.

I'm listening to a man die while I remain in hiding. I'm thinking that maybe I should have moved sooner and saved him, even though I'd have risked being seen - but I don't have any particular emotion about this, except maybe a little irritation at myself. I've been sent into this old stone ruin of a fortress, and I'd intended for only five particular men to be spared. Now I'm down to four. It's not ideal, but I'll have to live with it.

I couldn't hear her very clearly from my hiding place under their bed, but the woman who stabbed him said something to the effect that he should have recognized her. Some personal revenge thing - none of my business. Now I'm seeing the sort of smoke haze of colors passing before my eyes that I associate with life leaving a body. I watch it dissipate in the air, and I'm irritated at the waste. Waiting around is pointless now - and the woman should be directly above me. I stab up through the mattress.

When she dies, my perspective shifts. I'm floating in the void, with this massive black slab of a door in front of me, as wide as it is tall, some kind of geometric symbol across it. It's standing on this sort of grid far below, like a chess board where all the squares are black, with the door as a line across the center of the board. There's a few gravestones occupying some of the squares of the grid - that's new. I realize immediately they represent the previous targets the door sent me after - one of them must represent that woman whose death brought me back here. The door's saying something in my head about bringing it wisdom for the dead.

As FK's Nicholas, I saw an image of a vase of white roses, bleeding a few trails of red blood - I believed that this was a hallucination, thinking of it as "a bit of silliness" - and then I saw a mental image of Janette lying on a white couch, looking unwell, somehow connected with those roses. Now I'm sitting on that couch, and Janette's lying on her side with her head resting against my thigh, my hand in her hair. We're talking about a particular time in the past when things had been better between the three of us. As we talk, I'm thinking about how easily I revert to this version of myself when I'm around them - without thinking, my body language, my speech patterns change automatically. It's like taking off a mask.

POV shifts to show LaCroix. He's at some kind of charity event. At the moment he's talking to a man near a buffet table, a man he knows in some professional capacity, and a moment comes when he has to either eat or make some excuse. Without hesitating, he puts some item of food in his mouth. As a disembodied observer/Nicholas, I'm incredibly jealous of his ability to do that without flinching. It would make my life so much easier if I could pretend to eat - socialization revolves almost entirely around food and drink, so just imagine how much easier it would be to blend in. After a moment, LaCroix makes a displeased face, reaches for a napkin, and removes the thing in his mouth. He makes some comment about the poor quality of the food this year compared to previous years, and the man he's talking to agrees. LaCroix's posing as a gourmet, picky about what he eats - it's his usual trick, insulting the food wherever he goes. They make a joke about not being able to trust the food in a place that has such skinny staff, and then the man LaCroix's talking to complains that this event has gone downhill in general - disappointing for such a worthy charity. LaCroix makes a comment about the decline of morality as time goes by. He manages to say this with a straight face.

A woman who's been flirting with me - neither of us seriously - is taking my hand under the pretext of palm reading, turning it this way and that. She'd been joking around, but as she's 'reading' my palm, she notices the tiny raised circle on the tip of my thumb that holds a retracted needle and she stops smiling, though she doesn't understand what she's looking at.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've been sitting in a lounge room in the McKittrick. There's a host and a microphone, allowing the guests to listen in on his internal thoughts as we eat and drink. He's been sitting in the booth next to mine, having a conversation with a woman, another resident of the hotel. But when she leaves, he comes and sits across from me. He's bewildered as to why I've spent so much time here tonight. Of course the guests are all free to enjoy our stay at the hotel in any way we choose, there's no wrong way to go about it, and if I want to just sit here and watch his story unfold, that's fine - but my stay is half over already. Why don't I go out and see the show?

I'm thinking that I'll come back another time to enjoy the show - but nonetheless I leave the lounge and walk up to the next floor, which is in complete chaos thanks to the work of the three witches. Fragmentary memory here - I remember seeing the boy witch in passing and being annoyed with him, but no context beyond that. In a small room, I came across a woman who I realized has been/will be the next bald witch - right now she's another lost soul who came here on a mission but wound up getting drawn into Hecate's world. By the end of the night she has/will have shaved her head and altered her body language completely, transforming into one of the three witches for the next night.

The last of the three witches and the people under her sway are surrounded by sexual images. I only saw her briefly in passing as she led a young prince off down one of the halls. But instead I come across the naked prophetess who'll be taking this witch's role for the next night, currently in the process of transforming into that role. She puts her hands on my shoulders and pushes me to my knees in front of her, and I'm thinking that it's always a man she chooses for this part of the performance - the other guests in the room with me are all women, and they remain standing, pressing in close around us, watching her with a look of worship. She has a woman standing guard next to her during this dance, making sure none of the guests attempt to touch her without her permission. One of those women watching laughs off this restriction, and to show how ridiculous she thinks it is, she reaches out and puts her hand on the prophetess/witch's thigh with a familiar attitude. The performance comes to a complete stop. In the trouble that follows, I move away from the crowd and into the staff-only halls of the hotel.

There's a woman who's been unknowingly designated to play the role of Mary. (A reference to Mary Vetsera and/or Mary Kelly - the point is that she was remembered for her death, and that a certain amount of time has passed since, so it's time for events to repeat themselves.) She'd been running from a stranger with a knife, found a friend of hers to help her, and they've wound up barricading themselves inside a room. Due to a struggle at the door, the stranger's knife wound up on the floor inside the room with them. But the stranger wasn't the threat here - he was trying to help her. I'm in the POV of the thing possessing her friend, though possession in this case means only a certain amount of influence over his thoughts - he's the one fated to kill her.

There's a man, a servant, who I made immortal a long time ago. He came to resent me, so I sent him away to the household of a woman I'm close with. From her letters, I believe that's worked out well for them both. I'm staying with her at the moment, and he's showing me something I hadn't realized before - the wounds he had when I made him immortal never healed. The pain is very minor, but it never goes away.

There's a war going on between two factions working for two different higher powers - one called the Authority, the other called the Dark Ones. At the moment, I and two other people are untying a woman from a chair, she's been held captive. She's dressed like a candy striper. One of the people helping to untie her is a woman dressed in an old nurse's uniform; the other one is a man I've been working with. I'm explaining something that this man and I recently discovered - the Authority and the Dark Ones are the same entities. They're not divided at all, it's the exact same entities appearing to us under different names, playing us against each other. It's my intention to end the war by eliminating their influence over us.

The woman in the nurse's uniform has this look of hate as I'm talking about all this. In the end she says, "I hope you win," but it sounds like a curse. She runs out into the street and throws herself backward onto a spiked iron fence, impaling herself. The woman we'd been untying screams "Laura!", the nurse's name. People come rushing out of the building next door, calling emergency services.

Disembodied, I'm looking at a woman standing on a pier some two hundred or so years ago, facing away from me, looking out to sea. She makes a striking image, her black hair and her long dark skirt in stark contrast against the bright grey of the clouded-over sky and sea. There's music being played badly. The men she's been staying with or traveling with are having a going-away party for her, but she's stepped away from it for a moment.

The scene changes to the place she's headed - a man's riding a horse recklessly fast over hilly terrain, playing what he refers to as a game of tag with her.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After a few other dream scenes, I'm back to that woman on the pier. This time she's turned around, talking to one of the men from the party. He has a going-away present for her, two small dark objects that he presses into her hands, something that I think of as 'artifacts.'

I'm someone playing cards with three other guys, and one of them mentions the (some surname beginning with T) manuscript. It's this anonymous collection of old medical notes. A few copies have been made of it, but it was never published, so it's very rare. I tell them a bit about that manuscript - I love having the chance to do so, I enjoy sharing stories from the past a great deal.

During the war, it was an open secret that T. was seeing a certain woman. He always used a nickname when he mentioned her to others, but everyone knew. (As I'm saying this, I'm seeing an image of myself playing cards with T. in the past, much like the scene with these men now, both of us in uniform; and then an image of that woman walking down a street.) And she'd often go to his room to make use of his typewriter. (I'm seeing a typewriter that doesn't actually make sense for this time period.) For whatever reason, when he left to return to England those notes she'd been working on were mixed in with his typewriter and his other things. He didn't make it back to England of course, and when his things were eventually recovered, that anonymous manuscript was naturally associated with him. But the identity of the author of the T. manuscript is Florence Nightingale.

This doesn't get the reaction from the other card players that I'd been hoping for - I get some odd looks but mostly they just seem bored. They change the subject, talking about pharmaceuticals. I'm disappointed - I'm reasonably certain Florence is still a household name, recent enough and well-known enough that I'd thought they would find this interesting, even though they were all born well after her death. It's always an isolating feeling when this happens - no one much cares about old dramas. But at least they only see it as the eccentricity of a history buff, and I don't have to worry about them seeing me as a threat.

Three boys at a boarding school have smuggled in a canister containing what they think is going to be a harmless prank. They're wrong. They're in much more serious trouble than they expected, and one of the three boys immediately runs from the room, cluing the authorities in to their guilt. The other two try to explain that they're not at fault, they didn't mean to hurt anyone, it's the person who gave them the canister who caused this, and the third boy's gone off to fetch something that will prove it - but he'll be too late, that evidence will be gone.

Two guys have shown up at my IRL home with a dead girl in the backseat of their car. She won't stay in the ground. They're telling me she needs to be put to rest. I say yeah, she sure does - but not in my yard. Get her out of here. I go back to bed.

After going through a portal, I'm briefly disoriented, looking at this immense black hole in front of me - then I realize I'm still in the void, the portal I just went through only shifted my position within it. I'm floating before this vast swirling dark mass. It's something like a cloud if a cloud had long spines that curl and move, and something like a great tornado seen from above with a black eye at its center, and something like a nest framed with this curling mass of spines. It's unimaginably vast. The hole at the center is many, many times my height, and it's only like the pupil in a great eye; I can't begin to describe the size of the thing itself. I try to look to my left, to get my bearings in the void, but when I try to look away from the thing, static noise fills my head, getting worse the farther away I turn. I swim through the air to that black hole.

On the other side, I'm disoriented again - I'm underwater and I have a hard time figuring out which way is up, and there's too many colors after the void. I eventually work out I'm in the cabin of a sunken ship, tipped so the prow's pointing straight down - I quickly make my way out and shoot right up to the surface. I'm in a great cave filled with several such shipwrecks, with sun shining in through holes far above.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There are two women, lovers, relaxing in a small pool surrounded by Greek-looking ruins in a green field, with plants around the pool for privacy. This planet has been uninhabited for a long time, people only visit it now as a place to relax. An older, beautiful woman approaches the pool. The others dislike the interruption and the loss of their privacy, but it can't be helped; everyone's friendly and polite, and the women in the pool shift over to make room for her.

The scene changes: one of those two women is sobbing on the shoulder of a friend. Her lover's dead - that older woman killed her.

I got on an elevator expecting it to go up, this being the ground floor - there's only one floor above us, and only arrows instead of floor numbers. But it went down. I wonder how many basement levels there are. I reach to press the up arrow, saying something about my mistake to the woman still on the elevator with me. I'm new to this building. We talk about the company a bit as the elevator continues down, about finding your way around the various floors, and various luxuries that are provided for employees. I mention soul-selling and Satan, meaning it as a joke, but she talks about Satan fondly. We reach her floor, and she leaves.

My point of view switches to follow her - she walks down a hallway into a club. Her brother who goes by the name of Beelzebub - a fake name, it's really Samael - is lounging around with a cocktail glass in his hand, some glowing blue drink inside. He's a pretty man with long dreadlocks, wearing something black covered in stylized eyes in red. The woman's removed the pale coat she was wearing on the elevator, and the dress she's wearing underneath matches her brother, black and covered in stylized eyes in red. They consult about someone he describes as "a friend and a most simple prize."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's this swirling black mass of many colors, like an oil slick, lit up from within like lightning seen from above. I'm eager to dive in immediately - it's a portal - but I'm also thinking I should stop and go lucid first. As I'm torn between these two desires which are apparently conflicting, I wake up.

(Side note: that last was a reaction to trying reality checks. As a rule I'm not interested in them, but I have a lot of false awakenings that I tend to just spend dream journaling and I thought I could put reality checks to use there. So today I tried a reality check as I wrote that first dream up, and apparently this sort of thinking is the immediate result - associating lucidity with stopping what I'm doing to perform an action. Nuisance.)

A young woman stands downstage center, facing the audience; she never turns around. She's performing a simple, faltering version of the whirling, intricate dance going on behind her - contemporary ballet, the entire troupe on stage behind her. Everyone is in black and silver and painfully beautiful. This is her dream we're seeing play out behind her, her ideal. But the music is melancholy, nostalgic even - it's a waltz in a minor key, reminds me of Dvorak. Starts with just a music-box-like piano, but the music swells as the dancers behind her become the focus, all strings. I get swept up in the overwhelming sound of it and the movement of the dancers, until in the end it gradually fades away again to those music-box-like piano notes. A woman's voice from offstage calls to her to come to bed, the sun has risen. I focus on her profile as she turns to look offstage, towards that voice; when I look behind her again, the dancers have vanished. She leaves the stage.

I'm at a strategy meeting, impatient about it - I'm so tired of this cluster of timelines. Everyone here at this meeting is suspicious of each other, and convincing them to work together all over again every time I go through these events is getting really old. So I've stopped trying to juggle everyone's egos and am taking the lead here, and predictably, Astra winds up deciding to put me in my place. She mentally reaches into my head. I've been through so many timelines with her, though, I've learned to resist this, so I shove her right back out again. She's shocked. The rest of the room quietly clears out - no one wants to get involved in this. Everyone else has always been afraid of her. I hate that, the way they fear her. She puts up a pretense of being more mature than she really is, since she's possessed so many adults and seen so many of their memories, but she's still just a kid. I'm thinking, please let me find a way to keep her alive this time around.

This kid of no particular gender has just gotten a lift to a particular town, saying "Here's fine," to the person who gave them a ride. They walk into a diner. As they walk up to the counter I'm thinking how feminine they look, in contrast to some previous appearance. They know the waitress, and they greet her in a familiar way; the waitress looks them over but doesn't recognize them and asks if she should know them. They say no. They're happy that she didn't recognize them even after they sort of clued her in that she should.

As they leave the diner, they pass their father coming in. Their father doesn't recognize them either. He mistakes them for being part of some group of out-of-towners who are currently passing through, people he resents, and he complains about that to the waitress when he gets to the counter. The waitress asks if he knew that person leaving, he says no. The waitress says it looks like they knew him - they're still standing outside, looking through the window, staring at the back of his head right now.

Outside, the kid walks past a car. The two guys in the car say something to each other about how that person's too pretty for their own safety, and needs someone to ugly them up a bit - a threat.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man I'm meant to capture - I'm holding a small box which I'm meant to store him in. He's trying to convince me to turn against the people I'm working for, the Head Office. He mentions that they put him in a 7-color-prison - a shield of a particular 'color' prevents the power used by that 'color' from passing through; a 7-color-prison would normally be considered overkill. He mentions this as part of describing to me the cruel way he was treated by the Head Office, trying to convince me that they have to be stopped. But it has the opposite effect; I believe that if he was judged so dangerous as to require a 7-color-prison, I can't trust his words. I put him in the box. His sister was watching this whole thing, but although she's upset there's nothing she can do to stop me - she's an innocent, she's got no power of her own. I hand over the box to a guy from the Head Office who's waiting outside - he's new, young, and looks afraid of the box even as he takes it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've walked into a bath house. This place belongs to a group that I think of with a word that at the time I believed meant the young men of the city protected by Apollo (but the word I actually used was 'lemures,' the restless dead). It's empty and unused, and there are exposed pipes that are turning black. As I look around, I think that this explains the abandoned building next door.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's this kid, high school age, who set out to change himself, improve himself somehow, and I - as a disembodied voice - am asking him what his goal had been when he'd started. He'd wanted to be able to take care of his aging father. He's lost track of that along the way.

The scene changes from a hill outdoors to a classroom - he's popular, admired. This is a recent development, one of the things he's changed about himself. But he doesn't seem happy with the people around him - he seems arrogant, he looks down on them. And he forgets to spend time with his father. I see him with his father at a small table - they joke around with each other and talk the way people who are close sometimes do, with so many in-jokes and understood references to past events that it's effectively their own language. His father doesn't mind that he's so busy. But the kid recognizes that he's lost track of his original goal, and he has to correct his course. He goes to the house that he's been using to change himself, a place that grants wishes of a sort.

Inside the house, which is a Victorian, old and mostly empty except for portraits on the walls, he's greeted by three men. The one who talks to him is short, maybe 5 feet at the most, plain, and with curly red hair. The men ask him to stay and eat and drink himself into a coma with them again. He refuses. They say it's better than the alternative, but let him go on up the stairs. Every time he's come here to change himself, he's had to go a little deeper into this house. The first time, eating and drinking with them was enough.

Upstairs, a creature with a helmet that hides its face and with long metal hooks for hands emerges from the wall. The kid's met this creature before too, and knows how to deal with it. There's a sequence where I see various creatures and people emerge from the wall one by one, and it's implied that the kid deals with each of them in turn, but there's no need to actually watch the process play out since this has all happened before, and how to deal with each one of them is already known. The last one to emerge from the wall is a dashing man, blonde, cheerful, sort of an Errol Flynn-type character, as if he's just stepped out of a swashbuckling flick. They've met before, and they talk for a bit. This man will go up the next set of stairs on the kid's behalf, and arrange for him to get his wish. Other people have done this for the kid before, a different person every time he's visited this place.

My point of view switches to follow the Errol Flynn-type at this point while the kid stays downstairs. In the room at the top of the stairs is a portrait of a little girl - the kid's met her before. The two of them talk, and she emerges from the portrait. Long straight dark hair, a long white dress, and pink satin slippers with rosebuds. She quickly drops the personality that the kid would have been familiar with, and the Errol Flynn-type winds up on the floor in front of her, kissing her feet - fear, not devotion. She states that she collects "shades of the Ampha Berra family" - she opens a panel in her dress, displaying many different shades of bloodstains on the fabric underneath. The Errol Flynn-type won't survive, and she'll change the kid as he asked.