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There are two ill siblings, they seem to be recovering but then the girl relapses and starts fading away.

The younger boy is left and is depressed. I find him in a room looking for a book on knives. I go through the cooking books on the shelf and find the only one, but it’s a technical one and I keep stumbling over my words. The boy is unhappy and leaves.

Everything else is too foggy to remember, except this part where I went to the bathroom at my grandma’s house and saw myself in the mirror on the back of a door. I tried to remember if that’s where it was supposed to be. A tiger was peering at me from under the door…

Inspiration: Reading the Tower of God webtoon with Baam and Rachel, her disappearing on him. Mirror from me thinking about the TotM and what mirrors were around places I go. Tiger comes from a cat toy Jazzy has, I sometimes hang it from the window so she can play with it.

1. Something disturbs me, and I get up and go look out my bedroom door just as someone comes in and passes me by. I see nothing out in the hall and turn back to look at the person – but there’s no one there.

Then I realized that I was awake. I don’t know if the whole thing was sleepwalking or if some part of it was a dream.

Inspiration: Probably from my door creaking because of the wind and me being paranoid.

2. Editing Kyou Kara Maou! on Goodreads.

Inspiration: Was thinking about how the KKM! light novels weren’t in the MyAnimeList database and wondered about Goodreads.

3. Me and Rane follow someone into a waiting room of sorts. I’m wearing a long skirt and a sleeveless, light blue denim shirt I think. I lean against the wall as Rane sits down. She pats the seat to her right, the only one of the four along that wall that’s available, and I go sit down.

I overhear someone talking across from us, something about a young girl (around 16) being engaged, and I see she’s obviously not ready for it and shake my head mentally. She had dirty blond hair in a ponytail.

Then a dog comes up to me and I greet it like I’m familiar with it. Only it turns away when I try to pet it. But then I see another dog and think that must be the one I know. There’s another, bigger dog as well, and I decide to just pretend to ignore them and let them get to know me at their own pace. They’re all brown-haired, two are coarse-haired and one is long-haired (the bigger one). The last one comes over and smells my hands in my lap and I let it without moving. When I think it’s okay, I move them to pet the dog but it moves away.

Now we’re standing at the door out talking to the man we came with. He’s asking us what food we want and gives us two options. The conversation is a bit vague, but Rane decides she doesn’t want the one, but instead ‘Cesserian food’. Mentally I’m a bit ‘hmmm’ because I don’t know if I’ll like it.

Jump.

I’m in a room where someone is cleaning up stuff, there are papers with things written on them lying around and I realize some of it might be important. I go over and grab my dream journal and a clipboard with papers on it.

I’m in a bathroom that looks like the downstairs one IWL. I need to go but it’s totally clogged/gross and the seat is broke. I try to flush it but it doesn’t take care of it fully. I decide to try another one.

As I’m heading upstairs, I decide to go the bathroom up here; I know it’s always clean.

Jump.

The man had given me some kind of item that was supposed to be a convenient way to transport yourself around.

I was scrubbing at this pillow with a rag or something until I thought the area was big enough to use. Then I pressed myself down onto it and waited to be transported. …But nothing happened. (I was expecting to sink down into it and reappear somewhere else.)

I remember getting frustrated before because I dribbled water down a little black and white notebook with words on the pages.

I was annoyed and went to tell mom about it. She told me a bit about how it was supposed to work, and that you can get a marker that works for 2000 strokes.

Inspirations: Thinking about going through mirrors and transporting through water. Thinking about my aunt and her husband. A mix of a story mom told me about my uncle. My aunt going into labor last night and mom leaving to go be with her made me think about waiting rooms.

Yesterday:

1. Editing a series of books on Goodreads.

Inspiration: Before falling asleep I wished that I’d edited more stuff on Goodreads that day (I’m a librarian there).

2. Signing up for Ragnarok Online. Four love interests were shown, two guys, two girls. Second woman looked like the mature type with a mix of light & dark grey hair.

Inspiration: Saw it mentioned somewhere online.

3. There was another character introduced, they were trans and had really long white hair.

Inspiration: Sa-Ryun from Ability (webtoon), was editing pics of him that day and thinking of how some people thought he was a woman. I think lady from 2 inspired 3 which was inspired by Sa-Ryun.

Notes: The last couple of nights when I wake up early with a dream, I find myself thinking about it until I fall asleep again because I don’t want to forget it (even though I’m prioritizing sleep over recall). I noticed that those dreams sometimes end up effecting my later dreams.

I’m somewhere looking through books. I pick up some and look through them, but don’t end up picking any to buy because of the prices. I’m frugal, and I mention this to someone to my left. I’m shocked when I see that one of the books is $8.

I poke through the top of a box but it was children’s books. I saw an Aladdin book with a guy with some scruff and a woman. I wondered who they were.

When I was looking at some eastward facing shelves, I saw something with Ed (from Fullmetal Alchemist) on it. I picked up this box and it had tortilla chips in the bottom and I snort at the ridiculousness of a ‘movie entertainment kit’ like that. They might be stale anyway, who knows when it was brought in.

Someone calls out ‘Nice to see you again, Keitorin!’. I look around as I try to find the source before my eyes land on an older woman. I don’t recognize her at all but she knows me?

Jump.

I’m over by a mirror back around where I was originally looking at books. I have really long hair again and I’m trying to put it up in a ponytail, but when I gather it all up and go to get the ponytail ready, some falls and I have to try scraping it back up. I’m getting frustrated.

A woman who seems to be in my blind spot the whole time comes up and is supposed to be helping me, but she’s doing something off to my right that I can’t figure out. All of a sudden, she does something that startles me and makes me jerk back.

She says something. It’s blurry here, but she had pierced my cheek with a post earring! I was pretty freaked out.

I ended up at home telling mom about it. I keep gingerly touching the outside of it with my hands. I’m having a hard time swallowing properly because it’s awkward.

Mom doesn’t even seem that bothered! She even talks about how she and dad were thinking about getting something to eat, though we really didn’t have much money, but they were getting hungry.

I say, “I can’t even eat because of the piercing!”. I touched the back of the earring with my tongue and jerk back, because it hurts and saliva is gathered up in my mouth.

Inspirations: Aladdin thing from a fanart I saw of characters from The Book of Life. Chips from me having some recently. I wonder if the two dreams with mirrors in them I've had are because I've been reading people's TOTM dreams with them? Piercing might be because I tried to put my ear piercings back in but it messed my ears up.

Ritual: WTB 12:30am, woke 7:30 with first DILD. No techniques, hadn't really intended to get lucid, but I was wearing a Jawbone fitness tracker on my wrist to bed for the first time. It's a bit tight and I think the unfamiliar sensation served as an anchor for consciousness.

DILD (eventually), "Hong Kong Apartment": I am in Hong Kong with my husband, staying in the apartment of someone unknown to me. I'm curious who this guy is and why we're at his place, so I'm attentive to my surroundings. It is a one-bedroom apartment and the layout feels familiar; I figure it must be a common floorplan here. The first thing I remember is being in a small room of unclear function, a study maybe, and looking at a plaque on the wall. It depicts a Chinese character, the archaic version of that character, and the pinyin transliteration: sōng, corresponding to the English word "page"—not the leaf of a book but the job title. From this I suppose that the young man who lives here must be serving as a page in the Hong Kong government, in the same way that there are pages in the US Congress.

My husband is talking to me, and I'm vaguely following his words but not entirely sure what he's going on about. I'm still trying to figure out why we're here: does my husband know the guy who owns this place, or is this some kind of Airbnb arrangement? Meanwhile I'm trying to wrap an enormous porkchop—the size of a prime rib steak—that I have for some reason. It is fully grilled but no one has eaten it yet, and I'm not hungry now so I want to put it away. It had been wrapped in butcher's paper but I'm having trouble re-wrapping it, and this distracts my attention for some time as I end up having to use a piece of foil to supplement the paper where it is torn. As I finally wrap the porkchop successfully and go to put it in the fridge, I see that there is fresh lettuce in the fridge, and I've also noticed dirty plates on the counter. I had assumed the apartment's owner was letting us stay because he was away somewhere, but these details make me think he must be currently living here and could walk in at any moment.

I know my husband needs to leave for some meeting or event, and our conversation is delaying his departure, so finally I say in exasperation, "Get out of here already!" Right after he goes out the door, I worry that he might have misunderstood my tone of voice and thought I was angry, so I opened the door and called after his retreating form, "I didn't mean to speak harshly." Meanwhile a girl with short, curly blonde hair is walking from right to left in front of the apartment, and I think she might be someone he had just been referring to—at the time I even recalled her name, something with the initials "J.S."—so I gaze at her curiously. She looks back at me with the self-conscious but indifferent air of someone wondering why a stranger is staring at them. It seems like it would be awkward to start a conversation so I go back inside.

Alone in the apartment, I look around at the decor. There are a lot of hand-carved wooden animal figures, and they remind me of a set that I bought in a museum shortly before Christmas, but couldn't figure out who to give them to. They seem to match this guy's tastes... maybe I should give them to him, in thanks for the loan of his apartment. It seems like a nice gesture so I plan on it. In the center of the main room, which has an open floor plan connected with the kitchenette, is a wide square column that is hollow inside to serve as storage space. I note with interest that there are a number of oversized books here. One of them is at least four feet tall, and the title on the spine reads Disney as Orientalism, accompanied by some Disney-style graphics. I make a mental note that later I'll want to pull that one out and flip through it. It's so big it won't fit on a table—I'll have to do this on the floor! It is the largest of the books in this closet, but none of them are small. Several others are about three feet tall with matching red covers, and I see that one of them is about Shanghai. Books of this size must have cost a fortune... this guy must be doing well here. I wonder if it would be rude to read his books without asking permission first, but figure there's no harm in it.

I wonder how I'll explain my presence if this guy shows up while I'm here by myself, since I'm still not clear on who he exactly is or why I'm at his apartment. In fact, this question starts to bother me, because it seems like I should have a better explanation. Of course, it's always possible that I'm dreaming, but... I want to discount this at first, since it seems to contradict what I'm experiencing from this environment. It is so detailed, lifelike, and stable, it really doesn't feel like a dream. But I make myself take the time to think this over more carefully: if I am actually dreaming, that would explain a lot, like why I had a porkchop, something I almost never eat, and the difficulty I had wrapping it. It would explain why I am in Hong Kong with no idea why I am here, and why I find myself in the apartment of a guy I don't even know. I don't use any techniques to RC, I just think it over and gradually recognize the illusory nature of my surroundings: indeed I am dreaming!

So now what? Normally I would apply myself to some task or other, but I had specifically made a point not to do so this time, if I got lucid, because I'm facing too much work today to spend hours writing up my report. So my plan was not to do anything specific, but simply to contemplate and enjoy the dream environment. (For some reason I had the idea that this would save me time writing things up later, although that is proving not to be the case!) I walk toward the back wall of the apartment, which is completely transparent, and look outside. It is still night, but there is a well-lit open-air bar just below, with a stream running behind it. There are a surprising number of people down there, and all seem to be relaxed and enjoying themselves, like guests at a resort. I sit down to watch the scene, while thinking back over what I've just experienced. I'm still impressed by how detailed and stable this dream was. For instance, that Chinese character on the wall—it was so clearly articulated, even though I don't think it was one I've ever seen before, and I strongly doubt it's even a real one. I wished I had looked at it more carefully, and focus on reviving the mental image. I think can remember the top elements of the modern version of the character, but I'm vague about what composed the bottom, which was complex, and I had not studied it closely at the time. The archaic version was simpler, and I can remember it much more distinctly. Concentrating on this inadvertently wakes me up.

Interlude: After writing the above account and going back to bed at 8:45am, I certainly didn't intend to get lucid again, given that I've already spent a lot of time writing when I should be working, but I never want to rule it out. I ended up having several FAs, the later ones bringing on a very long bout of lucidity, in which I just wandered around exploring rather than working on specific tasks. There would still be a lot to write up but given time constraints I'll have to keep it brief. Woke for the day at 10:15.

FA: I was in the bathroom thinking that I should make a more consistent effort to recognize those little discrepancies that might make me notice I'm dreaming, like I did in the last dream, without realizing that I was actually dreaming at that very moment.

FA/DILD, "Trail of Smoke": I hovered for a long time on the border between sleep and waking and enjoyed observing its ambiguities. For instance, there was a point where I was convinced I was immersed in dream visuals but hearing everything perfectly accurately from waking life (I was probably wrong about this). I caught at least one FA and was pleased after my failure to catch the last one. Then a long dream followed where I was basically lucid the whole time, but also knew I wouldn't have time to write it up in much detail, so only certain episodes that were especially interesting stand out clearly in my memory. I really can't take the time to include them all here, but the last scene was worth mentioning:

I am wandering through a dream environment typical for me, a labyrinthine enclosed public space, and having just seen someone smoking on a magazine cover, I now find myself smoking a cigarette. The smoke doesn't dissipate completely but lingers faintly in the air along the path I have walked, like that memorable scene from Donnie Darko (2001). It looks like I could potentially trace back the smoke and rediscover all the places I have visited in the course of this long dream. This makes me wonder: how big is the dream world? And the answer seems obvious: there are no boundaries, it is as big as mind itself. Standing in that world even as I recognize its boundlessness, I feel a sense of awe.

I gaze at the glimmering smoke trails and murmur, "All the places I've been are like a trail of smoke that follows me."

-Forgotten fragment that I didn’t write down because it didn’t make enough concrete sense too. Really annoying when that happens.

-We’re at a woman’s house, standing in a room. I’m to her right. For some reason I know her secret - she’s a werewolf. She sneaks a look at me and mouths something, something that’s part of her secret. I think she’s telling me where something is, some keys or something. I wonder if it’s near a full moon, if it’s affecting her.

I’m in another room with the woman and another person and we’re looking through some kind of history or genealogy book. In the front, it has really thin pages width-wise and are made of different material, and normal length and paper after that. We’re flipping through it and are excited to see a couple of familiar names, but we turn to one that means something to the third person in the room. Romano Romaine.

There was another name before that that I recognized but I forgot it.

Jump.

I’m playing with a small toy house with a little girl. We end up taking it apart and I have to figure out how to put it back together by myself because she falls asleep. I’m bad at this stuff so I’m worried I’ll get in trouble.

Jump.

I’m in a room looking over at Spice on some kind of balcony room, he’s on the other side of a clear door and I talk to him.

Jump…

In yet another room, mom gets on the woman’s computer. The woman is standing in the room too but she’s not moving or look at us in particular.

Mom shows me a zip drive and asks me a question with her eyes. I know she’s asking whether or not to download something from the woman’s computer (her secret). I gave a real decisive answer by shaking my head both yes and no (lolol).

She puts the zip drive into the computer and a folder opens up full of other folders (about four rows). One is labeled ‘Sarah’. I guess that if the woman gets suspicious, mom can easily show that she’s just looking through her own stuff.

I'm seeking a book, something that I think of as 'a way out.' To retrieve it I'm drifting through a cloud of abstracts that sometimes resolve themselves into words floating in the cloud. They're dream images, illusions, but grasping the illusionary versions of this book will gradually lead me to the real thing. But they're difficult to capture - it's like trying to scoop up something small floating on water, if you're not careful the water will carry it right out of your hand again. It takes patience and deliberation and allowing the words to drift into my grasp.

I take hold of one word, feeling the substance of it. This changes the images that are drifting around me - now they're closer to the subject of that word, closer to what I'm seeking, and many of them are in the form of books rather than individual words. I repeat this process, releasing the word I had a hold of and reaching for the first relevant image that drifts into my grasp, and every time I repeat this process there are less individual words and more books, and the images displayed on the covers of the books become more and more relevant.

Now many of the books show images of a demonic face, which is heading in the right direction, but which also has drawn attention. A man I'm familiar with begins speaking with me, a demon or something close enough - I've forgotten the content of this one-sided conversation except that it was about that book I'm searching for. Our surroundings have gotten more solid by this point, and as I move through the cloud I find wooden steps under my feet.

I come up the steps into a room full of books piled haphazardly on wooden tables. There's a young human woman here looking through the books - long dark hair, blue jeans and white t-shirt, I recognize her as someone who has a history with that demon I've been speaking with. Her name's Dawn. Their interactions are familiar but antagonistic - she once struggled with him and lost, though I'm not sure she's realized she's lost yet. In any case, she came to him to search for something, but she failed and became trapped in a dream. It seems she's still searching for whatever it is. I find that sad to watch. She looks at the demon as he climbs up the stairs behind me - or I assume she does; I haven't seen him, he's just a voice to me, but she's looking right through me and to the place I believe he would be. In annoyance at his presence, she moves to another stack of books, further away. The demon sounds amused as he calls to her.

It occurs to me as I watch her that I've been consciously thinking of this as a dream for some time now. Since it seems she can't see me, I decide to step aside and watch the two of them. I settle down on a white couch out of the way and allow my perspective to change slightly. I can see the demon now, and Dawn's appearance has changed as well, both of them now dressed from the late 1700s, France - their hairstyles and clothes are looking rough, as if they started out with a fine presentation but over time the polished image has fallen apart. He's struck up a conversation, and eventually she says to him, "The doctor warns that (something to do with a slow death), and my minutes are done." She sounds defiantly happy about this, as if it's a kind of victory over the demon.

I'm in a garden, speaking in Russian with a very old human man in a wheelchair. We have an arrangement. I'm to kill him, but as he puts it, without ugliness. That he wants his death to be smooth, I have no problem with, but this ugliness he's referring to isn't about his own death, it's about preserving his image of me, or rather what I represent to him. He says I'm a man who should understand this, unlike that brother of mine - he uses a word that my dream doesn't bother to translate aside from noting that it's uncomplimentary. The old man wants to believe in the existence of a creature that's above all the things he dislikes in humanity, an embodiment of death without ugliness. I'm disgusted and feel illogically betrayed by hearing this from him, a man more intimately acquainted with violence than any human I've ever known - he of all people shouldn't have any illusions about this. It's hypocrisy.

As he talks we move indoors, to a dimly-lit room that's kept very cold. He has a selection of alcohol lined up before a mirror, and I go to pour him a glass; as I do so I see a small portrait of a blonde woman, which I pick up. A woman who works for him, who's been pushing his wheelchair, urgently asks me to be careful with that. I recognize the image as his granddaughter - she's how I met him in the first place, years back. He laughs and corrects me, and he says this in English: "Vivian. Her mother." This startles me, and I examine the portrait again - I would never have guessed they weren't the same person. Her mother had died before I met her.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

While using a spell to pull out some relevant books and scrolls from a collection, one of the books that comes to me is titled "The Unbeauty of Life," by a Japanese author.

I'm running up several flights of stairs, spiraling upward through a ruined building, piles of rubble around; I should have fled the building with the others when I reached the first floor but instead I kept going upward, thinking of the woman I'd originally come here to track down. As I reach the upper levels I find her laboratory, with her books scattered on the floor, sarcophagi in rows. The next level above that is devoted to "the theatrical vampire," complete with red stage curtains hanging on the wall, full of what I think of as romanticized images from stage and screen, and as I look at it I remember the sound of her laughing. There's one more floor above this.

I had signed up to do archery lessons somewhere. In order to pay for the lesson I had to help the person who owned the archery range judge the value of another peice of property they owned. It had to be worth at least $40k.

On it was this huge building. In it was this hemispherical room. The walls were covered with bookshelves curving up to the ceiling. (How the books didn't slide off of the upper shelves is beyond me.) There was also this huge bronze/golden contraption that showed the alignments of the planets in some alien solar system.

There were escalators in the building. I think one of them got broken, however.

The dream started at a small town similar to the Team Fortress 2 map "2fort". A male character did some (four) good deeds there and thought of going to a bigger place to do more good deeds, and he went on a path. At some point I saw some cartoon-like character who looked like a plump, olive-green skinned and more expensively dressed guy who had some companion that may have been a dog and who was in a room with books underground.

The man who did good deeds went past a scarecrow character (Note: I saw the scarecrow much later. More on that in a bit.) and the next part I recall the most of is seeing a very wide plane of green land with a factory on it. Someone was wondering what was inside the tall factory, and I later saw inside it: Somehow, the factory was being sabotaged. I saw one case of sabotage and then later, I saw another: Inside a room some equipment was damaged and somehow either the machines were used for honey or they were damaged by bees; I saw some (but few) bees flying around in the room once the people inside the room (I think) tried to use the machines.

Later I saw someone going back towards the place where the town mentioned earlier was located. He got close to a scarecrow.

Later, I saw a witch touch a character who was walking out the door with her mouth and then I saw another character touch the witch and promptly turn into the same plump olive-green skinned character I mentioned earlier, only he wasn't himself. The same character then said he was reading ridiculous books and this part is a bit sketchy: I'm not sure if he was just talking about one book or more than one but he said something like "like about Polygamy?" and I consciously didn't even know the definition of that word when I had this dream, to my recollection.

I posthumously figured that the witch was turning the employees under her witchcraft to sabotage the factory's machines, though I didn't really directly see it.

Morning of December 8, 2014. Monday.



I believe it is in the morning, possibly about nine o'clock. I am not sure of the location. There is a chair full of textbooks, notebooks, papers, and possibly other printed materials. I seem to be seated at least five feet away from this other chair.

Over time, fully convinced I am awake, I start to try to will a folded piece of paper on the top of the stack to move. There is a sense of control and “connection” somehow, though it is very slight. The piece of paper actually slides to the left and flies across the room to land on the floor. My mother makes an appearance a couple of times, and strangely enough, this seems normal to me (she died years ago, in fact).

Even though my telekinesis dreams are so vivid and lifelike otherwise, I rarely get the hint or idea that I am dreaming. In fact, I usually wake from such dreams with a sense of disappointment (as well as feeling slightly foolish). This, and being able to hover and fly about in a fetal position, is a very common in-dream ability. The hovering, however, sometimes triggers vivid lucidity.

I am contemplating the nature of my seemingly new ability and try several more times after putting the folded paper back. It works each time, and the paper slides and flies to the left of the room in the same way. At one point, I have a vague idea that the event might have been caused by the wind, but this is not the case. I am able to perform telekinesis a few more times.

Finally, I decide to try it on something else. I look at the dining room table and notice a few clothes scattered over it. There is an empty cola can sitting near the edge. I will the can to slide towards me and fall off the table but then fly into my hand (as is common in such dreams). However, I soon wake and wonder how I did not detect it was a dream.

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."

1.
I’m standing on my tippy-toes up on my bed reaching for something (on the ceiling fan?), wearing the same thing I went to sleep in - my Superman logo shirt.

I come to realize that I’m awake and really am standing on my bed. I wobble back down, feeling confused, before I craw back under the cover and go back to sleep.

2.
Hanging around a house. There’s an autistic boy and his cat. The cat is super friendly, I remember petting it when it snuggled against me.

I played a Pokemon game with him.

I looked in a bottom drawer of something at three of his books.

Jump.

I’m on a porch with a roof with him. We suddenly burst into dance with some music playing. I’m really letting loose, doing all kinds of moves including some flips, which is dangerous because I’m wearing the same clothes as IWL, a white shirt with a butterfly on it and a very long, wavy blue skirt.

We finish, and a group of elderly people pop up outside the windows of the porch that weren’t there before. I realize that we had probably disturbed them, our neighbors, with our noise.

But then suddenly they break out into a choreographed dance! But then when I look at them, there are also mid-aged clones of the same chubby guy. I think how vigorous the dancing is, and how good it would be for losing weight. I turn and ask “How often do they do this?’

After they’re done, one of them hands me a PaperBackSwap book in the default white wrapper. I get excited and open it, but unfold a piece of paper from it. It’s a notice that I’d have to go pick it up since I missed the delivery.

It says I actually have to go to their house to get the book, which I think is bullcrap. Part of the address has ‘Metville’ in it although I remember thinking upon recalling it that it was something else. There was also something written in big print letters on a black square.

Inspirations: I got a PBS book recently, the notice might have been because I was worried about getting my credit for sending off a book. Pokemon from reading past dream entries. Where did the dancing come from?? Need.more.dancing! Waait the dancing may have been inspired by a mod for Dragon Age: Origins! Yesterday I had everyone dance to a folk song in Camp. Chubby guys most likely from The Biggest Loser, since I had just looked at my paper and saw it was coming on the next night.

I'm reading a book. There had been a series I'd loved that ended some years ago, and now the authors have put out a new prequel series featuring some of the side characters - one of them is the Magician.

Scene changes slightly - instead of just seeing words on a page, I'm now seeing the scene described in the book. The Magician and Julie are having a standoff, just arguing with words at the moment but willing to cause damage if it gets to that point. I'd been looking forward to seeing a scene with Julie. In the main series, it's established that she and the Magician had a long and complicated history, but we only actually see her once - learning more about her is the main reason I'm interested in this new series.

But Julie's personality here is drastically different than it had seemed in the main series - I actually hadn't realized this was meant to be her until just now when I heard her name (she's using two of Julia's usual aliases). Her portrayal's so different that it just seems like bad writing, like she's been reduced to a caricature. And that complicated history she had with the Magician seems to have become a standard characters-who-irritate-each-other-wind-up-getting-together plot. In the years since that first series ended, the writers have really gone downhill. So I decide I'm just going to ignore this characterization, this new series in general, and focus on the main series instead.

For (supposedly) unrelated reasons, a character on the Magician's side puts his hands over his ears and starts singing to avoid hearing what the Magician and Julie are saying.

A woman's looking over a small art collection - sketches of the building she's in from various earlier eras, collected in a large book. On the wall directly over the book is a recent painting of this same building, but showing it thousands of years earlier when there was a lake here, with the door opening directly onto the water. She finds this painting a little funny - unlike the historical sketches, she believes this one's a sort of what-if image. The building's old but it's not that old. But the man who commissioned the painting, the owner of this place, she's thinking of him as being oddly precise about where the lake should be in relation to the building; as far as she's aware there's no evidence that there was ever really a lake here at all. The title of the painting is Lake Hae or Hayle or something along those lines. Although the building in the painting and the building in modern times are identical, somehow in the painting it gives the impression of being someplace sacred.

She turns the pages of the book - she's careful with it, it's very valuable. After the sketches of the building there are a series of anatomical sketches and portraits. She's on a page showing several sketches of an old man, mostly bald and with a sort of rounded profile. As a disembodied observer, I'm fond of the sketch, sort of nostalgic about it - both about the subject and about the sketch itself. She keeps turning the pages, and there's a sketch of a young man with a very square jaw; looking at him changes the scene.

Still in the same room, but a couple centuries earlier; the walls are lined with bookshelves. There's a woman sketching, holding a conversation with a man sitting in a chair. A servant comes into the room - he's that young man from the sketch - and the man in the chair stands up to speak with him. A man all in black and with very long black hair, he's the same man who owned this building and that art collection in modern times.