Recent DJ Posts

I'm aware T. is going to rob my home and kill me tonight, as if I'd seen the future. I took some steps in preparation for that, but I believed that what is going to happen can't be averted. However, it turns out I'd misinterpreted something: while T. really was robbing the place, the killer turns out to be someone else, a stranger who broke in with a knife. T. and some other people who live here help fight him off. We get to the scene I knew was coming, when the knife's supposed to cut deeply into my shoulder and stop just above my heart, and I wonder if I'll be able to feel pain in a dream. I decide to have the scene go a different way instead, I close my eyes and imagine that T. and the others hold him back enough that the knife turns aside. When I open my eyes again, the stranger is on the floor, dead.

I decide to perform "Deedlit's healing spell." (It's been years since I watched Lodoss - did Deedlit even have a healing spell? - I think this was mostly some generic mental association between elves and healing.) I say something I no longer remember, a phrase in English something like a prayer, and there's a warm gold glowing light around my hands, which I hold over the dead man until he revives, though he remains quietly on the floor. I then repeat the spell with the others in the room, although they don't seem to have any wounds, and they're surprised but appreciate it. I leave the room and go to heal my IRL sister L., who in the dream lives next door, waking her up in the process. I then go down the hall to find T. again and heal him too.

Me and T. talk for a while, and as he talks his appearance changes. He walks into the kitchen briefly and when he comes back, he's become a different person entirely, and he's joined by another man. They both claim to know me and to have been looking for me for a long time, although they call me by two different names. The one who wasn't T. speaks with a heavy Scottish accent and calls me Jack. As I'm speaking to them, I remember that while I'm lucid, I had some things I wanted to get done, and I try to remember what those were. I decide it was the Task of the Month. (Apparently reading the TOTM thread last night was enough to overrule my personal lucid goals.) I remember that the Task was to ask a DC who your true love or soulmate is, so I ask these guys, who's my true love? They both go silent and look extremely uncomfortable, like that's a question I shouldn't ask. I tell them any answer is fine, it's just a task, and I try phrasing it with 'soulmate' instead, but that doesn't get a better response. I feel like their belief that they knew me a long time ago is affecting this, that it's part of what makes this a question they don't want to answer, so I decide to go outside and find someone else to ask.

Outside my IRL home, I'm appreciating how vivid it is. There's a chill in the air, a nicely realistic touch, and there's no snow on the ground, which is a great change. I walk off the driveway and onto the main road, and for some reason I feel like that's an important dividing line, particularly when lucid. My attention is caught by a squirrel across the road standing on its front legs, craning its neck to look up at the sky; and then by the body of a dead deer at the 3-way crossroads. I believe (incorrectly) that this dead deer is always here at the crossroads when I dream, and I think about going over to talk to it, but on second thought the idea makes me a little uncomfortable - I think it'll follow me home. Better not. There's a rock just beside my driveway with some words carved into it, and I start to go over to read it, but a car drives by. I stop it and walk over to the driver, ask her who my true love is. Again, she goes silent and gives me the impression that this is a question I shouldn't ask. I decide to go for a ride, and I climb into the car through the window.

Inside the car, the woman I spoke to isn't the driver at all, she's a passenger. There's six women in the car, all of them working in the fashion industry or as models, and with the exception of the woman I'd spoken to and the driver, the rest of them resent someone who's not part of the industry hitching a ride. No one except the driver knows where they're going - it's a surprise. The driver's name is Audrey, she's someone big in the fashion industry, wearing large dark sunglasses. I ask Audrey who my true love is, and as an answer, she produces a piece of lined paper with something written on it, crumples it up, and throws it out the window. She's not throwing it away - she means for me to reach out my window and catch it. I'm too slow, I just miss it. But I decide - no, I didn't miss it. I caught it. I announce out loud, "Got it!" I 'remember' the feel of catching it, and then I draw my hand back inside the car. No good, my hand's empty. The women in the car look at me oddly for claiming to have caught the paper when I hadn't. I try the hand-behind-the-back summoning trick, but still nothing.

Since I keep failing to get an answer to this question, I decide I'll switch to a different Task of the Month. For some reason I believe that the other basic task is to kiss a DC. I stop to think about that for a minute, since I'm sure that can't be right, that's too basic, but then I decide it's meant as something simple to stick with a Valentine's Day theme. (Was I mixing it up with the kiss-a-zombie one? I had just raised someone from the dead, shame I didn't follow up on that. ) Although I'm not sure how I got here, I'm now following Audrey into an elevator with one of the other women from the car. I ask Audrey if I can kiss her, and she says sure. I can't remember what happened after that, but next thing I remember we're leaving the elevator and I'm thinking that didn't work. We're now standing in a large room with a mirror and a couch, and I ask the other woman, a slightly chubby, very beautiful blonde, if I can kiss her. She says okay. We're standing in front of the mirror, and I'm surprised to see the mirror's actually reflecting her and the room we're in (though not me, as usual), and her reflection looks exactly like her, although it's watching us instead of mirroring her actions. I lean in to kiss her and close my eyes, but perhaps because I was distracted by the mirror, I find I've wound up kissing her reflection instead, through the glass. I move us away from the mirror, focus on the feeling of her shoulder under my hand, and try again. I'm too focused on comparing this to real life and trying to improve the realism to enjoy it much - the feeling of her lips themselves is accurate, but that's about it. I'm thinking that this sort of thing really doesn't translate to dreams well, and I should focus on doing things that aren't possible IRL. So I remember the 'other' (actual) task of the month: I step back and ask her if she knows who my true love is. Again, she seems uncomfortable with the question and doesn't answer. Then I think that asking someone you've just kissed to tell you about your true love may be a little tactless.

There's a cat by the mirror now, yowling. Two people who work here rush over to it to try to get it to be quiet. On the other side of the room, there's a whole row of mirrors and a hairdresser standing in front of them, talking about originality or lack thereof in fashion shows. I lose lucidity and follow him, listening to him for a few moments before I wake up.

My IRL father and I are having a conversation. We're both aware this is a dream. (But I'm not really lucid, or at least not very - 'this is a dream' is just part of the plot.) We're talking about recurring dreams I've been having of falling. (IRL, I can't remember ever having dreamed of falling.) He's concerned about it, doesn't like the idea of me repeatedly splattering myself on the ground. I assure him that I hardly ever splatter on the ground.

As we're talking, the scene shifts, and now I'm falling from a great height - but I land lightly on my feet on the ground, demonstrating my point. I've landed somewhere near an airport. Near where I've landed, there's what I think of as another version of myself from another fall - but rather than being me, it's a woman with long red hair, lying on the ground, bending backwards at an awkward but not fatal angle, and motionless, because she's not really here, she's just an image, like a three-dimensional photograph. Looking at her, I remember various dreams where I watched other characters fall and was unable to stop them, and I acknowledge my father's point, that sometimes the falls don't go so well.

A woman I seem to know very well is waiting for me when I walk away from the airport, and we go to meet back up with my father and his girlfriend. (No resemblance to his IRL one.) We come to a street where we'd meant to meet with them, but we don't see them. I call out "Dad! Ada!" but there's no response. There's a bit of a crowd, people talking to each other, one guy handing out flyers, I get the impression there's a festival going on somewhere nearby. The end of this street is a dream boundary; if we cross it, the dream will change. But the festival is on the other side, and we're wondering if my father went on ahead, through the boundary. The character version of me starts to head for the boundary, but the part of me that's a disembodied observer zooms out and takes a look around, and spots my father and his girlfriend sitting on a bench under an overhang. They'd been blocked from my view by the crowd around the guy handing out flyers. So I cause the character version of me to have doubts about crossing the boundary, reminding him that it'll be hard to get back to this same scene if I'm wrong about my father going on ahead. Character!me turns around.

I tell the woman I'm with that I want to take one last look around, and I go and find a bench to sit down on. I hold my palm up in front of me, and speak to it as if to a computer, "Run search." Two glowing screens appear above my palm, one vertical, one horizontal - I think of it as a way I've created to execute dream programs. I give it more commands to run a scan of the area and locate my father and his girlfriend. Meanwhile, as a disembodied observer, I find this a neat trick, and make a note to try it sometime when I'm actually lucid; I'm wondering if it would still work. The dream scan finishes and has successfully located them, very close to the bench where I'm sitting.

I walk over to them. They seem a little out of it, as if they're high. Apparently they'd heard me calling, but it didn't occur to him that by 'Dad', I meant him. I say to him, "What did you expect me to call you? Paul?" (His name isn't Paul.) Some passerby who's clearly enjoying the festival overhears this and sticks out his hand to my father to introduce himself, saying "Hi, Paul!" My father and I tell him to buzz off, which his girlfriend objects to, as the random passerby seemed nice. By nice, she means good-looking.