Recent DJ Posts

I'm sitting on the edge of a bed in a small rented room, wood panel walls, watching a man kneel and lace up the boots he's just given me. I'm thinking that a chase without consequences lacks interest - we've caught each other several times now but neither of us has actually killed the other, which should be the natural conclusion here. Makes me feel tired. I think I'll stop hunting him after today. The boots belonged to a dead Nazi, and I'm wronging people by wearing them; that's the reason he's giving them to me.

Later the same day, we're standing in a very small graveyard on a green hill, and now he's giving me a green hat that I think of as going with the boots, though it doesn't resemble a military uniform. I recognize both it and the boots as part of a costume signifying Ivan, which would make him Koschei. He disagrees with this observation, says he'd rather be the Firebird. I'm thinking that he's greatly misinterpreted our story.

A concerned-looking woman and a businesslike man are checking in on a man who's recently been dug up from a grave - not his original one; someone else had decided to lock him up for a while. They'd been able to find him and retrieve him, but he'd needed some time to recover. The man he's staying with stops them at the door and says, "I don't know if he's ready for this yet." The businesslike man says something to the effect of "ready or not" and comes inside anyway. It's very pleasant inside - an open plan, wood paneling, lots of plants, dim lights with a slightly orange tint. There's a phonograph playing an old string quartet at a ridiculously loud volume. This is a modern setting, so the phonograph and the choice of music indicate the man who'd been buried is trying to calm himself down by turning to things from his past. The volume, as if he's trying to drown something out, implies it's not going well.

The man who'd tried to stop them at the door backs up so he's sort of standing guard in front of the door to the bedroom, but before the guests can force the issue, the man who'd been buried comes out on his own. Superficially looking completely recovered, friendly and open, neatly and formally dressed as usual - though as a disembodied observer, my first thought on seeing him was along the lines of, Was my hair really that short? What was wrong with me? Anyway, though he seems composed, he gives me the impression that it's just an act - that he's trying too hard to be his usual self.

The guests are surprised, wary, to see him seemingly doing so well, and he explains to them that so often when he's gone into the ground, he'd miss out on years, decades, centuries, and he'd expected the same thing to happen again. "Tonight I am an immortal," he says, by which he means the experience of having 'died' and returned without having missed anything, with his old life and identity still in place, "and I intend to remain that way. So I've had to squash some of my plans." The implication is that he'd spent his time buried coming up with revenge fantasies - but since it turns out he's only missed a few days, he's not going to destroy the identity and life he's constructed here just to carry that out.

From Buffy, I/Spike am meeting Dru for the first time. Found her lying in an alley, looking unfocused. In this version of the story, the William the Bloody nickname doesn't come from poetry. Scene changes to present-day, transitioning with Dru describing that last scene, clearly fond of the memory; she says she liked seeing that sort of initiative in the living. She's putting it in terms that are disturbing the woman she's talking to.

Nearby, I'm also reminiscing about Dru to someone else. We used to play this game with the people who'd hunt us. Scene changes to show the game - I'm running into a churchyard, holding a cross or something like it in one hand and some weapon in the other, run up to the hunter all wide-eyed. Make like I'm volunteering to join his hunt, country kid all full of admiration, or like the monster's right behind me - either way, the point's just to get in close. Not challenging enough to be called a game maybe, but we still thought it was fun.

The first run-through of the scene, I 'won' the game easily, but then I'm remembering a second one with this weathered old woman who was suspicious of me right from the start, didn't buy the act. Circling around her, I wound up climbing further into the hills covered in graves, and as I climb I transition partially out of the Spike character. I'm hearing voices up here among the graves, not from the graves themselves but still tied to this place - three men who were here a long time ago and moved on, people I've been looking for traces of for a long time. I can't hold on to what they're saying.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

From Hellblazer, I/Constantine am walking out a back door into a narrow courtyard and out a large gate, then turn back to look at the building I've just left. Ravenscar. The image is distorted - I'm looking at a long wall with a gate in the center, one tower visible over it, and a few windows opening onto that courtyard, letting you see a little more of the building, and that's all fine enough; except it looks impossibly tall, and at strange slanted angles, and the views through those windows are showing me more than should be possible as I look up and up and up. I catch glimpses of the moon through those windows sometimes. In a stunning lack of lucidity, I think of this as "the place that haunts my dreams."

Scene changes. I'm still looking up at that extreme angle, but I'm looking at a different place, focusing on this life-sized stone statue of a woman high above me in the moonlight. I have a sense of something religious about it, like she's meant to be praying, though there's nothing about her position to suggest it, or like she's meant to be an angel, though there's no wings. I think something along the lines of, "Of course, it would be her," with a sense of resignation.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man begging me for something, and I'm tired of this, bored. I tell him, life, death, pick one, plead your case, make it convincing, you've got one minute, go. It takes him a moment to process this, but then he starts singing.

I recognize the song from a theatre show I enjoy about Lucifer, but can't place the scene immediately - at first I think it's Lilith's song. I'm amused - you think reminding me of her will make me more sympathetic to you too? I like the inspired emotional manipulation, but that's not going to work - she moved me, he didn't. But then I recognize the actual song. It's from the story of a woman who had to choose between love and advancing her career as a dancer - she chose dance. The song is about her calling herself foolish for causing pain to them both, her and the boy she loves, but ultimately defending her choice as a valid one.

Fragments - song lyrics misusing the word indigent ("all the charm indigent in you" - I assume it was aiming for 'inherent'); and later, a fragment involving a tribe called Indogen, immortal creatures that were 'judged unworthy by god' and sentenced to stay in this land (wherever the dream was currently set) instead of continuing on their 'journey to the sun.'

An apocalypse scenario; I've run through this scenario two times already and failed both times. First, I have to leave this building quickly, and avoid getting involved with this group of people; that was the mistake I made last time. Second, I can't forget to (something to do with a virus and immunity or a vaccine or similar); that was the mistake I made the first time around. Third, I have to track down three men: one's a scientist whose theories are closely related to the events that are about to happen; the second is a specific doctor.

When I leave the building through the back door, the storyline changes; I'm caught up in some kind of street performance going on just outside, and a woman in the crowd sees me and recognizes me, and comes up to thank me for something I'd done for her in the past involving her ring.

Another apocalypse scene then: a woman who's carrying her son, looks around 3, is begging me to take him with me.

Rumpelstiltskin. There's a horrible smell coming from somewhere in the castle, and finally I've found the source: there's a dead body, someone who broke into the castle and got himself caught in one of the traps designed to stop such intruders from stealing my things. Belle and I have been calling back and forth as we were trying to figure out where that smell was coming from, and I'm pleased I found it before she did. I call to her now, telling her that I've found it and am taking care of it, without letting her know what it was. I magic it away.

Julia's ranting to me about something to do with the news, full of righteous anger. There's some important event going on in the world, some tragedy or disaster or outrage, and she doesn't feel they're covering it well; she's specifically talking about CNN's failure to report on real issues. I'm happy about all this - happy about her righteous anger, that is, not the tragedy or whatever it was - I love how she cares so deeply about these events that I've come to see as commonplace.

There's a girl, a witch, stopping in a school hallway to stand before the memorial to a recently-dead classmate, covered in flowers and candles. The dead girl was also a witch, although this isn't common knowledge, so although she didn't know the dead girl well, she takes this very personally. She's thinking about how she has something that belongs to the girl's killer, and about the girl's mother, and about poison. The candles burn down to stubs as she looks at them, and various other things around her start to catch fire; a boy who was close with the dead girl had been watching nearby, and when he sees this, he starts to run away. She stops him, corners him. He asks what she is; she says he'll never know, but that since he failed his friend, now there's someone else he has to protect - her.

A woman is introducing two of her friends to each other outside a mausoleum, introducing one of them by the nickname she calls her, "Little N." It's N's family mausoleum they're standing in front of. N introduces herself as "Anekhet (last name sounds something like Sastemony) - or Little N." From her tone, which is pleasant, it's still clear that the Little N nickname is a name for only this particular friend to use, not the man she's being introduced to. The man introduces himself with a bow as her ancestor and the founder of this town, and a "comocido" - which in the dream seemed to be a word related to suicide or homicide, a word that indicated the specific way in which he was killed, hundreds of years ago. Anekhet is surprised but not particularly thrown by this.

Integra is watching a map showing enemy vessels approaching England, trying to calculate how much time she has left, torn between two objectives, and finally she dispatches Alucard to a certain ship, to destroy it if he doesn't hear otherwise after a certain amount of time. Alucard drops out of the sky onto that ship, and in his head he's intensely focused on the form he needs to take at any given time, it's almost like psyching himself up, or like playing a role.

I'm walking up the steps to a graveyard. I'm a teenager or young man who lives and/or works in a temple or shrine or similar attached to this graveyard. In the previous dream scene I'd been talking to friends at the foot of the stairs to the temple about hard times their families had been through, and I'd been thinking that I couldn't really relate, my family never having been through anything like that, and I'd removed myself from the conversation - but now I'm thinking about the hard things in my life I couldn't tell them, specifically I'm thinking about an old man buried here whose death I couldn't tell them about. I float over to his grave.

But there's a guy here waiting for me. He attacks me - though I just float away from that - while blaming me for causing that man's death by convincing him to expose us to the media. He'd been one of something secret, supernatural or not quite human. But it wasn't like that - I hadn't been the one to convince him at all, and I'm frustrated by this mistaken rumor; it had been some pretty girl who'd talked him into it, I'd been completely against it, and I'd hated that he could throw away a lifelong belief in secrecy so quickly.

I'm sitting outside what looks like a very small cave entrance, too small for a person to get through, and I'm talking with several very small spirits, and a much larger, much older one in the cave. We're having a disagreement about a course of action, and finally the spirit inside the cave decides to force the issue by possessing me and taking control of my body. In doing so, he forces out the much smaller, relatively harmless spirit that usually possesses me, and it's quite shocked by this; it tries to get back in, but there's this glowing blue crescent on my forehead, like a closed eye, which acts like a lock.

I'm standing on a city street near a warehouse, surrounded by government vehicles, and talking to my boss, who works for the FBI. He wants me to see what's going on inside the warehouse, but I can't do that. I'm tired. The thing possessing me doesn't understand why this is an issue, takes over and answers easily - his answer has something to do with drugs - he speaks using his own accent, very different from mine, some variety of English, but if the boss notices he chooses to ignore it.

PSoH setting, following Leon. He puts out messages searching for D. Meets up with fellow 'searchers' - for various things - some of them more useful, or sane, than others. He's sleeping with one of them, and at the moment sitting up in bed next to her, saying "don't look at me."

A boy who leaves something broken with friends or family and is surprised to find they've fixed it when he returns, he hadn't asked them to do that.

A wrong turn leads to a dirt road, and then to a moss-covered graveyard, where I get out to walk. My IRL sister L. and I find ourselves stuck with a tour group.

3rd person. Kimahri's become a leader of his people, but he's having trouble. There's someone who's not considered very trustworthy, and he gave this guy a chance to prove himself, letting him broker a deal with an outsider for a very important supply. But there have been delays, and the people are beginning to worry that this guy isn't going to come through for them. They're having something like an informal town meeting, arguing about it, and the guy who brokered the deal is insisting that things will work out if they just wait.

1st person, I've struck a deal with someone whose face I never saw, only heard his voice. He sends me to sow something he designed in the cracks of the border between two countries. Greenery grows from the cracks and spreads into the neighboring countries, and it looks beautiful, peaceful, so no one will recognize it as a threat until it's too late. I see the landscape as if on a map, watching the borders shift in a chain reaction, watching control of land flip from one country to another, sending ripples through the ground under my feet, and I can hear that guy who designed all this, now telling me to watch, to learn how this works and to use it myself, but I already know how it works and all I want is to get as far away from the shifting borders as I can. When I get far enough from the conflict to get a clear look around, I can see the country I sabotaged is now completely surrounded, about to be destroyed. I head north, as far as I can get.

3rd person. Sansa Stark's come back to the north, as far north as it's possible to go before the Wall, and she's sneaking into a hidden tunnel leading to a tomb. She pays her respects and then leaves the tomb to wait in the tunnels, and one by one her brothers arrive - first Rob, then Jon Snow, then Bran (who is walking, and was never crippled in the first place). They're all glad to see each other of course, but Bran's the one they've been waiting for, the one who made a deal with the demon Cassux on behalf of their family. (Cassux - when I wrote this down it struck me that's probably a contraction of Castor and Pollux.)

Scene changes to a flashback: the recently orphaned Stark children 'captured' Tyrion (he probably could have left at any time if he'd cared to make the effort) and 'interrogated' him (nothing unpleasant, more of a casual conversation really). He's wearing a lion-fur cloak, and he's saying, "not such a bad thing, the Old Ways, not having to work so hard for everything." During a time of desperation for the Lannisters, he'd discovered the demon Cassux in his books and made a deal on his family's behalf, and because of that, everything in Westeros has changed.