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    1. Andromache, enchanted sleep, underground temple, morgue

      by , 10-01-2013 at 08:53 PM
      Someone who's just finished drawing a picture of 10 priests, then a picture of me, offers to draw a picture of Andromache; in the dream I believed that was the name of a goetic demon.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      There's a witch I put under an enchanted sleep a long time ago, but a girl's come to warn me that she's started to wake up. There are rhymes and charms meant to keep her asleep, but when I see they're not going to work I run for the nearest doorway, to put a few realities between us. The doors I pass through repeatedly change the scene until I wind up in a tiny square room, just large enough for me, with only the one entrance; I get rid of the roof and start flying.

      I'm with a group of people in what looks like some underground stone temple, talking to a guy who emerged from a tunnel in the floor, and I'm noting that he looks just like his ancestor. We're returning his ancestor's sword to him, although now it's just a sword - there had been something else attached to it, something we used. As I'm thinking about this I notice that the tunnel has a carving of the Monkey King's head set above it.

      A cardinal arrives at the top of the stairs leading down to the temple, followed by attendants in red and gold brocade. He's been our enemy before, hunting us down, although that's been resolved; still, we're not exactly pleased to see him, and his attendants start to run forward to put themselves between him and us. But he holds up a hand to tell them to stay back. He's brought us a satchel full of papers granting us certain privileges in recognition of our service to (something or other) - none of the privileges granted are actually very useful, this is just a symbolic gesture. I mention to one of the guys with me that I'd rather have another of those papers claiming we were acting with his permission and authority.

      In what looks like a morgue, there's a live man lying down on a slab being examined by a guy in a wheelchair, along with a goon in a suit standing behind the chair, and a man in a white coat standing over the slab. The guy in the chair is looking for someone who's had plastic surgery, and he's thinking the guy on the slab might be him. He's wrong. He's also thinking about peeling back the skin of the face to get a look at the underlying bone structure. The guy on the slab has got the wrong idea about what's going on, he was brought here by the man in the white coat under false pretenses, and he's saying, "So you recognized me on account of my face?" The man in the wheelchair had been gripping him by the chin. Now he starts to reach toward the guy's bare chest, thinking about the heart, and the guy says "Hey, I thought you weren't gonna take anything too-" He looks at the guy in the white coat, who is looking up at the ceiling and moving his lips silently, maybe praying.
    2. Demonic visions and possession, vampires and sirens and gods

      by , 09-09-2013 at 09:04 PM
      A teenage girl who's recently begun to see strange things, people who look different to her than they do to everybody else, demonic, eyes in the wrong places or no mouths, and so on - she's thinking about one man in particular, a mentor or father figure, who now looks inhuman to her. She believes this is a delusion. But she's run across a woman who obliquely refers to herself as inhuman, clearly believing that they're both the same; and the woman goes on to talk about various creatures like them gathering, organized by that particular father figure, and about a 'sister' who that father figure favors, and weighing the pros and cons of killing that 'sister.' It's clear this girl is the 'sister' being talked about, though neither of them realize it.

      This conversation had been happening at a food court in an airport while they were both waiting to meet other people, and eventually the girl put her head down on the table, folded her arms for a pillow and took a nap; when she woke up, another person was sitting next to her, a black-haired woman, talking to the first one, and when she sees the girl's waking up she tries to startle her. The girl doesn't get startled. The black-haired woman then says hello in a very odd, drawn-out tone.

      (Woke up. That odd, drawn-out tone was the sound of a chainsaw next door. Back to sleep.)

      Walking through mountains at night, talking about chocolate, and being followed by Gollum.

      Going along with Buffy's friends on some scheme they've come up with, now that she's dead.

      A small model of an obelisk, made out of salt.

      I'm possessing a young man in college, and I'm doing a terrible job of mimicking his normal behavior, all his housemates suspect something's up with him.

      Still in that college setting, a horror movie called 'Mandeathering' is recommended to me - I see a scene involving several creatures in a graveyard, one of them looking like Nosferatu and holding a child in his arms, described as a family that 'feeds on death,' and 'the weak ones' giving in to sadness or despair (though now I can't remember if 'the weak ones' were among the family or the ones they were feeding on). I google the movie, but think the guy recommending it must have gotten the title wrong, because none of the results I'm getting are for a horror movie; the first result is for a dream journal.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      On a ship, looking down at a human-shaped siren standing on an island and the man from my crew who's standing there with her. I'm thinking about going down there myself, but I'm also thinking about past experiences with things that call to you from the water, asking you to leave your ship. Never goes well.

      Fragment of one person chasing another on horseback on that same island, something to do with a god.
    3. Nightmare resulting in brief lucid, basilisk coat and unicorn horn.

      by , 09-05-2013 at 06:49 PM
      The lights in my IRL home won't turn on. None of them will, and I think of the darkness as a danger, which makes me wonder if this is a nightmare. I start to head down the stairs, by floating, head first. Yes, this is definitely a dream. I start to do my light-of-Apollo anti-nightmare trick, which after 2 uses appears to be my go-to way of avoiding nightmares now, but then it occurs to me that while I'm here, I could enjoy some lucid dreaming instead. I decide that there is no ceiling, so that when I look up, I'll see the night sky and be able to float up into it - and then I turn over and am pleased to see that this is so. After I've floated up into the stars, I look down to the house again to put the roof back on, and then, as if it was just a task I'd briefly delayed and had to get to now, I start up the anti-nightmare trick, and wake myself up in the process.

      (5:08 am, just half an hour after bed. As I was trying to get back to sleep, it occurred to me - this has happened a few times now, nightmares with this timing and on the theme of darkness - I'm starting to suspect this is the result of trying to sleep before dawn. Possibly on some level I'm aware that it's much darker than when I usually sleep, and my dream interprets that as something wrong. Reliable way of getting lucid, though, so that's not really a problem. Back to sleep.)

      Fragment: "Ancient papers, and an age a fraction of that."

      I'm discussing an upcoming ball with a young woman I'm acquainted with, leaning against her desk while she goes over the invitation, pointing out the bit where they encourage everyone to dress colorfully, and she, thinking herself quite clever and looking for me to praise her, tells me about the black outfit she's planning, so that she'll stand out in a sea of bright colors, and she asks what I think. I tell her I expect that's exactly what the people throwing the ball are planning themselves, so perhaps take that into account. She reconsiders, and asks what I'll be going with, as she can't picture me in anything but black. I say not at all, my basilisk coat is blue, isn't it? - it's entirely black except for the basilisk design but that's enough, and I think about the feel of that dark blue color, the warmth of that creature's image on my back. As I think about that coat I either am or am referencing The Etched City's Gwynn.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      OUAT's Belle is binding Rumpelstiltskin in a contract without realizing it. She was speaking in metaphors and he's got to abide by them literally. While the two of them were attempting to patch things up between them after a fight, she asked him to pretend she's the mistress and he the servant in their deal. He, sitting on the side of her bed, is thinking that they've done this before, thinking of a particular scene in which Julia was a princess and I was her servant, and how utterly beyond my reach she'd been then. (A scene from a dream I had years ago, accurately remembered as far as it goes, though he left out the unflattering parts.) He's been silent too long, and when Belle says something, he jumps up and makes a game out of it, addressing her as milady, going to her window and throwing the curtains open, asking what she'd like for her meal. And although she didn't at all mean that he should literally treat her as his mistress, only that she wanted him to think about things from her perspective for a moment, she's not surprised by the game and she takes it as a sign that all's well between them again, so she gets up to make breakfast herself.

      As she leaves the room, she finds a strange object in a corner of the hall - a statue of a unicorn that she hadn't noticed before, with what looks like a real horn. She knows Rumpelstiltskin's been after such horns, so she's wondering why he leaves one just lying around here - unless this is what he makes out of them. She thinks it's odd, and goes on about her chores, when she finds another one, smaller, in a window sill. She knows that wasn't there before, and she calls to Rumpelstiltskin, and turns to see that he's already found the first one, and is looking at it with obvious displeasure. This is something that shouldn't be in the castle.

      (Woke up. That last one was almost certainly influenced by watching Legend the other day.)
    4. Hera in a maze and Hemlock Grove

      by , 09-03-2013 at 08:48 PM
      I'm in a maze full of doors that lead to other worlds. The people with me have decided to take a door that leads out onto a snow-covered wasteland, they think this is going to lead them to our ultimate destination, but I have my doubts. I'm sure they're just going to wind up back here with a lot of wasted effort. So I let them go while I stay in the maze. After the door's shut behind them, I open it again, just to get another look, and while I can see them, the dream briefly switches to their perspective, showing that they can't see me or the doorway; our realities are out of sync.

      In the maze, I try to take a path roughly in line with the path they're taking through the wasteland, so that we can meet up again when they inevitably wind up back here. I check through doors once in a while to make sure we're still going the same way. But eventually I run across other people in the maze, and I discover people are gravitating towards a set of locked double doors with two keyholes to either side. This is the door my group's been looking for. But we don't have a key, and neither do any of the people clustered around. Hera approaches me in the form of an incredibly tall and slightly muscular woman, with long red hair and a peacock blue dress that clings to her body. She's looking for something too, but not a key, and she asks me why I'm looking for one. I explain to her that like the others I'd joined up with, I'd simply woken up alone in a vast, seemingly empty room, so big I couldn't see the walls or the ceiling, and eventually I'd worked my way here. As we're talking I realize that she's Roman, not Greek. She tells me she can get me through the door.

      As we go through the door I'm starting to focus on how attractive she is, and I hear a warning, something I think of as a quote, about the risk for dealing with gods "to become not ascension but craving." I acknowledge this but decide to go with craving anyway, she's very attractive. On the other side of the door we're in my IRL home. However, although I didn't notice anything odd at the time, once I took her out of the maze setting the DC stopped showing any personality; I carried her to the couch, but when we sat down she disappeared entirely. The dream storyline switched to a visit from my IRL father who starts 'getting the trees ready for winter' which involves ropes and makes me feel lazy for not doing it myself, and a sitcom involving two elderly men teasing their sullen young relative about just ignoring what you don't want to hear.

      (Woke up. Felt like those last scenes, my father and the sitcom, were both about me making the wrong decision with Hera. Back to sleep.)

      I'm Roman from Hemlock Grove. Olivia's lying on the stairs and I've had a taste of her blood, and it's put me in something of a trance. I'm thinking about the difference between love and lust. Peter knocking at the door snaps me out of it, but I watch Olivia stand up and walk up the stairs before I answer the door. I make tea, though he doesn't want any. He's picked up one of Olivia's shoes off the rack by the door and is fiddling with it, pacing around the kitchen.

      Fragments:

      I'm a teenage boy who gets into fights too often, trying to explain to a girl the reason why.

      I'm in a setting that looks based on the 1800's, getting into my uncle's carriage, although my uncle's surprised I want to come and warns me against it - I lie about the reason I want a ride, saying something about the walking path along the way. He accepts the lie and offers me a bulb of garlic.
    5. A nightmare, a pair of Mad Hatters, and Faustian bargains.

      by , 09-02-2013 at 07:08 PM
      There's some flyers warning about the invisible people from the community just outside of town, causing trouble. I'm annoyed at the whole us vs. them attitude people always have when they talk about those guys, just going to make things worse between us. But as I walk down towards main street, where a parade is going on, I see a few people from that community outside of town, except they're painted with this strange dark camouflage, makes them look like an oil slick. They're trashing the cars parked along the street. No one else notices. My perspective switches to third person - they're invisible. No one else can see them, the cars seem to just break on their own. Back to my perspective - in the parade, two horses are walking past us, and a camouflaged guy jumps onto one of them and digs his hands into its skull until it cracks and blood runs down. The dream switches to third person, so the guy is invisible, and the dream's focus follows the horse as it rears and falls, and the panicking people around it.

      Memory gap, but with the impression that things got increasingly nightmarish from there, a fragment about a cabin with a door leading out onto darkness, until at some point I do the light-of-Apollo trick, thinking that it worked last time I had a nightmare so might as well try it again, and that clears things up, but also wakes me up.

      (It had only been half an hour since I went to bed. Back to sleep.)

      Fragment: OUAT's Mad Hatter chatting with "Joker," a similar Mad Hatter type character but with a playing card style red-and-black costume.

      A man riding in the back of a limo is yelling at his driver to turn around. The driver isn't listening. Finally, the driver does turn the car around, and then stops it - not because of the man's threats, but because they've reached their destination. The man in the back of the limo jumps out of the car, but then realizes he recognizes the place where they've stopped.

      He's at the gate to a mansion, a place he's been before. The owner of the mansion is just driving up opposite, and when the owner sees this man standing outside his home, he stops the car and gets out, pissed off. The guy who'd been in the limo has made a few comments in the past about the mansion owner's "perfect wife" which were meant innocently but were taken badly, and also a comment about how he thinks he's going to die in that mansion, which the mansion owner interpreted as an intent to buy/steal that mansion away from him. The owner only recently acquired this mansion, and this wealth.

      As he's yelling, I, as a disembodied observer, am noting that he isn't looking good. His eyes are paler, he's looking a little scruffy, and in general, increasingly devil-ish - right on schedule. The rider in the limo certainly thinks of him as the Devil, exactly as we wanted, but the man himself isn't aware of the way he's being manipulated and transformed due to the Faustian bargains he's made, he's completely unaware of any supernatural influence.

      A truck driving past crashes into the side of the Devil-figure's car and breaks the mirror. Attention caught, the Devil-in-the-making turns away from the guy with the limo, reaches into the truck and grabs the guy inside - a tall, skinny man with curly red hair, and a strong smell of coal. The cab is littered with cigarette butts and many, many matchbooks from the place where the Devil-figure's wife works.

      Fragment: A father paying his daughter to take the boat out at a certain time, the creation of an alibi.
    6. Valerian root and blue lotus

      by , 08-27-2013 at 05:52 PM
      (After valerian root was mentioned in a previous dream, I looked it up and found it was used for insomnia, and gave it a shot in an effort to get my sleep schedule back in order - I've been going to sleep around 6-7 am, a good 2-3 hours later than I prefer. Marvelously effective tea, managed to get to sleep before dawn. Predictably, dream recall was terrible - but since I'm only using the tea to help me get back to my usual sleep schedule and don't intend to use it long-term, that's acceptable.)

      Just the one fragment: an image of an absurdly beautiful man representing either St. Michael or Apollo, with a comparison between the blue of his eyes, the blue-within-blue eyes of Dune, and the blue lotus.
    7. Critiquing dream magic applications, books, Bush, witches and Superman.

      by , 08-24-2013 at 09:44 PM
      3rd person. A military camp at night, raining hard, ground's mostly mud, the dogs and eagles used for running messages are having a rough time of it - at which point the dream switches to 1st person. I'm standing outside the dream, watching it, complaining to a woman with me about the use of animal messengers. "These people can create magic doorways linking one place to another, why are they still using messengers? Why do they even have supply lines?" She tries to say it's probably just shorthand, but I'm not impressed by this excuse. It annoys me that magic is only being used for flashy combat techniques and such when it could be put to so much better logistic use, it's a complete waste of manpower.

      The next ASOIAF book comes out, and I skim the first few chapters and find a pleasant surprise: another Melisandre POV chapter. I settle in to read.

      3rd person, following a woman who works at a newsstand that former president Bush II used to walk past every day as part of his routine, a long time ago. Now he's here with a bandage around his head, blood showing through, looking dazed. This happens twice. Both times he's found and picked up by his own security, but the woman is thinking to herself he 'looks the way he did in 2004,' meaning on the verge of death. The second time this happens he nearly walks into traffic, looking as if this isn't something he wants to do but is unable to stop himself. Unable to think straight, his mind is following an old routine.

      A woman took me back to her home and left me to sleep, and now I'm hiding behind a door and watching her tend to a crying man, seeming to comfort him. In actuality, the scarf she wears around her hair is soaked in tears; this is how the witch feeds.

      (Woke up with comparisons to Circe on my mind for that last one. Back to sleep.)

      3rd person following a couple who meet for lunch every day, sitting at the outdoor tables of a cafe in a major city. He's a writer, and she used to read his stories during her breaks and tell him what she thought at lunch, but with this most recent book she finds she's got less and less time for it and finds herself making excuses: "I had a few moments in class, but..." He dislikes that she seems to feel obligated to read it, and tries to tell her there's no reason she should be spending all her free time on his writing, but when he says this out loud it just sounds like they're drifting apart. He gives her a peck on the cheek as they stand up from the table, and as he leaves he passes two women bending their heads together for a kiss.

      I'm running some kind of transdimensional superhero team (though everyone here's wearing suits and ties, thank god, or casual clothes in Banner's case; no spandex in sight), and we've just encountered this reality's version of Superman, a version who grew up not on Earth but as the only living creature on a dead planet, raised by recordings, never understanding what had happened to everybody else.
    8. Chiron

      by , 08-10-2013 at 10:32 PM
      I'm drinking with a dead soldier from ancient Greece, and we started out talking about Dionysus and Hades but we've gotten around to talking about Chiron in comparison to Buer, and he complains to me that Chiron's been greatly misrepresented, which he blames on a line in Homer that people take out of context. He says that Homer had some nerve to characterize the guy as overly fastidious while he was killing everything "from here to Salamacia" - meaning some campaign they'd been on together, and I see the soldier's memory of Chiron washing the blood and dirt off in a river, stripped to the waist and with so much blood on his hands it looks nearly black. He's human; extraordinarily tall, but human.
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