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As Constantine, I'm strapped to a chair again while a man in a suit - a different one from last time, older - is loading a film strip into a projector. When he turns it on, it shows an external shot of Ravenscar. I remember this moment in time, this guy with the projector - this is when I was sealed off from magic. It wound up only being temporary, but the observer side of me is terrified of getting caught in the start of that without being able to stick around long enough to come out the other side. I don't want those mental associations getting into my head. I bail out of Constantine's perspective.

I'm on a small boat, the size of a rowboat but moving under its own power, taking me and several others in their own boats across a lake. It's surrounded by walls, artificially made, rounded so that the lake as a whole is circular - I associate this with the moon. The walls are composed of several giant slabs of pale stone, many of them carved with some message in hieroglyphics. Once I notice this, I have the boat back up to the first stone with carvings on it. It starts with the name of the artist and a short line in praise of the king who commissioned this work. The next panel includes two jackals, along with a lot of hieroglyphics I can't read, and I wonder whether the jackals are Wepwawet or someone else - there's nothing that looks like a name or a title, even among the hieroglyphics I can't read. In fact, I'm not sure I should call them hieroglyphics at all - aside from that first panel with the artist's name, the rest of this represents concepts, not words. The symbols I can recognize on the third panel include two rattles and a woman kneeling. This represents music and dance. It becomes clear to me that this entire series of symbols is depicting a prayer ritual - not just depicting it; the walls themselves are a prayer given physical form.

There's a woman who's been running from a very powerful man, and I've agreed to bring her back to him. But the powerful man isn't the one I'm doing this for - the woman's uncle is the one who made a deal with me. For the sake of the rest of his family, he needs to stay in that powerful man's good graces. Now that woman's standing on some platform above me, I'm on the ladder below. She's pointing to two objects on that platform just out of my line of sight, saying, "This is that gun you've been waving around, and this-" But I don't stop to hear the second part - I reach up and knock that gun off the platform, out of both of our reach. She tries to stop me, holding a knife, but she reacts too slowly, the gun's already gone. She shouldn't have wasted time trying to talk with me. We struggle over the knife for a bit, and I manage to turn it so it winds up embedded in the wooden platform instead of in me, but she recovers from that and quickly escapes before I can climb up the ladder.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

My partner and I are breaking a group of men out of a jail or dungeon or something similar. The men insist on taking the time to steal water from this place before they leave - they don't believe me when I tell them the place we're going will have plenty of water. It's faster to let them do it than to try to convince them - but for crying out loud, could you at least stick to the relatively sanitary stuff? Finally we get them moving, and we head up a flight of stairs, my partner leading them, me hanging behind to make sure we're not followed. I wind up falling further behind than I intended; at the top of the flight of stairs, we cross a long hallway with paintings on the walls, and then head down another flight of stairs. By this point I've fallen so far behind that I've lost them.

At the bottom of the flight of stairs, I'm in a place that's something like an airport lounge for travel between worlds, a transportation hub. The people here are speaking French, and I talk to one of them to confirm that I've arrived in the location we'd intended. Through a floor-to-ceiling glass window, there's a great view of the ocean and several green islands. It also overlooks several other glass corridors running through this place, and I see my partner leading the men from the jailbreak through one of them. They look completely bewildered. One of them sees me and gestures, clearly wondering how I managed to get over there. I should join them, but honestly, no one's chasing us, my partner's got the babysitting side of things covered, and that ocean looks really inviting.

After flying over the ocean for a while enjoying the view, I come across an area where a few people are swimming. I drop down into the water and join them. The further I go, the more crowded it becomes - it's beginning to get irritating. I try to talk with someone who seems interesting, but there's a woman right next to us showing off some kind of athletic feat who's talking constantly and difficult to hear over. I comment, "She's very loud, isn't she?" She immediately gets louder, ridiculously loud, and I remember that narrative versus command thing I'd been thinking about yesterday. Whoops. "Be quiet, please," I tell her, and while that's a command, she immediately goes back to a normal volume. Deciding to use the narrative to clear a little more space, I close my eyes, lose visuals, and describe the space clearing out - but while it does feel like I've got a little more space to move, when I open my eyes again, I find I'm opening my real ones.

A woman's feeling every bone in her wings break in half, one at a time, methodically, starting at the tips and working their way up. This isn't happening now - it's a memory. I'm not even sure it was originally her memory - this woman doesn't have wings now and I don't know if she ever did. But she's feeling the pain of it as if it were happening to her now.

She's strapped to a chair, and a man in a suit has just taken his hand away from the top of her head, ending her experience of that memory. He didn't get the reaction he wanted. He says something to the effect of "I was saving this for a reward, but-" and puts his hand on her head again.

This time she sees a memory of Constantine strapped to that same chair, from the perspective of a woman speaking to him. The woman runs her finger under his jaw - he makes a joke about how he would've shaved, but there's this whole held prisoner thing. Although I'm in third person throughout this dream, and although visually, I'm seeing this particular image from the perspective of that woman speaking, same as the woman in the chair is, nonetheless I feel the sensation of her finger on my/his jaw, unusually vividly tactile.

The man in the suit takes his hand away again. From what he's saying now, I get the impression that the woman strapped to the chair loves Constantine, and that this man and the group he's with are using that to groom her to kill him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

At a school, two boys close to graduation are lying in a field, watching a group of underclassmen playing some sport nearby. There's an underclassman in that game who one of them sort of took under his wing, and now the kid's developed a crush on him. The other boy is saying, great, take him home, get him "thoroughly raunched." The first boy takes this as a joke, says that he's not interested in anyone else, and kisses his throat. The other boy goes distant and pulls away. He resents emotional attachment - the first boy hasn't figured that out yet, but he will.

Hellblazer, I/Constantine had been working with this teenage girl in the previous scene; now she's gone alone to a hospital to see her kid brother. He's in a ward with a lot of beds, and he's kneeling up on the end of his bed to talk to her. He's saying, "Is it possible that Grace is only after Constantine?" Grace is a surname - the Grace in question is a middle-aged man. And when the kid says Constantine, 'uncle' is implied. "Because he's not exactly a... us anymore." 'Us' meaning a person, a human being. I'd made one deal too many. Which has made it possible for me to be summoned up and controlled, used as a tool - that's what they suspect Grace is after.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After an unsuccessful night looking for blood, I have to rely on Elsa, a sort of servant. Last resort. We use transfusion tubes to draw out the blood, to avoid any unwanted side effects on her, and I alter her mind to make it pleasant for her. I compliment her on the quality, she's changed her diet since the last time we had to do this. I'm speaking German-accented English.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm climbing up a stairwell, climbing up through years. As I pass the platform that will lead to the 1990s, getting close to home, I hear voices up ahead. I come across a man and a woman leaning against the wall; the woman's saying, "No, it's 203. They changed the calendar - finally. I was starting to lose track."

Further up, another group having a conversation, talking about the cracks in the walls. A woman's saying, "They're glitching so bad a man could get in."

I reach my door, present day. But just beside my door, the cracks in the walls are so severe that they've formed a sort of second door - I think I could walk right through. The black sort of skittering motion that appears in all the cracks is more visible here. But the scene just before I entered the stairwell had involved accidentally intruding in a place where I shouldn't be, disrespectfully, and trying to make up for that. I decide against stepping through the cracks. I take the door to the present day.

I step out into what's meant to be an apartment where I live, distorted in a sort of cartoonish representation of hallucination, like you might see in an old music video; it seems to be underwater. Then my field of vision pulls back - now I'm looking at a screen containing an image of this room. It's labeled as a game preview. I'm aware that if I'd stepped through the cracks, the scene still wouldn't have lasted for much longer, since this is only a preview - but that's where the real storyline would begin.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've taken my clockwork heart out of my chest to work on it. I have a mental association with the Snow Queen. I'm in my workshop, full of various clockwork devices, and I'm carrying on a conversation with my apprentice. The image changes to show the subject of our conversation - a bird whose flight over the desert is taking it over a pair of dark horses at the moment. I'm saying, "It doesn't matter if the bird is clockwork or flesh and blood." Either way, it'll fly the same repetitive pattern every year.

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.

As Hemlock Grove's Roman, me and Peter have just entered this old abandoned tower, and I'm showing off some of the tricks I've picked up since the last time we saw each other. I turn myself into a cloud of bats, thinking of this as something I'd learned from that one previous dream, and I come out of it high on the wall, looking down at Peter watching me, able to hold myself up against the vertical wall just by gripping with my hands - it's not completely effortless, but it's still easy. It's a rush. I'm having so much fun showing off with Peter, I want to laugh. This makes me start thinking something about connections with people, and then there's a memory gap.

The next scene I remember is in a different part of the same building, the memory gap only lasted for about one or two changes of scene. I'd climbed up into the metal rafters and I've been heading up in a spiral, and I've just come across a closed door; but I'm not playing around anymore, I'm in a hurry, either chasing or being chased by something. The door has no handle on this side, so I hammer on it and shout, "Open the door. Open the door, mom!" (I was thinking of someone specific by 'mom', but whoever she was, it wasn't my IRL mother or the mother of the character I'd started the scene as - I'm not sure I'm still playing his role by this point.) Door still doesn't open, and I'm not surprised. I step back and look at it. There's no way to open it from this side, just a keyhole big enough to look through - I can see some light through it, and I have the feeling I'm meant to look through it, and that thought pisses me off. I grip the side of the door, forcing my fingers into the gap between the door and the frame, and I wrench it open.

The other side of the door leads to somewhere else completely, unconnected to the building I was just in. It's incredibly vivid, nothing like the dream I'd been having up until this point - which hadn't seemed un-vivid in any way, but I'm thinking of this as a completely different way of seeing things. I'm in a stone hallway, brownish-yellowish stones, filled with many doors, all of them wooden, arched, narrow, dull red. I still have that sense of being in a hurry, and I immediately go to open the first door to my left. But as I do, I hear a woman's voice - the mother I'd referred to before - shouting this strangled "No!" and I hear the sound of a door closing, and footsteps in a hurry. And then I'm awake.

(Really awake, none of the usual transition, just footsteps and "No!" and suddenly in my bed with my eyes open. Was convinced I'd been woken up by the actual front door and actual footsteps - which is not unusual, I sleep while other people are up - but no, just the dream. Back to sleep.)

As Constantine (rhymes with turpentine), I've been in a police interrogation room for a while now when they let in this elegant older woman to see me, calling her "Mrs. Constantine." She's supposed to be my mother, which is a lie of course, my mother being long dead, but I instantly play along with the act. Memory gap, and then I'm being put in a holding cell, and I try to convince someone I pass along the way to have the police find that woman and pick her up, quick. Not sure I made myself clear, though, I'd been passing out, having a hard time staying conscious. I can see the brown smoke of her spell wrapping around me. Blacked out.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I had a classroom scene, so I went lucid and walked out. I didn't have any particular destination in mind aside from getting out of the school, and the first door that I reached for took me into the kitchens - still meant to be part of the school. The next door I can find is a refrigerator door, and I give that a shot - no good, I open it and find food inside. I think to myself that this is probably too strong an association to bother trying again, so I remove the refrigerator from the wall. There's a white wooden door behind it. This one opens onto a satisfyingly different scene - rolling green hills and a mountain in the distance that I mentally compare to Mt. Fuji from its size and the way it dominates the landscape, though otherwise they don't look alike.

I walk along a paved road leading towards that mountain. At one point I come across a house, and the road divides so that one path leads up a slope to that building and down again to rejoin the main road on the other side, and I'm admiring the organic shape of both the road and the house. It's a white one-story building composed of several rounded rooms, with a reddish-brown shingled roof with little spires over each rounded room. There were quite a few plants that I was admiring, and gardening tools, but I knew this was going to be too much detail for me to remember, and a lot of it didn't have any IRL comparisons I could easily make, to make it easier to remember. I focus on a couple woven baskets lying on a bench, with lids with little spires like the ones on the roof, the last thing I focus on as the path leads me back down to the main road.

The path leads me into a town, or a small city maybe, starting in a little square with two clocks standing on black iron poles. Both of them show the same time, 3:00, with the second hand pointing down at the 6; a bell tolls, and then they both run backwards, until every hand points to the top, midnight exactly.

The path leads on to another square, this one with a big brass bell. There are a fair number of people in the streets around me now, but I'm only paying attention to one - a man standing beneath that bell. He calls me over. He's this older man, and I mentally compare him to Mister Rogers, that sort of friendly and wise and harmless impression. His speech is slurred and very deliberate, as if he has a hard time forming English words. He says quite a few things about me heading for the mountain, and preparing for that, and he mentions K., an old IRL friend who I haven't gotten in touch with for a long time. I'm a little frustrated by knowing I'm not going to be able to remember all these details when I wake up, and I'm having a hard time picking and choosing which parts to focus on, but I hold up a hand to stop him and ask about K., ask him to clarify - is he saying I need K. with me at the mountain, that I can't do it alone? He's surprised by the question. He says, no, you can go on alone. And he compares me to "a dry martini: high in the hand, but hard to keep it." Okay, that's suitably convoluted phrasing that I'm definitely not going to remember that unless I wake up now. I choose to wake up so I can remember at least some of what he's said. I regret this decision almost instantly.

My IRL sisters are visiting me and we've been bickering as we walk to the door of my IRL house. There's a dead girl standing in the driveway, staring at the door, and - sarcastically, it's related to what we were bickering about - I say to her something along the lines of "Well? Are you coming in, too?" This is said more for my sisters' benefit than for the dead girl; she doesn't seem to react.

Inside, I get online and read a news article. The powerful old guard of some country have been giving themselves promotions. One man is referred to by the titles Ulmo (name taken from Tolkien, but at the time I believed it was a reference to some eastern European mythology) and Eleusis, and a rank which translates to Old Knight. The Ulmo of myth is (in this dream) associated with beginnings and the dawn, and that was symbolic for this man's political duties, but as these people have given themselves promotions those myth-derived titles have become more literal - he can now literally control dawn, and other forms of time related to the beginnings of things.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a caterpillar in my IRL house. I pick it up, and although it keeps wriggling away, I eventually manage to take it outside. When I put it down in the grass, it immediately tries to get back inside, and I realize there's a beetle out there it's trying to get away from. The beetle tells me that this is the spirit of a dead girl. It tells me a story about this girl and a hockey player who's also now dead, and about two guys who took a deal not to talk about something that happened between two hockey players and two girls. I see the hockey player and the dead girl on a train, and she's staring blankly into space with these wide, round eyes.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm watching an extended version of Near Dark with various extras. The one I'm watching seems to be an interview, but with the characters themselves, not the cast/crew. The family's standing around a Cadillac convertible, and Caleb's talking to someone about how he first joined the family, a long time ago. He'd been driving with a woman, she'd been drunk, when the family found them she hadn't realized the danger they were in. He talks about Mae, and then he holds up her hand and says "and lucky me - no ring." He laughs. Jesse looks a little disgusted by the way Caleb talks about Mae, but he laughs too. Caleb's wearing a belt buckle shaped like the head of a snake with fangs bared.

I decide to go back to the main menu. This isn't just for Near Dark, but for a wide variety of movies, and one displays a picture of John Constantine with a title that references immortality and love and/or betrayal. The menu images are constantly shifting, and he slips off the screen. There are at least two layers of the image, and I think of those layers as somehow acting as mirrors, both of the viewer and of each other. By changing the angle I'm standing at, I get Constantine back in view.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Someone's telling a story. The listener asks, "Was it the wrath of heaven?" The storyteller shakes her head. "It was the wrath of the humans." Following someone's advice led to some captured human surviving and leaving the fortress where the storyteller lived, an isolated building in the center of a vast field stretching to the horizon, the only landmark I can see. He returned with many soldiers. As a disembodied observer standing on the top of that fortress, I can hear the soldiers shouting to each other. They're speaking Korean, I don't understand them.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A setting based on a fantasy version of ancient China. An elegantly dressed woman is telling a terrified human man to "call me elder sister." He frantically agrees, although he nearly calls her something more along the lines of 'mistress' as he does so; he's thinking about her connection to his master. She releases him and walks off, through a fence, passing through the solid object like it's not there. Looking at this, the man says or thinks "What a way for owls to fly around at night."

A similar fantasy China setting. There's a man leading a human woman around a palace, talking about truth and the inability to lie. "Like this," the woman says, holding up the candle she was given by the woman who rules this place. It has words carved into it, which she believes promises her safe passage in some fashion. He laughs, and says that's a careful bit of phrasing, which causes her to look concerned. He reads it out, and it says something along the lines of "The human will want/feel no hunger." He points out that this statement will be true even if she stays here forever - she won't want food, she won't feel hunger. But actually eating solid food that will sustain her life, or returning to her own world to do so - that's a different subject entirely, and it's not covered by the carefully-phrased promise on the candle.

In a modern setting, I'm staying somewhere for the night with a small group of other people. Other groups are here as well, and there's concerns about space, so when I finally see the room we've been given I'm surprised by how big it is. There aren't many beds, but there's a lot of floor space, there should be no problem. We all sort out spaces for our bedrolls, and some of us go over the movies we have between us. I wonder if I can convince the others to put on Near Dark. The floor's becoming crowded, and I just manage to find a space for my backpack; on top of the backpack I place a stuffed animal shaped like a dog, which I'm aware contains a guardian dog spirit who protected me from the ghost of a dead girl earlier tonight.

Bela Lugosi as Dracula, waltzing with a woman in a long pale dress. I'm seeing them in black and white, like a movie.

A late-for-school dream - usually for me those are about feeling unprepared, but this one was much more positive. IRL setting, I'm outside when I see the bus pull up, and while most of my school supplies are inside, I have a few necessities with me, a notebook lying in the snow, so rather than go back inside for all my things and miss the bus for sure, I grab what I have and sprint for it. I miss it anyway, but the bus for the middle school pulls up behind it and they're heading in the same direction, so as it pulls away, I jump on the back and hold on, intending to switch to the high school bus when there's a chance. We hit a fork in the road and we lose the bus I want, but I'm confident I can meet up with it later.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Lady Liberty's torch being referred to poetically as the light of 2 things, one being the light of reason.

I'm John Constantine, in a bar, showing off by handing out predictions. It's a con, they're all just stuff I made up. But what I didn't know at the time was, by speaking predictions in that particular place, specifically by putting them in words, I was dooming them to come true. If I'd known, I would've come up with something nicer for myself. Made some (Hannibal-inspired) reference to a 'red dragon' I would have left out.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A separated or divorced couple, the ex-wife calls her ex-husband to ask if their oldest is with him. The dream 'camera' changes to show their youngest of 3, sleeping in a crib in the father's home; he's got a vestigial tail. They intend to have this surgically removed, but it hasn't been done yet. His paternal grandmother is standing over the cradle, thinking about that tail, and holding a gun in her hand. The father comes in then and stops her; the mother, still on the phone, hears enough to get an idea of what's going on, and she thinks, 'She's not wrong. Our species is a threat to yours.'