Recent DJ Posts

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.

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.