Recent DJ Posts

Sep 23 2018

Four nights lucid in a row! PB!

[D] FA where I'm in bed, feeling my breath intensely. I can see two spheres of breath rotating and flowing throughout themselves, as if each of them is tearing itself inside out. The spheres are located a few inches in front of my face and are about 5 inches in diameter each. They're arranged one atop the other forming a sort of figure 8. I shift to seeing this in third person from the left side. Maybe they're feeding into each other? But I see and feel their movement aligned with my even, deep breaths.

[?] Wrote something in my DJ but can only vaguely make out the words "tonight", "Jesus", and "fool". Awoke 5:30am.

[L] In 9. The dream starts in my bedroom. My bunk is high, almost shoulder level (like one of my old dorm rooms). There are some assorted items laid out on the bed. It's dark outside. I'm trying to find something. The dream shifts to the front yard briefly, then to the kitchen. I need to make F a BLT without lettuce or tomato, on a long sourdough slice. For some reason I'm trying to find a saucepan (maybe to cook the bacon?) but the only one I can find is submerged in water in a white bowl next to the sink. The pan has a thin coating of spaghetti sauce on it. Around this point I become lucid, or rather reach the threshold of awareness, but decide not to do anything about it and to observe instead. I don't consciously control anything, from dream body to dream logic. I put down the slices of toast in the toaster, and they seem too long but somehow change dimensions to fit. At first the slices are vertical as expected, but after looking away and back, they are arranged horizontally at the bottom of the toaster. I'm talking to F this whole time. Finally I tell her "I'm lucid". She doesn't really react. I decide to do something improvised, a coordinated reality check. I hold out my palm and either through speech/nonverbal command or through expectation, I have her stick her finger through my palm. It worked! However now I couldn't really see her, and could see through her. She was transparent and I could clearly read some text behind her that took the form of her body. The dream shifted quickly and I was outside the kitchen looking in, and the lights were off. I said aloud "lights on!" and some dim lights came on but not all. The dream started to fade. I remembered to do math but lost the dream before I could. When I awoke I tried to DEILD, however I could only see the emerging scene if I strained my eyes to the bottom-right corner; there were maybe 5 or 6 scenes that emerged. When I opened my eyes it was around 6:40.

[F] I find myself outside a sliding glass door with a family inside. They let me in, they're part of a resistance and they're hiding me from someone; before this I was in a ditch. This was in-depth but unfortunately my pen ran out of ink.

[D] I was in a church library. There were bookcases that slid apart, and I was shoved inside. Inside it was dark and there were others. We could see through the cracks of light left by the books. After several implied weeks of pleading my case that we weren't able to read the books in the dark, those imprisoning us finally gave us some better quarters. It was some sort of speakeasy establishment, and our quality of life went up (we had alcohol and other entertainment) but now some of the black prisoners were slaves/barmaids.

Sep 24 2018

I had at least four dreams but can only remember two. I'm trying to utilize a memory palace for dream recall when I don't have a physical DJ next to my bed, but it's not always working (although it does help a bit).

[D] I'm in the backyard of 9, in full knight's armor. I'm carrying a metal jug of gasoline or urine. It's daytime outside and I'm splashing this mystery liquid all over the lawn; I get some on my neighbor's fence.

[D] After a longish dream, I find myself sleeping 9's garage. There are several pillows, and one of them is fancy but makes no sense (day residue from a stupid sweater one of the Property Brothers was wearing). It's made by George (the Walmart brand). It was very visually vivid (and mentally/perceptually clear) at this point, and I think if I didn't get involved with the dream drama I could've easily become lucid. I was in a sling chair but now I'm in some sort of giant furniture bucket looking at a late 90's desktop and monitor. My dad comes in and talks to me for a bit. I decide to go inside and sleep on the couch (worried about bugs). When I go to shut down my computer though, my C drive disappears! I think my hard drive somehow unmounted itself (in the dream I thought somehow it got disconnected/shaken loose). It's a weird mix of XP and Vista and 7 and when I open the start menu I can't search for anything in the search bar. I start freaking out about my computer, eventually I wake up.

Date of Dream: THU 13 JUL - 2017



Dream No. 152 - SML's Bird Cage Ruination

The dream started off with my family at the beach but I forgot what we were doing specifically. We were in the car, planning to head back home and that's when the dream scene shifted. I was now in a lighthouse and I could hear a commotion going on at the other end of it. I peeked through the doorless doorway to see my brother, whom was being threatened by Logan. There was a bird cage in between Logan and my brother and Logan was going to lock him in there! I was going to go and stop Logan myself but then my brother had a look on his face like he didn't want help from anyone.

So instead, I called for Dreamy WB to go and sort Logan out... In this dream, Dreamy WB had responded immediately! She appeared as a hologram above the bird cage, with her hair in a low bun and wearing her glasses. For the whole time, she was smiling at me through the doorway and then she winked at me, that's when she vanished. Then I saw the bird cage start to shake and then it had collapsed and fallen down, its roof and walls laying on the floor like a bunch of wire trays. Then the bird cage had vanished altogether.

What reappeared in the same spot was a big pile of random debris but it didn't look like blasted, damaged wire. Instead, the pieces were like massive squares of this rubber material, like you would see on a playground swing. My brother still had a blank reaction on his face but I could see that Logan wasn't happy at all. Logan was standing at the debris, with his face in a moaning shape and tapping his foot in frustration. That's all I can remember about this dream.



Dream Trophies Achieved:
- Optical Illusion (See Dreamy WB wearing glasses in a dream)
>> That one time she was visible, she had her glasses on.
- Eccentric Dream Guide (Witness Dreamy WB do something she's never done before)
>> Turning Logan's cage into squares of useless debris has got to be a winner in my eyes for this trophy!
- I can't see you (Have Dreamy WB act as an invisible force in your dream)
>> During the whole duration of wrecking that cage... Logan doesn't even know who did it.

Date of Dream: SAT 20 MAY - 2017



Dream No. 116 - Separated Sections

Dream 116 A - The Ginger Vampire (Nightmare)
I remember my dad was angry at me for something, I forgot what for exactly though. We were arguing quite a lot and he started to shout. I then decided I would take a walk around the block of the old neighbourhood. It started off okay but when I got to the top of the hill. There was this one house where a big white dog was behind the fence, barking it's head off... It was loud and scary. I walked past the house as quickly as I could and went back down the hill on the other side of the block. When I was at the bottom of the hill, there was this non-existent shop selling all these bags of potato chips, it's hard to describe because you couldn't see a shop but then apparently there was one.

I came back home with a few packets of chips to find that now my mum was angry with me. Apparently she was angry for the way I was talking to my dad earlier, so why was she blaming me? Because she's always sticking up for my dad no matter what. Soon though she calmed down and said that she needed to go to the shops. I said to her I could come but she wanted to keep putting it off because she couldn't be bothered. I said I'd be willing to go with her really early in the morning so she could get it out of the way and have the rest of the day free.

So we did go to the so called shops at the time the dream stated to be 9:30 AM. As we were sitting in the car in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere, our ginger cat slinked up to my side of the car. She wasn't bad at the moment but I did notice that something was going to be off. My mum said something like “Zizi! You spent two and a half hours to come and look for us!”. Still, I wanted to find a way to shut my car window but I couldn't... The window was stationary and couldn't move. Then we hopped out of the car and that's when my cat turned really dark. She was hissing and making these long noises, at my mum first but my mum seemed to still be overwhelmed with awe... Like she was oblivious to the cat's demising nature. And then the cat turned to me and made even louder noises. Additionally, her teeth were showing. The most prominent feature were the added two white fangs that were massive and looked like white pearly daggers with a clean cut edge, just ready to slice some meat off a bone. The cat quickly made me wake up in fright at 4:57 AM.

Dream 116 B - Escaping Imprisonment
I was at my old house again, this time the dream was based in the backyard and a small section of the front yard. I started off in the backyard on the verandah where there were two beds... One was mine and the other one was grandma's. I was doing something in bed but I forgot what though and my grandma told me off. As soon as she did that, I had the thought in my head that I had no freedom at home and that I needed to leave and go somewhere else so I could get freedom that was being taken away by the other members of my family. The way I worded it to myself in muttering was, “I think I need a lucid dreaming partner, and fast”.

My grandma then got out of bed and started using a saw to cut small bits off the verandah at a time, like making an incision and then the little square chunk would break off. Although she had no physical contact me, a big cut was starting to appear on my thumb and bright red blood was oozing out of the wound. That's when I knew I had to get away now! The dream did show snapshots of me looking on my phone and during that time, I got the prompt to go to WB's place supposedly located in the far SE suburbs in the dream, to escape and seek refuge there.

I did tell my grandma that I was leaving to go somewhere and that's when she gets into a panic, calling my mum to come outside. Before my mum can get out, I decided to go to the other side of the house and try and hide there. That didn't work as my mum ended up popping her head out of the door on the laundry side. She asked me where I was going but I gave no details of WB. I only said to her that I thought it was time for me to find a dream partner and so I was going. I then zipped over back to the verandah side of the house but found out that my mum already had her head out the door. My brain in the dream thought that there could possibly be two of my mum... Or she could have teleported to each door. So she's still going off at me but at the same time, she let me leave.

So I went to the back gate and tried to pick the lock off so I could get out. As I was doing so, I could hear my mum saying to me “You'd better not go that way or dad will know”. The dream scene then showed my front porch area. My brother said something like “You'd better look out for Karla, she's trying to go somewhere”. The dream then went back to the backyard. I was frantically trying to lock the gate so the boys wouldn't get any sign of me being there. Then like Super Mario, when he receives the balloon power flower in Super Mario 64 DS, I started floating in the opposite direction towards the very back fence.

As I was floating, I could also hear myself singing to the music associated with that Mario soundtrack. Still, I was in a panic that my dad was going to get me if I didn't get away soon... That he'd be after me. It took a while to get out of the neighbourhood but when I did, I didn't panic as much. I then found myself floating down the Eastlink which I soon determined to be the wrong freeway. After a left turn, I then found myself correctly on the Monash Freeway, which didn't look like a freeway that much. I knew I was getting close to WB's place as I entered this whole region of peaceful greenery but before I could go any further, I woke up.



V Behind The Scenes V

It's the same length whether it's in this entry or another entry. So I thought I'd just do it here.

Dream No. 116 A:
Basically it started off bad and progressed into something worse and worse. When things are bad in a dream, I can call for my Dream Guide... But you know it's a true nightmare when you can't feel her energy at all. I might probably try and mentally train myself to call for Dreamy WB even in a nightmarish situation... Hopefully I may get some results after two weeks of training at my rate. That way, instead of the nightmare waking me up straight away, I actually have a chance to face it if I want to. In regards to the cat, it's like she was half way in between a cat and a grizzly bear... That's what my subconscious mind thought in a dream.

Dream No. 116 B:
In this dream, I felt like my whole family was restricting me from living life. It is strange how the beds were out on the verandah, it was day time in the dream though (well sometimes dreams just don't make sense at all). As soon as I told my grandma that I was leaving, she goes into a panic like "what did we ever do to you?" and calls my mum because she doesn't know how to deal with the situation. She uses my mum in real life too to help her with some things. The shopping, gardening, issues, etc. It's interesting how when you're in the middle of a fight or argument with someone, they don't care but when you leave them, then they care. Once again, this was a case of, seek your Dream Guide to help you. I read somewhere about unique energy signatures in dreams and Dreamy WB always possesses a warm energy, I'm always thinking of her as a mix of a friend, second mother, and therapist. Additionally, her dwelling always seems to be in these beautiful green fields that I can never fully reach on occasions... Such as in this dream.

Writing Expression
I realised I have written a lot down in this entry (not including Behind The Scenes). When on the computer, I always listen to music and when I was writing down Dream No. 116 A, I decided to listen to a track that resembles a nightmare. And then for a part of Dream No. 116 B, I was listening to that Balloon Mario OST track. Depending on what music I listen to, sometimes it fits the mood so well that I can write tons.

Date of Dream: FRI 12 MAY - 2017


Since this dream isn't too detailed, I will do the dream discussion here as well.


Dream No. 112 - Forest Hill Tower

My mum drove me to some unknown place and in the middle of it was this very tall tower like building. Underneath it was the carpark with four stories, concrete stairs connecting the levels, which led to the tower, made of some yellowish-sandy coloured brick. Only a lift was visible to get to the top of this tower which was apparently called Forest Hill Tower. I think to myself, “How am I supposed to get up there?”. The dream scene had then transitioned to some sort of shopping complex which was apparently accessible by getting to the top of the tower. But back at the tower, I couldn't see signs of the shopping complex anywhere.

At first, it was just me and mum but as the dream progresses, more people were coming to the tower. The dream scene then skipped to me being inside this movie theatre-like room with a whole bunch of school aged kids. This old man, who was wearing some kind of uniform like a cleaner came by and opened the double doors that were apparently locked to begin with. Through these doors, I saw masses of people gathering around the tower that was in the last dream scene. I then stopped the man before he closed the door again and I questioned him... I said something like, “So you lock all the kids in here and make them oblivious to what's going on?”.

I then rushed out before the man could lock the door again and I'm not joking when I say there were masses of people crowding the tower. They didn't look like they were doing anything though, or if they were, they were in their own world and not interacting with me in any away. Once again, I thought to myself, “How do I get up there?”. I then thought maybe Dreamy WB would be able to help. Although I didn't feel any sign of her, I felt like I had some ability where I could float. I went to the bottom story of the parking lot and started going up from there. I didn't reach the top, I was still far from it. That's all I can remember about this dream.



Behind The Scenes

When I got the "floating" ability (I actually don't know what it was exactly), I started all the way from the bottom storey of the carpark. I now think, wouldn't it be smarter to start from the top story? I think I could have reached the top if I did it that way. Another concept art drawing on my DeviantArt:

Dream No. 112 - Floating Scene by KarlaB14 on DeviantArt

A deal has fallen through. Sort of. I've got a prince in my debt, but that's pointless - what I needed was for him to eventually become a king, so that a little further down the timeline, he'll be able to ask another king for a favor. But the princess I'd intended him to marry has now been burned and beheaded due to a minor demonic possession incident, so now he's useless to me.

I find another kingdom that will work, a desert. Two daughters. In the throne room, I meet the younger daughter, but that timeline doesn't interest me. The eldest is locked in the dungeon, and I take the prince to meet her instead. I recognize her, though she doesn't recognize me - I'd met a version of her in another world. She'd been a he at the time. The prince had known her in that world too, and I think that could work out either very well or very badly. She's a lot angrier this time around, something of a freedom fighter, turned against her own father. This is promising.

I gave an old woman a recipe which includes a poisonous flower. She later turns up dead by the effects of that poison - but I suspect her son took advantage of that situation to kill her himself, knowing that it would be dismissed as an error in dosage. There's an inheritance involved.

Disembodied, I'm 'standing' at the edge of the ring of a gladiatorial circus, observing a man who's now lying on the ground looking half-dead, but he's nonetheless victorious and a crowd-pleaser. I'm bored. These games have been going on for days now and it's gotten repetitive, I'm impatient for him to move on.

I shift my perspective, finding the emperor in a large private room attached to the circus. A man in armor is talking to him about the man who's won the games, and the emperor is incredulous - why should the emperor fear or make concessions? That man fears him, the emperor - the proof of that is in the way he travels from place to place and uses the name he does. (His name is a word literally meaning "dark," but associated with low, dirty things.) The man in armor raises the issue of Dark's rumored connection to the queen.

The queen's present in the room, tall and dark and with green-tinted hair, hair mostly covered by a black veil. She's legendary for her beauty and suggested to be not entirely human; there's a rumor that Dark is one of her kind, and looking for her. It's close to the truth, but not quite it - in actuality, he's a survivor of the court of her previous husband. She's unaware of this. She only survived that massacre because the emperor refused to give her up, treated her as a prize.

She joins in the conversation, teases the emperor, saying that if she ever sees this Dark, she might recognize one of her own kin and turn on the emperor. Her voice is nasally. She then speculates more seriously about what would happen if she ever really did meet one of her sisters - "Lure her to her death."

The emperor is irritated with this line of conversation, and tells the two of them that this is enough talk, focus on the tribute instead.

Later. Dark is standing in front of an open shrine, holding an antique sword in poor physical condition but with great symbolic meaning. He's telling the spirits that if he enters the dream with this weapon, with all that meaning attached, it will become something miraculous. He's lying. But in actuality, it will lead him to a cross buried in the ground - I see the cross glowing dull red - and then to a bow which will infect him with hatred for a time.

I have a body now. I'm standing in a temple somewhere bright, talking to a woman who's explaining to me that she won't leave this building. She took a demon into herself, made herself its prison. She describes how she'd been fighting someone, and when it was over, a part of herself that should have been restoring was draining instead, and she hasn't been able to stop it - she can feel herself flaking away, and if this continues, there'll be nothing left of her in a mere few thousands of years.

In the 1940s, I'm watching three expensively-dressed women being transported from a large building to a long black car with the top down. They're speaking Spanish.

My partner says to me, if those women take this opportunity to escape, their guards will be killed in their place. She disapproves of this idea.

I say, she can't be sure of that. We haven't met their boss, so how can we know how he'll react?

She says, you don't summon up demon soldiers because you're such a kind and cuddly person.

There's a party full of drunk and pretty people I've gotten caught up in; it's being held in the honor of someone I don't really know, and when a group splits off for the private party, I go with them. The door closes behind me and Jules. Jules is dead sober - I'm not - and he doesn't look amused.

I'm talking to him about the person I've been trying to meet up with, a guy who's meant to be part of this group of party people somewhere; I'd first met him in a cell in Bangladesh, where I'd been trying to track down a particular object. I'm trying to stir Jules' memory of that time, but he just nods, goes yeah, yeah - he's annoyed.

He says, "Was I shot?" in a tone that suggests this happens frequently, and is probably my fault.

"In the left arm," I tell him.

He looks at the fingers of that arm, and I see a mental image of the neck of a stringed instrument. The implication is that getting shot affected his ability to play. Jules says, less annoyed now, "I do remember that one."

A woman's landing a griffon. People come to meet her, and as she talks to one of them she's going to her bag and attending to her armor, getting out gloves and a helmet that weren't practical to wear while she was riding. She's talking about the things that need doing, acknowledging that some of them might be impossible at a small outpost like this, without the easy access to resources you get in the cities. And there's an animal strapped to the back of the griffon, restrained to keep it from hurting itself during the ride, in need of medical attention. They're next to the stables, but the griffon's too large for that - once everything's unloaded, it curls up on the ground like a cat, beside a tall fence.

That woman and the man she'd been talking to are walking past me into a circle of armed enemies. Someone in the crowd says, "It is the corruption against the corruption." They sound surprised. I'm ostensibly on the crowd's side, but I arranged to bring these two here tonight, and I expect them to kill the man who leads this little group, currently sitting on a kind of throne. Although I say nothing, I see him watching me and I can tell he understands my intention - or more likely he's imagining some grand paranoid plan; but my plan here is very straightforward, just his death. I'm aware he and I are a minor nuisance for these people I've brought here, just something to be dealt with on their way to something else - I have a vague association with the moon - not at all the grand schemes he's been imagining.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm traveling through a city and taking the opportunity to meet with an old friend who was reassigned here recently, a promotion. She works in a form of law enforcement. She's talking about the changes on the island where we last saw each other, talking about the ongoing conflict there. She says the forest has been burned down, so they'll have no more place to hide. There's no more way to get past the patrols skating over the water - I have a mental image of a ring, a platform floating on the water, encircling the whole island, with the port itself as the only opening.

She describes all this as if they're good things. Time was, she'd be helping me get my people out of places like that. She's met the man who leads the people in that forest - his people aren't mine, but their situation is nearly identical. But I'm thinking, I shouldn't be surprised - the last time she helped me, something happened that frightened her. It's why she stopped working with me. My people weren't at fault, but I'm not surprised that she'd take that fear out on them. But listening to her now, talking as if my people should be locked up, it's like she's forgotten I'm one of them.

I'm in a hospital, speaking to a doctor. There was some information I'd wanted to get from him, but he's assumed I'm here about something else, a person who's been checked into the hospital with a specific condition. I hide my surprise and go with his assumption, only expressing my surprise that he'd known about this patient, since the ward they're in isn't his responsibility - has he kept an eye out for this condition since the last time we met? I'm privately thinking that if that person's developed that condition, then this both simplifies my job and complicates it; I no longer need the information I'd come here for originally.

I'm discussing this development with three other people in an empty hospital room - a man with a shaved head, a teenage girl, and a person whose gender I'm not completely sure of but I'm going to go with 'she'. Black hair, ragged like she cut it herself, short in the back and long in the front; pale with bad skin; and a grey hoodie zipped up, making her look heavier than she is.

Talking about that patient's condition, the guy with the shaved head had just been saying something about how dreamers have it rough. Talks about how badly things can go wrong just from being interrupted at the wrong moment; talks about people traveling through a dream being dumped back into reality wherever they happen to be at the moment, and hoping you're lucky enough not to be overlapping some physical object at the time; and that's just the passengers, the dreamers themselves get it worse.

The person in the hoodie shrugs this off, says at least if you can heal people, no one cares what nastiness you've got going on; they're content to leave you be in your swamp.

The guy with the shaved head is disgusted by this, says yeah, you enjoy making yourself the worst person you can be.

She says to him that she learned in prison, "There's no such thing as letting go of vanity, Wade."

I'm wading through icy water, tracking someone down. It's dark, the water looks black, and there's this mist in the air, I can't see very far. There's bodies floating in the water, wrapped in cloth. There's another man here with me, he calls me by the name of Logan. I'm focused on the dampness in the air - it caused problems earlier when we couldn't get a fire to catch.

Thinking about fire makes me see another time, standing in a large stone hall, standing off to the left of the woman presiding over some ceremony, having to remain still throughout her speech, wearing armor, uncomfortable. There were rows of people arranged in front of us, and as she called each of them up she'd hand them a lit candle, symbolic, but I was looking at those candles and thinking of them as never enough to hold off the chill.

Back in the icy water, we've found the person we were looking for in a little area surrounded by bare trees. He's standing off to one side and watching an old woman perform some kind of ceremony, something like a funeral for the old ruler here - I have a vague impression of something strung up among the trees, either the last ruler's bones themselves or at least something representing them. She knows who we are. She tells me that just because I've killed the old ruler, that doesn't make this place mine. The territory is passed down through the blood, and there's still someone with the elf blood to inherit it - the man we've been tracking down. He's not related to the old ruler, and he's more human than anything else, as is she, but that doesn't matter; this territory will remain in the hands of his people, not mine.

The man in question objects to this - this is a situation being forced on him. He tells me he's sorry. The guy who'd tracked him down with me makes some sarcastic comment, telling him to quit the humble act; but I believe him, this isn't something he'd wanted. Nonetheless, the old woman's in the right; there's nothing I can do here, we've lost. I tell him it's all right. It's only when I speak and hear the tone in my voice that I (the dreamer side of me) realize he and I (the character side of me) had been sleeping together; we're most likely going to have to end that now.

The old woman resumes her ceremony, now involving him. It doesn't take long, just a few words. There's a wreath of pale yellow flowers which he accepts from her; as soon as the ceremony's done he drops it and it falls apart in the water. I'm thinking of the moment I first met him, when he'd been locked up in a cell.

My brother is lying in fetal position on the ground, out in the woods, blood on his hands up to his elbows, just now returned to human form and very out of it. There's a girl with him. In the previous scene they'd been on a date in a restaurant, and she'd already known he wasn't human, and that he was violent - she'd gotten some kind of thrill out of it. But now that she's actually seeing the reality of it for herself, she's yelling at him, and being horrified by the blood on her own hands where she'd touched him. I'm watching from a distance, and I'd intended to give them privacy, but now that I've seen her reaction I'm disgusted by her - and disgusted by his behavior too, but that's not unusual. I allow her to see me and I go to get my brother on his feet.

Another time. I'm standing next to that same girl, making sure she doesn't do anything to interfere. We're watching a friend of hers go through a sort of rite of passage. She's standing in the woods, holding a sickle. Some variety of large wild cat walks out of the woods. The girl is supposed to kill that cat, but she doesn't move - she can't do it. The cat kills her instead. The cat then returns to her human form; her animal form was supposed to be passed down through her death.

Another time. A mistake's been made and we're going to need to allow one of our people to go to prison. An older man is offering to take the fall for her - he's been in prison before and he thinks it would be better this way. The youngest of us says there has to be some way to avoid this - none of us can leave this territory anyway, so a prison seems pointless to her.

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.

I'm traveling with a woman who most recently has been climbing these giant stairs cut into the mountains, leading a very large group of people, guided by her visions and signs. Now she's reached an old shrine that's of great personal importance to her. But that's not what she was looking for - she thought her visions were guiding her to a place where all these people could be safe. Now it seems it was just something personal. She believes she's led them all this way for nothing.

I'm extremely frustrated by all this, because the place I've been trying to guide her to with those visions I've sent her is still further on - I wanted her to see this shrine first for personal reasons, because I like her and I thought she deserved to know this part of her past, but it's not our final destination. Unfortunately, the stairs end here; there's no easy path after this point. How am I going to convince her to keep going now that she's doubting the visions? I'm almost tempted to just suggest scouting ahead myself and then conveniently 'finding' the place - but I need her to be the one to discover it, not me. I'll think of something, but I need to talk to her privately, and there haven't been many opportunities for that on this pilgrimage.

Right now she's busy talking with a priest I dislike - I'm not fond of priests on general principle, but this one in particular irritates me. She's apologizing. She's saying she shouldn't have rejected the idea of divine guidance - maybe if she'd believed, she wouldn't have gotten them lost like this. The priest reassures her, saying, "You delivered what would not be prayerful."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Still in that same mountain range, but this time I'm working separately from the main group, it's just me and a couple of her soldiers. I'm talking with a slave trader - he's got a group of people I've been looking for and I need him to release them. He says he can't possibly do that, they're an extremely sought-after species. He shows me a cage with a human man and woman instead, and a falcon that comes with the woman, and says that he'll give me one of them as a sign of good faith - he'll even trade me all three, the two humans and the falcon, if I'd be willing to give him one of my soldiers. He has a buyer who likes that specific shade of skin. Incredulous, I tell him this isn't a negotiation. He's going to release the people I came for, I'm not going to give him anything, and I don't care about his humans or whatever else he's selling.

But then he takes the hood off the human woman - white hair and a young face. I know her. I'm shocked, and she looks just as shocked to see me - I'd thought she was dead. Last time I saw her, she'd sacrificed me to her people's gods. It didn't work obviously, I can't die that way, but there was no way she could have known that. When my 'death' didn't stick, her people reacted very badly. I'd seen them holding a funeral for her later, but I'd been watching from a distance - they must have held the ceremony without a body. I'd just assumed they'd killed her. I'd liked her a great deal, sacrifice aside.

I'm giving a woman a ride somewhere in a carriage, and when she's gotten settled I knock on the wall twice and we start moving. I go to lower the curtains on the windows, and as I do I catch sight of her fiance out on the street, obviously looking for her. She's already made it clear she doesn't want to be found at this moment. As I'm looking at him I'm struck again by how incredibly dull he seems. I say to her, "On God's green earth, what do you see in him?" I gave up my chance with her so I have no right to judge the man she chose, but still - him?

She says, "On God's green earth, I won't let you steal my plan. I can't." Either she has drastically changed the subject or else I've drastically misunderstood their relationship - either way, I have no idea what she's talking about.

Just then, her fiance spots us - I should have lowered that curtain - and he shouts her name, Ephigenia. He is being ridiculously overdramatic, people will think I'm kidnapping her.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Disembodied, I'm watching my son be interrogated by a pair of policemen. We don't have any legal ties under my present identity, at his insistence - he's old enough now that we look the same age, so adopting him again wouldn't have been practical, but I'd wanted to arrange something, and he'd refused. I'm particularly annoyed about that now, when a legal connection would come in handy.

They've accused him and his sister - his biological sister, I didn't raise her, hadn't known she was alive until just now - of murder, and he's been repeatedly telling them he's innocent, but they've just produced an audio recording of what is clearly his voice stating that "we" - he and his sister - have been waiting for this since he was nine years old. As I hear the recording, I see a mental image of him at the moment he spoke those words, with a man tied up in front of them. Up until this moment I'd believed he was innocent. Back in the interrogation room, he's insisting that the voice on the recorder isn't his, but he's clearly fooling no one. They've been letting him tell his story, knowing he was lying the entire time.

I've heard enough. I remove my awareness from the interrogation room. Back in my body, I'm standing in my son's apartment - a tiny studio with a mattress on the floor, cluttered with random piles of clothes and other things. He wasn't doing well. I'm extremely annoyed about this situation - he'd betrayed me, he'd made it clear he was going to cause trouble for me, but for him to simply be removed from the situation like this by unrelated people, that doesn't sit right with me.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm running - as fast as I can manage, which isn't very - along a snow-covered mountain path, trying to hold my throat closed as much as possible. I'm wearing black leather gloves, the blood blends in very well. This isn't the first time I've had my throat slit, so at least this time I know my voice will come back eventually - just the memory of how frightening it had been the first time I had my throat slit still makes me uncomfortable. It's still incredibly inconvenient until it heals. One of my least favorite ways to 'die.' I'm thinking about the man who 'killed' me - a soldier on the same side I am. I don't know why he did this - he enjoys violence in general, so I'm hoping it was just something personal and not something larger I'd have to worry about.

Thinking about that man's possible motivations prompts a scene change. I'm peeling an orange as a visitor goes upstairs to meet with that man who'll slit my throat. I can hear the sound of an opera recording on the phonograph, and I warned the visitor that it's best not to interrupt while he's listening to his music - I didn't say this, but I'm pretty sure opera is the only thing that man loves aside from violence - but the visitor ignored me. Shortly later I hear the visitor scream.

I'm looking at a painting with the artist beside me. St. George and the dragon - I recognize that the dragon is meant to be myself. After noticing that, I recognize who St. George is meant to represent too. I say to her, very slowly and deliberately, "George can't save you." Whether I can do anything for her either isn't certain, but "George" definitely can't, despite what he believes.