All DJ Entries

After having to kill an animal and making sure to make it as painless as possible - essentially reaching into its mind and turning it off - I've wound up in an argument, arguing against the raising and slaughtering of pigs for meat. (Dream me and waking me have very different opinions on this.) I find it incomprehensible, especially contrasted to the concept of pets - including pigs kept as pets. I talk about the distribution of souls, how bizarre it seems that this one will be raised to be pampered and the next one raised to be meat, with no obvious difference between them except how they're treated.

I'm speaking with a woman from some religious order, talking about an orphan boy; with me is a man I'm close with who runs a clinic, which is where I met the boy. I've asked her to guide the kid to some local official or guard or something along those lines, to get him placed in a (word that means both orphanage and workhouse - I'm thinking of it as a place where he'll be cared for, the best place for him). She's telling me she can hardly be expected to keep an eye on some street kid who wants to run, especially when there's so many orphaned refugee kids coming into the city - many of whom would jump on this chance that he's trying to get away from. If he wants to disappear among them, he will. Even if she and the official keep him in line until he gets to the orphanage/workhouse, he doesn't want to be there; he'll just run off and disappear again. The observer side of me thinks she's right, I can't force the kid to stick around someplace he doesn't want to be just because I think I know what's best for him, this is pointless; but the character side of me is thinking, so much for the supposed compassion and charity of her order.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm watching a man sleep and trying to work out a way around a problem, thinking of ballads like Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin, thinking of warnings about people who stumble into something they shouldn't and wind up obsessed. I'm trying to avoid that in this case. This is a man who's abandoned some responsibility - nothing to do with me, this was before I met him, but I need him to take that responsibility up again. I'm trying to think up a dream I can give him to push him in that direction, but I'm concerned that if I interfere too directly, I'll just end up leading him further away from the path I want him to take.

I'm seeking a book, something that I think of as 'a way out.' To retrieve it I'm drifting through a cloud of abstracts that sometimes resolve themselves into words floating in the cloud. They're dream images, illusions, but grasping the illusionary versions of this book will gradually lead me to the real thing. But they're difficult to capture - it's like trying to scoop up something small floating on water, if you're not careful the water will carry it right out of your hand again. It takes patience and deliberation and allowing the words to drift into my grasp.

I take hold of one word, feeling the substance of it. This changes the images that are drifting around me - now they're closer to the subject of that word, closer to what I'm seeking, and many of them are in the form of books rather than individual words. I repeat this process, releasing the word I had a hold of and reaching for the first relevant image that drifts into my grasp, and every time I repeat this process there are less individual words and more books, and the images displayed on the covers of the books become more and more relevant.

Now many of the books show images of a demonic face, which is heading in the right direction, but which also has drawn attention. A man I'm familiar with begins speaking with me, a demon or something close enough - I've forgotten the content of this one-sided conversation except that it was about that book I'm searching for. Our surroundings have gotten more solid by this point, and as I move through the cloud I find wooden steps under my feet.

I come up the steps into a room full of books piled haphazardly on wooden tables. There's a young human woman here looking through the books - long dark hair, blue jeans and white t-shirt, I recognize her as someone who has a history with that demon I've been speaking with. Her name's Dawn. Their interactions are familiar but antagonistic - she once struggled with him and lost, though I'm not sure she's realized she's lost yet. In any case, she came to him to search for something, but she failed and became trapped in a dream. It seems she's still searching for whatever it is. I find that sad to watch. She looks at the demon as he climbs up the stairs behind me - or I assume she does; I haven't seen him, he's just a voice to me, but she's looking right through me and to the place I believe he would be. In annoyance at his presence, she moves to another stack of books, further away. The demon sounds amused as he calls to her.

It occurs to me as I watch her that I've been consciously thinking of this as a dream for some time now. Since it seems she can't see me, I decide to step aside and watch the two of them. I settle down on a white couch out of the way and allow my perspective to change slightly. I can see the demon now, and Dawn's appearance has changed as well, both of them now dressed from the late 1700s, France - their hairstyles and clothes are looking rough, as if they started out with a fine presentation but over time the polished image has fallen apart. He's struck up a conversation, and eventually she says to him, "The doctor warns that (something to do with a slow death), and my minutes are done." She sounds defiantly happy about this, as if it's a kind of victory over the demon.

I'm entering a large garage, looking for the owner. Off to the right I see a white truck I recognize from the first time I met him, when he'd kidnapped the queen. There are three vases full of red roses sitting in the truck bed now. The man I'm looking for is further into the garage, off to the left, along with another man who I also met during that kidnapping incident. I exchange the usual greetings with this second man, then walk up to the one I came to see. He's an incredibly big guy, tall and muscular, and he doesn't turn from what he's doing to look at me. Neither of us say anything for a moment - I have a hard time deciding how to talk to him - and then when we do speak, both of us start talking at once.

He asks about the queen at the same moment I say, "(the queen's name)'s sick." Dying, most likely.

He's shocked and horrified, as expected, and asks me a bunch of questions about her. As we talk, we raise the question of whether her sickness is a reflection of the state of the land, or whether the land's sickness is a reflection of the state of the queen - that they're linked is obvious, but which one started it, which is the cause, that's the question.

The other man joins in the conversation at this point. They'd been tracking the changes in the land on their own, not realizing what was happening to the queen; and comparing our information, the two of them become convinced it started with the land. That second man shows me one of their maps on a computer screen, showing when a giant creature associated with cold moved into the far northwest and burrowed deep into the earth - that was the first one, the one that started it. They'd already been planning to remove or kill it. It goes without saying that I'll be coming too.

As I'm looking at his data, I'm thinking, amused, how convenient, making this into a problem that can be solved with our skillset.

I was in what appeared to be a particularly bland examination room; everything was white or silver, and there was no decor in sight. I was aware that I was there under false pretenses; my brother and father and I had been tricked into a high-security facility that experimented on its involuntary patients. I found the door to be unlocked, and made my way down a maze of identical white hallways littered with medical equipment. Countless doors undoubtedly led to countless more examination rooms, two of which contained my family members, and dozens of white doctors with light-colored hair and long white coats bustled about, ignoring me entirely.

I managed to find my younger brother in one of the rooms. Despite the labyrinthine layout of the facility, I was able to instinctively move in the right direction. Will and I then searched together for my father, who we found to be looking more than his age, and sickly. He was still able to keep up as we all began our escape.

We quickly found ourselves in a new section of the building, where the amount of staff around us multiplied and closed doors were replaced by glass looking into large, near-empty rooms, most containing a single table with an unconscious individual lying upon it. Many doctors were observing these rooms, occasionally looking down to scribble notes on a clipboard.

The increased number of staff combined with the suspicious appearance of our group prompted us to look for disguises. We found a sort of locker room with hangers covering the walls, a few of which held lab coats. We each donned one before continuing onward, but mine had many tiny buttons, and I found myself left behind as I struggled to fasten them. I ran to catch up.

Time skipped ahead and I found myself in a woodsy area, supposedly the grounds of the facility we were escaping. My family was nowhere in sight, but I assumed them to be safe. I was more concerned with the battle going on around me: many young adults were struggling to fend off otherworldly creatures as they, too, tried desperately to escape. I recall in particular a giant spider - think Aragog - pinning a man to the ground as he cried out for help. Many of these people seemed to know me, and I them, for we called out to each other with updates on the situation. I was told to make a run for it, and ran over a small hill covered with fallen leaves, landing in a shallow ditch. I was confronted by only a small, metal chain fence, easily climbed over. Before I could attempt to do so, however, I found myself awake.

I'm standing on an empty stage, going over some papers for the show currently in rehearsals. My soprano calls down to me from one of the boxes - she calls me Mr. Bevelle or Deville or something similar-sounding. She's got black hair done up like a Gibson girl, and an unusually high speaking voice, but in a way that I find pleasant. However, we're both aware her singing voice isn't going to last - she's only going to be able to perform in a few more shows. Because of that, she keeps coming to me like this with demands on how to run her last shows.

Scene changes to show her at rehearsal. I'm disembodied this time, without Deville's sense of background information, and I only catch three notes of her singing - lovely clear tones - but I recognize Lohengrin.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm disembodied and observing a setting based on China some centuries ago. Literally just observing the setting - I'm outside of the timeline. Nothing is moving, not even the waves, and the colors of everything are incredibly saturated. I'm on a path with the sea to my right after a long drop, a long single-story house directly in front of me on this path, and several two-story buildings off to my left, among green fields. Far off in the distance I can see the shine of a building decorated in gold. Following the path, it curves to the left of that long house, and off to my left there's a man and a woman standing in a field, embracing, yellow flower petals frozen in the air around them. I know of them, though I don't know them personally. There's something secret about their relationship.

I retrace my steps back to the entrance to that long house, where those two live. I look in briefly, noting the room where she stayed off to my right, with a window looking out to the sea. I leave the house again and circle around to the right, hovering over the sea, sticking closely to the side of the building. There's a door hidden here - she escaped through here, sometime after that embrace in the field among the flowers. It becomes difficult to cling to the side of the building. I float above the water, following the path she took, until I come to another building and look inside - there's a pallet on the floor where she stayed for a while. A doctor looked after her here.

There's a war going on between two factions working for two different higher powers - one called the Authority, the other called the Dark Ones. At the moment, I and two other people are untying a woman from a chair, she's been held captive. She's dressed like a candy striper. One of the people helping to untie her is a woman dressed in an old nurse's uniform; the other one is a man I've been working with. I'm explaining something that this man and I recently discovered - the Authority and the Dark Ones are the same entities. They're not divided at all, it's the exact same entities appearing to us under different names, playing us against each other. It's my intention to end the war by eliminating their influence over us.

The woman in the nurse's uniform has this look of hate as I'm talking about all this. In the end she says, "I hope you win," but it sounds like a curse. She runs out into the street and throws herself backward onto a spiked iron fence, impaling herself. The woman we'd been untying screams "Laura!", the nurse's name. People come rushing out of the building next door, calling emergency services.

I'm someone playing cards with three other guys, and one of them mentions the (some surname beginning with T) manuscript. It's this anonymous collection of old medical notes. A few copies have been made of it, but it was never published, so it's very rare. I tell them a bit about that manuscript - I love having the chance to do so, I enjoy sharing stories from the past a great deal.

During the war, it was an open secret that T. was seeing a certain woman. He always used a nickname when he mentioned her to others, but everyone knew. (As I'm saying this, I'm seeing an image of myself playing cards with T. in the past, much like the scene with these men now, both of us in uniform; and then an image of that woman walking down a street.) And she'd often go to his room to make use of his typewriter. (I'm seeing a typewriter that doesn't actually make sense for this time period.) For whatever reason, when he left to return to England those notes she'd been working on were mixed in with his typewriter and his other things. He didn't make it back to England of course, and when his things were eventually recovered, that anonymous manuscript was naturally associated with him. But the identity of the author of the T. manuscript is Florence Nightingale.

This doesn't get the reaction from the other card players that I'd been hoping for - I get some odd looks but mostly they just seem bored. They change the subject, talking about pharmaceuticals. I'm disappointed - I'm reasonably certain Florence is still a household name, recent enough and well-known enough that I'd thought they would find this interesting, even though they were all born well after her death. It's always an isolating feeling when this happens - no one much cares about old dramas. But at least they only see it as the eccentricity of a history buff, and I don't have to worry about them seeing me as a threat.

A flood warning in Boston - they expect the buildings around the harbor to be under three feet of water. Evacuation is recommended.

Post-apocalyptic setting, there's a human doctor taking care of a human-looking robot going by the code name Rabbit. It has black stitches in a ring around its throat. It put them there itself - they're decorative.

Late 19th century England, two immortals dressed all in white are talking. "Just defend (this place)." "Domi, this is a terrible plan."

I've spent the past few scenes in this huge house, and I'm currently walking through a door that I expect to take me back to a place I'd been in earlier in the dream - there's a character I'd intended to meet up with again. Instead, I find myself in a room I think of as resembling a sanatorium - there are long rows of beds on each side of the room, with a few curtains here and there for privacy. On each bed there's a woman in a hospital gown, writhing like she's in a bad demon possession horror flick.

I go lucid and try to remember if there are any lucid tasks I'd wanted to perform of the ask-a-DC variety - no, there aren't any. But I believe dialogue is the only lucid trick I can do right now. So I ask something of the various women and get short, boring answers - I don't remember what I asked or what those boring answers were. The last one I asked gave me a longer answer involving a reference to an earthworm - I noted her response as nonsensical but phrased poetically, which I thought of as a step up from the straightforward and boring responses from the others. I'm now mentally comparing them less to demon possession horror flicks and more to Greek spirits - Furies or such.

Towards the end of the row of hospital beds, there's a woman who's much older than the others. She objects to me - calls my behavior intrusive. She takes my hand in hers, saying this will help her see me - representing that this should be a two-way conversation, rather than just me one-sidedly questioning them. Closing her eyes for a moment, she asks what's blocking me. My first instinct is that she's referring to meditation, mysticism, that sort of thing. But since she didn't say so specifically, I go with a safe response: I talk about general life concerns. She cuts me off and clarifies that she was indeed asking about meditation and mysticism and such. I, sounding annoyed, say I was getting to that - which is a lie.

But we continued talking about general life concerns anyway - specifically career things. Everything we said on the subject sounded sensible (even after I woke up), and she pointed out a good solution that I disliked - I thought it sounded like more effort than it was worth. She quite reasonably laughed at me for that - for wanting a perfect solution to just come along without any effort.

Shortly after passing a man whose head is a snake, three creatures are presented as things I'm meant to fight. But they seem harmless, and when I walk up to them, they disappear. Past them, I walk into a hidden door set into a tree, and spend some time walking through a series of rooms. The passageway I'm walking through makes a large circle, and when I get back to the start (there were a lot of scene changes along the way, so this "start" wasn't actually the same place as the tree-passage from before), I notice a flight of stairs heading down that I hadn't seen before, with small, glowing blue arrows hovering just above the floor, pointing down.

The stairs lead down into an enormous room filled with books and a portrait of a man I recognize as someone infamous named Corvo - he's someone I've heard of often, in the context of being a doctor or a researcher or something similar, responsible for some tragedy or some sinister event; but I personally think of him positively, even though I know very little about him - mostly I feel curious. I realize this was his room, and these are his records.

I'm standing in a city street in Corvo's POV, sort of - I'm aware that this is me going through his records, his reflections on the past. At this moment in time, he'd been disgraced, along with some other man who I'd also heard of, someone who's walking away from him right now. I have some mental connotation between this man and violence but also think of him as a better person than Corvo, someone who dislikes Corvo intensely but works more closely with him than anyone else, I have the impression Corvo somehow forced him or manipulated him into carrying out a lot of dirty work for him. Now Corvo's looking at the open gates to the city, looking at the crowds of people entering, aware that they're unknowingly carrying some danger that others refuse to listen to him about, and feeling powerless. With the knowledge that this is a flashback, he's feeling an incredible amount of pain over this moment in the past and whatever it eventually led to, and I feel that same emotion so intensely that I have a false awakening or something similar and spend it looking for some space to just calm down from that scene.

There's a kid who's gone down to the docks and started talking to a homeless woman there. He's already seen the events that are about to happen, and he wants be sure he's near her at a certain moment. She's fishing with a stick with a string tied to the end of it. She says to the kid she's "not fishing, just putting out bait."

There's a private party, all women, that's rented out the restaurant at an inn. There's some drama going on and the cook got stressed out and overwhelmed, he took a break in the garden out back and someone else, the former cook, is filling in. He's not human; he's something large, bulbous, vaguely frog-like. At the moment, the human girl acting as a waitress is standing in front of him saying "Um... um... um..." and he suggests what she's trying to say - that the other cook's just about recovered, so it's okay for him to go now - and when she nods gratefully, he takes off his apron and lumbers off. The boss, an elfish creature, walks over to him. In the boss's POV now, I say to him, "You knew staying here would change the way she sees things." That is, the illusions that make the humans see us as human were bound to eventually stop working on her. "Why didn't you say something to her before now?" He sort of grunts.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a little girl who's seen a glimpse of a woman in her house that no one else saw. As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking she reminds me of the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home, although this one's not particularly old, and she may or may not have a face. I like her. Now the girl's in the bed that she shares with her sister, both of them under the covers, except for her hand. She feels a touch on her hand, snatches it away under the covers, and asks her sister if that was her. The answer is no. The girl peeks out from under the covers and sees that there's no one there. But the moment she puts her head out from under the covers to look around, the rest of the covers are ripped off the bed, and the woman, who was standing by the head of the bed out of sight, says "Finally."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A man's holding a vial of some kind of virus. He's meant to add a second vial holding some blue liquid to it for some plan that's about to be carried out, but there's something wrong - this isn't the fake that had been prepared, it's the real virus. What happened to the fake? The scene changes briefly to show it back at the lab, where the real virus should be. I switch to the POV of that man with the vial and decide we're going to have to go ahead with the plan, it just means that what we're about to do is less of a bluff than I'd like. I add the blue substance to the vial. Something red like blood forms on the top as the two substances mix.

In a scene I think of as "Five days in," a man is meeting up with someone named Hugh. Hugh's sitting on a dock with blood around his mouth, one arm slung casually over his dog, greets him with "Hey man," and generally is completely relaxed and sees nothing wrong. The man meeting him is bothered by seeing 'immortals so much older than me' losing control.

A fragment involving a city made out of pieces of every road built in the past century.

Just a name: Sven Odinson.

I've got some government job in which I'm part of a team of people in suits protecting someone, and we're currently in a hospital, when I pass a room where a team of people in red uniforms, EMTs maybe, are preparing for something. Something about them catches my attention as odd, and I mention to a coworker the possibility of a disguised threat. She agrees with me.

Something about political opposition to dances in cathedrals by night.

A zombie apocalypse setting, in which someone was approaching the house I was holed up in and we nearly shot each other, wrongly assuming each other to be zombies. She tries to convince me to come with her to some camp and I agree only because I'm fairly confident about being able to escape her along the way if it seems necessary, whereas if I start a confrontation with her here and now I'm fairly confident she'll shoot me. She's traveling with someone who joins her then and gives me a checkup, and she takes a very long time to find my pulse. When she finally says "Found it," I say, "Look at that, I have a heart. That's one for the books."

A little girl saying "(something) to read hearts, death to solve the mystery." A choice between two different goals, reminding us to match the approach to the goal. This is a girl who I and the people I'm traveling with met a long time ago, and at the time she just seemed like a tragic figure, sole survivor of some massacre in which she watched the deaths of everyone else in her castle and the surrounding village. When I'm thinking about this, I see a memory of one of the people I'm traveling with standing in a pool of water with her, up to his neck in the blood and gore surrounding this girl. The journey we're on somehow involves the spirit of a certain place - either we're searching for it or it's opposing us or something - and we met this girl fairly early in that journey, but now that we've met her again, we realize she's more than she seems; the tragic figure we met originally was at least partially an act, and I strongly suspect she is that spirit.

Now she's saying, "Sure you shouldn't just make perception your goal?" That's following on the death-to-solve-the-mystery thing she said just before. One of the guys I'm traveling with says, "Sorry, our goal is to take the cat out of the box." A Schrodinger's Cat metaphor; we don't want to just find the answers for ourselves, we want to eliminate the mystery completely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3rd person, I'm looking down at a wide stone staircase in a castle, and descending the stairs there's this woman wearing buckskin who I think of as some kind of hunter, she's talking with the king. She's saying the words "-get our answers."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm taking my IRL youngest sister, L., to the sands to get her first dragon. (Relevant to upcoming IRL event today, sans dragons.) (Edit: Nevermind, the IRL event actually did wind up involving dragons. Or the word 'dragon', anyway.) I was talking with a few older relatives about the dragons, and L. kept trying to hurry us up, anxious about getting there in time to see the dragons hatch; but for the rest of us this is all old hat, so we wasted time talking, and now we're running late. We keep telling L. that it's fine, we'll make it on time, and even if we miss the hatching you've still got a window of a few hours after the dragons hatch to bond with them. But when we get down to the sand, the eggs are already gone. We have to catch up with the hatchlings in the barn instead.

Before we leave for the barn, I see what I think of as a king cobra in the sand - it's huge, as wide as a person, which I think of as normal for king cobras. I pick L. up and there's a chase sequence that ends with me tossing the snake over a wall, but then I notice a scratch on my finger. It must have bit me.

I can tell I'm starting to pass out. I go inside a house and find my IRL sister S. with a friend of hers, and I tell them about the snake bite and ask them to call the hospital or treat it somehow. The friend takes my hand with the bite and looks at the veins, which look broad and red and cloudy, like they've swollen or burst under the skin, and she gets me some cream to put on my skin. I recognize it as some ordinary skin cream that's not going to help, and I try to convince S. to take me to the hospital before I pass out.

(Woke up with my hand hurting where the snake bit it - turns out I really do have a tiny scratch there IRL, might be a papercut. Just after I finished writing this down, I got a phone call from S, letting me know she'd been taken to the hospital on account of almost passing out from unknown causes. A few hours and a not-too-serious diagnosis later, I tried to get a little more sleep.)

I'm lying in bed in some mansion, with a few of S's friends around bothering me until I get up and go somewhere with them. As I walk through a doorway into the hall, I realize this is a dream. It's not as vivid as I'd like - I can see everything fine, but it doesn't feel quite real, more like watching something on a screen - so I try a mantra to make it more vivid. Instead, everything disappears. (In retrospect, that seems obvious. I was focusing on the words instead of the surroundings.)

Next scene I remember is a woman using the family name Gale, returning to a Spanish-style house on the west coast, overlooking the sea. She's lived here a few times over the years, and for a moment I see it in sepia tones and with flowers in the windows, as she's remembering an old photograph from when she'd first lived here with her two daughters, before she became immortal. She's thinking that even though she's coming back earlier than expected this time - something on her mind about trouble on the east coast - she was still gone long enough that she can pass herself off as her own cousin.

Near Dark, back when Homer's actual age was close to his apparent age. He and Jesse are in a motel room with a guy who appears to be a friend - not like them, exactly, but not someone they intend to kill either. This guy's offering to teach Homer to play poker, and Homer says he already knows, but it's no fun because he has to give Jesse all the money he wins afterward.

(Woke up at 5:51 am, after going to bed at 4:30. Back to sleep.)

A young man has somehow traveled to another world, one populated almost entirely by vampires. They subsist off each other's subpar blood, donations are required and a vital part of the economy. Unaware of any of this, the guy from another world has walked into a store run by this world's equivalent of a friend of his, the magician who sent him here. She isn't a magician in this reality, and can't help him. It takes her a while to realize that he's human, they're so rare and unexpected, but she can smell his blood and when she figures it out, she has him in a trance before he realizes he's in danger. At that moment, her equivalent in his reality pulls him back to his own world - but the vampire follows him.

(Woke at 7:37. Back to sleep.)

A fragment of a scene involving Dracula, theater, and mythogenesis, using that term specifically.

A woman genetically engineered as a mate for a certain clone. The clone leads a double life, with a job and a wife who is unaware that he's anything other than a normal human, but he's also in close contact with the doctor who created both him and his 'brother', who he is somewhat obsessed with, and he suspects his genetically-engineered mate is secretly in love with that 'brother' - the brother is entirely unaware of any of this and believes himself a perfectly normal human, although the genetically engineered woman has recently appeared in his life and dropped some cryptic hints. The clone pulls the genetically engineered woman into his lap, which she tolerates, and demands that she tell him why she likes him, him specifically, "not the other one." She, with a charming accent I can't place, says it doesn't matter, and it's clear she's bored with his insecurity and instability.

(Woke at 9:40. Back to sleep.)

Three people whose lives are connected, although only one of them realizes it.

The first: A young man who recently beat cancer, legal guardian of his two younger sisters. One of them's been acting out in school recently and he's jokingly threatened her with calling in his biological mother, a woman who works with delinquents. But he is seriously wondering whether he should arrange for them to get together casually and talk - he doesn't mind her skipping classes but he's worried about what's going on in her mind.

The second: A teenage girl in a cancer ward, the same place where that man had been treated. Her death has been predicted to fall within the range of (the note said either Apr. or Aug., I couldn't tell which) 10-24. She has nightmares where this death is accompanied by a swarm of wasps. She doesn't fear death, but she hates wasps.

The third, and the one who is aware of the connection: A man who visits the hospital and watches the girl and the angel who lives there. The angel's voice can shatter glass, and it's going to kill this man someday - but it won't do anything until after that girl's death.

(Woke at 12:10.)