Recent DJ Posts

Near Dark-based, I'm enjoying watching Diamondback as this motel desk clerk tries to fight her off. She's just come around behind the counter, and she takes out her knife and stabs the desk clerk straight through the back of the hand, pinning his hand to the desk.

FMA-based, Ed's automail arm's bothering him while he's staying in a sort of underground village, and he's talking to Al. I'm briefly wondering why Al has a human body at this point in time, but then I remember that he retrieved his body very early in their journey, and then spent the rest of the time trying to retrieve something along the lines of his mind or memories or soul.

I've just entered into some wealthy household, and the lady of the house is greeting me. She uses formal greetings that trick me into responding in a way that formally declares us to be on friendly terms. By doing this, she's effectively prevented me from being able to bring up past grievances. This is very irritating. I'm thinking about how this way of manipulating words is something that she taught her husband, and it's the main thing that allowed him to make his fortune - that and the skill of building false walls that she also taught him, both things that she learned in her time working for a kind of illusionist or something similar, before she married. As I'm thinking about this I'm seeing an image of a false wall in their house which they use to spy on visitors, and then a scene of her visiting the court of a nobleman. She's raising a glass and saying "To the ruler of the land, Sho Haoon!" Calling him the ruler of the land is sort of overstating things - it's a position that's in question. She's been flattering him a great deal in order to get what she wants.

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

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

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

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

Monday: Forced into playing some game in order to save my father's life, using mandrake led to victory. People raiding a house, breaking things or stripping things from the walls and carrying them away. The words "los soños del amos." A dance performance featuring various actors - Biehn, Paxton, Goldstein (as Diamondback), Henriksen showing up later offstage - arranged by a woman trying to use this performance to prove her worth; an old money type applauds the performance, technically a success, but succeeding here just means she's got the chance to fork over even more money than she already has, she's being used.

Tuesday: A young girl who'd been in some kind of trouble runs into a reporter named Nicholas who promises to help her, but when she sees him in sunlight his eyes resemble a snake's. He tells her that if she succeeds in becoming human, he'll lose interest in her struggles, and then he'd probably kill her. A religion based on Alice 19th. A woman arrives from another world; I've seen this play out before, but in that version of events there was a man with her, this time she's alone; knowing what's coming, I kneel before her, ask her to spare my life, which doesn't seem likely to work until I point out how little she knows about this world, and promise to guide her to the halls of power; she relents and accepts. Elijah speaking to Rebekah, telling her he has plans to meet someone in a dream at sun-up, which amuses him since he's just now become capable of walking in the light and yet is going to spend the time sleeping anyway.

Wednesday: A large wolf in the woods, my cat cuddling up to it. A very small man is sent to pick a fight with a woman at a bar. He fails miserably. She talks to him about his daughter, says she couldn't believe what had happened, when the girl had turned out to be a witch after all and was snatched away by her mother - a 'good witch', who uses a different variety of magic than these two at the bar. It's implied the daughter's been taken to be used as a tool. She offers her help for a rescue mission, but he suspects she'd like to use his daughter as a tool, too.

Thursday: A young woman and a friend, trapped in a maze of rooms cluttered with objects - statues, tapestries, things you'd expect in a museum - searching for one that holds a specific design which is her only means of escape, but it's a needle in a haystack situation. She picks up a statue and reminisces about when her mother used to fill her home with things like this - as she thinks that, she finally spots the design she's looking for, a tile set into the floor. The mirror above it ripples, and she's aware that she'll be leaving her friend behind here, but she doesn't have time to wait for him, she escapes through the mirror, back into the real world. Once on the other side, the mirror breaks. She says to someone on the other side that her friend is still trapped there, but this person tells her "Abby, all your life there's been no one there" - no one else in the real world has any memories of that person she believed to have been her lifelong friend.

Friday: Meeting Olivia Atta Clemens for the first time at a party in Rome. NBC's version of Dracula is having an argument with someone referred to as his master, regarding the use of the phrase "your majesty," and people going missing.

Saturday: Nightmare in which some creature embodying darkness is crouched above me, dispelled with Apollo trick, after which the dream ceased being a nightmare but I become concerned that the creature had simply moved on to the nearest target. I'm chasing someone and run into a cop along the way, and at first ask for his help but then decide there's no point, we're in a country where cops don't carry guns. A guy explaining Kaballah annoys me by making cryptic comments about me and fallen angels.

Today:

I'm stowing some papers in a hiding place on the roof; I'm thinking that Lydia (mental connotations of an odd mentor/student relationship with her) will pass through here later, and I'm positioning the papers where she'll be sure to see them, but trapping them in such a way that she won't be able to retrieve them in the little time she'll have up here. A scene with Lydia and I entering a small room where I've been holding Boone, her husband, captive; I sit down while she talks to him, take off my hat and smooth down my hair - I've got blond hair here. A scene with Lydia in a room crowded with empty picture frames, which used to hold pictures of her - she's aware they belong to (either my character or her husband, I can't remember which).

A setting based on ancient Rome, I've been having a dispute with someone over a slave, one of my charioteers, and I'm thinking about this dispute as I watch the race. Something about one of the chariots or racers catches my eye, seems odd - then there's an 'accident.' Afterwards, I'm standing over a slave who broke several bones in that accident.

A series of underground tunnels, and a group of vampire hunters. I've found a dead-end tunnel directly underneath their current camp, and I'm crouching on the ceiling, listening to them. One, I believe he's the leader, has been threatening one of the others, but the one being threatened has just walked away from the argument, and from the camp, saying he's going off to eat. I'm slightly concerned that he'll come down into this tunnel - since it's a dead end, there would be no way to avoid meeting him - but I don't think it's very likely. The ones who stayed are still talking about him, and from what they're saying I realize that he also eats people, but that he's in some sense still human. The others are concerned that they may have to kill him one day.

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.)