All DJ Entries

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.

A man flies into a church in a hurry, and runs across an old friend he hasn't seen for a long time. He's excited to see his friend's still alive, but concerned to see he's not wearing his armor - he's in jeans and a t-shirt, and there's a sense that this means he's rejected a role, walked away from something. And there's a small scar by the corner of his mouth, that's new.

Unfortunately, there's no time to talk, he's running from something - he asks his friend for help, and his friend agrees, opening a portal for him. As he's about to pass through it, however, a group of people fly into the room, wearing armor like the kind his old friend used to have, shouting for him to stop - they're acting like both the portal and his old friend are a threat. From my 3rd person perspective's location, I can't see where that portal would lead.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm fighting someone, but I've stolen his weapons and made them my own - his cloud of mist, his glowing light. I feel a snap. I'm surprised to find he dies as easily as anyone else without his toys. Three of us who'd been fighting him together drive off, leaving someone behind to clean up.

I apologize to the man driving the car, someone I've been with for years now. That whole situation had been my fault - I'm saying I couldn't just follow instructions when I should have, and "Let it get too loud." He says, "And then it didn't anymore."

A woman and I have been tracking some thieves who stole the animals that her people raise - creatures like elephants but smaller, and with a sort of moss-like fur that grows on their backs and the top of their heads. Now the trail I've been leading her through ends at a beach. We're too late. Their ship is gone. But I'm able to pick up a mental impression of it and relay it to her - the tigers that they stole are in cages, but those other creatures have already been killed. The thieves only wanted their pelts. She sits down in the sand and starts to cry.

As we make our way back the way we came, over a mountain path, I'm attacked by some creature - it happens fairly often in this region and I take care of it easily, hitting it over the head with my staff and expecting it to run off again. She'd been hanging back before, but when she sees this she comes rushing over, though I don't think of that as necessary; she starts beating the creature, far beyond what's necessary. I stand back and watch.

I'm a demon - the long sharp teeth and writhing cloud of darkness make it hard to miss - but as we make our way down the other side of the mountain, I'm watching her and thinking that the people who tell stories about today will take one look at her and assume that two demons came down from this mountain.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm traveling through a dream with her, but at the moment we've come across an image of myself in the distant past, before I became a demon. I'd been speaking to a man dressed in armor standing in front of a sacred building, and that past version of me is saying something to the effect of, yes, I'd very much like to learn more about our people. It had been a rare opportunity - it was rare enough to meet another of my kind at all, but this was far beyond that, I'd jumped at the chance. I watch that past version of me follow the man in armor into the building.

This isn't what I brought her here to show her, it's just one of my memories intruding on the dream. I intend to continue down the road we're on, to take her to our actual goal here - but she wants to see more of this memory. So that's what we do. We follow that past version of me into the building.

Inside we're in a stone corridor; there's no sign of that past version of me or the man in armor. While the outside of the building had looked the way it had when it was new, the inside is a ruin from much later in my memories. But there's a few objects out of place, things that had been looted by the time it got to this point. I kneel down before one of them, a mirror made of bronze. I say to her, "It's a gate-"

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 playing go with an old friend, and off to my left there's a woman who's thanking me on her hands and knees. I've just told her about the arrangements I've made to get her and her unborn child out of their current situation. I'm looking at the board, not at her, waiting for my friend to make his move - I'm smiling throughout this scene, since it irritates my friend. I haven't looked at the woman throughout the conversation. This was business, although I did take a personal interest since the father wasn't human. As she starts to leave, I tell her I'd like to see the child when it's born. Take it to a specific temple - I don't mention this last part, but there's a particular fox demon who lives behind that temple, a relative of mine, and I think he would take an interest in the child.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

The spirit of a certain man has been released and possessed someone, and since I and a friend of mine are the ones who bound him in the first place, a woman's asking me how we managed it the first time. I'm telling her it won't work again - we were relying on his trust in us. We prepared a meal and my friend put sleeping drugs in his soup. Scene changes to show that night - the three of us are having a casual conversation. I'm arguing against some point he's just made, and to illustrate my point, I compare it to chess players - although the point of the game is to defeat your opponent, it doesn't follow that a chess player would hate everyone else who plays chess, just because they intend to defeat them.

A woman's looking over a small art collection - sketches of the building she's in from various earlier eras, collected in a large book. On the wall directly over the book is a recent painting of this same building, but showing it thousands of years earlier when there was a lake here, with the door opening directly onto the water. She finds this painting a little funny - unlike the historical sketches, she believes this one's a sort of what-if image. The building's old but it's not that old. But the man who commissioned the painting, the owner of this place, she's thinking of him as being oddly precise about where the lake should be in relation to the building; as far as she's aware there's no evidence that there was ever really a lake here at all. The title of the painting is Lake Hae or Hayle or something along those lines. Although the building in the painting and the building in modern times are identical, somehow in the painting it gives the impression of being someplace sacred.

She turns the pages of the book - she's careful with it, it's very valuable. After the sketches of the building there are a series of anatomical sketches and portraits. She's on a page showing several sketches of an old man, mostly bald and with a sort of rounded profile. As a disembodied observer, I'm fond of the sketch, sort of nostalgic about it - both about the subject and about the sketch itself. She keeps turning the pages, and there's a sketch of a young man with a very square jaw; looking at him changes the scene.

Still in the same room, but a couple centuries earlier; the walls are lined with bookshelves. There's a woman sketching, holding a conversation with a man sitting in a chair. A servant comes into the room - he's that young man from the sketch - and the man in the chair stands up to speak with him. A man all in black and with very long black hair, he's the same man who owned this building and that art collection in modern times.

I'm looking after a little girl and a little boy. My IRL father's recently married their mother. At the moment we're heading for the car, and the little girl asks to stop by our parents' new house. I say sure, we can swing by and take a look if you want - it has pretty steps, doesn't it? She says that's not it, she wants to go inside. I tell them we can't do that yet. The little girl doesn't understand why not - she says the divination's already been done. I hadn't been aware of that. The results of the divination must have been bad. I see an image of something being driven into the ground outside the house with a hammer - if it's blocked by anything, if it doesn't sink completely into the ground in one blow, then it's a sign of misfortune and they'll have to clear the misfortune before anyone can enter. I see my IRL father walking away from that divination and getting into a car, and I think about the traditions associated with the place our families come from.

Transition to that place - it's a small New England town. I'm walking down main street - well, 'walking'; I think I was disembodied at this point - and I overhear snatches of conversations with words like "dreams" (a girl pointing to a phrase in her friend's book) and "luck" (a goth girl talking on her cell phone about her boss). I pass by a church where the window is covered by cardboard. People are milling around outside, just left a service, and someone's commenting on how the priest here never gives any blessings and never reads from the Bible. Someone who works for the church is insisting, offended, that the priest is not a vampire - he's just unwell.

Transition to see that priest - he's giving a speech to a group of graduating students on an overcast day. He's making a point to appear in public during the daytime, to prove that he can. It's a small graduating class, maybe thirty or so people, and they're standing around him in a circle, very casual. The priest looks like he's in his 80s or 90s, slightly hunched, and he's got Nosferatu teeth. As he's speaking, the clouds are beginning to thin - the sun will be out soon. I'm mentally trying to get the priest to notice this, but he doesn't. Eventually one of the students comments on it, and the priest finally looks up. He finishes his speech and leaves in a hurry.

Someone's been describing a group of people to me, and he's just moved on to describe two partners who are separate from all the others in some way. His description focuses on one of these two, but my memory only really picks up when he moves on to the second one by saying "Another one, always in darkness." (Or shadows, or something with a similar meaning). I see an image of him as a tall hooded figure. I like him instantly. The guy describing him says that unlike all the others, this one exists in "both long time and short time." I see him in modern clothing now, living and working at an isolated shrine. By "exists in long time," it means that this guy's forced to go through time the long way around, living through each day one at a time (that is, the way time usually works), waiting for the others to reappear. That seems tragic. I'm thinking that he must be immortal in some fashion, to be able to wait for the others' timelines to intersect with his over centuries. The guy talking references "the swords that take the end of each user's life."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm sitting on a bus waiting at an intersection, looking out the window. One of the other passengers says we've reached Las Vegas now. I see a sign on a building that includes Las Vegas in the name, but the road we're on now is in a small neighborhood, small town atmosphere. The bus is just across from a small store, and there's a guy standing by the door playing a guitar. I'm enjoying the music. So is the girl sitting on the seat next to me. There's an old man sitting across the aisle who looks over at us to make sure we're paying attention to the music. He talks about the importance of paying attention and enjoying what's going on around you, something about being open to messages from the universe and synchronicity and all that. I'm bored with this conversation, but then I think that I've been hearing that sort of thing so often lately, between work and now this guy, it's a synchronicity in itself. (Except since it's turned out to be a dream, that's no longer true. Dreaming about things from work isn't exactly synchronicitous.)

Kuroshitsuji-based. I'm looking at a sort of frozen image of two people - as a disembodied observer, I can move around and look at this scene from different angles, but time isn't moving. Two figures in heavy fur-lined coats that cover them completely. I can't see their faces, but I'm aware the tall one in black is Sebastian, and the small one in white that he's carrying is Ciel and also myself. I'm focusing on the hood of Ciel/my coat - the opening for the face is completely in shadow, and something about the deepness and the blackness of that opening and the fact that the face can't be seen makes me feel sure he's a demon.

I'm about to enter a temple, together with three or four friends and family. We're standing around an outdoor sink where you wash your hands before entering the temple, and I'm looking around and thinking about the beauty of the entrance. Over to the left there's a separate building that's also part of the temple compound, but not sacred, and when I realize the others haven't been there before, I insist we go see it first. There's a line to purchase entrance - which is very expensive - and they don't understand what this other place is, so I explain it to them while we're waiting in line. This building, the McKittrick, was built by an eccentric rich man who filled it with all manner of strange collections over his life. After he died, it was bought by a woman who- (My memory's vague about what I said that woman did, but it was something to do with folklore. Elves were specifically mentioned, prompting a scene change.)

Third person, outside that building, it's night now. Three strange-looking figures that I think of as elves are standing around, agitated about something, waiting to execute some plan.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A friend of mine introduces me to a woman he's in love with - who turns out to be a living weapon sent to kill me. But she herself hadn't realized that; she was a sleeper agent, some kind of machine, programmed to become a weapon again the moment she saw me. It's painful to watch her personality disappear. I'm angry at the people who created her, and also blaming myself for involving both her and my friend. I try to take care of the situation without my friend finding out what's happening.

This ultimately ends in a chase scene where I'm running from that friend. I go semi-lucid while flying to avoid him. There's a small stand of trees at the edge of the property, and as I reach them, I decide to change scenes; I stop among the trees and focus on the feel of the branches around me, trying to change the scene to a dense forest. When I stop focusing on the feel and look around again, I'm not in a forest, but the grass is much taller and the buildings around have vanished, and the friend I was running from flies over my head without seeing me.

This guy's telling me about his cremation plans, saying that in a distant future, they're going to be able to revive people using their ashes - or rather, something about the carbon - on a specific distant planet or star or location in space he refers to as "G" followed by a short series of maybe three numbers. Seeing that place, I'm looking at vast stairs in the air, green, made of some vaguely moss-like material. Examining it, I see that it's made up of small, incredibly thin squares stacked on top of each other. The guy talking about cremation is still talking - he's saying these can be stacked so as to seem thick or thin, and they're used here in the perfect ratio to create a true geometric stairway to heaven. ("Heaven" used here to indicate something like perfection rather than afterlife.)

I'm on a green, grassy hill with two friends and a large crowd of other people waiting for some event, standing near our car. To the right, there's a great view of mountains below us, very green. I'm looking down at a town of mostly red buildings and can make out the steeple of a church; I'm aware this is somewhere in South America. There are a few other people around here enjoying the view, but among them, there's a man beating a young boy, presumably his kid. I jump in and stop him, and as we're fighting I demand what he thinks he's doing. His wife's standing here now, among other people watching, and as an answer, the man produces some letter he'd written. It talks about not being human. The wife sympathizes with him, but I'm outraged by this response, and since I'm not human either, I take personal exception to him using that to justify his behavior. We start fighting again.

Scene transitions during the fight, focusing on the blood on my wings which had come out during the fight. Now I'm in a motel room with a girl who's helping fix the feathers. A guy, a friend, comes in then and says "You two are (something about the fight and something we're looking for). I found the (thing we were looking for)." He holds up something that looks like a map, and I get up to go look at it. The girl with me is seriously upset with this guy, related to the fight, or more specifically the way I was fighting and the way he encourages me. She tells him that the guy I'd been fighting had swallowed my heart, and she'd watched me take it back from his throat with talons - she demands of the guy with the map, "That's better?!" As she says this, I remember how it had felt, though it hadn't been part of the dream before.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Setting's a sort of fantasy version of Korea, 16th century-ish. This guy has been working for an organization that's just had some great victory, completely defeated this opponent that they've been working against for a long time. Now he's just returned to their base and is alone with their leader, a tall foreign woman with this elaborately painted face like a mask and gold ornaments in her hair. But as she's congratulating him on this great success, he becomes suspicious - something's off about her. She sees this suspicion, and attacks him.

In actuality, this isn't his leader at all. 'She' is revealed to be the man who he thought they'd just killed, using an illusion (in addition to the physical costume and makeup - the illusion itself has been dropped now, the rest remains) to impersonate the leader. The enemy complains that he went to the trouble of portraying his own defeat just so the POV character would finally let his guard down, and it still didn't work! How frustrating! It goes unsaid, but they're both aware that since the POV character isn't human, he's impossible to kill unless he lets his guard down.

Two other people burst in there, an old man and a young servant, who tell their 'leader' that the POV character - who has now disappeared from the room, and I've switched to 3rd person - has knocked out two of the guards and used some kind of gas to put everyone else to sleep. One of them says that he had just been starting to like/trust that guy. The enemy in his disguise as the leader keeps one hand raised over his mouth to prevent them from noticing his identity. They move out of the room.

In the hallway, I see the shadow of a hand with long claws reaching down from the ceiling, just above the 'leader'/enemy's head; then it retreats. It's the former POV character on the ceiling. He generally tries to behave like a human being, and killing the enemy in that way would go against that effort, tempting as it is. So he loses the claws, drops down into the now-empty hall and looks around.

There's a frozen lake with a hole in the center of the ice, and a school building at the bottom that's an exact duplicate of a building on land. As Dean, I'm remembering fighting Sam in this lake sometime in the past, when he was trying to stop me from taking something out of it - I'd been filling a canteen from something at the bottom of the lake. Now we've come back to that same lake, and I'm thinking out loud about the "misfortune" that "follows" people who steal from this place. I point out that we didn't take anything back then. Sam pulls out that canteen, revealing that he'd secretly kept it. There's blood inside it - I'd gathered it for him - and it's a neverending supply, so if he relies on that canteen, he doesn't need to take it from anyone else. But it's still cursed. So he says to me, I might as well go ahead and steal what I need from the lake; the misfortune has already been following us anyway.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man talking to a woman just outside the door of a church, saying "What have you done to your hair?" He knew her in the past, but she's meeting him for the first time in her lifetime. I see images of him as one of six brothers who'd been cursed lifetimes ago. The images are like photos moving against a black background; he and his brothers give me an impression of being arrogant, self-centered, maybe not deliberately cruel but thoughtless, a vague association of violence. But the modern version of him had been very different, and I'm thinking about that change in him while I walk up my IRL street, into my IRL home, and start making tea. Standing over the stove, I'm thinking, "the debt has been paid" - the man suffering now has little in common with the brothers that the curse was originally placed on.

There's a girl dancing at my shrine, a little marker in the woods that's rarely visited. I'm paying attention but I have a hard time understanding what she's communicating with some of the moves of the dance. I'm wondering why she keeps changing the form of it when she comes here; it would be much easier to understand her if she'd stop changing it.

I shift to 3rd person (although the pov character was also disembodied, so there's not that much of a change) and realize that it wasn't actually one girl who comes to dance, it's actually different girls who came over many generations; the god/spirit of the shrine didn't really understand the difference, or didn't see the difference as important. On top of that, the moves of the ritual they perform weren't always passed down directly; some of them learned at least parts of it from writings and illustrations, without anyone to correct them.

There's a human boy who grew up with something not human and eventually fell in love, and now the nonhuman one is gradually becoming human. This is something he always wanted, but he's surprised because he expected it to be like flipping a switch, all or nothing; instead, human traits will appear for a while and gradually fade away again. Right now, the two of them are having a conversation about a friend of the human, named Michael, who the human's considering approaching - they have an open relationship, since they both believe it's important for the human to be close with other humans.

Two men, at least one a detective, are on the rooftop of a building in a city, talking about that Michael. They have some kind of personal grudge against that couple, and they have some plan to use Michael against them. One of them is assuring the other that the plan will work, they can trust Michael and he'll come through for them; they mention something about 11 o'clock. The human boy appears on top of the wall at the edge of the rooftop, looking a few years older than in the previous scene, and he tells them that he's "already taken the precaution of" killing Michael, in order to prevent Michael from killing him. Someone (I can't remember whether it was the boy or the detective; both sides agree on this point) makes a comment about how "before all of this," before Michael got involved with them, Michael would have been peacefully studying at this time of night.

As a disembodied observer, I get lost in a train of thought starting with that comment about studying and ending up thinking about disappearing cultural institutions, and then thinking about divination by lottery. With that last thought, I find myself at a shrine in the POV of the human boy from the previous scene. I intend to take a long trip, alone, but I needed to stop here first. There's a woman who works at the shrine performing divination by lottery, where there are small white balls containing messages from the deity of the shrine. The message she produces for me is "please do not go." I'm not surprised by this, and intend to leave anyway, regretfully; I only came here to say goodbye, though I intend to return someday. As the part of me in the mindset of the character is thinking all this, the observer side of me realizes that the deity of the shrine is the same nonhuman character from the earlier scenes.

A sort of ancient China-based fantasy setting. Someone's left an offering of a fish for me at my shrine, and I'm suspicious of it, so I only take a taste. It turns out to be fine. Now I feel regret; if I'd known it was good, I would have eaten the whole thing. From my perspective, after I tasted it, the rest turned to stone; I'm aware the humans offering it would have seen it differently.

Nearby, there's a man talking with his wife in their home late at night. He's going through a sort of existential despair, and he's sort of thinking through it out loud, talking more to himself than to his wife. Someone else appears and tells him that this existential despair is good, it's an indication that it's time for him to move on to the next stage of life, to become immortal. The man totally buys it. I'm a disembodied observer, but I still have the mindset of the character from the shrine in the previous scene, and I'm extremely irritated with that new person/creature. I think of this man and his wife as mine, and I don't appreciate others attempting to mislead and take advantage of them.

Outside - I remain in 3rd person POV and lose that shrine character's mindset. That couple's house is part of a small complex of several buildings enclosed by a wall, and elsewhere within that wall there's a woman who hunts demons, dressed like a man, chasing after a three-eyed crow, with another woman (a local, not a demon hunter) trying to keep up with her. They don't manage to catch it; it flew over the wall, and it didn't seem at all concerned about its pursuers. She's seen that crow before, the one controlling it has caused trouble for her in the past.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm traveling through a forest, and changing into a suit of chainmail. It's gleaming white, head to toe.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A fantasy China setting again. There's an elf woman dressed all in white, head to toe, and there are two men taking her over to an island in a rowboat. One of the men is young, the other is middle-aged and has been recently disgraced in some way, he's cut off his hair to reflect that. Reaching the island she wants to go to involves passing through several veil-like things in the air covering the opening between two cliffs.

When they reach the town on the other side of that passage, the older man immediately jumps out of the boat and heads off through the streets, moving quickly. As a disembodied observer, I follow him, and I'm thinking that I've seen this scene before, from the younger man's POV. (Which is probably a false memory, but there's a chance it's true - it's true that I was in the young man's POV in a scene just before the rowboat, and I can only remember very vague fragments of that scene.) I'm thinking now that last time, that man had met up with us after we'd taken care of some business, just before we left the island. I had wondered what he was doing while he was gone, but he'd refused to say, he's always very secretive - I'm pleased I'm going to be able to find out now. (Of course, as soon as I thought that, I woke up.)