Recent DJ Posts

From a disembodied perspective, I'm watching my IRL self. He's looking for something in this room, currently looking at an illustration of Loki hanging on a wall. The disembodied version of me is curious about the IRL version of me, and I've set up this space in order to observe his reactions. There'd been some previous incident where he'd taken on a sort of ritualized trickster role and unintentionally drawn my interest; he's not aware of me. (Though trickster's not the word I would have used in the dream and it kind of irritates me to use it now, but it's the best way to put it - a sense of something in common between the Loki illustration, the devil statue, my disembodied perspective, and the role my IRL self had played.) I've just now come to the conclusion that the thing that originally grabbed my interest had to do with taking on different roles rather than something inherent to him. This doesn't make me any less curious, but it alters the situation. He's now looking at a small black and white sculpture of the devil, and I switch to his perspective while he's holding it.

As my IRL self, I'm interrupted by the arrival of several IRL people. Eventually I wind up standing over a large pot with one of the women, and she's stirring whatever's in it. She calls me by the wrong name, and I correct her, annoyed. She repeats my real name, and makes a promise involving it, talking about dire consequences for anyone who violates this promise. Afterwards she describes the pot as holding the curse she's just spoken.

A psychiatrist talking to another doctor about music and musicians, saying this is the type of personality that in these days uses hypnosis to tell themselves "this is my fanciful, flighty dream, that no one lets die." In other words: treating a wild dream as a practical career path, and being convinced to abandon a dream, are both viewed as mistakes.

There's a group of women in a small village, they all wear black and cover their hair, and a while ago they summoned up the Devil. Now he can't leave until a certain thing happens - he's trying to cause that thing to happen, the women are trying to prevent it. The women are talking about another, younger woman, who's either new in the village or has been away, and so isn't aware that this thing must be prevented.

The scene changes to show that Devil, who's been posing as a human man in that village, and at the moment is trying to get home without being caught by the sun and without being seen by his wife, who believes him to be human. He gets out of the building he'd been in by crawling down the side of the wall head first, and sneaks into his own home through the kitchen window, just before his wife enters the room. She finds him there casually drinking a glass of wine, and he mocks her for some supposed addiction problem of hers.

Someone's playing a waltz, I'm looking at LaCroix dancing with a blonde woman. I don't know him (I'm not playing Nick's role this time, though I'm not myself either), but something about seeing him gives me the sense that I'm seeing a path not taken. As I'm watching him and the woman he's dancing with, I become aware that this is Underhill, and a dream; and possibly those are synonyms. (This wasn't lucid at all - the character I was at the time was thinking of this scene as his own dream, not mine.)

There's some flyers warning about the invisible people from the community just outside of town, causing trouble. I'm annoyed at the whole us vs. them attitude people always have when they talk about those guys, just going to make things worse between us. But as I walk down towards main street, where a parade is going on, I see a few people from that community outside of town, except they're painted with this strange dark camouflage, makes them look like an oil slick. They're trashing the cars parked along the street. No one else notices. My perspective switches to third person - they're invisible. No one else can see them, the cars seem to just break on their own. Back to my perspective - in the parade, two horses are walking past us, and a camouflaged guy jumps onto one of them and digs his hands into its skull until it cracks and blood runs down. The dream switches to third person, so the guy is invisible, and the dream's focus follows the horse as it rears and falls, and the panicking people around it.

Memory gap, but with the impression that things got increasingly nightmarish from there, a fragment about a cabin with a door leading out onto darkness, until at some point I do the light-of-Apollo trick, thinking that it worked last time I had a nightmare so might as well try it again, and that clears things up, but also wakes me up.

(It had only been half an hour since I went to bed. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: OUAT's Mad Hatter chatting with "Joker," a similar Mad Hatter type character but with a playing card style red-and-black costume.

A man riding in the back of a limo is yelling at his driver to turn around. The driver isn't listening. Finally, the driver does turn the car around, and then stops it - not because of the man's threats, but because they've reached their destination. The man in the back of the limo jumps out of the car, but then realizes he recognizes the place where they've stopped.

He's at the gate to a mansion, a place he's been before. The owner of the mansion is just driving up opposite, and when the owner sees this man standing outside his home, he stops the car and gets out, pissed off. The guy who'd been in the limo has made a few comments in the past about the mansion owner's "perfect wife" which were meant innocently but were taken badly, and also a comment about how he thinks he's going to die in that mansion, which the mansion owner interpreted as an intent to buy/steal that mansion away from him. The owner only recently acquired this mansion, and this wealth.

As he's yelling, I, as a disembodied observer, am noting that he isn't looking good. His eyes are paler, he's looking a little scruffy, and in general, increasingly devil-ish - right on schedule. The rider in the limo certainly thinks of him as the Devil, exactly as we wanted, but the man himself isn't aware of the way he's being manipulated and transformed due to the Faustian bargains he's made, he's completely unaware of any supernatural influence.

A truck driving past crashes into the side of the Devil-figure's car and breaks the mirror. Attention caught, the Devil-in-the-making turns away from the guy with the limo, reaches into the truck and grabs the guy inside - a tall, skinny man with curly red hair, and a strong smell of coal. The cab is littered with cigarette butts and many, many matchbooks from the place where the Devil-figure's wife works.

Fragment: A father paying his daughter to take the boat out at a certain time, the creation of an alibi.

I'm playing the role of a blonde woman with some kind of investigative background, now working with some kind of crime boss. People keep describing this as "a deal with the devil," me as "the devil's instrument," and so on, though I think of him as basically a decent guy. I meet up with him in a storeroom full of stolen goods waiting to be sold - small scale, everyday objects - and he tells me he doesn't mind if folks think of him as the Devil, it works out to his advantage, because after all, this way, "I am not real." I'm aware there's a double meaning there, it's a metaphor meaning I'm the person who deals with the world directly while he gets to stay in the background, like a ghost, never to be caught; but it's also a reminder that none of this scene is real. Since it's not real, I decide to stop wasting my time here and wake up.

Earlier fragments: following a truck transporting exotic animals; working on a farm picking berries, and getting annoyed at a coworker's spiel on northerner-vs-southerner work ethics; googling for references to Janette DuCharme, under that alias specifically; browsing a Halloween forum.

07-21-2013 -- I am walking by an apartment complex on either Hickory or Dale, where there is no apartment complex. I am more or less minding my own business, when I run into this guy who starts yelling at me. He tells me I am worthless and horrible, and he knew my mother, and my actions caused her to die in sorrow, and I ought to just go off and die, myself ... he goes on and on and on with really horrible accusations. I think back to the life my mother lived, and how old she was when she died, and how our relationship was (fine), and I can't see any reason for his accusations, and I tell him so, but he just keeps screaming at me, while I sit at this picnic table and begin to doubt myself and feel worse and worse. He finally stalks off, leaving me depressed, until a nice fellow I recognize from around the place comes up to me, asks me what is wrong, and tries to console me for a bit.

Soon I am feeling a little better, and I start to look around. I spot something that seems a little interesting: there is an empty tape box sitting next to an unlabeled tape, and the tape box says it is the first of three parts in a continuation of the Chronicles of Narnia, the first of which is about the silver throne at Cair Paravel. I instantly slide the unlabeled tape into a machine that instantly makes me a copy of it.

Soon I find myself in a family-type setting with a father and his little girl, and there is a VCR there, so I stick the tape in, wanting to watch it. There is a flash of light, and I suddenly realize. I have no idea what is on this tape. Sure, it could have been the the tape of the new Chronicles. It could also be a porno tape, just about to blare out a sex scene in front of this little girl! I violently stab at the eject button, and we see just a couple of seconds of a pair of silver boots sitting right in front of a ruby throne, before the tape ejects. I guess it was the right tape.

The father glances at me, as if to ask what's up, and I explain about the whole thing, and not being sure about what was on the tape, and even about feeling guilty for copying it. I apologize, and he looks at me like I am crazy, and decides to ignore me. He may be ignoring me, but a Narnian dwarf suddenly appears in front of me and tells me it is no real problem. If I can't finish the tape before leaving the library, they'll gladly make a transcript for me. He takes the tape and disappears with a pop, and I suddenly know the next time I make it back to the room where I copied the tape, I'll have a printed copy of it that I can take legally. I start to walk away feeling much better about myself.

I soon find myself in a small village of small houses with thatched roofs, and a young woman asks me what I am so happy about. I start to explain about more stories in Narnia, and the dwarf and the video tape, but she is walking away from me to the right. I turn to the left and see the same woman, and her daughter, and she asks me "What are you talking about?" "The Narnia story I was just telling you about." She says I wasn't telling her about any story, and I turn to look to the right and see a bent and shuffling old woman just about to turn the corner. She seems very sinister, somehow. I call out to her to wait a second, but she just continues around the corner.

I chase after her, and I see her just entering a crowd, so I continue forward, but when I get there, she is nowhere in sight. It is like she just disappeared into thin air. I find myself in the middle of maybe a dozen or so clowns, in rather duller makeup than normal, and ask if it is a convention or something. I am waiting for an answer, until I hear a noise that causes me to turn around back the way I came. There are three little girls standing there, being approached by a bent old hag looking more and more like the hag the queen turned into in Snow White to give her the apple. I realize whatever this thing is, it can change shapes to look like anybody it wants to. I run forward to grapple with 'her' and protect the little girls, and I suddenly find I am wrestling with a grim reaper figure in black robes (which I facetiously refer to as Skeletor) and losing the battle.

Finally I start speaking to it in the name of Jesus, and it starts to steam a little bit, and flinch back from me in pain, and as I continue, it breaks away and tries to run off. I give chase again, but it runs forward into another crowd of people. I run forward, and find myself being grabbed. I tense, ready to fight, but it is three Golden Horseshoe can-can girls who have pulled me into a tickle war. Three ladies working together, not one, not the thing, whatever it is. Soon I am walking along, studying everyone I see very carefully, looking for the old hag, or any single person.

Suddenly I find it is very dark, almost pitch black, and I am walking near the door to my apartment complex with no idea how I got there. It is kind of foggy, and there is a forboding figure looming in the fog just by my door. Just as I realize I have fallen asleep at some point, and am now dreaming, the figure jumps out and attacks me. Now I am able to see it's true form, a red devil in a black death robe, and I am very, very scared that this thing can invade me dreams. But there is no hesitation this time. "I come against you in the name of Jesus! I come against you in the name of Jesus!" It is flinching at the name. "Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!" Suddenly there is a powerful figure, an angel, standing next to me, battling the creature. Unexpectedly, it is female. I thought angels were male ....

She speaks in one of it's ears "I come against you in the name of Jesus." I follow and do the same. She does the same to the other ear, and again I follow, and do the same. It writhes at our words. Just as I realize we ought to do one ear each at the same time, I wake up, panting from the battle.

My imagination is running away with itself.

08/20/10



The setting is a town in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The few remaining adults are being picked off one by one, killed by things they can't even see. The surviving children are being drawn towards the town hall, where a dark force promises them protection.

I follow the point of view of a little girl whose father is killed in front of her. We don't see what kills him, but his arm explodes suddenly in a fountain of blood, and she's running, tripping, looking for somewhere she can be safe.

She crawls through the wreckage and finally finds them. A dozen or more children are gathered, underground, in a circular concrete bunker. In the center of the group is a demon, an inhuman little imp that looks especially pleased with itself.

It calls itself the Devil.

- time skip -

The children are running.

I materialize in the first person, cornering the creature as I do. It cowers as I place my hands on the concrete wall, one hand on each side of its head, boxing it in.

"Do you know," I ask conversationally, "How many lives I've been through? How many times I've done the same things over and over again?"

- faces i'm too close to fighting a war that doesn't mean anything hand to hand combat a peaceful mountain landscape and i'm teaching them to kill -

"You don't have any idea," I say, meeting the thing's terrified eyes and smiling widely, "What Hell is."

End recall.

Scare Factor: 4/10
Rating: 6/10

The quote's more or less verbatim. I get a bit too caught up in my characters sometimes. Also, flashbacks can be incredibly freaky.

With my DCs on a probationary driving period, it's up to me to play chauffeur. Also, black cats and an upcoming apocalypse.



I'm watching a horror movie unfurl through its main character. In this dream, I'm a lonely, middle-aged man who lives in a run-down apartment in the north end of Halifax. I'm taking out the garbage, first thing in the morning, reflecting on the fact that I actually feel happy, for once. I just spent the night with a woman who I really like, and it looks as if the relationship might last.

I feel my heart sink when I step outside. The alley is swarming with black cats. I can communicate with a few of them, and they have nothing but bad news about the supernatural elements moving around town.

And that's all I remember.

***

I'm standing on a rooftop in downtown Halifax, chatting with some of the people who are starting school this year. We talk about the dilapidated, ugly buildings that are most of the school buildings. I say that I actually like them; they're fun to take photographs of.

Some of the buildings, I'm pretty sure I explored in previous dreams. One of them is practically abandoned, and you can scavenge a lot of material from the place, if you're looking for it.

I offer a girl a ride home, and we drive through (rather confusing) one ways without much incident. The roads are practically empty. Our path continues into a parking garage and up a flight of steps, and I have to shake my head at the absurdity. I reverse, and pull back onto the road. Then I start wondering about the unisex bathrooms in the building, and how great it would be if they were everywhere.

***

I'm at the Ixburg swimming pool, swimming away. We have to vacate the pool, though, to make room for the shrimp.

Oh, now there's piles of pineapple and shrimp in the pool. I pick up one of the shrimp and eat it raw, not finding anything strange about this, even though I'm a vegetarian. One of my friends looks at me in horror.

I wander over to talk to the Corrupt Corporate Executive by the lifeguard station, a woman who is obviously planning something evil. I ask her what's going on, and she candidly tells me that they're trying to bring about the apocalypse.

"Oh, well," I say, rolling my eyes. "That's all right, then."

She explains that there's actually eight or nine horsemen of the apocalypse, and how the devil, as our culture knows him, is actually one of them. She gestures at a guy with bright red skin and a scraggly beard, with insects crawling all over him.

"Is that pestilence?" I ask, looking over at him.

"No, that's the devil."

"That's not Lucifer." I say incredulously.

The woman explains that there are several entities in the known universe who have collectively been referred to as "the devil". The mythology just has us all mixed up.

"So, if I decide to kill you all, I won't be inadvertently committing suicide?"

"Not at all," the woman replies with a smile.

"Okay..." I say awkwardly. "Good to know."

Scare Factor: 3.

Using characters from Fox and the Hound. I think the hunter is my father. I'm walking around our property, noticing that some areas are places you really shouldn't be hunting around.

Henry Spencer from Psych takes over the role of father. He's giving me a lift via boat to some point on the lake. Promises me lessons in something or other. I'm writing out a list/schedule for training.

The devil is sabotaging our bet by making my workouts easier. I notice every once in a while that the machines are on an easier setting than they're supposed to be.

The Devil, Oddly. Scare Factor: 2.