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I'm walking in the garden, mentally composing a letter. When I'm ready to start putting it down, I go to where I've left my portable writing desk. There are a few bees hovering around it, interested in the vine I left it under. I'm thinking about moving it somewhere I won't disturb the bees, but then I see an envelope that's been left on top of it.

The letter inside is written in classical Chinese. I have no difficulty understanding it, but rather than actually reading the letter, I'm thinking about the woman who sent it - even without seeing her name, there's only one person who writes to me in this language. I'm seeing a mental image of the two of us walking through a rough stone tunnel next to water, with light reflecting off the water, rippling patterns reflected on our faces.

That was a memory, but the next image I see is the present, through her eyes, something that can sometimes happen when I'm thinking about her. She's looking at a painting of a woman I think of as a saint, with an image of a dragon behind her; then her vision moves up to the ceiling, as if she's falling back. I see an image of a pile of roses turning to ash, and my connection to her is gone - not just this vision, but the connection of our blood is gone. She's dead.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man who's been sent back in time, and now several other people who've gone back to rescue him. He'd been involved with the woman leading the rescue team. They've just met up now, and very nearly attacked each other - both of them sneaking around a fortress, trying to avoid being seen. Having sorted it out, it seems he's working together on a mission with a woman from this era, and fallen in love, and has no interest in going back to his original time period. He's just broken her out of a cell in this fortress. The woman who came back to rescue him is thinking it was foolish to chase his spirit into the past when she had his (something) in the present.

The scene transitions to a modern-day park; that man was brought back to the present against his wishes, but so was that woman from the past. They're spending time in the park with their infant son, distracted and unhappy.

My attention shifts to other people in the park, a group discussing magic, specifically one man mentioning a "listen and learn" spell with leaves, as a second step for those just starting to work with trees. He describes trees in general as "a bit froggy, though."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A private performance of a show based on Frankenstein. The 'bride' character speaks beautifully; the 'creation' character is silent, and his hands are bent backwards at the wrist as if they've been broken. When he'd been alive, he'd been the doctor's student or lover or something close.

I'm visiting someone, arriving in the yard behind her house, and I find two men doing yard work. I'm surprised, and when I talk to them, one of them complains about being summoned like this - straight out of bed, early on a Sunday morning. (Summoned in the magical sense of the word - he was asleep in bed, and then he was here being put to work.) I go into the house, calling out, "Babe?" There are a few other workers around, and they give me odd looks for the term babe. It occurs to me that the word may be outdated. Or it may be that the woman I'm meeting looks much older than me now, since her hair's white. You have to keep adjusting the way you address humans as they age - it's a headache to keep track of all this stuff.

I find her and ask her about all this work she's having done around the house, and when we step aside from the workers for a moment I point out to her that summoning people on a weekend is rude, and besides, we're supposed to be demonstrating that we're not cartoonish villains here. What does she think she's doing, summoning up people like this? We are supposed to be reformed, we don't get to keep minions anymore. She protests that her helpers aren't 'minions,' but they most certainly are.

I'm taking a little kid home to her family. Initially I'd tried to just send her home with the click-your-heels-three-times bit, but while we wound up somewhere familiar to her, it wasn't actually her family's house. So I'm flying her back the rest of the way - but the kid was so excited about flying, I gave in and kept flying around instead of just taking her straight home. It's a pleasant night flight - lasted a long time and there were so many beautiful views, I deliberately made an effort to remember all of what I was seeing so I wouldn't forget it when I woke up. But despite that, there's not much to describe - a lot of scenes of beautiful city lights seen from far above, and occasionally diving down low over traffic to amuse the kid. The lucid observer part of me wondered why the dream character part of me stuck to following the roads - I supposed it helped with navigation. At one point while we were diving low, we wound up passing underneath this large overhang at a trolley station, and I found it difficult to gain altitude again when shut in from above, so we landed in the trolley car.

As FK's Nicholas, I saw an image of a vase of white roses, bleeding a few trails of red blood - I believed that this was a hallucination, thinking of it as "a bit of silliness" - and then I saw a mental image of Janette lying on a white couch, looking unwell, somehow connected with those roses. Now I'm sitting on that couch, and Janette's lying on her side with her head resting against my thigh, my hand in her hair. We're talking about a particular time in the past when things had been better between the three of us. As we talk, I'm thinking about how easily I revert to this version of myself when I'm around them - without thinking, my body language, my speech patterns change automatically. It's like taking off a mask.

POV shifts to show LaCroix. He's at some kind of charity event. At the moment he's talking to a man near a buffet table, a man he knows in some professional capacity, and a moment comes when he has to either eat or make some excuse. Without hesitating, he puts some item of food in his mouth. As a disembodied observer/Nicholas, I'm incredibly jealous of his ability to do that without flinching. It would make my life so much easier if I could pretend to eat - socialization revolves almost entirely around food and drink, so just imagine how much easier it would be to blend in. After a moment, LaCroix makes a displeased face, reaches for a napkin, and removes the thing in his mouth. He makes some comment about the poor quality of the food this year compared to previous years, and the man he's talking to agrees. LaCroix's posing as a gourmet, picky about what he eats - it's his usual trick, insulting the food wherever he goes. They make a joke about not being able to trust the food in a place that has such skinny staff, and then the man LaCroix's talking to complains that this event has gone downhill in general - disappointing for such a worthy charity. LaCroix makes a comment about the decline of morality as time goes by. He manages to say this with a straight face.

I don't remember much from the first dream I can remember from last night. I do remember being at a museum where supposedly the first "selfie" from the year 1010 could be found. It wasn't taken with a camera, of course, and it was actually a complete accident. Apparently a family had gone skydiving and the imprint from where their faces had hit the ground became fossilized, so this "selfie" was just a fossilized impression of people's faces. I was disappointed when I saw it, though. It was just a chalk outline of where the people had fallen, and someone had actually drawn these people on the piece of rock, which I thought was kind of wrong because it was in a cartoonish style and therefore inaccurate.

After that, I recall talking with some guy about Cruisin' USA (an old N64 racing game I used to have; I eventually traded it in a few years ago because, every time nostalgia told me to play that game, I was let down by the awful graphics and the cars' terrible handling). We then heard music from that game coming from somewhere nearby, so we started wandering around the floor of my residence hall trying to figure out which room someone was playing it in.

I woke up from that and had another strange dream when I went back to sleep. My parents were both visiting me at college, and I recommended that they see the Rocky Horror Show (my school's theater production this semester). I haven't seen it yet, but I've heard it's awesome. At some point, I remember noticing that my parents had left, so I started looking for them to see if they were still around. I ran out through the back door (I was in my house now for some reason - technically my old house, but my family just moved this summer, and I've hardly spent any time in the new house because I left for college a few days after we moved and have only been home for one weekend since). When I didn't see my parents there, I ran out the front door and saw my mom's car still in the driveway... packed full of my fraternity Brothers. That was confusing at first, but then they all shouted, "Thank you for helping your mother!" It turned out my mom was in the car too and had recruited them all to say that for some reason.

I woke up again but went back to sleep again. In this next dream, there was a floor event in my residence hall. I saw Jackie, one of my fraternity Brothers (we refer to everyone as a Brother regardless of gender), which surprised me because I didn't know she lived on my floor or even in my building (in reality, she does not). Anyway, the "event" was that everyone would be given a big crossword puzzle to take with them and do throughout the day, and whoever finished it first could return it to get a prize.

For some reason, at some point, we ended up outside by a road intersection off-campus. I decided to leave early and return to campus, which is when things started getting strange. By the time I was back on campus, I found it really hard to walk forward. There was some slight wind at the time, so I thought that could be attributed to the wind, but the wind didn't seem strong enough to interfere with walking. I thought it was strange, but I saw that everyone else was affected in the same way, so I figured it was probably just the wind after all.

When I got back to my dorm, I realized I'd forgotten to take a crossword puzzle from the event, so I decided to text Jackie to ask her if she could bring one back for me, but I didn't have her number, and I didn't know who else I could ask. I also remember getting a bunch of texts from my boyfriend throughout this dream and the last that I felt kind of bad about not having the time to reply to.

The dream suddenly because a Sims 3 game, and, since time can be sped up in the game, I accidentally fast-forwarded time (on the fastest setting) to a couple hours later before finally pausing it. I knew for sure now that I wouldn't be able to ask Jackie to get me a crossword puzzle because there's no way that "event" would still be going on. I also felt bad about not replying to my boyfriend's texts now that even more time had passed.

I realized after awhile that something didn't look quite right about the game interface, though I couldn't quite pinpoint what it was that was different. I did an RC when I noticed that and counted six fingers. I was dreaming! I counted again just to make sure. Seven fingers. Definitely dreaming! Instead of being all clueless as usual when I become lucid, I said out loud, "Now, this is where the fun begins."

Since I had no plan for the dream, I ran around, looking for something fun to do in a dream (I was no longer playing Sims anymore). I found a buffet table. I could eat! No, no, that's something I can do while I'm awake. Then, I spotted an empty glass and an empty silver pitcher on the table and decided now it was time to learn to exert some control over the dream. I decided that, if I poured the "empty" pitcher into the cup, I'd be pouring a drink out of it instead of nothing. I decided it'd be "something like eggnog" (the first thing that came to mind), but not quite the same, because why drink something in a dream I can drink in real life? The drink that came out was white and a little thick, but it didn't taste at all like eggnog. It was creamy, though, and kind of sweet, and... fizzy? I was actually surprised when I tasted something that was slightly fizzy because I wasn't expecting that.

I realized while I was drinking it that I was wearing my retainer, and my reaction to that was my one fatal mistake. I decided I should take my retainer out, but, instead of doing something quick like tossing it on the floor (who cares what happens to it if it's a dream and not real life?), I decided to find the case for it and put it back in its case. That was my big mistake because everything went dark, so I realized I was waking up because this had torn me away from what was keeping me occupied. Once I started to feel myself lying in bed, I knew that was it. I opened my eyes, disappointed I'd caused myself to wake up because of something so silly but also proud of myself for having had some control over not just myself but the dream environment itself.

I did one final RC just to ensure I was awake. Five fingers. I counted again. Five fingers again. Yep, definitely awake this time.

A woman who's been flirting with me - neither of us seriously - is taking my hand under the pretext of palm reading, turning it this way and that. She'd been joking around, but as she's 'reading' my palm, she notices the tiny raised circle on the tip of my thumb that holds a retracted needle and she stops smiling, though she doesn't understand what she's looking at.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've been sitting in a lounge room in the McKittrick. There's a host and a microphone, allowing the guests to listen in on his internal thoughts as we eat and drink. He's been sitting in the booth next to mine, having a conversation with a woman, another resident of the hotel. But when she leaves, he comes and sits across from me. He's bewildered as to why I've spent so much time here tonight. Of course the guests are all free to enjoy our stay at the hotel in any way we choose, there's no wrong way to go about it, and if I want to just sit here and watch his story unfold, that's fine - but my stay is half over already. Why don't I go out and see the show?

I'm thinking that I'll come back another time to enjoy the show - but nonetheless I leave the lounge and walk up to the next floor, which is in complete chaos thanks to the work of the three witches. Fragmentary memory here - I remember seeing the boy witch in passing and being annoyed with him, but no context beyond that. In a small room, I came across a woman who I realized has been/will be the next bald witch - right now she's another lost soul who came here on a mission but wound up getting drawn into Hecate's world. By the end of the night she has/will have shaved her head and altered her body language completely, transforming into one of the three witches for the next night.

The last of the three witches and the people under her sway are surrounded by sexual images. I only saw her briefly in passing as she led a young prince off down one of the halls. But instead I come across the naked prophetess who'll be taking this witch's role for the next night, currently in the process of transforming into that role. She puts her hands on my shoulders and pushes me to my knees in front of her, and I'm thinking that it's always a man she chooses for this part of the performance - the other guests in the room with me are all women, and they remain standing, pressing in close around us, watching her with a look of worship. She has a woman standing guard next to her during this dance, making sure none of the guests attempt to touch her without her permission. One of those women watching laughs off this restriction, and to show how ridiculous she thinks it is, she reaches out and puts her hand on the prophetess/witch's thigh with a familiar attitude. The performance comes to a complete stop. In the trouble that follows, I move away from the crowd and into the staff-only halls of the hotel.

I'm at a strategy meeting, impatient about it - I'm so tired of this cluster of timelines. Everyone here at this meeting is suspicious of each other, and convincing them to work together all over again every time I go through these events is getting really old. So I've stopped trying to juggle everyone's egos and am taking the lead here, and predictably, Astra winds up deciding to put me in my place. She mentally reaches into my head. I've been through so many timelines with her, though, I've learned to resist this, so I shove her right back out again. She's shocked. The rest of the room quietly clears out - no one wants to get involved in this. Everyone else has always been afraid of her. I hate that, the way they fear her. She puts up a pretense of being more mature than she really is, since she's possessed so many adults and seen so many of their memories, but she's still just a kid. I'm thinking, please let me find a way to keep her alive this time around.

(Yesterday.)

I'm a man trying to calm a situation down so that I won't wind up in a cell. It would be for a minor charge, but my situation's complicated. There's this woman I made a deal with a long time ago - I brought her to this world ('this world' is for all intents and purposes the same as IRL), and she freed me from the curse that had locked me up back in our own world. But there's a catch - if I'm locked up in a cell even for one night, that old curse will find me again, I'll be trapped again. I think of that as her 'winning' - we help each other often but I don't like her much. I'm afraid of being trapped, but I'm also afraid because if I'm trapped I won't be able to keep up the illusion that makes me look human.

(Today.)

A woman and I had been standing in the middle of a road surrounded by trees, discussing something - a car comes, the driver sees us, he swerves, he crashes. I'm irritated at the interruption, but I go over to the car so I can get a meal out of this before emergency services arrives. The scene changes abruptly - one moment I'm walking towards the car, the next moment time has passed, emergency services have already come and there's a crowd of people around. The woman and I leave and transform into a cloud of bats. In all my vampire dreams this has never happened before, and I pause to enjoy the novelty and absurdity. My perception's different. The sky is a brilliant saturated blue with something shimmering about it, and the air gives me the impression of containing new angles, like unseen tunnels.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I and a group of other people, all of us foreigners in this place, had been talking to a group of women on a small 'island' - just a heap of stones really. We're very frustrated. We're trying to get them to do something for their own good, and they're not cooperating. They end negotiations and vanish into thin air.

Still as the POV character from that last scene, I'm walking around the grounds of some large estate on a hill, with a gated entrance visible not too far away. I'm speaking to a woman all in pale gold - everything's pale gold, her robes, her hair, her skin, the mask that she wears that covers her whole face something like a welder's mask, only revealing one eye. She has her own issues with the people from that 'island' - she's saying they're against her and her plan simply because of her mental illness. She resents them.

I'm sitting on a wooden throne and talking to a man who's going through a bout of existential despair, and he's asking me about coping with vast spaces of time, with immortality - how do you do it? I find this hilariously awful - you're asking me?

Ritual: WTB 1am, woke 5am. Read and drank a cup of Calea zacatechichi tea. WBTB 6am, attempted WILD (counting and senses scanning), fell asleep while still on my back and had an ordinary NLD.

NLD: We were assaulting a dwarven fortress. I had stealthed in and filled the place with a smoke that was supposed to put all the dwarves to sleep. There were three other people my party waiting outside. As I was leaving I noticed that the smoke didn't seem to be working: the guards were as alert as ever. But someone started firing and soon we were embroiled in a full-out battle, which was what we had hoped to avoid because we were outnumbered. Although not the slightest bit lucid, I had a good deal of dream control and was using both levitation and invisibility to avoid being shot or captured, but my companions were not so fortunate, and I wasn't going to abandon them. In the last scene, the four of us have been captured and are being taken somewhere in the back of a van wearing straightjackets. One particularly gruff member of my team said to the others, "That's why one doesn't start to shoot until the light says he's turning on." I think he was trying to tell them that they should have waited for me to give the signal before initiating battle, and that our plan had failed because one of them had jumped the gun. After I woke up I thought it odd that he had been referring to me with the masculine pronoun, since I hadn't felt distinctly male in the dream, but perhaps that's how the others had perceived me.

After I woke it was light out, so I started with my plan to experiment with Remee in nap mode, set to go off after 20 minutes. Anticipation made it hard to fall asleep promptly, so after a while I reset it for another 20 minutes, since I wanted to make sure I was well asleep and ideally in REM before the lights started. I hadn't been carefully checking the time, so when I woke up again I was uncertain if I had missed the signal or if it had not gone off yet. No dreams I could recall. I checked the time, it was about 8:10, reset the Remee and went back to sleep, more easily this time.

FA: I woke up, looked at the clock, and saw that it was almost 9am. I remembered it had been shortly past 8 when I had last set the Remee, so I must have missed the signal again. I got out of bed, completely oblivious to the fact that I was transitioning smoothly from a false awakening into a real rising, until I began to take off the Remee and just then the red lights started flashing on the mask. After brief confusion I realized that I had just been fooled by an FA: how could I have checked the time on the clock just a moment ago when at that time I was still wearing the mask? I checked the clock again now that I was really awake and saw that it was a lot earlier than I had thought, only 8:30, so the Remee was going off right on schedule.

Note: The fact that I had woken up just before the Remee went off didn't feel coincidental, but rather a manifestation of what always happens to me with alarm clocks. Although I rarely form an accurate conscious impression of time in my dreams, for some reason I have an eerily consistent ability to wake up right before any alarm that I set actually goes off—usually within a few minutes, sometimes less than a minute in advance of the alarm. This seems to be what accidentally happened here. Not helpful in this case, though!

There's this machine. I fed it a small living thing to activate it. Now the screen's showing me several options to choose from, words that don't mean anything to me. The one on the screen at the moment is JEON. Swiping between options, I settle on a word that resembles AERIE written partially with Greek letters. The screen changes to show an image of four clocks. I'm aware I must memorize their appearances quickly, because I won't have another chance.

They're very elaborately designed, beautiful things - solid organic lines mixed with jagged exposed machinery; black wood, black clockwork, gold accents. The first is the simplest - a curving tapered pillar with the word MONUMENT in gold at the base. The others have human faces as ornamentation - the third has a woman's face with eyes closed like a mask and a single arm, arranged in such a way that it gives the impression that she's cradling something.

To the left of the screen, a case appears. It has spaces to fit each of the clocks. At the base of the machine, a slot produces several road maps. Without unfolding them, I can see that several places have been circled.

I am playing Dwarf Fortress, and mix with the game a little as I micro-manage the Dwarves to build an epic tower defense style entrance to their underground Fortress. It should be impenetrable! But I have to meet my friend A for coffee before I go to work.

I drive to the coffee shop on the North end of town in a white pickup truck, keenly aware that I don't have much time before I have to go to work, in the opposite part of town. I don't see her as I arrive, so I park in one of the open spaces and get out. There are little Dwarves around me, and a large wooden post next to the truck. I tie the truck to it with a rope as the Dwarves climb over the rope, the post, and the truck. Seems normal. Then the truck next to mind pulls away, and gets stuck on something, pivots substantially, and puts a big dent in the side of my truck.

Ignoring the dent, I still don't see any sign of my friend, so I go into the coffee shop. Immediately, some people ask me to participate in a study. I recognize most of them from when I was involved in the same study earlier. I was an auditor, checking in on their work, and never found out exactly what it was they were doing. Out of curiosity, I agree to participate. I thought I saw needle marks on some of the other participants, even though no needles were involved, so it seems like they have something to hide.

Assuring me that they just need to do a couple blood tests, a strong guy literally picks me up off the ground by my left arm and carries me down the hall. I would've walked, so I let him carry me. Then I suspect that perhaps the reason for this treatment is because what they are going to do to me should make me want to run away. I struggle to break free, but he is ridiculously strong. All my struggling has puffed out my arm veins. He stabs a big needle into my main bicep vein, and quickly draws blood out of me. I conclude that this all was just a very efficient method to get blood samples, and I relax.

I overhear a few scientists talking about one girl who they gave an injection to earlier. She has turned into some sort of monster, and is very dangerous. They have her barricaded in one of the lower levels of this building, about two floors below us. They then tell me that as part of this study, I must feed her, and they hand me a brown tray with a few unappealing plates of food on it. Apparently, she has killed all the guards, and everyone else who has gone near her. Great...

Making my way down to her floor, through some sturdy doors, and down some big stairways, I see her at the end of an abandoned hallway. Several open rooms are on either side of the hall, with no one in them. Some doors open, some closed. Blood, debris, and trash is strewn all over the floor and walls. It looks like a massacre. ...Quietly, I walk up to her from behind as she is hunched over a dead guy wearing a white lab coat. It looks like she's eating his flesh. I poke her gently in the back with the food tray to get her attention. With twitchy reflexes, she turns to face me abruptly, her cheeks and mouth covered in blood and weird black slime. Letting out a low growl, she begins to turn her body to face me as well as if she's getting ready to pounce like a cat. Basically, she's one of those scary fast zombies now...

Dropping the tray at her feet, I turn and run as hard as I can down the hall back the way I came. I hear her approach, but don't dare look back as even the slightest hesitation might be the edge she needs to catch me. I dart to my right into an open room, and close the door, locking it faster than I thought possible. A sturdy wooden door, with a very narrow window, I feel safe now.

Smashing the door right through the frame, she jumps into the room after me. I back away, and jump over a bed, putting it between her and I. She slowly walks up toward me, and climbs onto the bed. Laying down on her side facing me, she begins to speak normally. She tells me of how she no longer needs to have sex to reproduce. Having been discouraged by many males' eagerness to have sex, and concerned about that, she gave it up in favor of killing people to reproduce instead. Somehow it works for her. Almost on queue, I jizz in my pants. Yes, just like that SNL skit... "Well, now I especially am in the position to get killed by her!" I think, as I try to stay on my feet.

I put my hand on her shoulder to comfort her, and am teleported to a river in the middle of the night. I am positioned precariously on a steep snow bank, that is rapidly being dissolved into this raging river. I try to climb out, but the snow is too wet and slides down the bank, nearly taking me into the river with it. It all turns to slush around me.

With a few steps, I leap across the 10 ft river, onto the opposite snow bank that looks like its in better shape, and try to climb out of that side. The top of this one is crusty snow, and large chunks of it break off, falling over my head as I try not to fall with them into the frigid rapids right behind me. However, I have no other choice but to try, so I make another leap for the edge, only to have it break away, sending me falling backwards into the river.

Now looking down on the river from up in the sky, I see that I have died, and my body is being carried by the currents downstream. I watch as it floats along. Then it is carried to a Dwarven Fortress that is harnessing the water for some sort of industry. They fish my body out of the water and pass it to the medics to see if they can revive me. I watch as they try, and then conclude that I have died.

I re-materialize in front of the coffee shop again, having just parked the truck. This time there is a parrot on the post that I have tied the truck to. The parrot criticizes me on many levels. The parrot seems to have been emboldened by being let out of its cage. I let it criticize me, not really caring, because soon I must deal with the demon girl. I warn the parrot of this girl, and how the parrot himself should be careful - as she is very quick. I perceive images in my mind of the girl transforming into her demon form after being a cat, then a demon cat, in various stages of development.

I realize that time is not linear as we normally perceive it, and get in the truck to drive to work.

Setting loosely based on China some centuries ago. There's two men standing on either side of a gateway; they used to know each other a long time ago, but not anymore. The one inside's a soldier; the one outside used to be. Currently he's drunk and being held up by two soldiers who work under the one inside. The one inside is deciding whether or not to have the other one executed. In the end he decides against it and says something along the lines of "Get this drunkard out of my sight."

As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking that he's going to regret that decision. In a few years they'll be rivals who both want something or someone, and the other man will win. I see an image of that future, where the man currently standing inside that gate is now watching the other man from a distance. He's thinking back to this moment and wondering what would have happened if he'd executed him then.

Visiting the McKittrick, I've been following the taxidermist - a bald man with sunken eyes, looks starved and intense - as he talks to a young blonde man with a heavy jaw who works for the hotel, very earnest type. When it's time for the final banquet, they meet up with two women in clothes from the Victorian era and accompany them down the stairs - but I come to realize their final scene won't be with everyone else at the banquet at all. The women dance down the stairs, floating from one bannister to the other. Standing with them on the bannisters, so close to the ceiling, I'm very aware of Hecate's influence on the floor just above us.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've just walked away from a room where I'd been talking to a woman. Now I'm standing in the ruins of a building, on a street where a lot of buildings have been destroyed. Nearby there's a large brown rat on top of a pile of rubble, and I have a sense of fellow feeling as I watch it. I don't really want to go out into the street - it's much too exposed - but I don't see any way around it. Once in the street, I catch sight of a woman in a white dress two or three buildings down, behind a wall of iron bars. She sees me and jumps up and down to get my attention. "Nick! It is Nicky, isn't it?" I recognize her, we're close. I (or rather my POV character here) use several different names - 'Nick' is for all intents and purposes my (POV character's) real name, but I haven't heard it for a long time, so this is something of a reunion. But I'm debating whether I want to take the time to rescue her from behind those iron bars.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've been walking around backstage at a sort of club in the 1930s or so after leaving the audience of a show on stage in the main room. Talking to various people, overhearing conversations by dancers. I'm just now leaving a smokey room where two men have fallen asleep. I've been looking for someone, a specific woman. There's a disaster or a tragedy that's about to occur here, and I have to find her first.

The show in the main room ended while I was backstage, and everyone's straggling out. In the lobby, I come across a large man I remember meeting earlier. He's putting on his coat. Near the doors, his wife and daughter are waiting for him, and he introduces them to me. I recognize the daughter as the woman I was looking for - she's just a kid. I hadn't been expecting that she'd be a kid in this era. I kneel down to introduce myself to her eye to eye, using the name "Deacon Willfire" - it's the fake name I've been using here in the past, but Deacon is similar to the name I'll be using when she meets me as an adult in the future. She's very shy here, can barely look at me, but I'm aware that meeting me here will make an impression on her, and the similar names will help that memory along when we meet in the future.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm in that kid's room, standing by an empty fireplace that's so large I could easily fit in it just by ducking a little - it's grabbing my attention. But I'm also talking to the kid, saying to her, "A 300-year-old vampire for an imaginary friend?" (I'm referring to myself. She thinks I'm imaginary.) "You're trouble for sure." I'm thinking about the way I'm meeting her at various times in her life out of sequence. From her perspective, proceeding through time in the usual linear fashion, I've wound up being someone she grows up knowing, someone who's been around for most of her life.

A false awakening during which I tried to write down the previous dream. The dream I was writing down was a Rumpelstiltskin POV, and I'd written that in Belle's version of their shared dream there had been no corresponding scene with Bae. When Rumpelstiltskin found this out from her, he had a sort of bitter "aha!" reaction to it, as if this proved him right in doubting something. But now that I was 'awake' and writing this down, I thought he was mistaken in that reaction. There was more I wanted to write, but my pen ran out of ink. I went to fetch another and was distracted by various things.

(Woke up for real. Back to sleep.)

There are four servants in a mansion, one who's getting ready to serve guests. The other three have to stay out of sight of the guests, and two of them have stepped out a back door to talk about something.

The other one of those three servants, the only woman among them, finds those two standing around the open door and is very upset at them for leaving it open. They have some reason for it - but while doors are open, the spell that freezes time inside the mansion weakens. Allowing a few minutes to pass here and there means very little to them, but that fourth servant, the one currently serving the guests, is human. He only has so many minutes in his lifetime. She wants to preserve that limited life of his for as long as she can, even if it's only a few centuries. She's furious at them for allowing any of it to slip away.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A car crashes out of a portal onto a hill. The woman inside is unconscious, and when she wakes up, she gives the name of a flight that crashed with her and her husband on it. She believes that she's just woken up after that plane crash; she doesn't remember the car or the portal. That plane crash happened days or weeks ago. But she's taken to the hospital where her husband is still staying.

When her husband sees her, he's shocked to see she looks much younger than before she disappeared. He takes out her compact mirror from her purse - he has all of her things that were found at the plane crash site - and hands it to her. As he does so, I see an image of her at three ages. Her appearance now is a young woman with strangely large eyes, blonde hair worn straight back under a headband, neatly dressed. But I'm also seeing a version of her several years older, with long wavy hair and a loose dress; and at the same time, a version of her that's about 5 years old. I realize that she became younger while she stayed in that place on the other side of the portal, and if she'd stayed longer she would have reverted to that 5 year old image.

I'm with a group of people looking around the ruins of this small castle or fortress. I'm trying to track someone down - I don't expect her to be here, but I know she was here sometime in the past.

Switching to third person view, there's a hidden room in the ruins somewhere below us. There's a kid inside, a little boy, the son of the person I was trying to track down. He's been a kid for 170 years. The spell or curse or whatever it is that keeps him frozen in time also means he can only speak for one day in each year. He's listening to us move around over his head, and thinking about how he's saved that one day of speech so he can give us a message now.

That same boy is walking down a suburban street, and he's spotted and recognized by a young woman in a passing car. She tells the driver to pull over, and he does. Her name's Giselle, and though she's a vampire she's never killed anyone - she's been kept away from people by the man driving the car and his wife, her sort of self-appointed guardians. They feel some kind of personal responsibility for her, but they're very nervous around her. They're looking particularly nervous right now, as she gets out and talks to the kid. She's very friendly, she's delighted to see him, but without really thinking about it, when she gets close enough she bites his throat. She can't help it. As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking that she's going to wind up serving as a sort of adopted mother to the kid, and it'll work out well for both of them as far as that goes. But I'm also thinking that this is a sign that our - her, me, the kid, the kid's mother, some other people - our window of opportunity to become human is closing for this timeline. Once we've missed that opportunity, we'll inevitably wind up dying off one by one - the timeline wrapping up loose ends.

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.)