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I'm looking at an image of a woman wrapped in this dress made of blue cloth; the cloth also wraps up her neck and over some kind of tall headgear in a way that reminds me of a nun, or some medieval headdresses. The only skin visible is her face - or it would be, except that in this image, she has the head of an elephant. I'm aware this is specifically something added to this image, it's not literally her face. It's representing something to do with the shape. I briefly see a second, similar image, using the head of an anteater instead of an elephant, reinforcing the point about shape.

Scene change. That woman, with her own human face now - or at least, a woman in that same dress - standing in an immense room. A man's come to consult her. His skin has cracks running through it in a way that reminds me of magma. He's aware, as he approaches her, that this isn't the woman he's come to consult - she's a stand-in, a decoy, to protect the real one. He can smell the difference between them. He's about to say something about this, but he's distracted by noticing a different scent in the room. There's a dead body of a man lying on the floor a little way away, and now he walks back to that body and bends down to look at a circular metal medallion on the corpse's chest. He can smell two other people who were here earlier. One is his sister. The other, he asks the woman in blue about - a man he describes out loud only as "a writer," and his voice sounds annoyed. In his mind, he's thinking that this writer left for America years ago, and shouldn't be here now.

Then I have the impression that I'm looking at one in a series of scenes showing an alternate past, of what would have happened if that writer hadn't traveled to America back then, but I only actually see one scene - a group of people, mostly adults, celebrating the 8th birthday of that previously mentioned sister, Julie.

non-dream dream semi-lucid lucid false awakening

I'm attending my guru's teachings and a sequence of odd experiences happen. At some point he plays a drum in a certain beat pattern, without explaining its importance or decoding its meaning. Then he leaves his seat and a midle-aged lady student moves in to play the drum, trying to recreate the same sound. She thinks it's ike a mantra, that we can replicate to help our meditation. But she doesn't play it right. I feel some uncomfort, like knowing she shouldn't be doing it, but it's not my business to decide that, so wat I do is correct her and guide her to play the right beats. At this point I feel my guru's eyes on the back of my head. I turn around but he isn't there. I also leave.
Then I am with my guru, but the timeline is not linear. I left with him and a group of select people who will stay with him for the next hours as he meditates and eventually doozes off in a more private place. He sits in the middle and we sit around on mattresses. We will be there supposedly for 17 hours, meditating and sleeping. At this point the lady hasn't plaid the drum yet, but then we hear the sound. The guru is a bit upset. Not only it disrupts this quiet moment we're meant to have, but this drumming sound is a sacred sound that shouldn't be plaid by just anybody. From this place here he sticks his eyes into the back of my head on that room, knowing all too well that my good heart enabled that lady to play that drum.
So he closes his eyes, but he also gets out and personally ensures this lady is punished with temporary incarceration on a cave nearby. I just know all of this because I see it all happening in my mind. As soon as he leaves the cave (and during all that time he was just sitting straight, eyes closed in front of me), I sneak out from this room, to go see the lady. i feel guilty, because I encouraged her to play and taught her the right beats, so I should be incarcerated, not her. I sneak out of the room silently, everybody is meditating eyes closed or sleeping, so I assume no one seems me going.
I find a way to communicate with the lady inside the cave and to say I'm sorry for her torment.
I can feel the presence of my guru, of course he knows I'm there, the whole time we've been in more than one place at the time and our actions seem to be all interconnected. She is me and I am him and he is me and I am her. He is smiling from afar.

Based on F/SN, as Emiya, I've just found myself in a timeline where I'm acting as Servant to the white-haired version of Sakura. I'm thinking that I've been through this type of timeline before, and there are only two ways events play out after this point, neither of which I want to go through again. I'm trying to think up a way to avoid repeating those same patterns, to create a third possibility instead. At the moment, I'm helping Tohsaka climb up into some passageway, to either hide or escape from Sakura.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After a series of extremely loosely IRL-based scenes (although I thought of all the locations as IRL-based, the only thing that actually resembled IRL was my own identity), I'm walking into the lobby of a hotel where I'm living, heading for the stairs. I pass a woman working at the front desk, a woman with straight black hair in a bob. Looking at her, I think that she reminds me of the woman who appeared in a shared dream with my IRL sister years back, in which she'd been my sister's roommate. Her hair's longer this time. When I make eye contact with her, I become lucid. I immediately start floating. I remember my intention to try summoning Julia today (usually my most common recurring DC, she hasn't reappeared since my first and last attempt at deliberately summoning her), and I start to do so, but then I change my mind about the method - rather than try to summon directly, it's easier for me to 'summon' by traveling. Since I'm still moving towards the stairs, I decide that Julia is at the top of those stairs. It's a spiral staircase, gold railing, huge, in the center of the room; it reminds me of a pillar and also of DNA. As I focus on it, I become aware that I'm waking up. I can feel the bed against my back, and the image of the staircase has frozen, as if I'm no longer moving. It gives me the impression that it's melting - not the staircase itself, but the visual image, like a filter being applied to a photo. I lose visuals. I spend some time trying to force the dream to reform, and have the feeling I'm getting somewhere, there's a brief sense of something shining in the darkness, but I eventually have to admit that I'm now too awake for this.

Except it's a false awakening. I spend some time in that same hotel lobby, looking through my backpack, trying to find a pen with which to write down that dream, before waking up for real.

A man walks up to a wall and shouts at the guards on the other side, trying to get them to chase him somewhere. It's part of a bigger plan - but I've already seen this happen, and the plan didn't work, we need more people. So I shout to the guards too, telling them this man is a monster, send help, send backup, send everyone you've got. He turns around to look at me and is completely bewildered - he doesn't know me, he has no idea what I'm trying to do. But it works. He ends up being chased by far more people than he was expecting.

They've surrounded him, and everyone's drawn their swords. There's a small audience of people who are thinking of this as a duel, despite the difference in numbers. He's killed immediately, but I rewind time to let him try again. As I do so, I see an image of a page in a book describing this scene as though it were a story - it only describes his actions, the duel, not the part about me turning back time. He keeps being defeated, and I keep rewinding time by moments. He's the only person aside from me who's aware of what just happened, so he has the chance to adjust his actions accordingly, although that's easier said than done and he dies over and over again. But I'm giving him an infinite number of chances to succeed.

Just now he's cut the head off one of his opponents. The people watching the 'duel' exclaim over this. From his perspective that was the end of a long struggle in which he's lost far more often than he's won, but from the audience's perspective, the duel's only just started and he's completely dominating. A woman calls it horrific, the way he coldly executed his opponent. A young man who's an aspiring duelist is admiring what he calls 'the skill that comes with experience,' which amuses me, given my very different perspective on how well this fight is going.

I've just started working in a shop run by two hara, training dogs, and I've been talking over a problem with the owner. The other har is someone the owner purchased, but I'm thinking you wouldn't get that impression from seeing the two of them interact; I think of him as aloof and 'leonine' and that he's 'best left to his own devices.'

There's two close friends who made some archaeological discovery many years ago, as a result of which, the choices they respectively made caused them to drift further and further apart. Now a girl's delivering a message to one of them, who has become a demon, informing him that the other is on his deathbed. He has only a mild response.

There's a woman looking at a 'falling star demon' - a spirit of a star which would have been considered simply a spirit when it was in its place in the sky, but a demon when it falls - and she refers to it as her assassin. The falling star is a sign of her own fate. I'm thinking about whether there are any choices to be made here, or which could be made at an earlier point in the timeline; any options other than her dying here and now.

An old man and a young man have just gone through a portal to another world, chasing someone who's stolen something. The old man asks around after him, but the description he gives, which would have been very unique in the world they're coming from, is almost useless in this one: they're looking for a man about 6 feet tall, dressed "like a warrior." The majority of the men they're talking to here are wearing armor, so that's not very helpful. Bit of a memory gap then, something involving a woman they know and the young man getting into trouble.

The young man's in jail, where another man from another world - not the one they were looking for - is being kept separate, a big blond Viking-looking guy in a large cell full of straw, who seems a little lost and confused. He's being questioned by the jailer, who's talking about that woman who came up earlier; she has a very long series of names, ending with Williams. She's married to someone very respectable, and she's denied that she knows the man in the cell. The jailer is telling him this to try to get him to admit that his story about knowing her was a lie and confess what's really going on, but the man in the cell is completely bewildered. The young man, on the other hand, is aware that there are three versions of Williams, the one that belongs to this world, the one from his, and the one that loves this man in the cell.

Williams arrives in the jail then - the young man believes she's the version from his world. She refers to the young man as Zachary, and she's carrying a fox - when I look at the fox, I'm aware that Zachary is a shapeshifter, and there's some connection to this particular fox. Williams goes to the man in the cell and she calls him "Tin Man," which is a sort of code name, and she's using it to reassure him of who she is and that she really knows him. Zachary believes that the Williams from his world has been posing as the version from this other guy's world in order to get some information out of him. She has him let out of the cell, and when he goes to her, their eyes - the fox's as well - start glowing green, and I have the feeling this means they're about to move between worlds. She looks to Zachary and says something apologetic, and he suddenly realizes that this is both his Williams and the one this guy loves, and that the fox is him - he's looking at their future.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Just fragments for the rest of the day:

An intelligent species of birds that are dying out after losing all their females to some disaster, giving some other species advice in the hopes of avoiding that same disaster.

Walking down a street, four dancers appear in front of us, concealing an assassin among them.

Something to do with prison and hooded figures "finding their own way."

Describing the story of the King in Yellow to someone.

non-dream dream semi-lucid lucid false awakening

I am revisiting my kindergarten. It is now fully modern and totally different. I see one of the teachers from my time. I avoid her before she sees me. It connects directly to an art school. It feels familiar, but why should I know it? When several guys in the common room start looking at me, like they know I don't belong here, I hide behind a book shelf and pick up a large comics book. A boy appears and talks to me. He knows me, says he didn't expect to see me there again, I do feel like we've met before.
We go for a walk. A semi-rural area, it's pretty, but he says the surprise is still to come. At the top of a narrow street sided by old stone walls, we encounter an entrance to an old castle. He introduces me a couple of hippies who have reclaimed this abandoned site and are slowly making it their home and reconstructing it.
I leave and find myself floating through the air down to the urban area. I become aware and watch an open area, with concrete floor, a few trees, people walking in a hurry in different directions, heading to their jobs. It's a grey, rainy day, people look somber and mindeless. I am lucid and don't have a clear goal, so what I decide to do is reverse time. Don't know why, but I do it. I watch people walking backwards, the wind blowing backwards, the clock moving anti-clockwise. Then I stop it and time resumes it's course, forward. Most people don't react to what just happened, they do exactly what they had done before, repeat the same steps. But something amazing happens, a few of them remember! And whatever they are feeling changes their perception of everything. A couple of friends who is crossing paths again, they walk slowly to each other, with lucid understanding in their eyes, they stare with a smile in their faces and then they hug, with no rushes. Others stop walking and swirl around, like dancing, or stare at the sky or look at others admired that they haven't seen what they saw. They experience a small enlightnement with the realization of the relativity of reality.

There's a vampire who looks like a kid, who'd been having some kind of serious problems, but is assuring a friend of his that he's past them now. He's also discovered that, as a result of those problems, he can eat solid food now, and he's trying to stay off blood. He's optimistic about it. "I've been having some sickness, but-" His friend laughs, patronizingly. As a 3rd person observer, I side with the friend - this is a bad idea.

There's a woman working at some kind of community center, and a man who seems to be drunk outside, holding a knife. She's saying to him through the door, "Go home, Ray! You're sick! You need help!" Afterwards she starts thinking about fated events, and timing.

I'm working with a team of bounty hunters to catch two people, allowing one of them to lead us to the other without letting him realize he's being followed. We catch up to them in the woods, and they're both here, but they're unconscious, and surrounded by two "Wraths" - some semi-divine role, working for Ares. They're waiting for their master, who arrives just after we do.

Three people discussing a conversation they just had with a police captain who hired them. One of them uses the slang term "NeuTrooL", a pun on "new" and "true" and "neutral", which means information given by someone who mistakenly believes their view is an objective truth, completely neutral, when in fact it's influenced by their own bias.

A woman's telling me about her dreams, with a large cast of recurring characters and ongoing storylines. She's telling me her most recent one, about "the Prince and the Magician", and says that the Prince is captive but still playing an active role in events. As she talks, I see the prince sitting in a room that has something crystalline about it; he's a fae-looking thing, and he's sitting in front of a mirror with a spell on it, talking to someone at a distance. The creature in the mirror is very large, and has fur. The woman telling the story mentions the name Ba'alrael.

There's this guy running from some gang. It's about the patent for something he invented. He can't believe his invention is something anyone would be willing to kill him over, but I remind him it's not the invention they want to kill him over, it's the money. He's got some legal document - not the patent itself, but related to it, possibly he hasn't filed for it yet - which is what everyone's after, and after I get him to reveal it to me, a man who is my brother appears and snatches both the guy and the document away and runs into the forest, just as the gang catches up to us. This was our plan, the woods are my brother's territory. I act like I'm on the gang's side, or at least as if I want to catch that guy as much as they do - they were already aware from past interactions that I have an interest in the guy with the patent, and they've assumed I want the document for my own reasons. So they follow me when I lead the chase into the forest, into my brother's traps.

The path into the forest that I lead them on - and which my brother appears to be on, we catch glimpses of him now and then, though I'm aware he won't stick to the path - curves back and forth in strange ways, it's disorienting. I see an odd bullet coming - dark green like a beetle's wing - and I make sure I'm out of its path, that it picks off one of the gang as intended. It was fired by one of three men who work for/with my brother, people I know well. Time seems to have slowed down, and when one of the gang starts grumbling about the strangeness of it, a man emerges from the woods, the second of my brother's men. He explains that it's the insect-birds. They're insects which mimic birds and sing constantly, disorienting the birds and causing them to mistake night for day, and for us, creating an illusion of time slowing. They prevent violence being done in my brother's forest. But "their element is in possessing one," he says; that is, the insect enters and controls a single bird.

I'm reading a book. In it, the main character is looking at a river and thinking "The mare of time." The river surface usually looks calm, but it's been disturbed due to the ongoing combat. There's a thought that it's only humanocentrism that makes him see the 'calm' river as better/more natural than the 'disturbed' river. There's a reference to a distant place he's been searching for, or came from, or that otherwise has been referenced frequently in the story before now; from this point in the story onward, that place will no longer be a major part of the story. There will be a few minor finds, items from that place, fruits, henna - accompanied by the line "It was a good henna, but not enough to sit in front of the Skillet-mirror" - but the place itself will never appear in the story again, which gives the story as a whole a sort of surreal feeling, with storylines that go nowhere and scenes that don't quite match up, aside from always containing the same main character; a focus on imagery rather than plot. It reminds me of a less surreal Maldoror, or a more surreal Gormenghast, and I start thinking about the surreal in my own writing.

There's a Lost Boys tv show, currently showing the Boys versus some vampire skinheads.

A doctor who is giving up his practice and moving to an isolated island, moving in with the couple he loves. He's talking to his mother (a relatively young woman who insists he refers to her as his sister in public) about his intent to stop practicing medicine. They're standing on a small wooden hanging bridge high over a river, surrounded by tropical plants with broad leaves and looking out over the sea; it's very beautiful.

I'm in a marketplace filled with angry people. They don't like being guarded by off-worlders like us, and we're trying to arrange things so we can get at least half the guard duty covered by their own people. One of our guys in uniform is saying something about how surveys indicate the majority of locals don't mind having some off-worlder presence, and we're trying to find the best solution for everyone here, and more research is going to have to be done. I'm not joining in the discussion, I'm sitting in the dirt at the edge of the marketplace, out of uniform, just listening and watching. There'd been a chance of a riot here, but the danger seems to have passed. Now that things seem to have calmed down, the kid who alerted me to the situation and led me here reaches out and picks up the chips - money - that I left beside me on the ground. I put it there for him, but he seemed unsure if it was really okay for him to take it. When he sees me looking at him, he looks scared and smiles at me; I nod, and he grabs the money and runs off.

Someone with a different face than usual is explaining to a horrified listener that he's learned to shapeshift. The listener asks who he can shapeshift into; the answer is something along the lines of "oh, people I've eaten, people I've physically bonded with, anyone really." The listener wonders, but doesn't ask out loud, what physically bonded means exactly; he's wondering if just seeing someone is enough. "Objects, even." The listener, horrified by all this, asks, "What happens to your personhood?" The shapeshifter says he's removed a piece of himself and keeps it separate in this box, which he's now asking the listener to deliver to his aunt for him for safekeeping. It looks ordinary, and the listener asks if this shouldn't be labeled in some way. The shifter mocks the idea. It's not necessary to know something's significance to keep it safe; often it's the opposite, it's simpler and safer if they don't know.

A pair of time-travelers who've recently reunited are stopping by a football game they've been to before. They kept meaning to get around to changing this one little moment in time, and now they've got the chance. There's a guy who's been meaning to propose to his girlfriend, and they're about to be featured on the big screen; the first time around, neither of them had noticed they were on camera, and something unfortunate happened afterward. This time around, the time-travelers are sitting just behind the couple, and they poke them and draw their attention to the camera. The guy takes the moment to propose, the girl accepts - but they both seem rather awkward and uncomfortable with all the attention.

I've been living in a foreign country, working as a live-in tutor, but this is the end of my last day and I'm about to leave. I'm packing up the last of my things and then head downstairs. Downstairs appears to be the house I grew up in, but I'm thinking to myself that this stuff isn't really here, I'm dreaming, and this is only being used as a convenient background, so there's no need to pack it all. Despite this thought, I don't become very lucid; I just focus on sorting out which things only seem to be here because it's a dream, and which things I actually need to pack.

Julie's patting a big, shaggy old dog, in a room with four guys behind her, talking to her, though I can't make out what's being said. I'm using magic to check in on her from a distance and I don't have a very good connection in this room. She gets up and goes into the corridor, where I can't see her at all, but I recognize the sound of her sister's voice. I realize they're heading outside, which is convenient, there's tons of running water out there I can use. I switch the spell to a bit of water running down the side of the wall, and see that they've gone out into the courtyard and are sitting down on the benches around the fountain - even better. As I move the spell, I remember seeing a post here on DV with a title about learning to control the elements in dreams, which I hadn't read, since thinking of the elements as something you have to learn to use sounded counterproductive. I'm thinking about how helpful water spirits have always been. Again, I don't go lucid; the spell's POV has been moved, and I go back to focusing on the view. They're in the courtyard of a building made of large sand-colored stones, surrounded by potted and hanging plants, and from the fountain I'm looking up at Julie's sister, a woman with long black hair, wearing a black dress. She's saying something about "outlanders."

I'm with a group of people crossing a desert, when a girl - Julia - arrives in our camp on foot. She'd been following us after we left town, refusing to take her with us. She's an English woman, dressed in Victorian clothing; she looks as if she must be very hot in those clothes, but she's kept struggling along. Then a scene change, just a quick image: Julia walking in the desert on foot, while I and a woman sitting behind me are riding a horse, far ahead of her.

A fragment: an image of cities and towers in domes surrounded by wilderness, one of which has been heavily decayed, but which appears to rebuild itself as I'm watching; it's related to the breaking of a Sleeping Beauty-style curse.

Part of a castle has been blocked off to the public for a photoshoot I'm working on. There's a woman hanging around just outside the blocked off area, watching us; she's very pretty, with long red hair under a hat. It starts raining a little and we take a break, and I go over to smoke by the entrance. That woman comes over to me and we start talking. After a while, she tells me she's the daughter of someone I know, someone I watched die in hospital just yesterday. Thing is, in the present, that daughter is just a young child; I have a mental image of seeing her, as a child, in the hospital. There's something to do with timelines or the dead going on. I don't believe her. She tells me she's wanted to see me, and implies that in her own time, I'm dead. Some other people from the photoshoot come over then and distract me for a moment, and then the woman is no longer there.

I can't get a couple light switches to work, and realize this is a dream. (Noteworthy: that's a common dream sign for me, but up until now, it only happened if I went to sleep so early that it was still dark IRL, usually around 5 AM. This time I went to sleep at a normal hour, after sunrise.) I have a false awakening: I'm in my IRL bed, but am fairly sure I'm still dreaming. I wonder what to do with this - I look up at the ceiling and consider removing it and going flying. However, I'm distracted by the sound of a crash, and I see my computer (an old desktop model which I don't actually own IRL) has fallen over and broken. I forget about dreaming and get irrationally stressed about having to replace the computer. (I suspect there may have been an actual noise IRL that affected the dream.)

Based on F/SN, a bunch of photos showing the future of various timelines. I focus on one showing Saber in a park by a lake, with skyscrapers in the background, and it becomes the setting of the dream; someone who I at first mistake for Archer is teasing her, and he winds up falling in the lake. He's wearing some sort of uniform that I associate with the Mage's Association, and which I think of as being 'Saber's colors' (it's blue and gold), marking them as partners; then I realize he's an older Shirou, not a version of Archer.

I'm approaching a dance in the woods together with someone I know, and I recognize the song playing - Bottom of the River, Delta Rae. We walk over to three woman sitting around a fire, to speak with them. I think of the Fates and the Graces.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm Shirou, and Tohsaka's just walked away from those three women from the previous scene, and before I follow her, one of those women says to me, "Nothing like that to make your magic full of fear." I'm thinking that I have just enough awareness of Archer's memories to know there's something I don't want to remember; remembering it would cause me to repeat the same choices he made, and that's not what this timeline's for.

I'm reading an article about genius, stating that long-term caffeine use has disruptive effects on the brain.

I'm trying to buy something but I've upset the woman working the counter somehow and she's refusing to ring me up, or any of the other customers for that matter. She goes so far as to call the police. I literally offer her the shirt off my back - a basketball jersey, something that's worth something to her. We strike up a conversation, and she winds up being friendly.

An advertisement for a Christmas event called the Forest of Lights; Christmas shopping in a small store that has cookies out on display, someone exclaims over them, saying that they're just like the ones his grandmother used to make, which he hasn't been able to find since she died, not knowing what they were called.

A grandmother talking to a baby which is also herself: "You're going to be just fine." She's a woman who grew up in the present era, then somehow mentally time-traveled to the past and became trapped there, and wound up living out the life of her own grandmother. She's at a family gathering now and talking about a business she owns, when she has to sit down abruptly, and then holds out her hands and comments on how they're shaking. She's sure this is the moment when she dies. She's very calm about this, to the point that the people around her think she must be joking. There's a narrator then, saying something about how a part of her always expected that when she died, she would simply wake up back in her real body in the present. But she doesn't. It was a mind-soul transfer, the narrator says. When she died, she died. That was it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm looking at a grave marker in Erana's garden, and examining the spell on it; and then admiring the spell over the rest of the garden that makes it a sanctuary, and noting how even the water of the two rivers which flow around it are affected by the spell when they come into contact with it. Looking at all that running water, I'm having doubts about whether this will be the best place for Olivia to stay over the next few days, even though we're on her native soil, and even though it's otherwise ideal. The river running under the bridge at the entrance to the garden is just a trickle at the moment, but there's an image in my mind of that river growing wider, turning the garden into an island. I start to walk into the woods, and I pass Rogerian coming the other way with an animal he's caught for the two of them to eat. Olivia wakes up and says something about the meal, sounding delighted.

I woke up from having to go pee. When I crawled back in bed, I decided to practice reciting "I'm going to be dreaming" mantras for WILD practice. It usually takes me a really long time to fall asleep, but I think I was out within seconds. So that endeavor didn't go as planned.

Dream two plopped me in a situation where Dr. Who (Matt Smith version. I'm team Tennant. This confuses me.) is having a witty argument with some other dude in a chic suit and vest. There is a problem with space time or whatever the dire situation is at the moment, and I vaguely recall the argument is about how much crappier the Doctor's TARDIS is compared to the other guy's device. I think the other guy called the TARDIS "it's a time tomb" derisively -- not the biggest burn, but it's the one line I remember.

ANYWAYS, something something, because now they time-materialize the other guy's machine into what looks like the garage in my old home in Canada. Dream Knowledge tells me that in the room next to it is some sort of walk-in closet (I recall a lot of clothes hanging in the room), and there's Mallory Archer and a really old man in a wheelchair (he's someone's father based on Dream Knowledge), and Mallory is just berating the old man because she's drunk. The scene switches back and forth between the Archer scenes and Dr. Who scenes (though they are in the same universe), and I know whatever situation it was is being resolved.

I wake up, and regret the life decision to watch the Archer Top Gun remake on a loop before going to bed.

I attempted keeping a WILD mantra going for dream three, but my brain turned into a five-year-old and kept asking what Archer's first name is. I kept thinking "Sean?" even though I know it's not right. Clearly, my brain refused to let me sleep, so I hop out of bed.

It took me all of 15 seconds after deciding I'm up for the day and leaving the warmth of my bed that my brain goes "Lol! His name was Sterling."

3rd person following 3 people traveling through time, one woman and two men. One of the men, Billy, winds up being left behind, the other two have to abandon him in a place where he's "condemned by the powers to a life of battles." But they've just now encountered him again, as the 9th "killer" they have to face in a place of challenges, carrying a sword. A great deal of time has passed from his perspective and he's almost unrecognizable, cold and intimidating.

They've returned to their own time, in the hotel rooms they were in before all the time travel started. Due to timeline shenanigans, the woman runs into a 'past' version of Billy in the hall, a version who hasn't done any time traveling at all yet, smiling as usual.

The 'killer' version of Billy is talking about the souls left "there," abandoned by her. The other man who'd traveled with them questions that phrasing, 'souls' - "Are there really any souls in hell now?" Due to timeline shenanigans, is the implication - before Billy'd been abandoned, the two of them had a longstanding debate on what happens to the people in erased timelines, whether they still exist in any form. Billy's smiling, which is not a good thing, and saying they can finally conclude that debate.

8.30.2013

I was back to school. I was in my hometown. I was preparing for exams. Printed something, my schedule. Quick bathroom bath and dump. I took a car or vehicle to school. I checked my schedule while on the way.

I arrived, and mom caught up to me to give me my schedule. I asked my seatmate to hold my schedule while I get the schedule from mom (I know, it's confusing). I went back and found that my seatmate thought it was my exam paper and proceeded to pass it forward (even though we haven't started yet). His other seatmate was about to pass it along when I picked it up from his hands.

'Woke up.' I heard the radio say that it's already 8 a.m. I panicked. I thought I was gonna be late for my exam. I thought, wait, is it the second day of our three-day exams? I checked the clock and to be sure, it's almost 8 a.m.! Then I thought about the exam 'yesterday.' I can't remember finishing taking it or even taking the two other exams that day. Did I just go home and forgot about the rest of the exams? I don't know.