Recent DJ Posts

In the 1940s, I'm watching three expensively-dressed women being transported from a large building to a long black car with the top down. They're speaking Spanish.

My partner says to me, if those women take this opportunity to escape, their guards will be killed in their place. She disapproves of this idea.

I say, she can't be sure of that. We haven't met their boss, so how can we know how he'll react?

She says, you don't summon up demon soldiers because you're such a kind and cuddly person.

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

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

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

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

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

Circumstances have caused a woman to temporarily move in with me; we're not romantically entangled in any way. At the moment I'm cooking breakfast and she's sitting at the table - she's asked for eggs benedict. I'm mentioning some gadget that was around in the 50s for cooking breakfast that I'd liked, I don't know why they don't make that one anymore.

As we're talking, at some point I make a reference to something else that had happened in the 50s, and she gets the reference and responds as if she was also there. The character side of me doesn't take notice of this, but the dreamer side of me finds it odd that she got that reference - I take this as an indication that she's also, if not immortal, at least significantly older than her appearance. It's also clear that she knows I'm not human, though the character side of me doesn't know she knows.

When I bring the food to the table, I say something to her and she responds with yes, father, and then immediately looks embarrassed. The character side of me takes it as a joke in response to what I'd just said to her - but the dreamer side of me is thinking, that explains it.

I'm dancing with a different woman in my apartment. She's got short black hair in this 20s finger wave look, deliberately trying to recreate that look from the past, but this is the 1990s, and she's mortal. The dreamer side of me thinks of the song we're listening to as 'bland, inoffensive 90s romance music.' She's describing some kind of dull pain that lasts for weeks on end, and asks if I can imagine living like that, expecting the answer to be no. I have, actually. I try to describe the actual sensation without being specific about the setting, but she figures it out immediately and gets excited: "The Inquisition? You were there?" She always gets excited about these big name historical events she's read about, and they're never the parts worth remembering.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Someone of no immediately identifiable gender, who has been on the road for a very long time, parks their truck outside my IRL home and starts to eat lunch, clearly believing that no one is around here during the daytime. When they see me watching them from the window they start to leave, but I stop them, telling them I don't mind them stopping here.

Unfortunately, the dream apparently took that as an open invitation. While I'm outside talking to them, a great deal of people walk into the house - a married couple under the misimpression that it's theirs now and all their relatives. When I confront them they quickly accept that an error has been made, but they still keep standing around in the house. Telling them to get out does nothing.

So I rephrase, framing it as a narrative instead of a command. "And the people walked out of the house."

And giving no indication that they've heard me, as if it's their own idea, they all turn and start making their way out of the house. I'm pleased by how easy and effective that was compared to trying to control through commands - admittedly I hadn't put any mental force behind the command here, but there wasn't any mental effort involved in the narrative approach either. They're moving more slowly than I'd like, so I continue narrating. "It's a beautiful day, so they all decided to go outside." I'm curious whether the weather will respond to that - it doesn't seem to, but then it was decent weather to begin with. They're all outside now, but they're milling around outside the door. "They all decided to go to the park to catch up with their relatives." They start moving toward the road, and the women closest to me have started discussing some cousin they haven't seen in a while. This is really wonderfully effective, I'll have to remember that in the future.

I'm entering a large garage, looking for the owner. Off to the right I see a white truck I recognize from the first time I met him, when he'd kidnapped the queen. There are three vases full of red roses sitting in the truck bed now. The man I'm looking for is further into the garage, off to the left, along with another man who I also met during that kidnapping incident. I exchange the usual greetings with this second man, then walk up to the one I came to see. He's an incredibly big guy, tall and muscular, and he doesn't turn from what he's doing to look at me. Neither of us say anything for a moment - I have a hard time deciding how to talk to him - and then when we do speak, both of us start talking at once.

He asks about the queen at the same moment I say, "(the queen's name)'s sick." Dying, most likely.

He's shocked and horrified, as expected, and asks me a bunch of questions about her. As we talk, we raise the question of whether her sickness is a reflection of the state of the land, or whether the land's sickness is a reflection of the state of the queen - that they're linked is obvious, but which one started it, which is the cause, that's the question.

The other man joins in the conversation at this point. They'd been tracking the changes in the land on their own, not realizing what was happening to the queen; and comparing our information, the two of them become convinced it started with the land. That second man shows me one of their maps on a computer screen, showing when a giant creature associated with cold moved into the far northwest and burrowed deep into the earth - that was the first one, the one that started it. They'd already been planning to remove or kill it. It goes without saying that I'll be coming too.

As I'm looking at his data, I'm thinking, amused, how convenient, making this into a problem that can be solved with our skillset.

I'm a passenger in a woman's car. She's a friend, but now I'm discovering she's tricked me. She stops the car in an unfamiliar driveway - not where I thought we were going - and there's a man in the yard, tall, heavyset, long hair, in need of a shave. I don't know him, but I recognize that he's one of the species that my species is designed to hunt. I resent my friend for tricking me into this - I'd quit hunting them. My friend disagrees with me quitting, so she's forced me into this situation. The man sees me and recognizes what species I am; he runs away, and I automatically chase him without thinking about it.

He ran inside the house. I stop at the door - I'm not sure whether I followed him in order to kill him or to explain that I'm not going to kill him. Since I can't see him running now, that gives me a second to think instead of acting automatically. I decide I'm not going to kill him, I'm just going to explain that and go. Through the door he's shouting that he's called the police. I respond that that was pointless, since I'm already here. I hadn't meant that to sound as threatening as it did, just as an observation - I really need to think before I talk. But I hear him running away from the door and going out a side window.

I see him running for the trees at the edge of the property, and I say out loud, "Why do they always go for the fucking woods?" I follow him again, and this time the thought process - such as it is - is definitely about hunting rather than explaining. It's the familiarity of going for the woods that tipped the scales - old habits are hard to break. I hear something moving in the branches, jump up to grab him, pull him back to the ground - and discover it's not him, it's a human. I've never seen this guy before. What was he doing up in the trees, watching us? Also, I seem to have injured his throat where I grabbed him.

Then there's a flashlight shining on us, and a cop telling me not to move. The man I'd been hunting is behind the cop. I'm exasperated by this - taking advantage of our human appearances to hide behind real humans, it really irritates me. It's understandable, given that the alternative for him was death; but it still irritates me.

My driver's pulling the car over. He apologizes for this - stopping here instead of taking me home. It's on "her" request. (He didn't literally use the word "her," we're speaking Korean.) He'll of course be here to drive me home afterwards, if I don't decide to throw him out and drive myself (which has happened before.) He's bracing himself for a bad reaction - which he probably would have gotten, I'm pissed off and want him to explain himself, but then I'm distracted by the people outside the car. Among all the people on the sidewalk with black umbrellas, there's one umbrella in dull red. I know the woman carrying it. I get out of the car.

I recognize where we are now - there are stone steps set into the white stone wall that runs alongside the road, leading up to a cemetery at the top of the hill. Someone I knew was buried there not too long ago. There are several people here with the woman with the red umbrella - they're dressed trendily, and I think of them as very young though I'm only a few years older than them. They're acting like they're going to a celebration, loud and upbeat. The woman with the red umbrella hangs back and takes my arm, watching my reaction to them. They're a part of the life of the person who was buried in that cemetery, but it's a part of his life that's completely foreign to me, something I never saw when he was alive.

I've come to a group of buildings with many rooms, with people sleeping inside. I stick my head inside one, and the woman inside starts talking. I hear her voice distorted, like a phone call with a bad connection; her mouth isn't moving, she still looks asleep. I apologize for waking her up, I hadn't meant to, and when she stops talking I enter the room. I put my hand on her head, and I lose visuals and get an impression of many voices, very quiet. I'm aware this is an opportunity to listen in on her dream.

It seems to be morning now; for a moment I think I've just skipped over her dream entirely. I'm in her apartment, and her bed is empty; so's the bed where her roommate sleeps. I look out the window, and see her on her bike. She's late for class, and wondering why/how she slept so late. She sees me standing on the sidewalk, and tells me I better hurry too if I want to get to school on time. She thinks I'm one of her students.

I leave her and walk through a park near her school, watching a squirrel run along a branch. As I'm walking a woman sitting in one of the trees addresses me. She asks how to get close to a human. It's the usual, I tell her - you talk with them, you create shared experiences, you care about them.

I'm aware that woman's just altered this reality. I'm returning to a home where I live with various people, and that woman from the tree is there; she's a part of this 'family.' She's set things up so that everyone thinks she's this beautiful ideal; someone compares her to Quan Yin. The part of me that still recognizes that this is a scenario she created is amused. Setting yourself up as an ideal isn't a very realistic way to experience being part of a family, but whatever floats your boat. We eat a large dinner of various rare dishes, everyone contributing a different one, and I'm a little irritated because I know I'm not going to remember all these dishes when I wake up, there's too many of them to keep track of, and the dream goes through them too quickly. But when the meal's done, we're all sent out to hunt for some new rare dish to bring back to that woman from the tree. I and one of my 'sisters' wander through an arcade, looking for something rare.

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.

There's this vampire who went through a bit of a rock star phase in the 60s. During that time he had this assistant who would occasionally arrange for the vampire to wake up with one of his groupies locked in the same room. The vampire resents this. He compares it to throwing a live, venomous snake at someone - neither the snake nor the victim has any choice in the matter, the snake is used as a tool.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

This woman, thoroughly soaked by the rain, just completely drenched, has just been put into the back seat of a car. The man who's just gotten out of the car and insisted she take it is now standing in the rain. After just a moment the woman gets out of the car again, makes this sort of exasperated sound, drapes her coat over his head to keep the rain off, and gets back in the car. The coat is thoroughly drenched so this does absolutely nothing to keep him dry, but he gets this big lopsided grin.

There's another guy standing in the rain with him, and my first impression - before the woman had gotten back out of the car - had been that the two men were enemies of some kind, but that the first guy was obliged to go along with him for something. But looking at the second guy again now, on second thought I'm thinking of him as a friend.

The scene changes to show the woman and that first guy again, parting at a rural train station sometime in the 1800s. I'm thinking about how during the scene in the rain, they hadn't remembered each other from this time. Part of immortality - it's important for them to forget every so often.

False awakening. I try to write down this past scene, and write that there were three different ways things could go for that pair in the rain. The best route for them is associated with fire.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm a man passing a large arched opening in a stone wall, and as I look at it I remember that someone had asked me to fetch something for him from down here. I hadn't intended to, but since I'm here anyway I might as well. I go inside, into an immense underground stone dome with a dirt floor. It's empty, and large enough that it's difficult to see the other walls, but I'm aware there will be a door off to the right leading to a place where things are stored. As I'm walking, I hear a voice accusing me of enjoying blood. I don't see a physical source of the voice, but I expect he'll show himself eventually. I sort of laugh at the accusation but otherwise ignore him and keep walking. The voice continues: "If you are one of the evil dogs, care to know as much as I do?"

I started questioning the dream in a fairly dull IRL-based scene, and then questioned why I was questioning it - but I did eventually become lucid. Once becoming lucid, however, I as Jaime immediately started looking for Cersei.

(Side note: this was an interesting level of lucidity. Fully lucid in most respects - lucid about the fact that I was dreaming, lucid about my ability to control the dream, no desire to stick to the previous dream storyline - but I wasn't lucid about my own identity. On top of that, I only started playing Jaime's role when I became lucid - up until that point I'd been my IRL self. It's standard for me to play the role of other people when I'm non-lucid, but I'd thought that conflicted with lucidity - apparently not.)

I was still in a room that was meant to represent my IRL home, but it had no doors, which I understood signified a resistance against me taking control and changing the scene. I had the feeling I had to get out in a hurry if I wanted to maintain lucidity. So I turned around in a full circle in order to create a door that would be there when I turned around again. It was a wooden door, rounded at the top, and when I opened it I saw a scene that was meant to represent my IRL neighborhood.

I closed the door, called out to Cersei, and opened it again, understanding that this will have changed the location it links to. Now on the other side of the door there's a dark stone enclosed walkway with large windows overlooking a castle courtyard. Better, but this isn't the place I was looking for. I have a mental image of a glittering gold-and-white castle that I want to get to, where I expect Cersei to be. I try again - I close the door, call to Cersei, and open it again. The scene on the other side of the door hasn't changed this time - it's still the dark stone walkway. I decide that this means Cersei must be in this scene somewhere, so I walk through the door.

Recall gets increasingly shaky after this. After walking through the castle a bit I found Cersei in the courtyard, and after a short conversation she took me to a rowboat that we'd both have to row - she gave me some explanation involving the word 'knowledge,' and I made an (apparently less than successful) effort to remember her phrasing so I'd recall it after I woke up, it seemed symbolically important. The boat carried us briefly along a waterway running through the castle, and I think I began losing lucidity at this point. There's a memory gap, and very little recall after that - before I woke up I'd wound up back in an IRL-based scene, and I'm unsure how much lucidity I had by then.

A nightmare involving a creature called the Sandman whose facial features are fluid, constantly slowly changing; and then a false awakening in which the Sandman creature is approaching my POV character's bed.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm walking around the grounds of a mansion where I've been staying. Talking to someone, he's looking at something behind me and says, "Look at that, straight out of a painting." I turn around to look. The sky in the distance is yellow-tinged and nearly completely covered by these two dark slabs of storm clouds, like solid walls. The opening between them makes me think of the parting of the seas. The water beneath those clouds is being tossed up in such a way that it's revealed an old and famous shipwreck, it's been pulled out of the depths. Another ship, a modern one, is thrown out of the sea by the winds, and it crashes straight through one of the massive floor-to-ceiling windows of the mansion.

(A false awakening mostly about trying to describe that last scene, then actually woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm looking after an enormous, shaggy black 'dog' - more like an enormous wolf - that belongs to my neighbor. Most of the dream revolves around playing with him and petting him. When I go to feed him, his water is kept in a intricately curved copper tube, almost like a French horn.

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.)

An earlier semi-lucid fragment - I'd been riding in a car someone else was driving, they took a turn much too fast and swung wildly into the next lane, and I was thinking to myself with some annoyance about how ridiculous dream driving can be sometimes.

There's two women locked up in a circular stone room with no apparent doors and a ceiling so high it can't be seen, like a well or a small tower. I get the impression they're a couple. They're both blonde, one with darker hair and wearing purple, the other with hair so light it's almost white. Hovering around the one in purple is this sort of little glowing gold ball; she's leaning towards the other one, who's unconscious, but who starts to softly glow when that glowing ball gets close to her. They're rescued by people who break through the wall - an old woman and several people I think of as Hunters who've been doing something with a fountain in the center of the room on the other side of the wall. The old woman looks at the hovering glowing ball and calls to the Hunters. "Got one more for you - two!" she adds when she sees that the unconscious woman is also glowing. As they get both the women free, the woman lifts this fancy white horn and says to the woman in purple, "It's yours." And then she quotes a riddle or poem or something similar that led them to this horn - "With the wit, the way." Wit turns out to have been a pun on wet, something to do with that fountain in the other room, and it's those two women locked up who'd figured it out.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man trapped inside something like an enormous hourglass, tied to a chair in the bottom half. It's slowly filling with this black liquid. I'm following this from the POV of a man outside the hourglass, watching. This is something like a form of brainwashing - the man in the hourglass is on the other side of some conflict, and a serious threat, and we're turning him to our side. But as a 3rd person observer, I'm aware this is going to backfire; we seriously underestimated how insane that man was to begin with, so making him loyal to us doesn't actually mean he won't still be a threat to us.

Still as that same character who'd been watching the hourglass, I leave the room and go to meet a woman I work with for lunch. But just before we start eating, someone bursts in and stops us - the food's been drugged, something connected to that man I'd left in the hourglass. We leave with that person who burst in, and as we walk he's saying, "We all talk about the war, but does anyone remember what it was about?" We don't. He explains something to do with Skins - the gold or silver markings on our skin that remind the 3rd person observer side of me a little of circuits. Mine are gold, the woman I'm working with has silver; in earlier times, we'd have been on opposite sides of the war. We find this an uncomfortable concept.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm a young man walking around our castle at night with a girl from a visiting family. We're supposed to get married sometime in the next year or so if negotiations keep going well. Neither of us are supposed to be out of bed right now, but we both were sneaking around on our own and happened to meet up. Right now we're hiding behind a door, watching the leaders of our families talking in the next room. I'm thinking that the colors they're wearing make them both look like they're part of the same family; my family's colors are red, gold and black, but right now our patriarch's only wearing black, except for the sword pin at his throat, which I think of as "hardly red at all" - a dark red, nearly black.

There are two women sneaking around a castle at night. They'd been intending to escape and then come back when the vampires are asleep and destroy them, but they've just now realized that the vampires never sleep; and on top of that, they've just realized that one of the vampire women here is the exact same woman written about in Quincey's journal. Reading this journal is the thing that made them realize their hosts were some kind of monsters - they don't know very much about vampires at all except what they've read in this journal. So it's a shock to discover that the women in this castle don't age or die, and the idea that the monster in Quincey's journal still exists makes them feel like they can't win. At some point Ephesia is mentioned, a woman's name, though I can't remember whose. One of them suggests giving up on their plan, since it seems hopeless, and tries to convince herself that becoming one of them wouldn't be so bad.