Carabas
Member

There's this man who's gotten himself into some trouble, and I've offered my help in solving that problem. Alternatively, I've told him to speak with a woman who works for me, and she'll help him disappear for a while. When he doesn't come to meet me, I check in with that woman, still in the alley where I'd told the man to meet her, behind the building where she works as a maid, still in her uniform. She tells me the man didn't show. She looks worried. I'm annoyed. I think the man's making a poor decision.

It reminds me of another time. I see a building on top of a lake, a massive black arch. I'd made a deal with a woman that had led to the creation of this structure. She sees it as an architectural wonder and a symbol of her power, influence, capability, something along those lines; I see it as something impermanent. Like Ozymandias. I think of it as foolish. And I thought she would have realized that now that her deal's played out; I'd expected she'd want to make a new deal, to change course, I was looking forward to it. But when she does come to me for something else, it just compounds her original mistake. I'm disgusted but give her what she asks for.

I'm talking to a man, a great inventor or artist of some kind, who's been given an arena to work in. The structure is very white and the sky is very wide and very blue, and the arena's filled with shadowy figures he's been given to work for him, something like automatons, not alive. Human-shaped, but when I focus on them they look a bit like something that's been burned to charcoal, flaking at the edges, except for their teeth, which are white and sharp; inactive right now.

Until this moment I had a lot of contempt for this man. But he's saying to me, "I'm not an idiot," and that he knows he's already made his last great work. Though he's currently working on a project, and though his masters who gave him this arena have great expectations of him, he doesn't expect to live to complete it. His bitterness makes me think a little more highly of him.

Working for these things was a mistake. I don't say this to him out loud. There are a couple floating hooded figures with white masks in the arena, and we're both putting on something of an act for them. They're not his bosses, or guards, exactly, but they are effectively monitoring him at the moment. Something more like citizens, as opposed to slaves like him, however honored a slave he might be. He turns off the music he's been listening to while he works, and he's trying to give the impression that he's simply stopping work for now and going to bed as usual, that there's nothing wrong.

Escaped from my IRL home onto my IRL street and went lucid when I crossed that boundary line. Started flying, admired some views of Christmas lights, getting less and less realistic as I went on, culminating in a castle with turrets completely covered in white lights.

Memory gap, crossed a lake by a natural rock bridge and entered a cavern on the other side, memory gap again, and then I'm semi-lucid again in a room with three sleeping people I recognize, including Julia. I try to leave without disturbing any of them, fail in this. Mary Jane wakes up, the closest to the exit, and we speak for a while; although we seem to know each other, I'm aware that Mary Jane is wholly imaginary, and that's the point of her in this scene, that she's imaginary. Julia is in the bed across from hers, and eventually wakes up - that's what I wanted to avoid most. I can feel the sensation of pressure from her hand, which stands out - it's the first time I've used that sense in tonight's dreams. Her face has started to resemble Mary Jane's, which is sad but not a surprise; but I think "her name is still her own," which is a surprise and a relief. (This whole scene is about mental associations.)

I'm talking to the thing which is possessing/has become a part of a friend of mine. It's attempting to be threatening, and I'm attempting to stall. We're talking about why it would bother possessing someone at all.

Although I don't say this out loud, I'm thinking that for me the appeal is what I think of as different flavors, the experience of different personalities/perspectives, when from the outside they pretty much all seem alike. And I'm also thinking that travel is the more obvious reason, the one that it would expect me to guess without having any personal experience with possession; and I think that sure, visiting Hawaii and seeing some pretty scenery is always appealing, but then there's the way humans will get up close to an active volcano, which is the really interesting part - meaning their thought process, not the volcano or even the danger itself.

But the thing possessing my friend says that what it likes is the conversation; that we've been talking now for two minutes without pause, and it's enjoying the novelty. I don't get the appeal, but whatever works for you.

I enter a lecture hall and speak to the man who I believed summoned me, dressed in black with a small white owl on his shoulder, but it turns out the owl is the one that called me; this is news to the man in black, and he's not pleased about it. The owl speaks in a pleasant woman's voice and changes into the shape of a four-sided mask, one face for each direction; three of them are simple stylized masks made of wood or similar, but the fourth is an actual face - it moves, it has eyes - just in cartoonishly distorted proportions. She's been sealed/trapped/stuck/reduced to this. She introduces herself as Loki Laufeyjarson, which is not the name I was expecting her to say but I roll with it.

She talks about each of her masks - in the one that resembles an actual face, she says she'd taken this form and scorned high heels (meaning an artificial way of gaining the height she feels she should have had anyway - 'height' is not really the issue she's talking about). In one of the wooden masks, she talks about using this form for dealings with a magician, and she suspects that magician of having a hand in her current unfortunate circumstances.

She returns to the form of the owl sitting on the man in black's shoulder, and we're now in a yard behind an estate, surrounded by partygoers. The man speaks of my payment and I dismiss the small amount of money he offers; I tell him I expect him to provide me with food and lodgings, pea soup and three packs of smokes a day. (Neither of those are things I'd want IRL, but I wasn't being my IRL self here.) I'm already leaving, stepping over an ornamental pond; it's a demand, not a negotiation. He's irritated, but she accepts immediately. I walk off into the trees along the border of the property.

In earlier scenes, symbols of eyes and blue lotuses above the entrance to a cave, and drinking a polar bear's blood from a glass while wondering about parasites.