Recent DJ Posts

There's a woman who's been unknowingly designated to play the role of Mary. (A reference to Mary Vetsera and/or Mary Kelly - the point is that she was remembered for her death, and that a certain amount of time has passed since, so it's time for events to repeat themselves.) She'd been running from a stranger with a knife, found a friend of hers to help her, and they've wound up barricading themselves inside a room. Due to a struggle at the door, the stranger's knife wound up on the floor inside the room with them. But the stranger wasn't the threat here - he was trying to help her. I'm in the POV of the thing possessing her friend, though possession in this case means only a certain amount of influence over his thoughts - he's the one fated to kill her.

There's a man, a servant, who I made immortal a long time ago. He came to resent me, so I sent him away to the household of a woman I'm close with. From her letters, I believe that's worked out well for them both. I'm staying with her at the moment, and he's showing me something I hadn't realized before - the wounds he had when I made him immortal never healed. The pain is very minor, but it never goes away.

I'm someone playing cards with three other guys, and one of them mentions the (some surname beginning with T) manuscript. It's this anonymous collection of old medical notes. A few copies have been made of it, but it was never published, so it's very rare. I tell them a bit about that manuscript - I love having the chance to do so, I enjoy sharing stories from the past a great deal.

During the war, it was an open secret that T. was seeing a certain woman. He always used a nickname when he mentioned her to others, but everyone knew. (As I'm saying this, I'm seeing an image of myself playing cards with T. in the past, much like the scene with these men now, both of us in uniform; and then an image of that woman walking down a street.) And she'd often go to his room to make use of his typewriter. (I'm seeing a typewriter that doesn't actually make sense for this time period.) For whatever reason, when he left to return to England those notes she'd been working on were mixed in with his typewriter and his other things. He didn't make it back to England of course, and when his things were eventually recovered, that anonymous manuscript was naturally associated with him. But the identity of the author of the T. manuscript is Florence Nightingale.

This doesn't get the reaction from the other card players that I'd been hoping for - I get some odd looks but mostly they just seem bored. They change the subject, talking about pharmaceuticals. I'm disappointed - I'm reasonably certain Florence is still a household name, recent enough and well-known enough that I'd thought they would find this interesting, even though they were all born well after her death. It's always an isolating feeling when this happens - no one much cares about old dramas. But at least they only see it as the eccentricity of a history buff, and I don't have to worry about them seeing me as a threat.

(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?

A woman's looking over a small art collection - sketches of the building she's in from various earlier eras, collected in a large book. On the wall directly over the book is a recent painting of this same building, but showing it thousands of years earlier when there was a lake here, with the door opening directly onto the water. She finds this painting a little funny - unlike the historical sketches, she believes this one's a sort of what-if image. The building's old but it's not that old. But the man who commissioned the painting, the owner of this place, she's thinking of him as being oddly precise about where the lake should be in relation to the building; as far as she's aware there's no evidence that there was ever really a lake here at all. The title of the painting is Lake Hae or Hayle or something along those lines. Although the building in the painting and the building in modern times are identical, somehow in the painting it gives the impression of being someplace sacred.

She turns the pages of the book - she's careful with it, it's very valuable. After the sketches of the building there are a series of anatomical sketches and portraits. She's on a page showing several sketches of an old man, mostly bald and with a sort of rounded profile. As a disembodied observer, I'm fond of the sketch, sort of nostalgic about it - both about the subject and about the sketch itself. She keeps turning the pages, and there's a sketch of a young man with a very square jaw; looking at him changes the scene.

Still in the same room, but a couple centuries earlier; the walls are lined with bookshelves. There's a woman sketching, holding a conversation with a man sitting in a chair. A servant comes into the room - he's that young man from the sketch - and the man in the chair stands up to speak with him. A man all in black and with very long black hair, he's the same man who owned this building and that art collection in modern times.

A flood warning in Boston - they expect the buildings around the harbor to be under three feet of water. Evacuation is recommended.

Post-apocalyptic setting, there's a human doctor taking care of a human-looking robot going by the code name Rabbit. It has black stitches in a ring around its throat. It put them there itself - they're decorative.

Late 19th century England, two immortals dressed all in white are talking. "Just defend (this place)." "Domi, this is a terrible plan."

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?"

A man - or rather something that can look like a man - is a guest in this old couple's home, and he's just won some kind of friendly contest between them. As he's about to leave, the wife tells her husband to go fetch something in particular from the attic, something to give to the guest as a sort of trophy for winning that contest. The husband produces a scarf that he believes has several hairs from a certain genius musician woven into it. It was given to him in Paris long ago in recognition of something, and it's very precious to him, so it's a worthy gift. The guest takes the scarf but sees that the hairs woven into it actually come from a cat. The wife was aware of this. By forcing him to accept this bogus gift, she's tilted the contest in their favor in the end. The guest acknowledges that it's her win, without letting the husband know.

As the guest leaves, he's thinking about the rematch they'll have when he returns to this place in 83 years. The people he'll be having a rematch with are that couple's descendants, but he doesn't understand the difference between a person's descendants and the person themself.

I walk into a room where I have to complete some challenge, a kind of game. I have a vague sense of danger, it's not quite a nightmare but it feels similar, as if it has the potential to become one. I'm semi-lucid, in that stage where I'm aware that I'm dreaming and can easily control my surroundings, but still following the dream storyline. Small rings of light form around my wrists - at first I'm not sure what this is, then I think of it as both something that this room provides for the challenge, and something that I summoned myself. I decide that the user has to make the light take a solid form before it can serve its function. Focusing on it, the light condenses into a metal cuff around my right wrist; the left one fails, it remains light. Looking at the right cuff, I decide it represents a kind of shield, a personal force field. I focus on the left one again, without looking at it this time, trying to make it condense into the other cuff, and I decide that it's worked, though I don't want to risk looking down to check; I can now feel the shield working in the air just around me. I move further into the room and start the game, which involves running a course and using the shield to deflect small projectiles. A woman's voice keeps score. At the first curve in the course, everything goes black.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Due to a conflict with someone else, an immortal has been forced to enter another immortal's territory. Although they appear to be different species - the one the territory belongs to is a sphinx, the other one looks like a human man - they're still similar enough to require separate territories, so this has led to a confrontation, although on the surface it looks like a casual conversation. It's night. The one that looks like a man is saying something about how anyway, this isn't the same city he agreed to stay away from - it's partially joking (the city's changed names in the years since that agreement), but it's also partially serious, grasping at straws, looking for an out. The sphinx has no particular ill will towards him, and understands his situation, but nonetheless can't permit him to stay here.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A vampire guy's in a subway car, picking out a meal. There's a small group of others with him, people he'd turned, but he's the only one doing the hunting. One of the others, recently turned, is impatient with him. Finally she says to him, come on, let's just take the whole car, let loose once in a while, please? The other vamps are a little annoyed with her - they're impatient too, but she's being childish - but he's considering it. I'm in first person now, though I'd started out in 3rd and I have no sense of when I switched; as one of the other vamps, I look around at the number of people in this car. There's a lot of them; the car's not full, but there's enough that they outnumber us. I'm thinking about crowd control. I notice a couple of them looking this way, starting to pay attention to the conversation between our leader and the new girl. Without saying anything, I get up and move to stand by the door to the next car, to block the exit. I look through the window into the next car, and consider the number of people in that car, too.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man I think of as a legendary king riding on the back of some enormous reptile through a completely black space. He's not human, at least not anymore, and this isn't a physical space; he's something that is sometimes summoned into the physical world. The creature he's riding is covered in trunks and carpets and cages piled so high that I think of it as a moving mountain; I can't tell how much is luggage and how much is the body of the creature itself, but the whole thing is maybe four times the height of the man riding it, who is sitting cross-legged just behind the creature's head, front and center. At the very back of the creature, the king's servant is opening the top of one of the cages. It contains a small and unhappy creature that they've just captured, something very rare; the top of it opens up like a flower and contains a kind of liquid, which contains some 'essence' that the king is after.

There's three people riding a motorboat through a river in a jungle. They stop when they pass a man standing waist-deep in the river, working at something, and one of the guys in the boat talks with him about a foreign researcher who's made some big discovery that's driving up prices in the area. The guy standing in the river is saying that pretty soon they're all going to be out of a job. The guy in the motorboat says it wouldn't be the first time they've had to live out of tents; they'll survive.

Various non-lucid scenes: two immortals discussing faith and religion while rummaging around one's kitchen; the owner of the kitchen and her mother are both christian, and I'm surprised and intrigued since I hadn't found that to be very compatible with physical immortality. Rose and Martha meeting all the past incarnations of the Doctor in the TARDIS. There's some fantastical mystery involving spirits, and I was tasked with demonstrating the rational, physical origins of the events - the drama with the spirits is still considered real, but as a sort of reflection of the physical world, not actually physically present there - however, now that I believe it's all been solved and wrapped up, I'm asked a series of questions that force me to go through and reevaluate all my conclusions, suggesting there may be another answer. IWTV references, thinking about Lestat's life-has-no-more-meaning-what-if-i-could-give-you-a-new-life speech, resulting in a bit of an IWTV-themed power trip. That ended in an unpleasant party, which I left and returned to my IRL home.

In my home, looking out the window I've noticed various construction or roadwork or similar workers out in the street, and one of them's walking up the driveway. I move away from the windows since I need to go put some proper clothes on, but before I can do anything more than that I hear two of them inside the house, just in the next room. I'm aware that when I deliberately moved away from the windows, they'd mistakenly believed there was no one home and came inside. So I step into sight now and ask them wtf. They're surprised to see someone home. They talk briefly to each other. One of them says, "He's not going to forget. How do you want to do this?" After that, the two of them raise tools as if they're weapons - one of them's holding a hammer, the other a mallet - and although I'm aware this is a dream (I'm thinking as if I knew it all along but felt no need to act on that knowledge before now), I have difficulty defeating them or removing them. In that case, I decide to summon up something to remove them for me - I think of a dragon. One doesn't appear, but instead, as a direct result of that thought, I have a feeling that I think of as "a part of me that hasn't been fed," and with a voice much deeper than my own I say "Get the fuck out of my home," after which I see fire. Then I'm looking at the fire from a distance - I'm somewhere outside, and neither the burning cottage I'm looking at nor the scenery has any resemblance to my IRL home, I've completely changed scenes. Despite this, I believe that I've succeeded in removing those two from the house and feel satisfied.

False awakening. I'm in a bed - not one I'm familiar with IRL, though I believed it was in a relative's house - and I reach for my dream journal. I can't find an empty page to write in, and I realize this is an old journal, one I'd already filled up. A few pages have been torn out.

There's a kid who's gone down to the docks and started talking to a homeless woman there. He's already seen the events that are about to happen, and he wants be sure he's near her at a certain moment. She's fishing with a stick with a string tied to the end of it. She says to the kid she's "not fishing, just putting out bait."

There's a private party, all women, that's rented out the restaurant at an inn. There's some drama going on and the cook got stressed out and overwhelmed, he took a break in the garden out back and someone else, the former cook, is filling in. He's not human; he's something large, bulbous, vaguely frog-like. At the moment, the human girl acting as a waitress is standing in front of him saying "Um... um... um..." and he suggests what she's trying to say - that the other cook's just about recovered, so it's okay for him to go now - and when she nods gratefully, he takes off his apron and lumbers off. The boss, an elfish creature, walks over to him. In the boss's POV now, I say to him, "You knew staying here would change the way she sees things." That is, the illusions that make the humans see us as human were bound to eventually stop working on her. "Why didn't you say something to her before now?" He sort of grunts.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a little girl who's seen a glimpse of a woman in her house that no one else saw. As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking she reminds me of the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home, although this one's not particularly old, and she may or may not have a face. I like her. Now the girl's in the bed that she shares with her sister, both of them under the covers, except for her hand. She feels a touch on her hand, snatches it away under the covers, and asks her sister if that was her. The answer is no. The girl peeks out from under the covers and sees that there's no one there. But the moment she puts her head out from under the covers to look around, the rest of the covers are ripped off the bed, and the woman, who was standing by the head of the bed out of sight, says "Finally."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A man's holding a vial of some kind of virus. He's meant to add a second vial holding some blue liquid to it for some plan that's about to be carried out, but there's something wrong - this isn't the fake that had been prepared, it's the real virus. What happened to the fake? The scene changes briefly to show it back at the lab, where the real virus should be. I switch to the POV of that man with the vial and decide we're going to have to go ahead with the plan, it just means that what we're about to do is less of a bluff than I'd like. I add the blue substance to the vial. Something red like blood forms on the top as the two substances mix.

In a scene I think of as "Five days in," a man is meeting up with someone named Hugh. Hugh's sitting on a dock with blood around his mouth, one arm slung casually over his dog, greets him with "Hey man," and generally is completely relaxed and sees nothing wrong. The man meeting him is bothered by seeing 'immortals so much older than me' losing control.

A fragment involving a city made out of pieces of every road built in the past century.

A sort of ancient China-based fantasy setting. Someone's left an offering of a fish for me at my shrine, and I'm suspicious of it, so I only take a taste. It turns out to be fine. Now I feel regret; if I'd known it was good, I would have eaten the whole thing. From my perspective, after I tasted it, the rest turned to stone; I'm aware the humans offering it would have seen it differently.

Nearby, there's a man talking with his wife in their home late at night. He's going through a sort of existential despair, and he's sort of thinking through it out loud, talking more to himself than to his wife. Someone else appears and tells him that this existential despair is good, it's an indication that it's time for him to move on to the next stage of life, to become immortal. The man totally buys it. I'm a disembodied observer, but I still have the mindset of the character from the shrine in the previous scene, and I'm extremely irritated with that new person/creature. I think of this man and his wife as mine, and I don't appreciate others attempting to mislead and take advantage of them.

Outside - I remain in 3rd person POV and lose that shrine character's mindset. That couple's house is part of a small complex of several buildings enclosed by a wall, and elsewhere within that wall there's a woman who hunts demons, dressed like a man, chasing after a three-eyed crow, with another woman (a local, not a demon hunter) trying to keep up with her. They don't manage to catch it; it flew over the wall, and it didn't seem at all concerned about its pursuers. She's seen that crow before, the one controlling it has caused trouble for her in the past.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm traveling through a forest, and changing into a suit of chainmail. It's gleaming white, head to toe.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A fantasy China setting again. There's an elf woman dressed all in white, head to toe, and there are two men taking her over to an island in a rowboat. One of the men is young, the other is middle-aged and has been recently disgraced in some way, he's cut off his hair to reflect that. Reaching the island she wants to go to involves passing through several veil-like things in the air covering the opening between two cliffs.

When they reach the town on the other side of that passage, the older man immediately jumps out of the boat and heads off through the streets, moving quickly. As a disembodied observer, I follow him, and I'm thinking that I've seen this scene before, from the younger man's POV. (Which is probably a false memory, but there's a chance it's true - it's true that I was in the young man's POV in a scene just before the rowboat, and I can only remember very vague fragments of that scene.) I'm thinking now that last time, that man had met up with us after we'd taken care of some business, just before we left the island. I had wondered what he was doing while he was gone, but he'd refused to say, he's always very secretive - I'm pleased I'm going to be able to find out now. (Of course, as soon as I thought that, I woke up.)

A setting based off the Victorian era or thereabouts. A man who belongs to some organization or secret society made a deal with another member, who is now dead. Now the man's been debating whether he'll bother keeping his end of the deal, since the other party's dead and thus isn't in a position to know or object. Right now he's in the dead man's home, in a type of storage area, going over some of his belongings that relate to that organization they're both in - that was part of the deal, disposing of some of these things according to the dead man's wishes. One of those belongings is something I think of as a 'cookie', though it's dry and tasteless, makes me think of hardtack. He decides to eat it after all, keeping up his end of the deal. Eating it causes him to become immortal.

That same man at a later date, confronting his wife in her home, a basement room with brick walls but with several potted ferns and a table set up holding a large, beautiful book - her journal. She believed him dead, there was a funeral. He's standing over her journal, and he's asking why she hasn't been writing. He says, "You're not a (his family name - Bowman or Barrow or something like that), you don't (something along the lines of being driven by a consuming passion)." He feels that the changes and upsets in her life - such as his own 'death' - shouldn't have shaken her disciplined, well-ordered approach to her tasks. She's also immortal, in a different way than he is, but linked to him in some way. The nature of their immortality means they can't possibly live together again, even if they'd wanted to.

That same man again is being pinned to a wall, held off the floor, by his daughter. They'd been talking relatively calmly earlier, but he realizes she's become a vampire, and her eyes glow blue and then gold, and now she's got him pinned to the wall. As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking that she has the same face as a pirate woman who'd died in this man's arms long before his daughter was born; the pirate had been Chinese and the daughter's a white Englishwoman, but I think of them as having the same face and being in some sense the same person, and I have a vague impression of a third woman, a servant in England, who also has the same face. The daughter says to him, "You know what to do. Then come get me!" He stakes her, and she crumbles into dust. He's still stuck hanging on the wall.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm standing between a coyote and a bird. The scene after this discusses the coyote as wandering and gathering a pack of odd strays - other species, including housecats.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a woman, a leader of witches, who's given me some instructions to carry out, something I'm meant to do with her grave after she's been buried. Now I'm digging down through the loose dirt in her grave, sinking into it. I'm afraid of it closing over my head and suffocating me. I get out of the grave and fetch my staff, and use that to probe through the dirt, waiting for it to hit something.

After a few other scenes, mostly involving the witches but gradually transitioning into scenes with IRL characters, I'm walking through a bookshop and I spot a book with a title that mentions one of my lucid goals, the one I'd intended as my task for the day. I immediately become lucid, but realize I'm already waking up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a group of people getting together at a restaurant, taking up the second floor, a sort of balcony area looking over the main room. The owner of the restaurant's friends with the leader of this group, and he's saying as he escorts them in, "You're the one who wanted to do this here. If you wanted privacy, you should've-" The tone's good-natured. There's a table set out for three: the boss, his wife who hasn't yet arrived, and a prostitute. The restaurant owner's wife comes over to talk to them, and she knows the prostitute, they exchange some friendly words. The prostitute's asking what this is about; the leader's got some plan in mind involving her, but they're waiting for his wife to arrive before he'll talk about it. The rest of his people are arranged at the surrounding tables, waiting and watching the main table quietly.

There's a woman who rose from the dead. Her girlfriend's explaining to her that this has all happened before, repeatedly: they meet, after a few days this woman dies, and then a little while later she'll turn up again and 'meet' the girlfriend again, with no memory of this having happened before.

I'm flying down the center of a stairwell.

At the bottom of the stairs, I switch to 3rd person. This is a college, and classes are letting out. There's this incredibly beautiful androgynous person who stops a guy in the hall and talks to him, then s/he gives him this piece of paper with a small square smear of something dark green on it. This color will alter the guy's personality. The guy takes it, and he refers to them as boss and generally acts friendly and cheerful, but he's careful not to actually touch the color. S/he tells him to find a place without any people.

The guy heads up the stairs to the second floor, and I switch to his POV. Most of the classrooms have a few people in them even though they're between classes, but I find one where the chairs have been stacked up on the tables, I figure no one's going to be using this classroom for the rest of the night, and I call the boss over. S/he gives me some more of those papers, with different colors on them and labels giving an idea of their effects, and tells me to distribute them to some of the other students here. I go to do so, but then realize I've mixed up the one s/he gave me with the others. It was clear when s/he was talking to me in the empty classroom that s/he expected me to have already taken it, and now I'm worried about making them mad. When I can't find it again, I wind up taking a different one instead, a slightly lighter colored green, the closest match I could find. Immediately after, I find the one I was looking for, and I wonder whether it's safe to take two. I take it anyway.

I'm talking to someone against the boss's wishes. I consider myself loyal to the boss, but s/he's got a self-destructive streak that I have no problem acting against. Those papers would have prevented me from doing so, but taking two of them sort of cancelled each other out, the changes they caused didn't stick. This guy I'm talking to is a detective or something similar, and I'm telling him a woman's name. He has others working for him and he has them ask after the woman.

I'm a different character in that same college setting. There are police or military or something surrounding an angel - which looks nothing at all like a human, I mostly have an impression of a vast white face like a mask or a doll, twice the height of a man, alien and hostile. I'm thinking to myself that I can't die, it's impossible, like I'm trying to convince myself, but seeing that angel shook me - something about seeing something that old, something that existed before I was created. The disembodied observer side of me is thinking that although the character side of me isn't aware of it, there's some connection between me-the-character and that angel.

As the same character, I'm talking to a woman, and ask her to lend me some money. I don't need a lot, just something to get me into a game, I'm confident as long as I have some money to start with I can easily multiply it. She's disgusted, says it's always the same with me. She gave me a business (I have some mental association here with both religion and gambling) and she expected me to run it, so why am I still doing this? I find this ridiculous of her. I had absolutely no interest in the business she gave me.

I'm talking to someone about characters from Buffy - but all but one of us here are aware that I'm just using them as metaphors to talk about us. The one who isn't aware, who thinks I'm just talking about fictional characters, gets bored and leaves, but I keep using the metaphor. I'm saying, no, Giles's problem was that he knew exactly what his - and more importantly, Buffy's - destiny was supposed to be, and he knew it wasn't going to happen. Hence his downward spiral; he knew what they should be doing, and yet there was nothing he could do. I'm looking at a woman who I equate with Buffy as I say this.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've just driven to my IRL mother's house from a lake, and decided I'm too tired to drive back to the lake tonight, I'll spend the night. Mom gets me a coffee, there's chunks of chocolate floating on the top, I'm thinking about how much I appreciate her thinking to provide comfort food like that. The coffee's too bitter for my taste. I'm thinking that's odd, since I usually drink black coffee. We talk about how tired I've been, and she says it's due to the work I've been doing. I think that's strange, since the job I've been doing is easy, but she says anything you're not used to will tire you out, and relates it to her own similar experience.

Regina is surrounded by people she resents and is saying "Get me my advisor. Now!" As a disembodied observer, I'm pleased to hear this - the advisor she's referring to is Rumpelstiltskin, and earlier someone used a similar phrasing and tone to ask for their father, so I take this parallel as an indication that she's viewing Rumpelstiltskin as a father figure, which was something I wanted.

As Rumpelstiltskin, I've been recently de-cursed but have made sure no one else realizes that. I'm looking through a cabinet for an object related to the situation Regina's currently in. I find it: a small statue of a man in armor standing beside a stone pillar with what looks like Chinese characters on it. I pick up the pillar, removing it from the rest of the statue. I'm talking to myself as I do this, saying "You're here, but are-" I hear Regina's soldiers arriving outside, come to fetch me. I've been expecting them. I immediately pocket the pillar and statue and adopt a pose appropriate for my old cursed self, irritating my bad knee for a moment but making sure no one else will be able to tell it's bothering me, adopting a mindset and mannerisms as if I were putting on a costume and mask, though it takes effort to mimic what used to come naturally - that manic delight and curiosity and energy and attention focused in a million different directions at once. I'm getting used to faking this, though, and am more worried about whether that trinket I'm carrying will work.

I'm at my mother's house, and she's putting 9 red beans in the snow behind the house. I ask her why, and she's astonished that I don't know. "Beans for Martin," she says. It's a reference to Redwall, which isn't just a story but a legend, or a fairy tale, something with customs attached - specifically in this case, leaving out nine red beans. "Ever since I was a little girl, they've always had nine at Christmas."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragment to do with immortals whose modern clothing preferences tend to gravitate towards those most similar to the eras they grew up in; and later, getting a blood snack from my boyfriend's fridge, talking about indulgence and temptation.

My IRL neighbor momentarily mistook me for a ghost he was looking for. I'm out looking for my IRL cat, to bring her inside, but I see two identical cats and am not sure which is her. (Noteworthy: doppelgangers are a common nightmare theme for me, and this time it's not a nightmare.) I catch them both, and as I'm holding them and explaining the dilemma to my neighbor, I become sure that my cat's the one on the right. Even though they're identical there's a different 'feel.' I'm pleased I was able to recognize the difference. But my neighbor insists that my cat is actually the one on the left; even after I discover some difference between them, he continues to insist on the wrong choice.

Belle and Rumpelstiltskin are having an argument. He's looking very small and confused; he'd been wearing a coat covered in sharp quills like a porcupine's, and while normally he likes it, right now he doesn't have the show-off body language needed for it; he's managed to stick himself with it, twice. She's saying that he's mistaken about why she's unhappy, and that for all the nice things at the castle, she'd opt for a plain thatched house with ordinary things, with someone who does ordinary things, "something that matters." She means blacksmiths or farmers and similar - someone who's part of the community. Rumpelstiltskin's annoyed by this. "Well, you got me."

Fragments: IRL sister S. and her friend P. help me with car trouble; and I tell someone to find me based on the imagery in a dream I made for them.

3rd person, I'm looking down at a wide stone staircase in a castle, and descending the stairs there's this woman wearing buckskin who I think of as some kind of hunter, she's talking with the king. She's saying the words "-get our answers."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm taking my IRL youngest sister, L., to the sands to get her first dragon. (Relevant to upcoming IRL event today, sans dragons.) (Edit: Nevermind, the IRL event actually did wind up involving dragons. Or the word 'dragon', anyway.) I was talking with a few older relatives about the dragons, and L. kept trying to hurry us up, anxious about getting there in time to see the dragons hatch; but for the rest of us this is all old hat, so we wasted time talking, and now we're running late. We keep telling L. that it's fine, we'll make it on time, and even if we miss the hatching you've still got a window of a few hours after the dragons hatch to bond with them. But when we get down to the sand, the eggs are already gone. We have to catch up with the hatchlings in the barn instead.

Before we leave for the barn, I see what I think of as a king cobra in the sand - it's huge, as wide as a person, which I think of as normal for king cobras. I pick L. up and there's a chase sequence that ends with me tossing the snake over a wall, but then I notice a scratch on my finger. It must have bit me.

I can tell I'm starting to pass out. I go inside a house and find my IRL sister S. with a friend of hers, and I tell them about the snake bite and ask them to call the hospital or treat it somehow. The friend takes my hand with the bite and looks at the veins, which look broad and red and cloudy, like they've swollen or burst under the skin, and she gets me some cream to put on my skin. I recognize it as some ordinary skin cream that's not going to help, and I try to convince S. to take me to the hospital before I pass out.

(Woke up with my hand hurting where the snake bit it - turns out I really do have a tiny scratch there IRL, might be a papercut. Just after I finished writing this down, I got a phone call from S, letting me know she'd been taken to the hospital on account of almost passing out from unknown causes. A few hours and a not-too-serious diagnosis later, I tried to get a little more sleep.)

I'm lying in bed in some mansion, with a few of S's friends around bothering me until I get up and go somewhere with them. As I walk through a doorway into the hall, I realize this is a dream. It's not as vivid as I'd like - I can see everything fine, but it doesn't feel quite real, more like watching something on a screen - so I try a mantra to make it more vivid. Instead, everything disappears. (In retrospect, that seems obvious. I was focusing on the words instead of the surroundings.)

Next scene I remember is a woman using the family name Gale, returning to a Spanish-style house on the west coast, overlooking the sea. She's lived here a few times over the years, and for a moment I see it in sepia tones and with flowers in the windows, as she's remembering an old photograph from when she'd first lived here with her two daughters, before she became immortal. She's thinking that even though she's coming back earlier than expected this time - something on her mind about trouble on the east coast - she was still gone long enough that she can pass herself off as her own cousin.