007. Black Rook, Brothers

It worked! I had a dream about Black Rook last night (not lucid, but it's progress). He and I were building a forge on the roof of this crumbling building. I think it was abandoned—this is definitely becoming a theme with me—because there were tree roots growing up through the roof through a thick layer of sand. We dug a circle for the fire and walled bricks around it, but the roots kept getting in the way and I don't think we ever finished.

...

After that I dreamed I was swimming through a canal, staying submerged because there were guards looking for me (it was all very Assassin's Creed). I swam under a portcullis and wound up in a sewer with this old blind man and his pet white rat. He gave me two stiletto daggers, ebony black with hilts wrapped in paper. I climbed up through a grate and into an old city with a Middle Eastern look. There were two brothers there: early thirties maybe, both handsome, one bearded and one clean-shaven. They'd been feuding and I was acting as messenger between them, and I got them to make peace with each other.

Something weird happened while I was running through the city, though. It was very crowded and I was weaving and dodging around people, and I came face to face with this... man. I usually can remember dream characters' faces if they're important, like the brothers, but even though I stared straight at him I can't remember what he looked like. He was at least two or three heads taller than everyone in the crowd, and he radiated malevolence in a way I've almost never felt before. He didn't do anything, though, just stared at me and then turned away and vanished into the crowd.

It was very vivid, more than the rest of the dream, and I have absolutely no idea what to make of it, especially because nothing really bad happened, but I feel like it was probably important.

I guess I'll find out.

black rook ♜

One of the most fascinating aspects of dreaming, particularly lucid dreaming, is the notion of dream characters -- aspects of yourself that often behave in surprising or enlightening ways. Most of them are just hollow, indistinct, but some stick out. Among the lucid dreaming community there's a focus on dream guides: particularly individualized dream characters that act almost as mentors to the dreamer. They can help the dreamer become lucid, as well as serve as a teacher after that.

I have no idea if I have a dream guide, but there are a few recurring characters that stand out -- most notably, a woman called the Gatekeeper and a man I've been referring to as the "black rook". The woman's only showed up once or twice; she's fair-haired and gentle, with a wry sense of humor, and she almost always dresses in black. One time she was the mistress of Louis XIV; once she gave me a key (hence the title) and disappeared.

I have no evidence that the Black Rook is even the same figure, although my gut says he is. He's always male, always dressed in a black sailor's coat, always in a role of benevolence, but he doesn't always behave the same way -- sometimes distant, sometimes approachable; sometimes young, sometimes old; sometimes tall, sometimes short. He's helped me escape from various nightmare beings, and was there both times I successfully became lucid of my own will. If anyone is my dream guide, it's him, but I haven't seen him for a while.

(Why "Black Rook"? I've always liked chess. I picked black for two reasons -- first because that's what I always pick, because going second gives me a chance to assess my opponent's playstyle [do they open with a knight? with a pawn? one space or two? which piece do they clear the way for first?]; and second, it seemed to represent the dream world the best. I picked "rook" because I feel that's the role the character fills: not the flashiest or the most powerful, but always there to protect me when I need him.)

I figured writing about him in the evening might prompt him to show up again, plus it's interesting. Can't hurt, right?

~Darcy

004. Rescue / 005. Cellar / 006. Abandoned House

Forgot to post for a little while. I wrote these down on my phone and then didn't transfer them.

...

004. Rescue
3 October

I dreamed I was in a redwood forest, like in the California northwest:

I guess I was working as a park ranger or something, because this man came running up to me and a few other men in great distress saying his wife had been hurt. We found her at the base of a big tree with her arm gone, and not cleanly; it looked like it had been chewed off by something, not cut. We  thought she would die, but she didn't. It was too dangerous to move her, so we built a fence of rocks and sticks to keep her safe [though I get the feeling this isn't standard park ranger protocol...].

Then the same group of men and I rescued this little girl who had been kidnapped. She was seven and couldn't remember her life before being captured. I was the only one she would talk to -- I think the men scared her -- and I was trying to figure out how long she had been away from her family. She had no idea what months or years were, only days, and couldn't tell me how many there had been. She couldn't sleep so I read her a picture book about a mouse.

...

005. Cellar

6 October

I was back on the east coast, on a big farm. There was a decrepit old house and this cannibal guy(?) lived in it. He kept changing shape so I'm not sure what he actually looked like. People would bring him offerings -- normal food, mostly, but also treasure and weirder things -- and he kept them in the cellar. Somehow I ended up with his key, even though I didn't want it and didn't really want to work for the guy, because he was, well, a cannibal. I had to go into the cellar for some reason, but while I was in there thieves broke into the house. I locked the cellar and slunk away before they could see me, reasoning that the man would be happier to have the key back than he would if I tried to fight the thieves and lost. I didn't get to see whether I was right, though, because I woke up. 

...

006. Abandoned House

9 October

This is starting to become a theme -- there was an abandoned house, a different one, and these girls locked me inside and told me it was a maze and I had to find my way out. There was something or someone in the house with me, but I never caught enough of a glimpse to tell what it was. I think it was a man? I saw its shadow on the wall and it didn't look like a human's shadow, but I don't know. Whatever it was, if it had malevolent intentions they weren't towards me, because the dream didn't have a nightmare feeling and it never actually hurt/followed/threatened/showed itself to me.

Anyways, the girls who shut me in the house told me I had to find my way through the maze to get out. I could hear my dog barking next to the door they'd thrown me in through, so I kept the house's walls on my right and the sound of him barking behind me and I found my way out on the first try. The girls were really mad, and I told them they hadn't designed their maze very well.  

sorry

I haven't been posting because I haven't been remembering many of my dreams. The only thing I can recall is a brief fragment of someone (me?) standing in front of a car, as if to block it or make it stop. I'll post as soon as something interesting happens.

~Darcy

003. Paintings

Last night's dream was pretty short. I was a painter, and very good—much better than in real life. There were two I was working on; the first was a man riding a brown pinto horse that was rearing in front of an oncoming storm. My mother said "a man" had told her he was interested in my work and might want to buy it.

The other painting was deep blues, purples, and pinks, with turquoise highlights—it was a forest, not unlike that Avatar movie, with a tall faceless figure in the center. I was having trouble finishing it because the canvas kept ripping, but it was turning out really well and I didn't want to sell it.

002. Other Manhattan

Sorry I didn't post this yesterday. Didn't remember my dream last night; this is from Sunday night/Monday morning.


Before I came back to where I live now, I went to school in New York for a year. It's my favorite city in the world, and it frequently appears in my dreams as a result — but altered, different. I've come to call my dream-version, creatively, "Other Manhattan", and you'll probably hear about it a lot.



...

In my dream, I had finished college and was going to move to New York with my friend K. We were packing to leave, and there was some confusion about what I was going to do with all the stuff in my dorm that I wasn't taking with me. Something happened involving a guy that had — I don't want to say stalked, so let's say bothered me a lot during the year. I don't remember much, but I guess we got all my stuff packed, because next thing I knew K and I were on the subway, leaving the airport. I remembered that we had to transfer from Jamaica Station to get to the hotel, but I couldn't remember what line we were supposed to transfer to. We got to Jamaica Station and decided to go to the surface so I could call up a map on my phone. We came up near this beautiful fancy hotel, which I remembered in the dream my previous visits to NY, but I knew it wasn't the one we were staying at. [I'm not quite sure why we had to stay at a hotel if we were moving. Dream logic, I guess.]


I went to get my phone but realized K and I had left our luggage on the train. There wasn't time to go back down through the station, so I ghosted down through the street into the train. There was a bit of delay because to get the bags I had to un-ghost, grab them, and go incorporeal again while holding them, because my hands just went through otherwise. I managed to get the bags right as the train pulled away into the tunnel, and came back up to the surface exhausted by the effort.


Then the dream skipped forwards to K and I walking down an avenue — it had to be 7th or 8th, since it led to Times Square — but we were being followed by someone bad. I didn't know I was dreaming, or become lucid, but I knew I had powers, so I told her to link arms with me. We took tight hold of our bags, and I closed my eyes and imagined the Other Times Square: flashing hotels more like Vegas than NY, the dazzling Broadway theaters, the black glass towers, the incongruous Big Ben-like clock tower. I took one step, eyes closed, picture held, and we blinked dozens of blocks in that single step.


We must have found the hotel, because then I was using my teleporting powers to sneak K and another friend, M, into a theater where a musical was playing. We were all excited, but there was a woman onstage talking about how there had been such a problem with break-ins that the theater would send people to each seat to check people's tickets. The doors had already closed so we couldn't just leave, and we didn't want to get caught. M had an invisibility cloak, though, so we threw it over the three of us and we snuck out through the walls.



...

I haven't had a dream that vivid — or one involving Other Manhattan — in a while. I'm going to try using it as a visual/mental "spring-board" to try and go back intentionally — focusing on it before I go to sleep in the hopes that it will manifest. If I succeed enough, deliberately going somewhere might work as a device with which to become lucid. Wish me luck!


~Darcy

001. Morrigan

I can only remember bits and pieces of one dream from last night, and it was pretty short. Morrigan from Dragon Age was looking for her father, but there were some men, mercenaries maybe, looking for her, and I'm pretty sure they wanted to kill her.... I was with her and another woman — nobody specific, just a construct — and there was this dead white tree on the top of a short bluff. The girl and I climbed into the tree, and Morrigan hunkered down among the roots and threw a bedsheet over her head to hide. It wasn't the most cunning disguise, and when the men showed up the woman and I had to pass a D&D-style speech check to convince them we hadn't seen her.

Then we all rode away on the back of a tortoise. It wasn't a particularly big tortoise, as far as tortoises go — about standard Galapagos size, I'd say, but we all managed to fit on top of its shell somehow.

...

Yeah, so that's pretty standard as far as my dreams go. In fact, I'd say it was entirely unremarkable. My dreams are weird.