Dreamed, Friday night. Oh, such dreams.

It was an amusement park, of sorts, with animal shows and rides and such like. And there was a boat ride, and there were seals, and there were monsters of all sorts- and there were all the demons of hell, putting on a circus show. We were not allowed to leave, but somehow we tricked our way out of the show. There was colorful cotton candy, and on our way to the seal show there was a boat ride that involved little flat boats that sank. My shoes were soaked thoroughly, but I did not fall into the water as some did. The animal trainer was a demon in disguise, but so were members of our own entourage; people whom I had gone to school with, teachers and classmates and the like- one in particular was half demon, and he alone was slated to escape unscathed. Fortunately, I got off with soaked shoes and little else before fleeing the ominous vibes. Others were not so lucky, though they were too far underwater for me to hear their screams.

And it was much like the band trip, in that they fed us in groups and herded us in droves, and hypnotized us by the handfull. So I ate chocolate cake and carrot cake and sat by my friends (A few of you were there, most were others, like Jess, and perhaps Rebecca, but I can't quite recall...) and when the Demon King of Myth and Nightmare stood on his stage and gestured, I turned my eyes away, and the dreams dissolved around me...

Only to find that I was he, that King of Myth and Dream, driving my mother's Toyota van through the bleachers, and into the sky. There had been a falling out of sorts between my Lady and I, and she needed to be found before someone got into trouble; mischief is common among gods.

Though this was a different dream (and I think I knew it at the time, for all that I was clothed in red and black and harlequin diamond and was quite definitely male- there was a quality of lucidity to these dreams that I found ever so disturbing...) there were remembered bits from the first; the seals, and the boats. But I drove past these, not bothering with the steering wheel, using only the power of my mind. The radio is a bitch to adjust when you aren't using your hands; the car doesn't handle half so well, either.

Creatures met me in the sky, and I asked them for directions (perhaps I wasn't quite as male as I thought, after all...) but none had seen her. There was another, lost like I, without a name or a place. His memory was gone, his home destroyed, ground into white dust and whiter ghosts until he alone was left. He was a Warrior, and he called shotgun until we reached the ruins of Kiev, at which point we had to abandon the Toyota and continue on foot.

There was an opera house there, with elaborate and beautiful frescos all across the walls; the visages of great men looked out from the walls in unfaded colors against the blinding white stones. It had been foretold, however, that if I ever set foot on those brightly colored white flagstones, the last standing remnant of that great civilization would fall.

Kiev was white stone and white dust and white sand and white walls; the sky was blue but it was a white sort of blue; everything was a brilliant, mutli-hued shade of white, save for the ocean which might have been green; the sand tics, which were a proper sand color; and the skeletons, which were a rusting iron red. The only things living were the sand tics, giant clicking things with little pinchers and enormous stingers that gleamed like steel. Each tic was the size of my hand (and my hands were rather long-fingered and elegant; I was a King, after all) and they scuttled across everything. As we walked through the city (the Warrior and I) we could look out over the walls at the beach, where the remnants of fortifications rose up from the sand. Scattered across the sand were what looked like statues, rusting metal statues with their arms upraised, rusting swords and shields in hand.

There was one sword not rusted into uselessness; it reeked of evil, but the Warrior took it anyway, claiming it reminded him of home. So long as he didn't go crazy, I didn't really care. Kiev was once a human city; now it was dust and ruin. I said to the Warrior, "In two and a half years, my people could make this place great again." I was lying; for all I knew, I was the only one left.

We approached the Opera House, and true to the prophecy, the entire great building sank into the stones as I stepped forward. Didn't crumble, didn't collapse- just sank into the cobbles with a cloud of dust. What remained were steps leading to a wall that looked out over the water.

I heard voices, and hid myself in the pale shadows. A self-styled little goddess was calling for her keeper- she called herself Melnipon, searching for Velnithan, her Lady. Velnithan appeared at the top of the wall, clad in the sea green and blue weeds of a Wraithling Nymph- but I knew her, knew her to be my own Lady, Queen of Myth and Dream. She did not see me, but spoke to the little goddess, questioning her. Kiev was a recently ruined city, and she knew the prophecy of my coming to the opera house as well as I did.

The Wraithling goddess had no answers, and my Lady grew angry with her. Melnipon gave up her treasure, then; a relic of Kiev, a shining theatre mask of green satin and sequins and feathers. When my Lady put it on, her eyes when white like the stones and glowed like the pale hot sun, and she spoke words I could not understand. I remembered them, though, for someone would know them, somewhere. The mask disappeared when my Lady took it off, and then she was great in her rage.

"You are no god, puny creature! You seek to trick me, sea spawn- but I know you, I know that it is nigh to feeding time, and I shall feed on you myself!" In a wave of water and skittering bubbles, we were all washed away- but my Lady saw me and my companion at the last, and saved us from the depths.

(Now the dream took a pause, and I was no longer the King of Myth and Dream with his red and black cape and pianist hands- I was the Lady, his Queen- something like Titania to Oberon, only we were not nearly so petty, nor so...exhibitionist.) We left the now-underwater city of Kiev; the car was gone, but the Warrior and his new sword went with us. We travelled to other ruins- the ruins of his home. In the outer city, little gods dwelled, small gods, old gods, dying gods, confused gods- even little Melnipon, the sea wraith with delusions of grandeur. My Lord had no knowledge of this place, and no place in it- but to these sad relics, I was Velnithan, the Rose. The visions I had seen beneath Kiev's Mask had led me back to this place, the home of the surviving deities- my Lord had been too busy searching for me after the fall of our little Circus to notice the way the world fell apart around him. A rather annoying, if mildly endearing quality in a man. He still tended towards being infuriating, of course- but we were gods. It was what we did.

In the center of the Warrior's nameless home (for he was out of time and place and mind, and was made sad by the grey ruin of his home) was a sanctum of sorts- none of the little gods ventured into it. The Warrior had been a king here; this was his home. This small, mean stone hovel, the home of a great king- for there was no doubt that he had been great. He found a scabbard for his evil sword in his home, and remembered a little more of who he might have been. Not his name or his people's name or the Truth behind the end of the world, but a little. Enough to know how to call back the memory of his past to let it wander in the air around us. There were little vials lined up on the windowsill (the empty windowsill; as Kiev had been blinding white, this place was slick silvery gray; the sky, the sun, the walls- everything) containing arcane things and drugs. He took grains of stone from one vial and swallowed them, the pressed his hand against a tile that leached color into the air; all was gray, multi-hued gray, but this was undeniably fuscia.

And then he drew us, my Lord and I, into his dream, or he drew his dream into the air, and spirits walked around us. "It is not Truth," my Lord noted. "But it is true for being the memory of the thing, if not the thing itself." And we watched fantastic creatures waltz around us, and we watched the Warrior weep with longing for what had been lost- and then it crumbled apart around us, and we were alone, the three of us, in the tiny little room.

"Again," I commanded, and he nodded. There were answers here, and there was a Truth behind it, somewhere. Again, he swallowed grains of cloudly garnet and touched the tile that had his name writ on it in a language none of us knew, and again the visions rose up around us. I had seen them before, when the Mask had been upon me, and there was an afterimage of what they had truly been beneath the new images, ones like cartoon scribblings of gods. There was color in the memory, bright color scrawled across the walls; the graffitti of the gods. There were no people or creatures this time, only the brightly colored tiles that had been used to worship their odd gods. (Some of them looked like the silhouette of a punk Mickey Mouse; others, like Joe Boxer smilies- the original tiles had had incomprehensible signs on them, but these were different and we knew it.)

There were two doorways; one led back the way we came, and was dark; the other, on the far side of the room, led to a brightly lit hallway. The Warrior tried to walk that way, but we knew that death, or worse waited for him there and we tried to stop him. We would have failed had a noise from the entrance not startled us. A loping, hunched creature crawled in; it's skin was mottled shades of gray and green and its eyes were heartbreakingly sad. It mewled pitifully, crying for a mother, any mother.

I am no mother; I am a Queen and a Lady and a Goddess- but not a fertility goddess, and not a mother goddess. I am a death goddess, a mist goddess- entirely useless when it comes to dealing with the crying children of dead eras.

The Warrior, however, recognized it. "It is the representation of the Future That Is To Be," he said, and tossed the ugly thing an even uglier looking fruit, conjured out of dream and madness. It ate, and turned somewhat happy eyes on us. In its own way, it was rather cute.

If we were to find our Truth and save our world from subsuming into white and grey as the cities of the humans had, we would need to nurture our Future That Was To Be, and so we did.

The Warrior remained with the creature in the place that had once been his home. My Lord and I took a librarian and a guardian from the archives- not real people, but real memories of people, and we went to search for our answers. The librarian, a girl, led us to the boats where much of this mess began, and we began the next part of our journey. Our new companions, however, grew quickly distracted, and insisted that we return to the Park, not to the place of the seals and the sinking boats and the demon children, nor to the place of amusements and rides and treachery, but to the Library.

It was imperative that we avoid that place, but they were most insistent that we visit its brightly colored buildings. And as we climbed from our skif onto the floating docks beneath the stretched canvas awnings-

I woke up, because it was Saturday morning and 7:30 and mom was yelling up the stairs to get ready because we had to leave in an hour and it would take me forever, anyway.

I wrote it all down in greater detail and with less drama in my dream journal, but that was how it went.

I drew the Lady last night, standing on the walls looking over the ocean, wearing the Mask. She looks lovely in blue and green; her hair is blonde and full of whispy snarls. The Lord is tall and dark haired with a tiny goatee; he wears dark red and black and can cut a sinister figure when he chooses. I didn't get a good look at his clothes, not the way I saw the Lady's dress when she posed as Velnithan the Rose, a middle goddess of water. Shimmering irridescent sea colors- blue and green and seafoam pearl. Beautiful. I didn't get much of a look at the Warrior, either, though I did see his sword and the scabbard he found for it in the inner sanctum of his nameless city.

The Future That Is To Be really was rather cute, in a pathetic and long necked sort of way.

I am disturbed and delighted, however...and writing this down has brought back the memories of countless other dreams that I've had and remembered at some point, which is lovely. I'm not sure what it is that causes these periods of intense dreaming; the past few days have been full of dreams, though Friday night's was the only truly imperative one. It could be hormonal; I'll have to keep track of these things.

The amusement park was deeply disturbing, but Kiev was amazing in a way I can't even describe- amazing and terrible, for it was full of death and insects (really nasty insects, too- they looked able to take your head off if they chewed long enough) but beautiful in that it was so amazingly detailed...and the skeletons among the ruins on the shore were awe inspiring.

I love dreaming.