This is why I keep a dream diary.

 

I've just had a series of the most vivid, lucid dreams I've ever had – the same narrative continued through the whole night. The aesthetic and mood were clearly inspired by Echo Bazaar, but other than that, they were wholly original.

 

I was in the shadows of the World Tree, right among its roots, in a world where the Tree was not an Ash but a weeping Willow. The tree was not only a real, physical object; it was also a sign of the zodiac, and I had been born under its sign. Those born under the sign of the Tree were known to be prone to madness, because from birth, during the month when the Tree was ascendant, they gained knowledge of the other worlds the tree could turn to – knowledge that vanished again the other eleven months. This meant, among other things, that even as an infant, I could speak and reason intelligibly during that month. The inconstancy of this knowledge, dealing with its loss and return, was what broke the minds of many.

 

I couldn't say for certain whether, in the dream, I was mad or not. But something had gone terribly wrong. I was beside the tree, yes, but not in the city of my birth, which was just at the edge of its shadow. I was elsewhere. The tree had turned to another world – a place of darkness and water, devoid of color. I think it was an anteroom to both Faerie and Death. People who came there were all wracked with private obsessions, and they could not leave, not in any direction, unless they came to terms with them.

 

There was, in that place, a mild-mannered Faerie Prince. He was one of the few there who was not so wrapped up in himself that he could not see the troubles of those around him. His mother, I think, was our jailor, but he himself... I am not sure if he was jailor, or inmate, or neither. In any case, he was my friend. I was, I think, his lover. When I would stray to the stranger places under the roots and bargain with beings composed of tattered memory, agents of some other power, he would wait patiently and then have me dragged back, less lucid and more driven than ever before.

 

I had lost someone I loved. That, the Prince told me, was true of everyone who dwelt in the pool where I kept finding myself. But he was – for my own good – hiding something from me. That was not the only obsession that had brought me here. There was also a vendetta. A rival. A recurring image in my brain, of death by fire – either someone had burned to death, while I watched, or such a death was the just punishment I meant to return and mete out to them. But the more I bargained for knowledge with the hooded beings, the further I drifted from the world. The further from Faerie, as well. I was making a beeline for Death, and in my more lucid times in the pool, before my obsession returned, I knew it.

 

I began to put the pieces together when someone new came to our pool. A human woman, supplied by my dream's central casting from a local friend of mine. When she wasn't melancholy and wrapped up in herself, she was cheerful – more social than any of the rest of us. The Prince tried to help her as well – I thought at first that he was replacing me with her, and grew sullen and jealous. But as he taught her about the place, I re-learned what I had forgotten, and managed to keep it in one of the saner corners of my mind. It stuck with me, even through my next bargain.

 

Shortly after that, the Prince came to me. He spoke more explicitly of my problems. He helped me grapple with my Jungian shadows, so to speak. And he gave me a mission – get back to the world. Take the new girl with me. And set things right. (I do not think that he and I meant the same thing by setting things right, but I didn't have the heart to tell him so). He took the two of us, secretly, to a place where various forbidden fairy resources were kept. I think they may have been dreams in a bottle. He pressed one of these on me, but I palmed three more when he took the woman aside to speak privately about her own mission – a dream of fire, a dream of blood, and – in a sudden pang of conscience – a dream of ice, to keep the fire in check.

 

Swiftly, secretly, he brought us to the portal back to my world and pushed us through it. If he had been found doing this, his punishment would not bear imagining – what his mother wanted, I think, was to reap us; stealing us away from death and taking us to Faerie. Regardless, tending to us was a sacred responsibility.

 

Just as we came to the real world, I woke.

 

I think there are a few things about the dream I understand that my dream-self did not. The young woman was the only person there who was well enough to care about the other people she saw. She may have been one of the few in that place who had not been born under the sign of the Tree. The Prince took her in not to look after her – but to help her look after me. I suspect when he took her aside to speak privately, he was giving her a few predictions of what I would do when we returned to the world, and instructions on how to keep me safe. I'm a little angry that he didn't give me any such instructions for her – I suspect she was there with us because she'd been a suicide, and returning from the dead was not likely to do her any favors, if she was from the same city as I was. Either he didn't understand how traumatic returning from the dead would be to her, and how shocking to everyone else – or he understood, but cared about me enough that it didn't matter to him. Faeries.

Impressed.

President Obama's contraceptive compromise proves again, to those who may have doubted, that he is decisive, determined, and hella shrewd.

...

... I have pretty much spent all day thinking about that dream.  Man.