Crows

I was aware that this was a dream, but I was not lucid.

I believe I was moving back to my hometown in the dream. (In real life I'm not doing this, but I'm moving back somewhere close.) I was trying to retrieve some boxes I had shipped; it seemed I was attempting to retrieve them from out of a garbage truck. I was doing this with two totally fictitious high-school friends, in the parking lot of a (much more run-down) version of our high school. Somehow, successful completion of the task involved getting access to lockers inside the high school, which we did.

On our way back out of the high school, Evita Moreau suddenly appeared. This was quite a surprise, as she (as far as I know while waking, and also as far as I knew in this dream) essentially never appears in my dreams. (This is a person who I never see in real life either, but who formed a strong impression.) She had aged and wasn't so recognizable, but nonetheless I knew instantly who she was and was trying to figure out what to do about it while we talked.

The conversation reached no special conclusion, and she faded into the realms of mystery once again. (I don't remember any actual words which we said to each other.) I went outside to go home with the two friends. It was getting dark, and the grass was mostly dead and damp as it might be in late autumn. There were many crows in the air. The crows had an unnatural dark shadow/cloud which followed them as they flew; I was quite aware of it being physically implausible, and was trying hard to come up with an explanation for this. Then I saw a skeleton of some large beast, surrounded by dense black fur. The body had been picked clean. All the crows around were trailing (still physically implausibly) black fur from the beast, indicating that they had participated in the slaughter (or at least the subsequent cleanup). I became a bit worried about the crows eating me, and hurried along.

Entity

I released some kind of noncorporeal SCP-style horror. This entity was being contained in a government facility which seemed to be a mixture of datacenter, power plant, and research center. I don't remember exactly why I released the entity, but it might have been malicious on my part. The main effect of the entity was to create pervasive glitches in reality having to do with most kinds of communication channel. Any kind of symbolic communication would be changed randomly, in ways that mostly maintained the pragmatics of the message while destroying epistemic content. In other words, the more a property of the message matters to you, the more likely it is to be preserved by the entity; but unimportant aspects of the message get a lot of noise injected. The communication glitches are inserted into the brain as well, resulting in an altered state of consciousness for everyone. However, spoken language was only mildly effected by the glitches (as compared to written language).

An additional effect of the entity which was not so obvious was that any symbolic act involving a symbol for "up" is interpreted as a call for the entity to eat you. Somehow we were able to communicate this to people without getting eaten, though.

Society gradually devolved into a non-functioning post-apocalyptic state due to the difficulty of things running smoothly under the influence of the entity.

Song

The main portion of the dream was about living in an unfinished house. The sense was somewhat post-apocalyptic, but more a large financial meltdown then a zombie apocalypse. There weren't resources to properly finish the house. However, I remember two houses; the idea seemed to be that we were taking stuff from my childhood home to try and finish this new house, but it wasn't going so well. I recall a storage room filled with furniture which had been painted over too many times, and then left unused. I also recall being in the old house with Mom and Daniel, and pointing out that all the books were supposed to be moved to the new house already. Mom replied that, well, we had moved everything at one point but we'd picked up new books since then. There was also a bit about flowers growing outside the old house, which mom recently planted. I tried to move a small one from a bad spot to a better one, but realized there were so many it didn't matter.

There was a song on the radio which I tried to look up in the dream because it seemed really interesting. I thought it could be the mamas and the papas, based on the style, but the content of the song was something about atheism. I wish I could remember more about it. There were lines saying that when you're getting married it all makes sense, but then what if you die and there's no recompense? That was the most significant line, but I don't remember what the other lyrics could have been. In the dream, I made up extra lyrics to the same melody which went something like: Moses stepped in the 20th way to find knowledge of God; but his knowledge was wrong to the present day. (This is mostly capturing the sense of what was said without capturing the rhythm. This "20th way" was an obvious indication that Moses had a lot of knowledge of rituals, in the dream.) I considered these new lyrics worse, but felt they added something missing in the song; something like comparison to ancient religion where the song discussed just modern.

Cult

Day after day, we would have dinner with our host. The dinner was invariably excellent. Those around the table were mainly older men, greying. Our host - the master - was a quiet man, with an unremarkable face like a lump of flesh. Sometimes his part was played by a lacky. Sometimes a dog wearing human clothing. They thought we didn't notice when the master was switched out. How malleable we were! They were gaslighting us, teaching us not to notice. Day after day, we had lessons with the master. We were locked in, unable to leave this building except under one condition: proving that we had learned the master's ways by beating him in a contest if wits. I was determined to escape by other means. They caught me on my first attempt. I had snuck out a window to a neighboring apartment. My memory and/or the dream gets hazy after here.

Island Apartment

Another dream about an apartment. This one was with family, not alone. The city we were in was a multi-island city, and one without bridges! We found a really cheap and nice apartment, and on the beach, but it was on a smaller island with less transportation options and more crime. I recall trying to figure out how the commute would work, looking at options in google maps. The bus routes which were suggested terminated at the shore at various points, and ferries were not explicitly shown. It seemed I'd have a long commute to the big Island for work.

There were also some scenes about moving. We were trying to figure out exactly how close another friend was - of course they turned out to be on another island entirely.

Bad Apartment

I was in an apartment which was falling apart. The landlord was arguing with another tenant who had bluntly refused to pay rent - "I dislike to pay, prefer not to pay" while I noticed that the television antenna had fallen over. I dragged it inside to take it to the dumpster out back, realizing midway that dragging it through the apartment rather than taking it around was foolish and only served to alarm the other tenants.

In another portion of the dream, there was a community center. I don't remember exactly what happened there. I have the image of people exchanging food or clothing, my intrusion on events which had nothing to do with me, a back door and a back room.

Estate Tour

I was on a tour of someone's estate in Germany. The estate had been turned into a kind of tourist attraction. There was a train which would take you all over the estate (which was nice enough that I considered just staying in it for a while), and also games were set up. We might realistically suppose these were augmented reality games with goggles or some such, but in the dream it was just as if you were able to play video games in real life with no boundary. In a swampy area, the game had to do with catching insects which were infected with the spirit of an evil witch; this was a scavenging hunt game with no violence, intended for younger children. (The connection of the witch to the story of the estate was not made clear in the dream.) In a large building which I take to be the central estate, there was a monster-slaying game. While playing this, the view became more abstract, as if I was playing an actual video game. The interface was somewhat confusing and I accidentally went up the stairs many more floors than I intended. The monsters grew more difficult with each floor, so on the floor I ended up at, the monsters were far too high for my level and kept simply killing me. (I would respawn on the same floor.) I was quite surprised at how many floors there were, given that I thought this building used to be the living quarters of the estate. I eventually found my way back down. Someone (plausibly my brother) was playing with me and we were chasing a cat (a real cat, I think) around the place.

Riding the train around the estate, I viewed many German houses and buildings out of the window. (These may have been on the estate as well, or simply near its borders.) All the buildings were painted bright colors, often primary colors, in dazzle-paint style. I felt somewhat surprised by this, but thought that it was typical of Germany, and so was a little puzzled why I should be surprised.

There was another part of the dream which I remember less well; this included a room with a console and tube which accessed a spaceship? Maybe an alien trying to get home?