some old dreams i thought were significant at the time. might start keeping a dream journal again. somewhat conversational tone in the second.

Dreamt that a bunch of different governments were making plastic/artificial-feeling crosses and chopping people up to fit them. People were protesting the fact that the crosses weren't exactly made to measure or missing a heel or something rather than the fact that people were being butchered. As I was waking up, rest of the dream felt as though I were shifting around in bed trying to fit various abstracted shapes repeatedly, to no avail, feeling heavily unsatisfied.

This weird fantasy was unfolding before me and it was as if I were both a passive witness and the source, as if I were doing it myself, but all of it was being done rather wink wink nudge nudge sarcastically. It started with this fuzzy black silhouette of a spider that kept proclaiming itself the prince of darkness very solemnly yet arrogantly, and it had these weird beady human eyes and teeth vaguely attached to it and I kept having to cut between two different views of it to even see the whole thing. Then as if in counter to it, this count of darkness, an elaborate arabesque priestly figure with black robes, began proclaiming itself the count of darkness and herald to the darkness of the cosmos. It was channeling this misty dark swirl that kept growing horizontally in all directions and had this weight and thickness and almost milky yet wispy texture to it. While proclaiming himself as the count, he also kept claiming to be doing the counting, which seemed awfully important. I can't tell now whether they were proclaiming these things or if I was repeating them like mantras, but it seems like it was somehow both. Then, this castlevania-esque labyrinth of very elaborate and well decorated rooms began sprawling out around them, almost of my own doing, as if I were decorating them myself but not explicitly, and more and more I began to look to the count of darkness with a sort of reverence and, gradually, his room, at the very end of the castle I'd constructed, became both progressively more detailed and forbidden. All the deco was distinctly fake. The books on the bookshelves were props and couldn't even be opened, everything seemed very static and plastic yet very convincing. I think it's rather important that I stress that the sleep was shallow and that that was where the general feeling of sarcasm came from. It was a sort of haze where I could tell the whole thing was 2nd degree or in a frame but I wasn't exactly awake enough to see it for the dream that it was.