kore_logs | And every time you go to sleep...

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And every time you go to sleep...

Who: Meyer Lansky and all y'all
Where: ~Only in dreams
When: Day 83-88
What: Meyer is having some dreams. Perhaps you'd like to stumble into them.
Warnings: There is definitely disturbing imagery in here. There's copious amounts of murder and blood, kidnapping, drug dealing, and traumatic childhood memories that most definitely include murder and gore. There is also swearing, of course. More warnings will be added if more come up during the dreams.

[[This is an open dream log, to keep things tidy! I set up a couple specific threads for people, but other people can jump in as well, or they can make their own thread, or they can jump into the collective dream thread!

Please just note what day the dream is occurring on if you tag!]]

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Daneel looks around, frowning faintly. "I am not certain where we are. I do not know this place."

A minor detail. There are ways to navigate the unfamiliar, although typically they don't work in dreams. He offers the child his hand, warm and inviting. "We will find our way out together."

But that doesn't solve the problem of someone else being in distress, and he looks up, listening. "Do you know who is crying?"

He stares from Daneel's hand to his face, then shoves his own hands back in his pocket, indicating that he has no interest in holding hands. That's for children, he thinks dismissively, and he's not a child, except that he is.

It's perplexing, and for a moment he's quiet, trying to work out the answers to the questions posed to him. Finally, the answer comes unbidden to him, although he hasn't previously thought of it, hadn't consciously even noticed the sound of the crying child in the background. It had been expected noise, the kind of thing that one learns to tune out.

"You're in the woods near Grodno," he says, somehow knowing where they are despite feeling utterly lost. He doesn't know whether the information will mean anything to the seemingly kind stranger. "My brother's crying." He doesn't know how he knows, but he does.

Daneel withdraws his hand, unbothered by the dismissal. Children are a strange thing for him -- intellectually, he knows they're small humans, but he's had little reason to interact with them, and they behave differently.

"Should we find him? He sounds like he's in distress." The place Meyer names has no meaning for him, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't be able to help. And he does need to help.

"I don't know where he is," he says, not sounding overly concerned, but he's perplexed nonetheless. His little brother is his responsibility, after all, his to look after when his mother can't, and yet, he can't seem to find him.

"Maybe if we go this way," he suggests, pointing at a clump of trees. Truth be told, it looks no more distinct than anywhere else, and he can't remember if he's been in that direction before. He's decided he'll accept help from this stranger, but only because he has very little choice otherwise. His hands are still ice cold.

"Follow me." Daneel takes the lead, because if there's a risk he should be the one to take it, not this child. He trusts Meyer to follow him, too. "We will find him, do not fear."

Failure here, for him at least, is not an option. How dangerous this place might be is a mystery to him, but if he has anything to do with it, no one will be harmed.

That this is a dream escapes him, still.

He follows, noting that the sound of the crying seems to be getting louder. It's still hard to tell exactly where it's coming from -- every time he thinks he's pinpointed a location, the sound seems to shift somehow, to come from somewhere else.

Perhaps following isn't exactly the right word, after all; he falls into step beside Daneel, looking up at him curiously. Meyer at once appears younger and older than he is: at eight, he's small in stature, but his face is serious, overly so for someone so small. Fumbling in his pockets for a moment, he pulls out the contents, examining them carefully. There's a piece of candy with lint stuck to it, a coin or two, a book of matches, and a half-smoked cigarette.

It's the cigarette he offers to Daneel. He's always been told to be polite when someone offers assistance, and the most polite thing he knows to do is offer someone a gift, no matter how small. "I don't know if we'll find him," he says thoughtfully, "We're pretty lost."

"Thank you."

Though he doesn't, cannot smoke, Daneel takes the cigarette with every gesture of formality and respect, and he tucks it into his pocket. He couldn't say why, exactly, he accepted it, but here and now, in this moment, it seems appropriate to.

"We will find him, and we will offer aid," he promises. "We must be close."

He nods, continuing through the trees, eager to find his brother and put a stop to the interminable crying, but he pauses, confused, when he walks into a small clearing and sees an apartment building there, as though it had simply appeared from nowhere.

It's not his New York apartment; it's the apartment from his childhood, and it's with a jolt that he starts to realize that all of this makes very little sense. Why would there be a building in the middle of the woods, and why, if he's a child, is he still thinking about his New York apartment? Something is wrong, but he can't quite put his finger on it.

He turns back to Daneel, looking suspicious, folding his arms across his chest. "Where are we?" he asks, although he can't really expect Daneel to answer that, and besides, he's the one that recognizes the building, although it's out of place in these snowy woods.

"I cannot answer that," Daneel says gently. "I have never been here before. I am more lost than you are. Is it familiar to you?"

He lifts his head to listen to the crying, uncertain, worried. "But we should hurry, shouldn't we? If your brother requires assistance, should we not be quick to offer it?"

That would be the obvious solution to him, but he's singularly lost, more than just geographically. There's a nonsense to this that he can't place, something he cannot understand.

"I live here," he says, with all the impatience of an eight year old somehow combined with the world-weary affect of a much older man. With that important fact tossed out, he dashes up the stairs to the apartment, expecting Daneel to follow, to come and help him.

Throwing open the door to the tiny apartment -- it's really only two and a half rooms, and it's cramped -- he looks around expectantly for his brother, for his mother, for someone, but the crying has stopped, and it's eerily silent. The silence almost seems more oppressive than the crying had, somehow, and his eyes dart around the apartment nervously, as though expecting something to jump out at any moment.

"They're not here," he says. His tone is flat.

Daneel follows, his face grave. The end of crying is probably a good thing, but there is no sign of anyone here.

"Where could they have gone?" Even in a dream, Daneel is a logical creature, and they passed no one in the stairs, and the window seems unlikely. It's a concerning detail in an overall inexplicable experience.

"Shall we search?"

"New York," he says suddenly, the thought occurring to him seemingly from nowhere. "They went to New York. My father's there. He must have sent for them."

But if that's the case, where had the crying come from? And why does the apartment smell like freshly baked bread, as though someone had been there minutes before? They must have left in a hurry. They must have forgotten to bring him along, since he'd been lost in the woods.

"Will they come fetch you?"

It's an innocent question. If they care for their son, then they must bring him as well. That they might not is unthinkable: humans who raise their own children necessarily care for their wellbeing.

And a small child -- as fluid and inexplicable as age seems to be here and now -- must be protected.

"They..."

There's a long pause, and then an expression of consternation. "It didn't happen this way," he says insistently, and even as he's saying it, he doesn't know how he knows it, doesn't know why those words are coming out of his mouth, but they make sense somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind that knows this is a dream.

He's running into the kitchen in an instant, looking for his mother, his brother, someone, the adult part of his consciousness telling him that this is all wrong, that this isn't a real memory, that he's not really alone, but he can't find them anywhere.

"Look for them!" he calls out to Daneel, trying and failing to keep the frantic, childlike tone out of his voice.

Obediently, feeling that thread of terror, Daneel goes to the other rooms of the apartment, seeking out any sign of any other residents. He can see nothing, can see no sign of where they might have gone.

"I see no trace of anyone," he reports, reluctant to give such bad news, but it is nevertheless the truth.

"They're... In New York," he says again, almost as though reassuring himself. Reality is starting to seep into the dream, making him question what's true and what's false, making him wonder whether any of this really happened, whether he's awake or asleep, whether this is all an elaborate fantasy one way or the other.

He stares at Daneel again, accusation clear in his eyes as he asks: "Are you real?"

The question catches Daneel by surprise. Why would he not be real? Unless the question is one of his humanity, which is a different question.

"I am real." He knows he exists, if nothing else. "I am a robot, but I am certainly real."

"Am I real?"

It's not a question of humanity, and somehow, it doesn't even strike him as bizarre that Daneel is a robot. In his brain, in his dream, that makes perfect sense and isn't worth questioning. He looks around himself, stuffing his hands back into his pockets, still unable to warm them up. The question of reality, though, strikes him as an important one. Maybe it isn't real.

"You appear to be real to me."

But dreams are an alien thing to him, something he cannot quite make sense of yet. He treats everything as though it was real: imaginary things are something he has little experience with.

"I am not certain what else you would be, if not real."

"I think," he says slowly, ponderously, and he's aware of the fact that the room somehow seems to be melting, to be fading even as he speaks, but it somehow makes sense. He himself is turning from a child back into the adult he'd been when he entered the dream, growing up even as the room dissipates.

"I think this is a dream," he tells Daneel, and maybe he wants it to be, because there's a tone of desperation in his voice that wasn't there seconds before.

Edited 2013-06-21 16:02 (UTC)

"I am aware," Daneel observes, "which would imply this is my dream, but this does not resemble any place I have seen. Nor should I be able to dream."

He's going through the problem rationally, or at least as rationally he can be in a dream. He's not coming to any sensical conclusions, either. When he was human, he dreamed of people he knew, places that were familiar. He doesn't know the man in front of him, nor why he would imagine him as a boy.

"Is this your dream?" Strange, impossible, but he can't rule it out either.

Edited 2013-06-21 20:36 (UTC)

"It's my dream," he says automatically. It's one he's had many times before, or at least some version of it, but it's always varied, always changing, and Daneel has never been in it before. How could someone else get into his dream in this way?

Certainly, he's seen strangers in dreams before, but they've never had the awareness level that Daneel seems to; they've always been an obvious creation of his own mind, and this man isn't.

"Then we need to wake up," he says determinedly.

"This is an excellent plan," Daneel agrees. It's just slightly unsettling to realise that he's intruding like this. He's often aware of minds, but not quite like this.

There's only one problem: he can't really be asleep in the proper sense of the word, and even if he is... well, how does one wake up on purpose? Is whatever he is doing close enough that the same rules apply?

"Is there a method of doing this I should be aware of?"

"I don't know," he says honestly. Usually, when he becomes aware that he's dreaming, the realization of it snaps him back into wakefulness almost immediately, but this dream stubbornly lingers.

Then he has an idea, albeit a half formed one. "I came into this dream by dreaming that I walked through a door. Maybe if we walk out the door, we'll walk out of the dream, yes?" It's not much, but it's an idea nevertheless.

Well, it's worth a try, and Daneel will easily give way to anyone who has more experience with dreams than he does -- which is most people to be sure.

"If this is your dream, then perhaps my own attempt will make no difference, but I will try to think of a door. Unless a particular door is necessary?"

He's not good with dream logic.

And every time you go to sleep...

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