I had long & vivid dreams this morning.

In the first part of the first dream I meet a witch with long black hair & wearing a black dress. She calls on spiders and creatures of the night to do her bidding & cause trouble. At first I like her, but when I think she’s evil, another witch appears. This one has long, scraggly white hair and wears a frost-colored dress. She uses cold & frost to cast her spells (like the Snow Queen in the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale). The 2 witches are enemies, but both are evil. Maybe the first represents fear, since she conjures creatures that people fear. If so, then maybe the second represents depression, which saps hope & the will to be active.

I leave these two & later find myself inside pretty, palatial rooms that look out onto courtyard gardens. I only see the inside of this castle, but think it’s of modest size. I think a TV show like Game of Thrones is being filmed here & that this is a perfect place to film the story. In the story the family that lives here is basically like House Tully of Riverrun. This castle lies in the north though, near a cave from which a dark force in about to emerge. Three elder men of the clan say that the new head of the family is Edmund & it will be his job to warn the rest of the land when the dark force comes out of the cave. I worry that the new lord may not be up to the task of being a strong leader, but the elders seem to think he will be. The elders say he has until the 15th day of the new calendar (when Winter begins) to get something done.

In the last part I’m in a back room of a used book store. I find a book about Versailles & portfolio of architectural plans for a palace, perhaps the one I was in earlier. I also wonder what happened to my plans of the original starship Enterprise. (I suspect the plans represent me wanting to have a plan for how to fix my life & put it back in order.)

In a later dream, I’m living with my mother in a big house full of people. We each have our own room, & it’s kind of like when the early Soviets first had commoners live in the houses of the rich. Mother & I each buy a few items from a craft store like Michael’s. She buys some ceramic houses & toys. I buy some perfumes. We put them on our own shelves in our rooms. We’re both on the same floor with an old man who lives in another room. On the floor below us lives a family with young children. I’m chatting with the old man when he says we’re being robbed. I go down the flight of stairs with him & find a young man with fair skin & dark, curly hair trying to steal stuff.

The old man has a small black gun. I take it from him & point it at the young man, but I don’t really know how to use it. I tell the young man to get out & walk toward him with the gun. He seems scared, but asks if he can have a stuffed animal from the shelf behind me. It looks mostly like a stuffed bear, but might also be a stuffed dog. I say ok & take down the stuffed animal. I see the back of its head is open & has small silver snaps that I play with to close it. I think the young man seems psychologically damaged & vulnerable from living on the streets himself. When I escort him outside, I think this whole neighborhood seems impoverished. The young man then sits in a wheelchair & asks to take that too.  I don’t think I should let him have it, because someone else in the house may need it, but the old man says, “That’s what I’d do if I were homeless.” I think he may be right, that the young man can carry things with the wheelchair & not have it taken away from him like a shopping cart could be. I agree to let him have it. He leaves.

I walk back upstairs toward my own room. I’m sure we’re on floor # 5, yet I seem to have gone up only one flight of stairs. I tell the old man that I seem to have jumped through time & space somehow, but he doesn’t seem surprised. Now I look at a bottle of perfume I had in my hand & see about half of it has spilled on the floor in front of me, filling a little indentation in the carpet. It looks like brown bits of cinnamon bark & oil. I feel sad that I lost one of the few things I cherished while I was trying to protect myself & others from having other things stolen from us. I look at the ceramic houses Mom still has on her shelf & think we don’t really need these things, but they seem to make her happy. I also look down from the balcony on our floor at the children playing on the floor below us & think they seem happy & sweet. I’m glad their family lives here with us. Even though we’re all poor, we seem to be good people.