Rather odd dream.
I dreamt I was down by the shore next to a lake with a surface smooth as glass, frozen under a milky sky. Low hills on the other side and behind me a slate grey hillside ramping up into the low cloud. There was a little one room house made of concrete with a red roof and two windows and I knew that my little brother, who exists only within this dream, had just stepped inside. There was an old woman with cropped grey hair on the shore-side fishing, and I stepped past her and went inside the house. There was no one inside. My brother had disappeared, had vanished. Outside I cried out to my other-mother up on the hillside that lived in a house next to a bus-turnaround. She ran down the hill to me and as I told her how my brother had vanished, a small crowd formed. I tried explaining how he had impossibly disappeared into thin air, but they shook their heads and told me that he had probably just run down the hill, out of sight, when I wasn’t paying attention.
And then the old woman by the lake serenely spoke up and explained that he had been taken by the Wolf-demon Akaji - a figure who wore his ribs on the outside, had antlers and who could talk in human tongue, and who stole children away to learn the tricks and jokes of humans. Akaji had been haunting the lakeside for a long time she explained, since before her days as a child. And we all wept and wailed.
Then the dream shifted and I was a young boy in a classroom brightly decorated with maps of strange lands and with the costumes and bones of fantastical creatures and men. A dozen or so children were beside me and we sat at the little study desks with ink quills of old. A bright flash of golden sparks before the blackboard and a thin, tall man dressed something like a High Elf who was also a circus ring-master. He looked heroic and proud, but I knew that this was Akaji, trying to win favour in a different guise. He did some tricks with hoops and birds from sleeves and then asked us to tell him jokes. All the children clapped apart with delight and began to babble, apart from one girl near the front who frowned and then shouted his name at him. Akaji barked and shifted into a strange mahogany coloured man with blonde hair and antlers, still in a curious sense handsome but also somewhat twisted and frightening. He scowled at the girl with his long face and jumped through a door. I followed him through and found myself in a café in Cardiff, bright sunlight pouring through the windows, and knew that he fled into a different time, and that I would have to make a new life as best I could in this unknown year as the door swung shut behind me.
Not often I get dreams of such clarity. A rum do.