Dream: Death's Apprentice

There’s a lot of stuff in this dream that I can’t remember. It’s one of the long ones, where I wake up feeling like I’ve had a serious workout, but I drifted back to sleep and forgot a bunch of the plot.

I am Death’s Apprentice. I don’t know why, and I don’t feel like it was something I really volunteered for. Death is a slim, fit-looking man with short blond hair. It seems like he’s not in charge of natural deaths and the like, but has to assassinate certain key individuals to conform to some kind of plan. Everything has to be done in a very precise manner, and nobody is allowed to realize that it’s anything planned or deliberate.

Being Death’s Apprentice, I have certain powers. I am able to become invisible, but when I do so, everything around me becomes very blurry, so I can only do it when I don’t need to maneuver in small spaces or perform precise tasks. I can move through walls and solid objects, but it’s difficult and a little draining. I can also fly.

I remember having a small ring on my little finger, and holding it up against a different ring that a friend of mine has; it could be M. W. from college. It seems that a bunch of our friends are all understudying for different Immortal characters.

There’s a party, and one elderly woman at it needs to be killed. I arrange to slip a poisoned dish into a buffet line for *just* long enough for her to take a serving, and then yank it back from beneath; I remember looking up at the bottom of the serving area. Later, I hear that a different person at the party, a young woman, has taken ill; I realize that she must have somehow gotten the food intended for the older woman. I have an image of her sitting against the wall, breathing heavily, her face red and sweaty. I have to arrange for some snack to be handed out to everyone, with a special package containing the antidote going only to the young woman. Death shows up, and tells me that I was cutting it close, and need to be careful to avoid mis-steps.

Then, something has gone wrong, and we have to escape to another place. I remember Death setting up a machine in a small room; it reminds me of the tiny office at the Industrial Arts lab in middle school. There is a small guage with a purple line marked on it; he fiddles with some piece of machinery that adjusts a purple sine wave, and I tell him how to adjust it to make it match the marks on the machine. Once it is set, he pushes some button, which starts shooting pellets, like the shape of Chicklets gum, but the size of sandwich bread, into a closet. It is some kind of insulation to make our transfer safer. Then, we are in a different place altogether – it’s like a huge mall. Everything is in black and white, and I know that if I can find Death, he’d be in color because he’s one of the Immortals. I keep going around asking people to help me find him. I see one woman in dark monochrome reds and black, and it almost seems like she’ll be able to help, but she’s on some other mission. I walk into a place like a bar, and sit down and talk to someone there.