The Robin Hobb Collection discussion

I thought it might make sense to compile Bee's dreams in one place for people to puzzle over them. [I think they are short enough that this doesn't present a problem for copyright]

I'm going to start by going through the chapter-heading dreams from both FA and FQ, since these are easy to find. If people find dreams from the main text itself, they can then add these if they can, or tell me what page to find them on and I'll add them.


Are we all sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin...

B1
This is the dream I love the best. I had it once. I've tried to make it come back, but it does not.

Two wolves are running.

That is all. They run by moonlight across an open hillside and then into an oak forest. There is little underbrush and they do not slow. They are not even hunting. They are just running, taking joy in the stretch of their muscles and the cool air flowing into their open jaws. They owe nothing to no one. They have no decisions, no duties, and no king. They have the night and the running, and it is enough for them.

I long to be that complete.

- chapter 10, Fool's Assassin

B2
This is the dream from the end of my time. I have dreamed it six different ways, but I will only write what always stays the same. There is a wolf as big as a horse. He is black and stands still as stone and stares. My father is as grey as dust, and old, so old. 'I'm just so tired,' he says in two of the dreams. In three he says 'I'm sorry, Bee.' In one of the dreams, he says nothing at all, but his silence means everything. I would like to stop having this dream. It feels so strong, as if it must happen, no matter the path I choose. Every time I wake from it, it feels as if I have taken a step closer to a cold and dangerous place.

- chapter 14, Fool's Assassin.



B3
"The dream came to me all edged in black and gold. The colors of the dream were very bright and everything in it seemed very large, so that the smallest details could not be ignored. It began in my mother's garden. The lavenders were heavy with bees and the sweet scent hung in the air. I was there. Then I saw the long carriageway that leads to the house. Four wolves were coming up the drive, trotting two by two. A white, a gray, and two red ones. But they were not wolves."

... "They were not beautiful like wolves, nor did they have the honor of wolves. They slunk with their hind haunches low and their scrawny tails down. Their ears were round and their red mouths hung open and they slavered as they came. They were wicked ... no, that's not right. They were the servants of wickedness. And they came hunting for the one who served the right."

..."After the false wolves go past, I find a butterfly wing on the ground. I pick it up, but as I do the wing becomes larger and larger and under it is a pale man, white as chalk and cold as a fish. I think he is dead, but then he opens his eyes. They have no color. He does not speak with his mouth but opens his hand to talk. He dies with rubies falling from his eyes"

- chapter 14, Fool's Assassin [N.B. this is not from the Journal, but described directly to Fitz]

B4
A dream from a winter night when I was six years old.

In a market square, a blind beggar sat in his rags. No one was giving him anything, for he was more frightening than pathetic with his cruelly scarred face and crumpled hands. He took a little puppet out of his ragged clothes; it was made of sticks and string with only an acorn for a head, but he made it dance as if it were alive. A small sullen boy watched from the crowd. Slowly he was drawn forward to watch the puppet's dance. When he was close, the beggar turned his clouded eyes on the boy. They began to clear, like silt settling to the bottom of a puddle. Suddenly, the beggar dropped his puppet.

This dream ends in blood and I am afraid to recall it. Does the boy become the puppet, with strings attached to his hands and feet, his knees and elbows and bobbing head? Or does the beggar seize the boy with hard and bony hands? Perhaps both things happn. It all ends in blood and screaming. It is the dream I hate most of all the dreams I have ever had. It is the end dream for me. Or perhaps it is the beginning dream. I know that after this event, the world as I know it is never the same.

- chapter 26, Fool's Assassin.

Fantastic idea. I will have to come back and peruse! ;-)

B5
Then, from the gleaming mists that surrounded us, there burst a wolf, all black and silver. He was covered in scars and death clung to him as water clings to a dog's coat after he has plunged through a river. My father was with him and in him and around him, and never had I realized him as he was. He bled from dozens of unhealable wounds and yet at the core of him, life burned like molten gold in a furnace.

- chapter 29, Fool's Assassin.

B6
This is the dream of the flame horses. It is a winter evening. It's not night but it's dark. An early moon is rising over the birch trees. I hear a sad song with no words, and it is like a wind in the trees. It keens and moans. Then the stables burst into flames. Horses scream. And then two horses race out. They are on fire. One is black and one is white, and the flames are orange and red, whipped by the wind of the horses' own passage. They race out into the night. The black one falls suddenly. The white one races on. Then suddenly, the moon opens its mouth and swallows the white horse.

This dream makes no sense to me and no matter how I try, I cannot draw a picture for it. So this dream is recorded only in words.

- chapter 13, Fool's Quest

B7
The dream begins with a distant bell tolling. In this tream, I am myself. I am trying to run away from something, but I can only run in a circle. I rush as fast as I can, trying to run away but always I find I am running directly back to the most dangerous place. When I tumble too close, they reach out and catch me. I do not see who they are. Only that they capture me. There is a staircase of black stone. She puts on a glove, slipping her hand into his anguish. She opens the door to the staircase, and grips me by the wrist as she drags me down. The door slams shut behind us, soundlessly.

We are in a place where the emptiness is actually made of other people. They all begin speaking to me at once, but I plug my ears and close my eyes.

- chapter 24, Fool's Quest

B8
In this dream, everything stank. I was in a terrible place. Animals walked about without their skins. They looked like hanging deer in the cooling sheds, after the carcasses had bled and when the hunters stripped the hides from the meat. I do not know how I knew that, for I had never seen hunters ride to the hunt, nor deer hung to bleed before skinning. The animals were dark red and purple and pink with glittering white muscles. The worst was around their staring eyes. They could not blink.

In the streets the men and women were wearing the animal's skins. It was so clearly wrong and yet all the folk there in Wortletree thought it the most normal thing in the world. I did not want to be there. On the water, a great seabird with broad white wings called for us to hurry. They made me go.

- chapter 31, Fool's Quest

B9
I dreamed I was a nut. I had a very hard shell and I was curled up inside it. Inside my shell, I was me and there I kept all the parts of me. I had been swept into a river, and it tried to carry me with it but I stayed in one place and refused it.

Curious to say, I abruptly fell out of the river. I fell onto green grass and it was spring all around me. For a time, I stayed tight inside my shell. Then I unfolded myself and I was all there, in one piece.

The others who had been carried by the river were not so fortunate.

This is a dream that feels truer than most. It is a thing that almost certainly will happen. I do not understand how it can happen, that I shall become a nut and be swept away in the river. But I know it is so. And the mouth of the river looked like the shape I draw below. And the river sprang out of a black stone.

- chapter 33, Fool's Quest

B10
Wide gapes the gates of yellowed bone. A tongue of plank is our path between the teeth as we walk toward the gullet. Here I will be devoured. This is a true thing, near unavoidable on any path. I must enter those jaws.

- chapter 35, Fool's Quest

B11
In this dream, I am very small and I am hiding inside a tiny case, like a nut in a shell. I am floating in a wild and raging river. I am very frightened because I fear this journey has no end. Around me there are others who are flowing with the river. It seems I could come out of my shell and melt and be part of them.

Then a dragon picks me up. He holds me tight in his paw so that even if I wanted to come out of my shell and melt, I could not. I am scared, and then he lets me feel that I am very, very safe. 'As the wolf did for my young, so I will do for his cub. I will protect you here. When you emerge, come to me. I will protect you.'

I draw here the dragon. He is a terrifying creature, but to me he is a kindly uncle.

- chapter 38, Fool's Quest

Thanks for reminding me about that.

I've found a thread on a robin hobb forum that seems to identify all the prophetic stuff from FA, so I'll copy that over to here soon. Then I intend to skim through the Bee chapters of FQ to collect any mentions she makes of specific dreams, and also anything odd she says that sounds like it might be a prophetic announcement.

I won't be re-reading the Fitz chapters, however - at least, not for a long while - so if you find anything relevant in them, let me know!

B.a
I hated the one with the snake boat

B.b
[I hated] the one where I had no mouth and could not close my eyes to avoid what I was seeing

B.c
I helped a rat to hide inside my heart

B.d
There was a fog, and a white rabbit and a black rabbit ran side by side from terrible ravening creatures. The white rabbit was pierced with a living arrow. The black rabbit screamed as it died.

[all the above introduced by talking about dreams that frighten her, although that doesn't necessarily apply to all of them]

B.e
Dream of the flying buck

B.f
the one about the tapestry with the tall ancient kings with golden eyes

B.g
It took six pages for me to write my Dream about the fish-white boy in the boat with no oars and how he sold himself as a slave.

B.h
...a Dream I'd had of my father cutting open his chest and taking out his heart and pressing it into a stone until there was no blood left in it.

- all from chapter 14, Fool's Assassin

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B.i
a dream about a young bull (in which the words of B.II (q.v.) appear)

- from chapter 25, Fool's Assassin

B.I
When the bee to the earth does fall, the butterfly comes back to change all.
- chapter 10, Fool's Assassin

Context: Bee's mother has just collapsed and died. I also think it's important to mention this line from Molly, one of the last things she says before she dies:
Look at the fat bee on this blossom! I've cut the stem and still he won't get off. Well he can just ride along for a while.

Further evidence of importance: Bee describes this riddle as the poem from a dream of hers. And she doesn't want to say it, but feels compelled to because "the truth was on me and I had to speak it".

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B.II
Horns not grown, he swings his head in warning and still all take heed
- chapter 25, Fool's Assassin

Context: Per and Lant have had a stare-down (Per wins) after Per beats up Taffy on behalf of Bee.

Evidence as to status: unclear. Bee identifies it as words from a dream, and she says it out loud. She doesn't say she has to say it, though, she doesn't say it to anybody, and she doesn't identify the dream or the words as being about Per (or Lant, for that matter).

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B.III
Cold comes from the heart, on waves of red blood
- chapter 26, Fool's Assassin

Context: Bee sees the Fool, and shivers. Fitz asks whether she's cold. She realises they are standin still now and he has already asked her twice, but she doesn't know the answer. She looks for words, and that's what she says. Then she has some kind of weird episode: she feel disconnected from everybody, and as though "everything had stepped back at me". Riddle stares at her "but I was not where he was looking". The world appears to stop. Shortly after, the dog-killing man creates an incident. Oh, and after seeing the Fool, Bee looks at her fingers and thinks they are 'white. As white as the beggar's eyes. Had he looked at them and made them white?'

Status: unlike the former two, this time Bee doesn't say anything about these being words from a dream, and unlike the other two she's just answering a question (weirdly), rather than feeling compelled to speak without provocation as in the other cases. However, the slow-time-big-distance-out-of-body thing, and the timing (just seeing Fool) certainly suggests something important is going on.

Wastrel - I'll leave you to re-organize this and then I'll delete this post. Am currently reading chp 31, FQ: Fitz reading Bee's journal

"Here again I found the butterfly man dream. And a reference to the Wolf of the West and how he would come from the Mountains to save all. I turned a page. Here was a dream of a well brimming with silver. Another of a city where the ruler sat on a giant Skull Throne. At the bottom of each page she had carefully judged how likely each dream was to be a true dream and likely to happen. The one of the butterfly man had been extremely likely. The dream of the beggar I had to recognize." And "I came to her dream of a city and of standing stones with cleanly carved runes on them"