I had one of my standard not-as-incoherent-as-one-might-expect dreams. I can't remember everything, but one detail in particular struck me, because it was so frickin' weird.
I had been exiled from the part of this peculiar faux-renaissance kingdom where I was teaching, and had been forced into slavery. I was working in a galley, where our sole task was to turn a capstan. This capstan had many strings trailing from it, which rapidly became tattered, and which one poor sod had the responsibility of repairing.
Unfortunately, there was no way of repairing it. Double unfortunately, every day the captain would inspect the strings, and if they were not up to standard, execute the person responsible on the spot. It came about, soon enough, that I was appointed to fix them, and, of course, I couldn't. So the captain's servant immobilised me with a quick blow to the back of the neck with a machete, and I had the fairly surreal experience of collapsing to my knees (held up by the servant) while thinking "Am I really about to be executed in my own dream?" This thought was, of course, mixed in with a healthy dose of panic, because although apparently I was lucid enough to think of it as a dream, I was also rather terrified of actually dying.
I cannot stress enough how weird it is to remember being kneeling, quadriplegic, waiting for someone just outside your field of vision to execute you.
The captain cut off my head in one clean blow, everything went dark, and the dream segued seamlessly to me somehow reuniting with my students/adoptive daughters apparently (the elder had a name with three syllables starting with "s"; the younger was named something with a "p", possibly Pearl. I don't normally remember names well, so it's odd), without bringing up the whole bit where I... you know, experienced my own death.