An account

I am using a tea cup to catch rain that contains some kind of power. There is a very important (possibly sacred) torch that I was meant to do something with (I have a vague impression of something involving the sky) but, while standing at the edge of a cliff, I have managed to drop the torch, and I am watching it fall into the waves and go out. "Oops." A group of five people in a car, on a road trip. They stop at a sushi place and one of them goes off to try to pick up a woman he saw outside. Two of the others say something, sheepish, about how they have been hitting the 'family' note a little too much on this trip, it must have freaked him out, and now he is proving to himself how unattached to them he is. They do not mind. There is a portrait, tall and very narrow, of a woman standing in front of a Buddhist grave marker. The woman who was the subject of the portrait is standing in front of the painting, looking at it. A strange reptile-like creature steps out of the painting of the grave, and I know this is her dead son. There is a memory gap - next fragment I remember clearly is in a dark space with three exits, an entrance to an afterlife, and the woman's talking with her son, who now looks more or less as he did in life - human - although there are shadows clinging to him in a shape suggesting a tail, and he is standing halfway in one of those three exits, with flames around his feet. They would been saying something about how that exit's not for her, after she tried to hug him and he stopped her. She says, "<PERSON> hurt, darling. Men die." Then she vanishes.