Lucid Time!

I am going around in a large city built by the side of a bending river interviewing at various locations for jobs. The first place I go to interview at is a very large skyscraper, upwards of a hundred stories tall. The building is very interesting in that the original shape of the building was a sort of cone that got gradually steeper as it went up. But apparently after the building was built a new company bought it and built a frame around it in the shape of a hexagon. So there was like an outer tower and an inner tower when you went inside and the two were connected by interior catwalks and the lobby of the tower ran all the way up the inner wall to the hundredth floor.

I go to the interview and it seems like this company would like to hire me, but I'm not entirely sure I want to be hired by this company. Simply by observing the social interactions I can tell that this company has some problems with income distribution and that at this company the CEO and higher workers get paid a lot while the people on the bottom who are actually doing most of the work are getting paid peanuts. I don't think the company is deserving of my skills but want to think things over. I decide to explore another job opportunity.

In the industrial sector of the city is a woman who owns an abandoned warehouse and some of the surrounding area. I meet with her and begin talking about her business. What her business does is not entirely clear, but it seems to be a cross of a design and sculpture firm and a recycling and scrapping business. She has a friend who works in a scrapyard and breaks down automobiles and other scrap into usable materials, as well as another friend. (A gigantic cyborg rat) who takes apart computers and electronics, and remakes some of the components into art projects, while selling some valuable things like gold.

I have a sort of informal interview with her, telling her that I will return with a resume and such at a later time but just want to get a grasp on what her company exactly does. She avoids the question and instead brings me hot chocolate. "I'd love to work here, and she seems to really want to win me over, but I doubt she can afford to pay me well, if at all." Our interview is interrupted by an official looking person from the city coming in and saying that the business defaulted on a loan and will be closed down in a week if they cant make up the money.

I very vaguely remember the woman embarking on a new conceptual art project. Her cousin is Benedict Cumberbatch and she wants him to pose naked in a public place with a picture of Lapis Lazuli from Steven Universe over his crotch. But she wants me to draw the picture that will be used, if I can, she will hire me and her business will get back on its feet so she can pay me.

We are testing the piece in a vacant office. I draw several pictures in different styles and mediums until I get one that the woman seems to think will work. The last thing I remember was we were playing Fallout 4 and talking about the game.

-+-

I was with my dad in the front of my house. It was a clear summer day in the late afternoon. I looked up in the sky and saw that the moon had rings like Saturn. I recognized the dream sign and became lucid. I thought about how my dream dad usually doesn't like it when I get lucid so I decided to try and educate him about lucid dreaming.

"Hey, do you notice anything different about the moon?"

"No, the moon has always been like that, ever since the [vauge astronomical event] changed the solar system."

"No, the moon has never been like that." (More planets began to emerge from behind the moon, and the ringed moon begins to get larger.) "Because this is a dream; my dream. Everything I say and do is a product of my mind, even you."

He goes on to say that he doesn't believe me and insists that this is real.

"Look, anything is possible. In a dream you can go anywhere, and do anything. You see that planet up there? If I want to, I can fly to that planet." (Gesturing to one of the small planets that had emerged from behind the saturn planet.)

"You can do that in No Man's Sky."

"Shut up."

I decide to just leave him and show myself. I leap off expecting to fly there, but I begin to float back down and land on the roof of my house. I leap off again and try to engage my fire jets. I look over my shoulder and see them blowing out clouds of smoke and sparks. (I think they were even making sounds like a gasoline engine that wouldn't start.)

"You can't do it, see?" He yells.

"You're not in control of what I can and cannot do." I turn and focus on my destination. My fire jets properly activate with a loud crack and I shoot off out of the atmosphere and into space. The ringed moon is becoming a gas planet. As I got closer I tried to focus on the color. I wanted to see if I could control its color and make it be green, as there were no green gas planets in the solar system and wanted to see what my mind's interpretation of a green gas giant would be like. It turned into a green planet with some bluish bands and storms, and I thought "Close enough" without realizing that I was heading right at it. I tried to pull 'up' and fly over the planet's pole. I ended up glancing through the upper atmosphere for but a second flying through storms of swirling turquoise clouds before emerging on the other side and coming to a stop.

I looked around at the moon system of the gas planet. It had five major moons. I didn't take the time to look at all of them in detail; my eyes went straight to an earthlike moon (I think it was in the third or fourth orbit out) and flew straight at it. I was trying to focus on having spaceflight be steadier and not rocket me towards destinations so fast, but of course focusing on the negative schema only caused me to rocket forward once more, giving me only a second to slow down as I fell through the clouds and collide with the ocean of the planet.

After my crash I lost a great deal of lucidity and became semi lucid and stopped paying as much attention to the dream's plot. Somebody on the planet had found me and brought me to the planet's leader. The planet was populated by small, pale skinned, dwarf-like humans and their king/leader gave me a dinner of fried fish and potato planks, then sent me on a quest.

Marcus was there and he told me we needed a mode of transportation for the quest. He took me to a train yard and started pressing buttons on these steam engines and mechanical faces came out of the front of the boilers making them look like Thomas the tank engine characters. He got a silver steam engine and started driving it through these security gates while I held out a lance on the front of the train to break through them. The silver steam engine turned into a robotic velociraptor and started going the wrong way so we had to get off.

...

The dream somehow gave way to us venturing through a dangerous mountain pass. The area we were in looked like one of those east-asian landscape paintings with the very exaggerated mountains. It was during a clear and starry night, but the light from the massive gas planet in the sky made it as bright as twilight. I was venturing with Marcus, a huge stone golem monster, and one of the Thomas the Tank engine engines. (Okay... once again... very interesting choice of characters.) I wonder what it is with dreams making trios of utterly random characters.

Regardless navigating these mountains was difficult. There was a floating cobblestone path but some of the stones would give way and fall to the ground if you put too much weight on them and I was trying to help the rock monster get across. At one point he fell and I grabbed him with one arm, and I wondered how I was strong enough to hold him up.

We managed to get to the next mountain where we encountered another animated stone figure, this one even larger. It attacked us, punching Marcus with the force to break the stone temple floor below us, then ran out of power and returned to being a static statue. I tried to pull Marcus away but his arm came off. When I looked at where it had been, I just saw very high tech looking mechanical parts and somehow knew that it was some kind of automated drone and the real Marcus was somewhere else.

The sky turned red and all the stars and planets disappeared along with the other dream characters. The sky was full of thousands of jet black shooting stars. A giant six-armed woman appeared and claimed to be the hindu goddess Kali. She showed me a purple blanket with gold embroidery of leaves and flowers going around the outside. It was made of some kind of indestructible silk. She then wrapped it around my head and face, leaving only my eyes exposed, tied it so it would stay on, then walked into the haze and disappeared.

I was now back in my house, standing at the top of the stairs. I undid the knot in the blanket and examined it. I thought I had woken up and was just hallucinating that the purple blanket still existed. I lost the dream for real into another short false awakening that I don't recall.