lucid

I'd led my friends into an abandoned house to hide from the group of rebels. They've found us now, five rebels armed to the teeth against six or seven unarmed civilians.

Well.

And me.

"What's this?" The leader sneers. "Snivelling collaborators, hiding with the trash?" He smiles, and it's an awful little thing. "Get up and fight us!"

"You still outnumber us, after all," says one of the rebel women, a smile in her voice.

That won't do.

The group of civilians are removed with a mental gesture, hustled through the aether. It takes me a moment to think of a place to set them down, where there won't already be a crowd. I settle on the dirt pile next to the Ixburg house.

I blink, coming back to the now-emptier abandoned house. The silence has been drawn like a bow string, the rebels staring at me.

"Seems fairer now," I explain.

The leader swears.

"You don't understand," he says, anger colouring his voice. "When our enemies came in and overthrew the last regime, they turned my country into HELL. They needed diamonds to fulfil the promises they made to their allies; they worked the citizenry like dogs. This is our chance to set things right."

"Of course," I say mildly. "By marching into people's homes and murdering families in cold blood. Setting things right. Definitely not starting on the same track your enemies did."

Face red, the man shouts a war cry and charges at me.

"So then Andraste was standing there looking like a normal human being, and Divine Victoria had to figure out how to explain to everyone who she was. And that was important, because Andraste was assembling a team to save the world."

"Of course, why else would God come back as a snarky, gorgeous redhead?"

(Explaining my dreams to someone IWL.)

Andraste
Divine Victoria

My husband and I are visiting the UK. It's incredibly difficult to find a parking spot.

We're wandering through a series of buildings that are all interconnected, and I'm opening new doors, creating new spaces that sometimes lead back to the previous ones. We run into my grandmother.

There's a contest that we somehow become involved in, and there are little children hurling chunks of ice. I talk to their parents disapprovingly, and somehow win the contest, described as the "yelling" person.

We're fugitives now, trying to escape the UK. My attempt to get us free passage out of the country fails when I can't get the three images on my ticket to line up (like a slot machine), despite exerting dream control. There are dogs coming after me, and I send bolts of ice magic at them, freezing them in place, because they can run faster than I can.

I find myself in an empty field, looking up into the night sky. I start walking, and realize that there's a lunar eclipse in the sky. I'm flying towards it now.

I'm looking at a brick building, and decide to run up the side, Prototype-style. I'm having trouble with it, though. Instead, I run as far up it as I can and grab on, allowing the mechanism on the side of the building to buoy me up.

I look at the moon, which is a cube in the sky, and try to fly again. I can't.

A cabin in the country, where a man is offering lessons on writing a novel.

My husband and I are running through a parking lot, but the cars and semis keep trying to collapse on top of us. We're trying to get back to our parking spot.

I remember that a previous LD involved me having to report in to a jail (um, juvenile detention facility) for a day, and I decide that sounds like an interesting dream plot. I warp the road that I'm driving down until it leads to a fictional location.

This is a bad part of town, so I'm trying to chain down the bike that I'm now riding so that both the wheels are locked and it's attached to a concrete structure. I head inside and explain some of my health issues to the receptionist, and then I'm stuck in the waiting area with a book (a new fantasy series by J. K. Rowling!)

I have to go back outside, though, because I'm not sure that I actually finished bolting my bike down. Sure enough, when I go outside, it's gone. Now there's a gang of some kind attacking... not the facility itself, but the people around it. I think it's a raid to steal all the bicycles.

One of the gang members comes after me, and I pounce on him. "And what are you after, huh?" I ask, looking deep into his eyes. I take him down.

The other gang members back down after I defeat their leader. I let them limp away, and go back into the building.

I chat with Sadie, a friend from real life, and then I'm called into an office that belongs to the head of the facility. The warden walks into the room, and she throws down a series of print-outs that explain why the conversation that I was having with Sadie indicates that I'm a spy.

(I'm secretly a SHIELD agent. I wonder if Sadie forgot to add up her character stats correctly again... that would explain the flubbed deception check.)

I play innocent. And then I realize that somehow, I'm going to become the warden.

So now I'm the warden, destroying my own facility because it reeks of pure evil. It's an easy job once the building is evacuated: the warden actually murdered the people who built the facility, so their spirits are perfectly willing to unmake the place during their escape. I destroy the stained glass wards leading to the outside world, and some spirits are quick to flee.

Others will want their vengeance. I sit down, cross-legged, and calmly wait for them to find me.

I'm at some sort of retreat, and I'm on a break outdoors, spending some time by myself. A van with a logo painted on the side stops at the side of the road, and I walk up to ask what's wrong. The driver says that he's making a delivery to the local Co-op, but he can't find it. I look over the hill in a couple of directions, and, as it's a dream, the Co-op appears on the horizon. I point it out to him and he moves on.

In a hall made of stone from the floor to the ceiling, Dumbledore gives instructions about the tournament. At the beginning of each round, we pick an element, and then we have to use that element in a free-for-all to tag the other players. If you're tagged, you're out of the round.

I start the first round with a more difficult element that I'm used to (air, I think). I'm mostly focusing on complicated defensive uses of the power, and I'm out of the round fairly quickly. Irritated, I prepare for the second round, bringing up a wall of flame.

I'm visiting the IT department, and I realize that they actually have a desk for me there. I tell them that I've had a desk upstairs for some time, and that I'm actually leaving the company in a week (in 2013), so they can probably give the desk to someone else. The desk has years-old mail that's been waiting for me, so I start going through it.

There's a certain type of fight that exists in fiction just to show off how overpowered the major players of a setting are, compared to the main character. This is one of those fights: Maleficent versus Dumbledore. Only... Dumbledore hasn't shown up, and I'm the only one standing in her way. I drop my hands to the side, palms up, and burn with power, until suddenly I'm Maleficent as well. (I have a moment where I go through: wand, wandless, crook staff, staff with bobble on the end—perfect.) I bang the staff into the concrete, sending up a shockwave at my opponent, and twirl the staff around into a ready pose, lime-green light streaming from the tip. Bring it.

My brother talks me into following him to a pool, but it turns out that once you've entered the pool area, you can never leave. I walk calmly over to one of the glass windows, face it squarely, and punch it. A crack appears in the safety glass. I punch it again, and again, until we're running over the roof of a park canteen/cafeteria to get away.

I realize that I forgot to post in the class discussion forums this week to get my participation mark (even though the class is over...)

I've left my glasses somewhere, but I know that searching for them the traditional way in a dream is a lost cause. "Accio, glasses," I say, and they fly into my hand from wherever they were hiding.

From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favour fire...

Infiltrating a sorority/fraternity and it's terrible. And my female SHIELD agent is covering for the fact that Captain America is terrible at undercover work.

Now I'm part of a group of three people who are living semi-harmoniously in an older part of town. We have some interesting projects on the go, like improving playgrounds and adding giant transparent red walls to sidewalks so that people have to zigzag through.

I'm looking through a catalogue that has sheaths for ritual daggers that are being advertised pinned to the pages. There are daggers for earth, air, fire and water, and unsurprisingly I'm interested in the fire one.

And then I remember that I already have a ritual dagger. I turn it over in my hand. The blade is pure silver in the dream, unlike the real one.

I'm walking down a road, trying to find my way back to the original path.I know that if it takes too long to get back, I'll lose the thread of the dream, so I hold out a hand to the end of the street and soar towards it.

The street I want to take is the second from the end, but I can't find it, because the second path is now an alley that goes into someone's backyard. I follow the path and find a raspberry bush, and I look around for a basket. I decide that there will be one on the deck when I go to find it, but there's only a box that holds some kindling. I empty out the kindling onto the pile of smaller pieces of wood.

I look around and see an old, dying tree, and all I can notice is that the branches are so dead that they'd make great kindling for the cabin owner's fire.

There are workmen in the backyard. Apparently there are signs saying that they'd be in the area.

I'm Dean Winchester now. Sam and I know that when you get caught somewhere, you pretend that you belong there, so we approach the workmen and strike up a conversation.

They're vampires, as it turns out.

There's a fight.

I drive a stake into one man's chest—

wait, that's zombies in this universe

—and my silver dagger appears in my hand. I swing it around and slice into the vampire's neck as I throw my weight forward. The vampire stumbles, still off-balance from the stake, and I'm behind him, slicing into his throat and grabbing at his hair so that I can fully behead him.

(There's an argument as to whether this works according to the rules of the game. I win.)

There are bodies all over the back yard, now. We're going to have to burn them.

I grab wood from the shed out back and set to covering our dead vamps with lumber and kindling. I'm lighting the shed itself on fire when I hear a shout.

The man who appears was a friend of John Winchester's, and he's angry that his property is going up in flames.

I'm trying to choke him out without killing him. He struggles, and it's not working, but then he changes tactics and tries to grab at my ears and pull.

I decide that it's a trope of the genre that you can hit someone over the head and knock them out without being at risk of killing them, so one of us hits him over the head with the butt of a rifle.

Fire burns, and the old tree from earlier provides us with as much kindling as we need. I go over to the cabin, and realize that there's meat drying in the racks along the outside wall. My stomach churns as I realize that it's cursed all to hell—I don't want to think about what kind of meat has gone into the ground meat patties that are sitting on the rack, but there's a telltale haze of angry spirits hanging around the meat. Somehow, at least one of them is an ancient, powerful indigenous spirit, how the fucking hell...

I set it all on fire.

A blonde, average-sized woman with curly hair enters the yard, looking curious. "What's going on?" she asks, looking genuinely curious.

Because all we need is another civilian to knock out and haul away before they die of smoke inhalation.

"Ma'am," I start—

She looks past me. "You know, certain spirits are actually freed when you burn them."

Witch, I think. Of the Supernatural-style variety. I run forward, brandishing my knife, and she laughs as I plunge it into her chest. Light explodes from the place where the knife stabbed into her, and she soars up into the sky, a being of pure white light and destruction.

I turn around to deal with the spirit, and I think I'm calling up an explosion of—hellfire, soulfire?—and it's enveloped completely.

My long black cloak trails out behind me as I crash into the other witch, tearing into her. I snarl as I grab part of her cloak—pull it away with part of her essence as a ripping, tearing noise fills the air—and shoot past her. There are three of us, beings of darkness and the night, tearing through the sky and tearing into the thing of light that wants only to destroy.

Darkness can be a force for good in the world just as light can, and both can snuff out life as well as they can extend it. All we need—I think, flying at the other witch—is for some idiot to think that the good guy is being outnumbered here just because they're burning with Light.

There are a series of beautiful houses and construction sites. My dad is doing work on his own house.

I'm a child walking with Wednesday and Pugsley Addams. I forgot my sunglasses, so hold up my hands and say "Accio, glasses."

"That should only work if you say 'sunglasses,'" points out Wednesday.

"I knew what I meant," I shrug.

The cast of the Addams Family now fused with the whole crew of lovingly dysfunctional people who raised me. It's weird.

Now it's the finale of this version of the series, and there's a wooden automaton that accepts that it's "his time." He sits in the mud bath and waits to fall apart.

(Except that this was all part of his plan, and the reason that he has bad eyesight is because his real eyes are hanging from the earrings of the trickster god who has been working "with" the bad guys. He has one last chance to take the band of bloodthirsty pirates out before he moves on to the next world...)

Wednesday and I are adults now, and we're talking about getting married.

I'm in my teenage home. I realize that I'm dreaming, and spend some time looking at how weird some of the angles and perspective are in this dream.

I'm a vampire that's hunting vampires.

Sam & Dean Winchester are hunting me.

The woman I killed was a vampire preying on the local townspeople, but you can always trust Hunters to not understand nuance.

Later, I'm using telekinesis on small objects around my grandmother's living room. I'm finding that I can easily lift objects that are within about four feet of me, but to move anything further away, I have to move closer. I find this frustrating, because I know I'm dreaming, and this is all about what I believe I can do.

It's a rubber band bracelet thingy, for gods' sake! This shouldn't be that hard!

The light rail car speeds across the desert, its tracks raised high into the air. An attack helicopter closes on us, and the tension of the people within the car is palpable.

The train is carrying civilians, and we don't have any way to fight back.

The wind whips at me as I stand at the open door, the grounday speeding past far below. What's the worst that could happen? I think, This is only a dream.

I jump.

I reach out and grab onto the landing skids of the helicopter, grinning wildly.

(Later, I'm Harry Potter taking on an army of conventional weaponry.)

I'm looking for a place to stay for the next few weeks while I take a course in a new city. I know that a certain motel/hostel/dorm has spots available for students, but they also fill up fast. So I head over there as soon as I'm in town.

Luckily, there is a place available. Unluckily, it's haunted by the victim of a mean-spirited (and presumably lethal) prank by members of a fraternity or something. We don't actually have those here, but it was a group of guys and they were terrible people.

So now the ghost violently murders people who stay in the dorms.

There's a woman screaming.

I'm running towards her as she's being dragged into a fluffy duvet or pile of pillows. I really should emphasize that they were unabashedly evil pillows, with the electrifying reek of corrupted darkness emanating from them. I grab the woman by the elbows, and she tells me No, it will get you, too!

I can't hold her, and my arm ends up dragged into the rift. Excruciating, electric pain arcs up my right arm (the kind of pain that you only feel in dreaming, where it overwhelms everything and it hurts but doesn't feel like pain in waking life). I try to pull my arm away, but there's resistance, sucking me into the rift.

I rip my arm away—

But the bleeding, rotten darkness is still everywhere and there's nowhere to go—

I wake up. I reality check, tapping my fingers against the sheets. One-two-three-four-five. Genuinely awake. Damn ghost thinks it's gonna get the better of me, huh?

I slip back into dreaming. I'm back in the dorm room, and it's quiet. Shadows whisper along the ceiling and in the dark corners of the room. I hold out a hand, and the shadows still.

The ripping, tearing thing leaps into me, but I'm ready this time. I channel the pain, force the thing out of my body until it faces me, forced to its knees on the floor.

Let's solve your problem. My terms.

"You thought this place was haunted," I tell the brown-haired child. "As it turns out, you're not the only one with powers."

I raise a hand and Matilda floats up off the floor, her eyes alight with excitement. I cut the enchantment, and she lands on her feet.

"So you're my teacher?"

I nod.

My husband and I are hiking around a lake. The sky is blue blue blue and the colours are crisp and vibrant.

In the dream, this place is actually Medicine Hat with mountains (but in reality it's more like Kelowna.) I'm looking at the glaciers up in the mountains as they melt and shift and change, feeling the warm sun and the cool breeze on my skin.

We need to get back to the town, quickly, but we're partway across the lake. I'm trying to use my phone and Google Maps to figure out the fastest route back to the town. We may need to hitch a ride on a boat.

We're back in the town, and a friend, G, is helping us load supplies into a white Beetle. He's supposed to drive it a little ways, but instead he drives off with it.

That would only happen in a dream, right? Well, at least that makes dealing with this easy.

I lift off the ground and fly after the Beetle, wondering if car speed counts as flying at superspeed. I'm trying to use telekinesis to latch onto the car, but I end up peeling off the back bumper instead.

I'm in an old, rickety wooden house with a group of friends. Each room contains a challenge, and when that challenge has been defeated, I can spawn a new room and continue moving upwards through the never-ending attic.

The trick is that it's always hard to control groups of people. In one room, simulacra of our personal bags, backpacks and purses appear, and we all grab them by habit, wondering why they're somewhere other than where we left them (the entrance of the house.) Unfortunately, the challenge in this room is to "not steal things," and the simulacra technically aren't ours.

I figure this out, and tell everyone to put the things back and line up to ascend to the next room. Everyone moves into the area that will allow the next room to spawn—but one person didn't listen.

I'm outside, and I'm mad at husband for GM'ing a game that didn't really allow our characters a possibility of surviving. And then I realize that the scenario is kind of silly, and I'm dreaming.

There's an algae-infested lake/creek behind the old house, but I jump in regardless, willing the water to clear and breathing in deep. I swim up the creek, underwater, marvelling at the beauty of the rocks at the bed of the creek, bright green aventurine and glowing orange citrine, and I reach down to bring some with me. And I remember that I'm dreaming, and I leave the rocks be.

I reach another house up the creek, and I wander its rooms. I feel static, and I turn around with a smile, asking a question. A woman has appeared behind me, and she asks me about the old house. I tell her about it, but I know that she had something to do with the whole thing.

Prev night: stole a combine with my mom and tried to harvest someone else’s field? Attempted to escape on motorbikes and was cornered in a shop/garage of some kind.

---

My in-laws come to pick up me and my brother at my old apartment building to drive us to school. It’s a five-minute walk, but it’s nice of them to offer. When we get to the school, traffic is being redirected away from the parking lot out into the county. We drive a few minutes before getting to another school where their kids go, and we have to… walk back into town? Maybe there’s a shuttle?

---

I’m at my old apartment building talking to S. She’s apparently using the laundry at this building because it’s a nicer laundry facility than any other place in the city. I’m trying to work the laundry machine, but I’m having trouble sorting out delicates from the other stuff, especially because as I’m sorting them, the basket/machine is filling with water, soaking the clothes. I start finding monopoly money that looks really similar to real money, and I joke with S that it’s just like that fake million dollar bill. Apparently she’s brought a monopoly set so that people can play it while they’re waiting for their laundry.

---

I wake up lying in the street. I’m obviously not in the city I thought I was in. I hear fabric flapping, and I see that I’m in a valley of some kind. Near the top of a nearby mountain, there are a series of flags flapping in the breeze. I remember that I want to attempt to teleport, but I don’t remember where I want to teleport to, so I decide to just go with a previous dream, because it’s fresh in my memory. I aim for the apartment building.

Things are hazy, but I close my eyes and picture it. I open my eyes a couple of times and have wound up in the wrong place, but I try again until I reach the apartment building. Now that I know where I am, I continue with my road trip.

We finish our coffee and the blonde conference-goer shakes my hand with a smile. I hand her my card and grin back.

The waiter walks up as the woman leaves. He leans over the table to pick up empty plates, his long hair swinging a bit as he moves, and I lean back, holding my coffee.

"These new age yoga nitwits are easy pickings," I tell him conversationally. "They'll buy anything if they think it will help them along a spiritual path."

The two of us chat for a bit, and I give the waiter my card and head out.

Perspective switch

I'm the blonde "yoga nitwit" from before. I'm looking into a mirror, changing my hair and appearance to match my character. My husband comes into the hotel room and smiles at me.

"You got him?"

"He's hooked."

Someone comes and knocks at the window of the fire escape, and my husband dives for cover so that we're not seen together.

The manager of the hotel is explaining to us that they ran out of space, so there's going to be a whole bunch of kids sharing our suite.

"That's unacceptable," I tell him or her. Their gender presentation keeps shifting.

They shrug. "You still have the bedroom. It's just the living area and the bathroom that you have to share."

I look at the line that's formed in front of the bathroom and narrow my eyes, but I can practically see the timer for our op ticking down before my eyes.

"Get out," I tell them. "I'll deal with this later."

We probably have to scrub the op.

I'm on another part of the same floor when all hell breaks loose. I'm pinned by a couple of girls from high school and a man is dumping cages full of dangerous things on me, which I'm deflecting. I break loose, wearing the guise of a brown-haired Samael.

"Get back, fiend!" says a booming voice, and Thor is swinging Mjolnir past my head. I dodge across the room, and the hammer comes flying at my stomach.

Oof. Confirming that sacred objects can still knock the wind out of you. Good thing I'm invulnerable, or this probably would have torn straight through my chest cavity. I still go flying, knocking down a wall behind me. Splinters of wood go flying everywhere, and I pick up the hammer.

Just as an enemy agent pops out with an AK-47. I'm swinging Mjolnir by its strap to ricochet the bullets back at my enemies, and then I'm letting the hammer fly—

And I throw myself through the door into the hotel room.

"Elhaz," I command, waving a hand at the wall and weaving protection into the doors and windows. Overwhelming force, meet immutable object. That should buy me a moment's peace.

I wave my hand in a pattern, more jerky than it needs to be, and glance up from the floor at Sandman's Lucifer, who's standing on this side of the door and looking at me with a nonchalant expression.

"You were supposed to be covering my back," I accuse.

I bicker with my counterpart. The two of us are the same person in different universes, or maybe opposite sides of the same coin.

---

I'm walking on the side of a highway in the mountains. A girl has stopped me to ask about backpacking, and I say that I'm just walking from inside the town to the campsite on the mountain.

"Really? I've never been there," she says.

"You should; it's the best climbing spot in the area."

My name is Honor Harrington, and I'm biking down a path in a valley. In the centre of the valley is a school, and I hop off my bike to go investigate.

I sneak in through an unalarmed pair of double doors, and look around the main floor.

The intercom is blaring something. My communications device is picking up another frequency.

Honor Harrington is there? says an alarmed voice. We can't let her get to the balcony!

The balcony. Interesting. I'd better get up there, then.

I still haven't been spotted; they just know I'm in the area. I pick the doors that I walk through and the shadows that I creep through carefully, and make it to the room by the balcony. There's a bench there, and I poke at it to find a secret compartment filled with papers; glossy, like a magazine. I feel a stab of betrayal; J at the church put them there.

I need to unravel what's going on here. But first, I need to make my escape.

---

I drive my car into the parking lot at the school and step out. It's a work night for a local club, where we all sit and chat and work on projects. I used to volunteer with them, but it's been a while since I've gone.

I'm inside, working on my project, but my hackles rise as a woman walks behind me. Apparently while I've been gone, one of the only really bad bosses that I've had has risen through the ranks of the organization. I try to ignore her, but leave soon after.