Hyu's Adventures

This one is kind of old and happened right after my last entry.
I haven't really found the time to write it down until now.
My dreams are also getting kind of long, which is amazing, but also kind of a pain to write down.


The time is ticking.
I have no choice but to diffuse the bomb, there is no way we'll get out of the explosion radius in time.
I quickly grab an electric screwdriver from my back pocket and start removing the digital clock mounted on top of the bomb.
There is less than one minute left on the timer.

"Hurry up!"
"Shut it!"

Removing the clock reveals a highly complex maze of cabling.
Screw this!
I remove the electronics as well, in the hopes of finding a simpler set of cabling leading to the warhead.
Fortunately I am right. The whole electronics are wired to the warhead by only two thick cables.
I can do this!
But my short burst of confidence is quickly shattered by a rather troublesome discovery.
The warhead is nuclear.
How the fuck did this happen? How did anyone manage to acquire a nuclear fucking bomb?

A quick look at the dismantled clock reveals that I have 7 seconds left.
I decide to cut one of the cables at random.

"I know this setup! Cut the red one!"

I move my knife to the red cable, but it shifts colors with the other yellow one.
Whenever I switch, the cable colors switch as well. It's impossible to cut the red one. WTF!

Seeing the last few seconds run out, I notice that I'm not really scared to die.
I wonder why that is.
Oh...

Yeah...
I start rubbing my hands but am interrupted by the bomb hitting zero and audibly powering up.
Well... this is not good. I might wake up because of that.
I think about quickly portaling the bomb away before it goes off, but then I notice that it is plugged into the wall with an extension cord.
Really?
I unplug it and the warhead turns off.
Lol.

I resume rubbing my hands but I am yet again interrupted, this time by the DC that was with me.
I unsummon him because I have no time to deal with DC's right now.
I need to stabilize the dream and get my second lesson in time dilation...

... I'm in Haven with Yuya and Liv.
I have trouble stabilizing the dream but eventually manage to get there.
Once stable I immediately get back to doing the awareness technique from the previous dream, sort of to show off in case Yuya tests me.
But she doesn't. There is simply no need, she is fully aware of my thoughts and how aware I am right now.
Liv is curious about what we are doing and I have a difficult time explaining it to her.
She is unaware of the difficulty of remaining in a dream or the concept of stability.

We walk along a path that I remember. I've been here before but I cannot quite remember what I was doing.
Then I see the water pools, yep, this is the fighting practice area.
Yuya starts walking onto one of the pools and I follow her.
Walking on water is second nature to me nowadays, but thinking back, it's the first thing that Yuya taught me when I met her again.

I suddenly get goosebumps and instinctively power up and take a defensive stance.
Huh? It was Yuya.I felt the shock of her suddenly powering up.

"Nice reaction!"
"Cheers. What are we doing?"

I barely manage to block her attack as she blinks towards me.
Without my recent training she would have knocked me unconscious with this.
I'm kind of in the mood to fight her now, I wonder how I compare to her nowadays.
I smile.

"Awareness Hyu."
"What? Oh, you've got to be kidding me! During a fight???"
"Why? Are you scared that I'll slap you across the face?"
"Hahaha, alright, let's do this!"

I awaken the dragon and charge towards her.
She easily blocks all of my attacks. No surprise there though.
So far so good, I manage to remain fully aware of my surroundings.
The fight is pretty tame, I don't get myself into uncomfortable positions, have I gotten closer to the skill level of Yuya?

She summons her pressurized spheres.
Well shit. I forgot about those.
The spheres are horribly dangerous and difficult to fight against.
She basically creates 5 water spheres about the size of a basket balls.
Then she compresses them down to the size of a grain of sand.
I'm not even sure how it's possible to compress a liquid at all.

The pressure of these spheres is immense. They can be used both defensively and offensively.
She moves them around telepathically at extreme speeds and can make them burst whenever she wants,
releasing the contained water at extreme pressures, cutting through anything in their way.

You really can't let them touch you unless you don't mind loosing a limb.
Fighting against them requires a lot of blinking, which causes stability problems due to the distorted vision.

It would be rather useful to have my katana right now, but I'm not using it in a practice battle with Yuya, it's too dangerous.
I don't use the dragon eyes either, because the thought on using them on a friend scares the shit out of me.
In return she doesn't use her water extraction technique, which I wouldn't know how to fight against.
I only saw her use it once in a fight.
Within a split second she extracted the entire blood from her enemy and he died on the spot.
It's a really scary technique.

What am I doing?
I'm thinking too much. I should look for openings instead and strike whenever I see one.
But Yuya is way too skilled to provide such an opening, I'll have to force one.
I create and launch spheres of compressed energy at her. Those are rather explosive and fairly dangerous.
I got the idea from her water spheres. Attacks of compressed energy have their advantages.
They are much more efficient against single targets.
The technique is also cheap energy wise, so I can cast it a lot, making it an ideal tool to get someone off balance.

She is moving 3 of her water spheres into a defensive position to cope with my relentless attacks.
Time to get serious.
I make an aggressive blink, right in front of her, and try to strike her with a fist.
This is obviously not going to work, I expect her to blink away.
I'm using a multiblink attack, which is very difficult to perform.
I try to feel where she's going to blink to to dodge my attack and blink myself to the new location simultaneously.

Blinking usually has some sort of cooldown, making this impossible, but using enough energy it is possible to force it.
The energy required to do this is ludicrous though, so multiblink attacks are extremely exhausting.
But you basically put your opponent into a position where he is forced to multiblink as well to dodge the attack.
Yuya and I are skilled enough to do it about 4-5 times in a row, but after that everything hurts.
Your aura is completely unstable at that point and takes seconds to recover, during which you cannot focus your energy at all.

The reason I'm using such an attack is to nullify an immense advantage she has over me.
She doesn't need to stay lucid. She lives in this world, I am merely a visitor.

Here she goes.
2 Blinks... 3, 4, and finally a fifth.
The energy in my fist has completely dissipated due to all the blinking, and she can now easily block it.
I land on the water surface and have difficulty remaining on top due to my now unstable aura.

I attack her again, purely physically this time, as I neither of us can focus any energy.
Whoever manages to focus his energy first will have the tremendous advantage of launching the first serious attack.
I might have the advantage on this, dragonic energy is extremely unstable by nature, so I'm used to it.
I should be able to focus my energy before my aura has fully stabilized.

I can feel my aura tingling. This should be enough!
I focus energy into the tattoo stretched over my right arm and quickly cast a fire based attack towards Yuya.
She dodges it by blinking.
How the hell can she do that???
How is her aura stable enough already to blink?

I screwed up big time. I casted this before my aura stabilized, and now it's completely messed up again.
Yuya is over me charging towards me. She's casting a spell.
Shit, I can't do anything.
The water surface collapses beneath my feet and I am dragged underwater.
She's controlling the water, increasing it's pressure attempting to hold me in place.
I see her splash through the water surface still charging at me fast.
She is wielding a trident.

But she's overconfident. She's in her element, so she thinks I must be at a huge disadvantage.
Yet, even though I do not control water, I can make good use of it.
My aura stabilizes and I create an extremely strong electric field in front of me.
Electrolysis! I split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The correct mixture is highly explosive.
She realizes what I've done too late and I ignite the mixture with a fire sphere.

Oh shit. I didn't think this through.
The explosion is huge and we are both catapulted out of the water.
Everything is extremely foggy because so much water evaporated and water drops are going everywhere.
I can barely see. This is really dangerous, the dream could collapse.
I don't even know where up and down is.

I decide to completely ignore my vision and rely on my sense of global awareness instead.
Good call! I sense 5 sources of compressed energy approaching. Water spheres!
I quickly locate Yuya's aura and blink towards her.
I catch her slightly of guard and manage to land a focused hit.
She blocks it fine, but still.
Focused energy attacks are better to avoid than to block.
They cause all sorts of vibrations in your aura making followup moves difficult.

I try to chain a few attacks together but quickly feel the exhaustion kicking in and I back up.
Most of the water has come down and my vision becomes useful again.

She performs a blink attack.
Shit! She's going to chain them up.
We blink a total of 4 times.
It hurts so much.

This keeps going for a few more rounds.
One of us performs a multiblink attack and gets us both completely out of position.
Then it's a race to the first attack and a matter of somehow defending against it.
It is absolutely exhausting.
My limbs become insanely heavy and I start to loose the ability to focus my energy properly.
We fight for maybe a total of 15 minutes, which is actually quite a long time considering the speed we're going at.

"Alright... let's call it a draw..."
"No... I win."

Oh come on. She's just as exhausted as I am, she can barely stand.

"You lost awareness of your surroundings."
"Fuck my life."
"Haha. You completely forgot!"
"..."
"And guess what? You're still here."
"Huh? I thought the goal of this was to remain aware of my surroundings."
"No, that's not the goal at all. The goal is to have deeper dreams. The goal is to remain here for longer."

...
Wait what?

"Hold on a second!"

She got that grin of her face.
That "she knows everything" grin.

"You're telling me the heightened awareness thing isn't actually necessary to stay lucid???"
"Of course not! How would you pull that off for multiple hours in a row?"
"..."
"I said your awareness level was too random, we did some training to fix that."
"So you're saying it is already fixed?"
"I am now convinced that it is already fixed."

Woah. That was fast.

"So.. what are we doing now?"
"Teaching you to let go."

Let go? Let go of waking life?
Not thinking about it all the time and rather focus on the dream?
Of course... she told me many times before...

I take a quick dip in the water to get rid of the smell.
I'm sweating like a pig.

We walk back towards Yuya's place, discussing dreaming and being awake.
I mention Dreamviews, which I haven't done very often before.
Yuya tells me to say hi to fOrceez and Dark_Merlin.
Liv doesn't say a word. I don't think she's ever seen Yuya and me fight, that must have been quite intense for her.

Damn... I'm so exhausted.
Why do you even get exhausted in dreams?

"Why wouldn't you?"
"Eh... yeah..."
"Indeed."
"So, what do I do against it?"
"... are you serious?"

>_<

"You sleep of course! Or did you think I would sleep just for fun?"
"Well... now that you put it this way."

Liv leaves us and we quickly get into bed.
Goddamn I'm exhausted. Every muscle in my body hurts.

"This is a problem"
"What is?"
"If I want to sleep I'll have to close my eyes."
"So?"
"I might wake up?"
"zzz, you've picked up a lot of nonsense"
"I have?"
"These 'dream rules'. Darkness is bad, don't close your eyes. Don't talk. Yada yada."
"Yeah, I kinda have, haven't I?"
"I know the not talking one is nonsense, I talk all the time."
"It's no different for closing your eyes."
"I know you're right. I only wake up because I'm scared that I might. But it seems hard to get over."

"Pff... hahahaha"
"What's so funny?"
"Hurr hurr, I'm a badass dragon, I can fight a goddess of water and do all sorts of shit."
"Yet I can't even close my eyes.... haha.... I'm sorry Hyu, but this is funny."

It kind of is.
Screw it. Let's do this shit!
I close my eyes.

"You know, when you exploded half of the fucking training pool you didn't see anything either."
"That didn't wake you up, so why would closing your eyes do so?"

Yep, my thoughts exactly.
I open my eyes again to sneak a closer look at her.

WHAT THE FUCK?
How am I awake? What is this shit?
I'm a bit mad, but happy to have made progress.
I take some quick notes and go back to sleep.

A similar music track played during the training part of this dream:


I'm some sort of private investigator, and I'm searching for evidence with 2 coworkers in an apartment.
I quickly realize that I don't seem to have any gloves on me and ask one of my friends to give me some.
After putting on the gloves I go to the kitchen and start opening all the cabinets.
I wonder what I'm looking for...

"Hey, what are we looking for again?"
"Are you serious?"
"Uuh... yeah..."
"*sigh* we're looking for a quantum accelerated pipe."

... wait what?

"Like, for smoking?"
"For smoking weed, yes."

A quantum accelerated... wtf?
I keep searching and end up finding the most glorious of smoking devices I have ever seen.
It seems to be made out of some sort of glass and it glows in all kinds of colors, depending on how you angle it against the light.
But then finally it dawns on me... a quantum accelerated pipe... yeah... right...

I rub my hands and further investigate the pipe.
I am sad to find out that it isn't loaded. I would have loved to smoke some weed.

I remember that Yuya told me that I should break out of the dream plot when I become lucid.
Oh! And she wanted to teach me about time dilation!
I become very excited and quickly teleport myself to Teraluna.

I end up in a flower garden. Yuya is attending to some flowers right in front of me.

"Yuya Yuya Yuya"
"Hi?"
"Hi! Time dilation and stuff!"

She grins.

"Calm down! You're going to wake up."

Right...
After attempting to get myself into a calmer state I take a look at my surroundings.
The flower garden is beautiful. All of the flowers are very colorful and they smell great.
I touch and smell some of them until I decide that the dream is perfectly stable.

"So... the thing you call time dilation."
"Yes!"
"Well, for starters it isn't really time dilation."
"I guess. I couldn't think of a better word to describe it."
"Right. So, there's quite a few ways to approach this."
"I'm pretty sure I know which way works best for you, but first of all we need to work on something else."
"Oh?"
"Well, it's sort of directly related."
"Sure, what is it?"
"Your awareness in dreams."
"I've noticed that you sometimes are extremely aware when you're here, but only for short periods of time."
"You experience awareness in short bursts rather than continuously"

I quickly realize that she's spot on about that.

"Yeah, now that you mention it, it's pretty bad."
"Good, so first of all I am going to show you a technique to hold a certain level of awareness."
"Great!"

She drops the flowers.

"Let's go for a walk!"

We walk through the flower garden and talk some more about time dilation.

"Alright, stop!"
"Hm?"
"I want you to tell me the color of each flower on the plant we just passed, without looking."
"Err, sure? Let's see... it was green, yellow, blue, yellow..."
"No, you're cheating."
"I am?"
"You're using your sense of global awareness to tell what color they are without looking, what I need you to do is to remember what color they are."
"What? All of them?"
"Yes! I want you to remember every single detail of what you experience."
"Let's keep walking and pay attention."

This is going to be hard... like, really hard.
Is it even possible to do this?

"Sure it is, especially since you're dreaming. Remember when I told you the difference between focusing on something in waking life and in dreams?"
"Oh yeah, that's right."

I focus really hard on everything I see, even the smallest of details, and try to take mental note of them.
We walk past a similar plant, with approximately 50 flowers on it.

"From top to bottom, go!"

I try to remember and surprisingly, accessing my memories feels natural and easy.

"Red, red, yellow, blue, yellow... err, ultraviolet?, red, blue, blue..."

I keep going through about 20 of them until Yuya stops me.

"Hey hey, awareness!"
"What? Was I wrong?"
"No, but you're neglecting your awareness. Have you noted the details of the things we just passed?"
"Oh... oops. Wow, this is hard."
"Haha, see, just memorizing and remembering is easy."
"What I want to teach you is to remain aware of your surroundings, even if you are focusing on something else."
"If you can do that you should be able to continuously remain aware much more easily."

This makes so much sense!
Yuya is so amazing, why haven't I asked her about this before?

We keep doing this. I memorize all the flowers including other details and try to recite them from memory without loosing awareness of the new surroundings I encounter through walking.
It's really hard at first, but then it becomes surprisingly easy.
I feel like a genius, having such amazing memory all of a sudden.

Since I focus so hard on my vision, it becomes more and more intense.
I can see beyond the color spectrum visible to the human eye.
Ultraviolet and infrared, I can see them so clearly.
They aren't red or violet at all, they are entirely different colors.
The now 5 base colors start merging together to form new ones.
Everything is so beautiful.

It is so hard not to get distracted by this beauty. I have to remain aware of everything.
But it works! I can quite literally feel my awareness leveling out and remaining strong as I go along.

Yuya keeps asking me more and more difficult questions.

"How did this plant smell like?"

I can no longer answer these question with words, so I project my memories towards her, showing that I remember clearly.
We go on like this for some more minutes.
I feel like I have just achieved something major.
I have never ever experienced such an amount of focus.

We finally reach the end of the flower garden.

"And stop!"
"Okay?"
"Yep, time to relax, you cannot possibly keep this up much longer."
"Oh, I can't? It started to feel natural some moments ago."
"Still, if you keep that level of focus up for too long your brain will just spontaneously break out of it."
"You'll either loose all your awareness or even wake up."
"So it would be a bad idea to try and do this all the time?"
"Yes. You can do it for a limited period of time, for example during a battle where you need the extra focus."
"What I'm teaching you is to remain at a constant level of awareness."
"The important part here is that it is constant, not that it is on a level where you have surreal perception and memory."
"The goal is to never let it drift below a certain threshold, this way dream stability should remain high."

I understand her so well, her explanations are perfect.

"It's just more efficient for you to learn it this way."
"Not everyone is capable of achieving such a level of focus."
"It's something you often find in dreamers that are experienced with dream battles."

Dream battling has so many uses, how amazing.

"So dream stability is directly related to your level of awareness?"
"Well, yes, sort of. It's complicated."
"It always is."
"Actually, it is really simple... like most things."
"Yeah right."
"It's the painfully simple things the human mind cannot comprehend."
"After all your mind is trained to understand the complexity of the waking world, not the simplicity of the dream world."

Wow. That is deep.
I have never thought of it this way.
Yuya never ceases to amaze me.
She just drops these mind blowing ideas on me, as if they were the most obvious things in existence.

"Should I try to do this awareness technique in waking life?"
"No. At least not right now. You said you have constant headaches."
"Yeah, probably a bad idea."

She smiles and gives me a big hug.

"We'll continue this next time."
"Wake up and write this down so you don't forget it."
"I will! Until next time!"

Wake up... Have I ever tried waking up from a dream that wasn't a nightmare?
Heck, even a nightmare I haven't tried to wake up from in forever.
I close my eyes and command myself to wake up with my inner voice.
I feel a tingling sensation all over my body.

I open my eyes.
A quick nose plug RC confirms that I am awake and I start taking notes, excited to have taken my first step towards properly long dreams.

More music for no good reason:



Immediately after falling asleep, I wake up due to some noise in the house.
I look at the clock, and 6 hours have already passed, which frustrates me a bit.
I change position and try to fall back asleep, thinking about lucid dreaming.


... I'm walking to school.
There's quite a few other students walking there, but I don't know any of them.
The weather is nice.
For some reason a blue flower catches my attention and I stare at it.

I'm dreaming!
I can't help but say out loud:

"YES!"

Some of the student look at me as if I was mentally retarded, but I don't care.
I rub my hands and try to activate my other senses, but the dream already feels very stable.
A female voice whispers into my ear:

"You know, you could totally do one of the students."

...

"FAYE!"
"Haha"
"Really? Aren't you supposed to help me rather than encouraging distractions?"
"I'm just messing with you."

I shrug it off.

"You're messing with me all the time."

I summon my phoenix wings.

"I'm off to see Yuya, you coming?"
"Sure!"

She holds onto my arm and I teleport us both to Teraluna...
... We appear in Yuya's garden where she, Liv and two other people are having tea.
We join them.
It feels good to be here again, it has been too long.
We talk about various stuff until I finally bring up the topic of my recall, chronic headaches and tiredness.

Yuya approaches me.

"Move forward."

Hm? I slide forward on my chair a bit and she sits behind me.
She starts pressing against various points on my neck, similarly to what a doctor did in waking life.
Then she presses her forehead against the back of my head and wraps her hands around it.

I can feel sort of a click in my head.
I suddenly feel very lightheaded, as if I was floating.
I can sense her gradually feeling though all the fibres of my aura in my head.
It feels pretty damn good.

"Do you have headaches even when you're here?"
"No. Only when I'm awake."
"Hmmm..."
"Is there something wrong?"
"Actually no... not really."
"No-one seems to know in waking life either... I'm getting a scanner thing done in two days."
"Oh, what's that?"
"A machine that looks into your head without touching it... it's harmless."

She hugs me.

"You'll be fine, I bet it's nothing."
"Yeah, it's probably something really stupid that is just difficult to detect."

I look around. I'm so happy to be back here. I know I will recall this dream.
It'll be fantastic for my motivation.

"Hey Yuya."
"Yes?"
"You really need to teach me about time dilation."
"What do you mean?"
"How to stay in dreams for hours, days, months... years!"
"Shouldn't you worry about fixing your recall first?"
"Yes! And then time dilation!"
"Haha, alright alright. It's difficult though you know?"
"I don't care."
"You don't care?"

I shrug.

"I have all the time in the world. I don't mind if it takes months or years to learn how to do it."
"Because once I do know how to do it, making up on the time spent learning it should be pretty easy."

She smiles.

"That's a good attitude. I'll make sure to remind you next time you visit me."

We talk some more and the dream fades away.

I try to remain still to DEILD, but someone's being noisy again which is too disctracting.