Puffin

Type: DILD.
Lucidity: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Vividness: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Two hours after waking up today, I took a nap, because I was hoping to enter SP and have a WILD. Instead, I fell asleep normally and then entered multiple false awakenings. What happened next was one of the longest and most effed-up dreams I've had. When I woke up, I did a record amount of reality checks. Where in the world did this come from, why is my subconscious so demented, and why did it have to happen when I was attempting a WILD?

It was afternoon. I was outside, and the sky overhead looked normal for the time of day. I was walking along the right side of my house, sandwiched between the house and a long, straight wooden fence that extended down it. This fence was ashen in colour and seasoned-looking, with uneven, ragged boards that were slightly pointed on top. There was green grass everywhere, and the exterior of the house itself was made of ruddy red bricks with light-coloured cement in between. I was headed to the backyard, where I "knew" the house's garage would be. When I rounded the back corner of the house and reached the yard, it was an extremely strange setup.

There was the same, tall wooden fence as the one along the side of the house, but this one was much taller, probably twenty feet tall. It fenced in the entire yard on three sides, then connected to the fence I'd just walked along. Because of the yard fence's height, it blocked out the view of everything outside the yard, although I could see tall, normal-looking trees going at least ten feet past the height of the fence. The presence of the ridiculously tall fence and trees caused it to become darker in the yard, since there wasn't as much room for light to get in.

I looked to the left, at the yard. There was just straight brick on the house; there were no doorways or anything to get in and out. There was just more slightly-overgrown grass, and the garage. This garage was painted white and looked rustic; a few patches of paint here and there were flaking off. The garage door was open, but I didn't see any cars.

Then, someone from my school's graduating class walked out. I recognized her immediately, and she looked normal - she had long dark brown hair, freckles, and blue eyes. I had invited her over, and now it was time for her to leave. I smiled and waved as she walked past me, leaving through where I'd just come from.

Then, I saw my dad walk up beside me.

"Hey [Puffin], can you help me for a sec?" His voice sounded a bit muffled. I didn't think this was odd.

He led me down the right side of the house, where I had entered the yard from. Once we got past it, the area wasn't the front yard or driveway of a house like you'd expect; instead, it was another backyard. The setup for this part is very hard to explain because of how complex it was. The side of the house we'd just walked down opened up into a square-shaped lot (probably 60x60 feet), completely closed-in by the same tall fence, and on the other side of the fence you could see more trees. A few of these trees even arced over the fence and above the yard a little; their branches and trunks were thick and gnarled. However, they didn't cast any discernible shadows of their own; the whole yard was just in one solid pale shadow, darker than the back yard. The terrain of this yard slanted up five or six feet towards the back of the lot, especially on the left side.

In the middle of this yard, leaving three or four feet on each side for walkspace, was a big hole. The edges of this hole were smoothed out, and covered in grass, but then it steeply dropped off into blackness; it was very, very deep. Sometime when I was walking along the house, my dad had gone past me and ended up on the other side of the hole, in the far left corner of the yard where the ground was the most raised. Apparently he wanted to return to my side, but now the yard was littered with big, wide boards of slightly-destroyed wood. Most of them were irregularly-shaped, like the random pieces of paper a kid cuts out with scissors. My dad couldn't just walk around this field of wood, because they were filling the yard all the way up to the fence. But in the hole, there was a possible way to cross it. There were two very, very tall grey rocks with flat tops floating in the hole. Connecting the two rocks was a large, flat piece of dry grey wood. There were two other wood planks, and this created a bridge across the whole.

On the middle plank, there was also a big, triangular-shaped rock that must have been four feet tall. It looked like it weighed a ton. My dad slowly made his way onto the planks (which wobbled a lot, and he held out his arms for balance, but he didn't look concerned). Once he reached the middle plank, he pushed the rock down into the big hole without any effort, and it disappeared. There was no way he'd be able to push it in real life.

I decided to check in for the day and sleep. I walked away a few steps and looked at the brick wall of the house. Unlike before, when I saw no doors, now there was a basic white door with a gold doorknob. I opened it and walked into blackness. As I walked forward a few steps, I felt slightly numb, losing feeling in my body as I sometimes do when I'm lucid and the dream ends. And I did become slightly lucid at this point! However, the dream scene changed.

I woke up in bed. But not really; it was a false awakening. I couldn't see anything around me because my eyes were still closed, but I knew the room was spacious and had a high ceiling that was painted beige, as were the walls. I knew the bed was an antique, with polished wood with fine details and rich colouration. I knew the bed had white bedsheets and a thicker white quilt on top of that. I was on top of the covers, lying on my left side.

Immediately, I "knew" I was awake and resolved to DEILD. I breathed normally and stayed still. Although the third breath was a bit quicker and deeper than the others, which usually stops my DEILD attempts, I managed to get small vibrations rolling up and down my body. In the center of my vision, I saw a light blue square that was blurring in an outwards direction (almost like a tunnel). It expanded, and a blurry, pale scene formed in front of me. There were very abstract, blurry, dark grey shapes of people's heads and some desks. The only colors in this scene were darker, pale blue and greys. The scene then started to fade slowly as I started to fail the DEILD.

As the scene faded, taking about ten seconds, I saw a very clear image in my mind's eye - it was a shoulders-and-up shot of a beautiful woman holding a baby up against her shoulder, one hand resting on the back of its head. I heard a woman's voice narrating something along the lines of, "most mothers prefer to hold their baby with two hands if they are pregnant." It was nonsensical but I didn't realize it.

Once that image faded, I was back in bed with my eyes closed. I thought, 'let's try this one more time'.

I managed to get the blurry square again, but it was darker than before and disappeared quickly, leaving me lying in bed again. I laid there on my left side for a few moments and breathed out normally. But I didn't get any results.

Then I opened my eyes, giving up. I blinked once and looked up at the ceiling. Then, I suddenly heard an incredibly high-pitched, desperate scream, like something straight of a nightmare. It said, "don't look up!", and the "up" drew itself out into a long scream of its own. In the next instant, I was still looking at the ceiling, the yellow colors and window briefly flashed white like a camera had gone off, and I heard one of those sounds like in a horror film - it's like the sound wind makes when a big truck drives past you on the highway, minus all the mechanical wheel and actual truck noises. When everything was white, I saw the bright green outline of a tall church steeple, leaning over towards the right. This was in the corner of my vision. The 'outline' was most like someone had taken a simple photo and inverted the colors, so the blacks were white and the other stuff was green.

The flash only lasted a moment, and then as the whiteness and church faded, I felt a momentary 'shift' or acceleration downwards, although I didn't actually move from the bed at all. It was like an invisible force had come into effect and was spiritually trying to pull me down. Then, I felt a hand strongly press me down into the bed, and roll me over onto my stomach, with the left side of my face pressed right against the bed. I couldn't see anything. At some point my vision had stopped working and everything had gone a dark, dark brown. My back was suddenly exposed and uncovered as I laid there, and then I felt a sharp blade slowly going into my back, dragging slowly along my rib. It started about four inches below my right shoulder blade, tracing along that rib. The knife was excruciatingly painful as it slowly cut its way through my skin, which seemed to give too much resistance to be realistic, but that only made it worse. I had never felt this much pain in a dream before. The cut went down along the skin and stopped when it got to the very side of my body. All the while, I was paralyzed, and I screamed like crazy.

For a second, I became almost semi-lucid, and I broke free of the paralysis, but when I moved it, was like my bones were stiff and gelled together or something. I turned around, a bit more onto my back and looked at what was doing this. It was a hooded figure, with a black robe like the grim reaper, and surrounded in something like grey smoke. There was a thin, lighter brown woven cord loosely coiled three or four times around his neck; this cord was made of long brown hair! I wasted no time and growled at this creature and attempted to kick him away, but I couldn't move my legs anymore. I tried to punch him, but I was totally paralyzed again.

He turned me over and proceeded to cut another line into me, slightly further down my body along the next rib. It was really painful. This cut lasted about seven seconds, slightly less than the first, but then I felt another one, a bit further down still. The whole time, I screamed, and as the last cut ended, I saw a flash of another brief image: my vision turned a solid yellow, and I saw three abstract curves that were larger on one end and smaller on the other. The three lines gradated from red to dark brown, almost black, and only took up about a tenth of the total area of my vision; they appeared off near the left side.

For a brief moment during the cuts, I was aware of my sister lying on the bed beside me, and she said something like, "I told you so", but I can't remember the exact words. The words she said were laced with pain as if she was getting cut, too.

The dream finally ended, and when I woke up, I could feel residual stinging in my back. I didn't get up immediately, nervous that I'd entered another FA. It took a lot of RCs and a few minutes of lying stock-still in bed before I could get up and shake things out.