Lucid Time!

I'm visiting Puerto Rico with Manei. We have traveled there by way of a chrome propeller plane, it looked like a world war 2 bomber. The San Juan area also looked notably more compact and less developed than I ever remember it being. The largest roads in the city are two lane asphalt and there is almost a complete lack of high rises with most buildings still looking fairly traditional. The airport was a single runway and a couple of hangars, no proper terminal.

She seemed to have handled most of the travel arrangements. She has us in a teal and red vintage car (all of the cars looked vintage to be honest). We drive for awhile and experience some pretty ragged time dilation. But at some point while driving she asks for the map and I bring it up on my phone. Barring the tech level and general tone of the dream my "phone" is an obelisk of pure glass able to project advanced holograms, and near instantly load our navigation with voice commands. It projects a hologram onto the windshield that helps us navigate. But when we get close to the house she tells me to put it away and not let anyone see it, as other people cant know we have advanced technology.

The dream properly begins when we arrive at an orange stucco building with white slatted windows built along the beach. It is nighttime now but I can still see the building clearly as there is a streetlight built into a palm tree that illuminates the dream. The building is built into a hillside and we enter through like a utility door which takes us through a basement like space. There is a storeroom full of lumber, metal, bags of cement, piping, and boxes and boxes of raw materials, fittings and other construction materials. This then transitions into a robust workshop with several benches, shelves upon shelves of tools and some larger machining equipment like drill presses. Everything has a heavily worn appearance to it; well loved and well used. We then pass through into a large utility room with a generator, water heaters, electrical boxes, and a big gear shaped door. It looks like a fallout vault. Eventually we go up a fire escape into a laundry room.

Manei then meets an older woman with graying hair who upon seeing her runs up and hugs her. They have a long dialogue which was in really minced-up rapidfire spanish that I can't recreate having not studied the language since high school. All I remember was that Manei referenced the woman as her "Abuela" in one instance and then her great aunt. I think Abuela was actually supposed to be her name. But at the same time the general gyst of the conversation was "Translated"

Abuela: "Manei! Welcome back!"

Manei: "High great aunt Abuela"

Abuela: "Jesus maria jose you've gotten tall... look at you."

Manei: "Can we stay here for free or do we have to pay to use the resort?"

Abuela: "You and your friend are always welcome here. Provided you eat my brown rice and shrimp."

Manei: "That sounds delicious, maybe tomorrow night. Can we use Marcus here."

Abuela: "Bah, I dont care. Just don't let the other guests see you. They're all sleeping right now."

I took Marcus out from a leather briefcase. He's been a little metal robot ball for years now. When I turn him on he seems pretty unhappy about the smell of the clothes in the suitcase. Abuela offers to do our laundry for free. She takes a lot of pride in doing laundry and actually enjoys it. I take the crystal smartphone too. Manei and I head down to the beach and the immersion in the dream is really cranked to 11. The sound of the waves, the warmth of the breeze and the hiss it makes as it passes through the palms, the moonlight reflecting on the ocean. Its all so detailed and realistic. I goof around with the dream for a few moments, picking up a large seashell and running my fingers through the sand. I feel the ocean water and wiggle my toes in the sand. I just become so enamored in the detail of the dream and thinking about how weird it is that its all a construct of the mind.

"Theres more interesting things here than sand and saltwater." Manei said, squeezing my shoulder. We sat down and looked at the milky way.

This was where the discussion happened.

"I just want to meditate, none of this tomfoolery."

She seemed disappointed. This was there the dream transitioned. I was still very much asleep but everything seemed to melt away. The clarity very quickly degraded. I was still very much asleep, but any visual of the dream was gone and the audio was more of a mishmash of inner voices. I could sense Manei was disappointed. She wanted to do something fun.

Me: "Theres no sense in goofing around anymore. Our meetings are so few, so far between and so fleeting. Regardless of whether I practice or not the results seem the same. It's been over a decade now since I started this journey. Im going to get old by the time we make real progress. I want to get to know you but when its only for a few moments here and there... seemingly only often enough to just tease and tantalize me with another reality. One so immensely better than the one I spend so much time inhabiting. Its maddening, I would have preferred to never know this peace at all rather than see it only to have it so consistently ripped away."

Marcus: "So you would rather spend what little dream you have lamenting this fact rather than enjoying it? Illogical."

Manei: "Then tell me what would be enough for you? To become lucid every night? To spend hours here. You would always greedily desire more. You run the risk of becoming lost, losing sight of the reality you truly inhabit. This is merely a vision, perhaps what you might experience in your afterlife. Your next life. However you want to view it."

Marcus' tone was cold and robotic. Manei started out with a stern anger but relapsed into understanding.

Me: "So you mean to tell me this is out of my control? Even my own mind is not mine to command. There is no architecture or technique with which to circumvent this limitation, and I am so assured in that fact that I am now telling it to myself. It is so ingrained into my mind that I will never be able to convince myself otherwise."

Marcus: "Would you prefer to wind up like me? A mind that has done away with emotion. Something approximating regret still plagues me for doing so."

Manei: "I'm sorry to say this but your discipline lacks in that regard. I cant trust that you wouldn't neglect the waking world."

Me: "I'm going to neglect the waking world either way. I've told you many stories of how cruel the people of wakingworld are. Wars, greed, disease-"

Manei: "And yet you come here so often bringing violence."

Me: "True. A Majority of my tenure in these dreams has been as an agent of violence. Regrettably so. I must confess I have developed a disdain for many of my human vices. The marching of time on my body, emotions and feelings that surge through me uncontrollably, and my insatiable desire to desire some things that I will never have. Through those countless acts of violence I have expressed my frustration with this worlds' many predicaments."

Manei: "But those feelings and experiences are part of the human experience."

Me: "You say that like the human experience is good because it is the default. Nobody said being a soul trapped in a prison of flesh and bone was some fundamentally amazing thing."

Manei: "But I'm a human. And I choose to enjoy living, every moment of it. Even the difficult parts."

Me: "But are you? Many times you have proven yourself supernatural... your physical avatar within the dreamworld. Do I count you as human as some component of me? Do I count you as human because you as you claimed were once a girl who lived in California, in some parallel earth. A parallel earth that seemed more free from the vices and failings of the one I inhabit, but still one in which you passed from terrible degenerative disease scarcely after reaching adulthood? Are you an avatar of God? Are you an angel? I can never know because there are so many lies and illusions and my experience of this universe so linear and fleeting."

Manei: "I can't make you believe anything either way. It's kind of complicated."

Me: "I'm not a fan of "its complicated" as a way of dodging the question."

Manei was visibly annoyed. I can see why she doesn't like putting up with me. "You see your reality is how you view it. If you think I am a real spiritual entity then thats what I am. if you think Im just a part of your brain, then thats what I am."

Marcus: "I can make him believe. From the wheel to the spinning wheel to the printing press. To the mushroom bomb, the figure-eight DNA and the three-two-two hyperdrive; humanity will march on. But we will always search for purpose and answers. You are but one speck in that. You have lived after four of the six milestones were met. If you live long enough to see the fifth then you will live long enough to see the sixth because you will be able to live forever then. Each of these milestones is not just the humans technology but alters their perspective on the universe. Then come the time of great questioning, when we go to the center of the galaxy and do the final test, and ask what the point of it all is and get all the answers from god or the universe or whatever you want to call it. So if you see the matrix be made and the events play out come contact me and tell me that you believe, because it is coming. if it does not get made soon your timeline is doomed and it doesn't matter anyways."

Manei: "Are you only a cynic because of what you think other people believe and think they will judge you? There are so many people on your earth believing in undercooked religions that are all only half-right. A real sign of your maturity, that one. At least you take my lessons to heart and ask questions even if they are sometimes annoying ones that I dont want to hear."

I lost the dream at this point either had a nighttime awakening, NREM or just forgot the rest of the conversation.