Lucid Time!

One thing about LD comps is I feel compelled to share dreams I wouldn't otherwise because they seem somewhat inappropriate for public discussion. Content Warnings for the relevant bits, proceed at your own risk.

I recall being in the park of my old town meeting up with a group of about 20 dream characters who are part of a firearms enthusiast club. I have brought a new gun.it looks like an fn p90. I converse with the members of the group who are enthusiastic about owning new large assault rifles and are talking about wanting to go to a shooting range to have an accuracy competition and take slow motion videos of bullets hitting things.

The leader of the club is an army captain or major who wears a slight beard of light brown hair and a baseball cap. He gives a short friendly but firm lesson on gun safety. Reminding all club members to check safeties and keep weapons unloaded. He then emphasizes not to point any firearms at anyone ever. Even if they are unloaded and have the safety on because a bullet could still be in the chamber.

We dismiss the meeting and I head home. The layout of my old neighborhood is disjointed and in order to get home I must walk along a narrow dirt path that runs through woods and wetlands. The trees are bare and the reeds in the wetlands yellow and dead as though it is winter. On one side of me are huge vertical houses five or six stories tall built on sloping lawns draining into the wetlands.

I navigate back to my childhood home before remembering that my parents and grandparents are visiting and would never approve of me having a firearms. I go in through the basement door and wrap the carbine in dirty laundry including a thick jacket.

I make my way upstairs and all the dream characters aggressively question me including my childhood friend X. I repeatedly explained that I was just doing laundry and tried to sound annoyed rather than nervous. eventually they bought my line of bs.

I got up to my room which resembled how it looked when I was in junior high. I hid the laundry with the gun in my closet. My father appears and shows me a Lego star wars ucs at-at and says he wants to build it with me.

…

I am at college but the environment is original to dream. At first I am in a cafe with a subway and see my old supervisor from when I worked at subway. I then headed outside onto a pool terrace. There are multiple small hot tubs in a sort of terraced structure, with water flowing down waterfalls from one tub to the next. There are a multitude of dream characters lounging around in swimsuits and some of them are rather attractive. Many of them are looking at me funny.

I then notice that I am not wearing swimming clothes but rather a tucked in button up shirt and dirty white boxer briefs. I immediately feel embarrassed and decide to remove myself from the situation, heading back inside. I go into the women's bathroom by accident. It is a normal, actually somewhat nice bathroom with a vase of flowers on the counter. I get thrown out by a woman and go into the mens room.

Spoiler for CW: feces and masturbation:

The mens bathroom is some disgusting surrealist nightmare. The room is huge, about the size of a gymnasium but with walls painted black or a very dark blue. The floor is made of deep forest green tiles maybe three inches on edge with white grout. The floor is not even, but rather made up of shallow square hoppers. Shallow pyramid shaped depressions with floor drains in the bottom. Perhaps two-thirds of a meter on edge.

The floor is covered in feces. Most of them are rather small, just looking like dog poops on someones lawn but there are huge elephant turds and big piles of poop like a frozen yogurt. Some of the shallow basins have their drains clogged and are filled with yellow urine. About a half dozen male dream dream characters stand near the center of the room pleasuring one another in a literal circle-jerk while another guy is completely naked and crapping into one of the hoppers. A fat guy is sort of squatting by the door also pleasuring himself. His penis is very long, about three feet and has a dozen or so holes in the top. They are not wounds they look like additional urethra. He moves his hands up and down covering the different holes playing horrible screeching offbeat woodwind music with it. Like you know in spongebob how squidward sucks at playing the clarinet... it sounded like that. I remember the dream engaging the sense of smell, which almost never happens.

I lost the dream and mercifully woke up. Did a WBTB with the intention of having another dream about me being junior high age, a frequent theme but recognizing it and becoming lucid.

Spoiler for CW: sex:

I became lucid outside the south entrance of my junior high school at night. There was prior dream content pertaining to schools but i don't recall it or what brought me to being lucid. My friend X is there. I am in what looks and feels like my junior high school body, based on eye level, and looking down at myself to see the polo I am wearing is one I had around that time. That and I am mildly overweight. X
Looks older. Not her current age but late high school or early adulthood.

Se rocks her hips side to side in a suggestive fashion and starts to unbutton her shirt showing her cleavage. She explains that this is a shared lucid dream that she created and that she has listed for me for many years and wanted to try sex but couldn't for religious reasons and because she had inhibitions in waking life that she feels she can have a little fun in the dream. I more or less shrug and say 'sure what the heck' but it feels a bit weird to be having sex with my awkward male adolescent boy. In the past (in a lot of dreams I don't normally upload to dreamviews because I get self conscious about dream horniness.) I've done a lot of mostly successful experiments with becoming female for sexual oriented dreams, and finding more comfort and enjoyment in it.

"OK but I'm not comfortable in this body. Let me change."

I look up at the sky with the intent of changing into a female. Snow gently falls from an almost pitch black cloudy sky, only becoming visible when it falls close to the light bathing the school entrance.

I look back down at myself to see the transformation is extremely successful. My female body is tall and very toned but with a large chest. Am now wearing a very tight and revealing cutoff top (no bra underneath) but the same pants. I began feeling myself with one hand going up and feeling my breast which is firm but otherwise very realistic. With my other hand I felt my abs and navel before reaching down into my pants. I feel my clitoris and began fingering myself. Again very 'accurate' sensations, I am being conscious not to scrape the inside with my fingernails. I can feel a lot of sexual charge and realize I need to modulate it to keep the dream stable so I stop.

I rip off my top and thrust out my chest.

"So, X (I addressed her by name). Are you ready to get to know the real me?"

Her eyes were bulging out and her mouth formed an 'o' with shock. She backed away until she stumbled on the curb between the school bus loop and sidewalk. She stammered out about how she didn't know me at all and liked 'me' but wasn't comfortable girl on girl. I asked her if she was willing to be male and that I would help her transform. She nervously then more firmly declined and asked me to please change back into my 'normal' self, how I was when the dream began. I declined saying I'm not willing to be male.

Seeing we are at an impasse she dejected states she no longer wants to have lucid sex unless both sides are happy. Bur she wants to confirm the shared dream really happened. I tell her to message me on Facebook with something random like "cheese puffs" to confirm it.

It starts to become daytime and X leaves. I decided to explore. I lost lucidity striding around half naked in the increasing snow.

Nonlucid dream x2: (2pts)
WBTB: (Success 2pts)
Winter theme (5pts)
DILD: (10pts)
DC Interact (2pts)
Full Transformation: (10pts)

Night 2 was a total bust. I've been ill but I'm getting better now so hopefully I can start pulling out some actual lucid dreams for this comp soon.

The dream was presented as a third person view of a space probe sent to land on jupiter. The probe entered orbit of the planet and dropped a lander with a heat shield. I remember having the presence of mind to think that "you cant land on jupiter, it's a gas giant!" but this didn't influence the course of the dream. The lander falls through the upper atmosphere and deploys a parachute at which point it begins to drift slowly downwards through layer after layer of clouds. The probe is a spherically shaped metal with eight green blinking lights that protrude from it as though they are corners of a cube.

The probe descends through the lowest layers where the clouds are illuminated by narrow bands of sunlight, it is almost pitch black. Then into another layer where things are illuminated only by flashes of lightning and there are huge tornadoes between the upper and lower cloud deck like columns. Then several more layers where it is too dark to see. Eventually it lands on the surface, which is made out of some type of crystals or ice granules with a light blue or grayish coloration. The dream narrator which has been describing technical details about the space probe including how it is able to survive the pressure and temperature changes exalts success.

I begin to think how cool it would be to go to a gas giant in a lucid dream and explore the surface. I then find that I am no longer an observer and have my body in first person and question how I am able to be here seemingly wearing nothing but shorts and a shirt. But there wasn't a conscious acknowledgement of the dream state. I start to wonder how this came to be and I wake up.

-+-

There was another convoluted yet boring and lengthy dream about driving. I am visiting my father who lives in a large house in a very flat farm field with a big garage. At some point I swerve off the road while getting on the freeway, though there is no damage to the car, it is still very stressful.

There is also a point where I stopped at a gas station/convenience store and went inside. They have a large supermarket freezer holding drinks typical of such places. But as I walk around it I notice it gets bigger. The glass doors on the freezer are three or four meters tall and there are huge shelving units holding giant sized food items, specifically refrigerated/frozen pizzas that are more than a meter across. I decide I want a bottle of nesquik chocolate milk but it disappears in my hand.

-+-

I am jogging along my old route in my old neighborhood. A snake is chasing me, it looks like a cobra. It hisses and bears its fangs. I continue running but it is slithering rather fast. I stop and opt to stomp on it to kill it. I tense myself and ready. It lunges at me and I jump in the air over it, stomping on its just behind the head with my right foot. The sudden motion carries into my waking body and I kick in bed and wake myself up.

-+-

A dream having something to do with ATLA. It was a directors commentary with mike and brian and some alternative scenes. Apparently it was an alternate timeline of the show. Aang and Katara were already a couple and they looked to be older, late teens. They met in a red room with fire nation trappings and were kissing a lot and talking about how they wanted to get married. It was then revealed that they built their house on the back of the lion turtle.

I woke up around 3am and was up for about an hour, it was a natural awakening. Though I am sick and my sleep schedule is whacked up. I was up and about for a bit and intended to do a WBTB, as I've had success with that in the past. No dice. Some non-lucid dreams though.

I had a false awakening which led into a dream of my dad and grandfather driving me to work with me in the backseat. I stop at work briefly and speak with my supervisor before getting back in the car. They tell me that they intended to take me to the hospital and not work and that they were just there such that I could tell my supervisor face to face. The dream went on for quite awhile, though it mostly consisted of fairly idle chatter and riding in the backseat of a car through uninteresting areas.

Another brief awakening.

Seperate dream. I was at the doctors office. It felt like the office that I would usually go to but the room was larger and seemed darker. The doctor told me that I was "147" but didn't reference what the number was (weight, blood pressure or some other medical score). She seemed irritated and disappointed with me and then left the room and I was left alone.

I remember a feeling of deep depression hit me. I wasn't properly lucid, it was at best described as layer 0 lucidity, in that I was vaguely aware that something was off but didn't properly recognize the dream state. (I won't be counting it as lucid for the purposes of the competition) The unseen dream director or whatever you might call it was pushing for this particular emotion but I was aware that some 'external' force was pushing me to that emotion and I became frustrated and fought back against it. I became very angry to the point that I woke myself up.

2NLDs=2pts
1WBTB=2pts

Okay I thought this was the first day of the winter comp so I wrote up all my nonlucids. I actually came down with a... well i sick.

There is some kind of war going on an I have been drafted into the air force. I am flying in the rear seat of an A-10 warthog. (Which google says is a single-seat aircraft, though the dream made it very clear that it was this specific model of aircraft) as a gunner/ewar officer. We get shot by a missile though the pilot in front (a woman with curly red-orange hair and freckles) says we still have partial power to one engine and manages to land us on a long stretch of road rather than having us eject.

We then land. This looks like the road that I use to drive home from work and we are facing in the same direction. There is some damage to some buildings like cracked windows or bullet holes and very few people and cars but despite the war theme of the dream things seem relatively normal. She wants to get back to base with our damaged aircraft even though it is many miles away, and we begin to taxi along the road as though we are a car. Though with our wingspan we take up the whole road and go own the middle.

Eventually we come to some stuck traffic and our commander (who also wants to recover our aircraft) says we have permission to shoot the cars on the road to clear the way. Neither me nor the pilot have any issue with this so I begin shooting cars with our missiles. We only have four missiles and when we run out I start using the autocannon each time we come across cars blocking our aircraft.

Eventually the landing gear breaks on a pothole and we are forced to get out. The commander concedes that we will not be able to get the aircraft back to base so me and the pilot decide to get out.

There is what sort of looks submarine beached in the middle of a farm field. It is broken in half and laying in pieces with smoke and flames coming out. We contact our commander to ask him why there is a submarine in the middle of a farm field and he explains that it was actually an experimental stealth spaceship carrying nuclear ICBMs that fell out of orbit when the battle began. He says that we need to scuttle the wreckage using one of the nukes. I go get close to it and find the nuclear warhead laying on the ground. It looks like a black cone like the warhead of an ICBM but I notice it appears to be damaged and I start to feel sick. I try quickly to set it on a timer using a small control panel but the thing is completely broken, so I run away from it and hide behind a brick wall in a collapsed barn/warehouse. I tell the commander that there is only one nuke and it is leaking radiation and that I might get radiation sickness. He pauses for a moment and then says he will have a helicopter come and bomb the spaceship wreck along with destroy our plane and recover us, and that we need to fall back because there is a whole platoon of enemy ground troops advancing in our area of the battlefield.

-+-

I am visiting Erid (project hail mary). Though I am able to walk around on the planet with no space suit and no real problem, though everything is very dim and I carry with me a powerful ball shaped lantern that lets me see in all directions. I meet Adrian (Rocky's mate, who was mentioned in the book but never shown). They are an Eridian fighter/boxer of some sort. About 50% bigger than Rocky with a thick almost spherical body rather than a more flat one. Their arms are thick and have spikes near the joints and the 'fingers' have a narrow sort of "blade" growing out of the tip made out of a whiteish material.

Despite this menacing appearance and presence Adrian is very friendly and excited to tell about their career as a fighter.

-+-

There was something to do with the master cheif from halo.

I was in my old neighborhood at night coming up the hill I used to run. It is warm as though it is late spring or early autumn and the last of twilight is just fading away. I become fully lucid and begin to fly. It doesn't seem to be my usual flying but rather a slow sort of swimming through the air that never gets me more than a few meters off the ground.

I tell myself that there will be a means or indication to stabilize the dream. I see a tree with dreamcatchers hanging from the branches. I take one off and loop it around my neck which increases the clarity. I then land, deciding that I want to convert the dream to daytime. I set down, no longer flying.

I then reach up for the sky. I really start to question my method of dream control here, recalling something from the robert waggoner book about thinking of the dream as a mental space rather than a physical space. But I still want to use a physical method of dream control. I begin pawing vaguely at the night sky, rotating the moon and stars along with it. I rotate the entire planet 360 degrees with a few pawing motions until the moon rises and is roughly in the same spot. No sun. I then remember that I should probably rotate the earth east-west. I try rotating to the west one or two swipes and the sun appears, though it is in the northern sky, roughly where polaris would be.

Neil deGrasse Tyson appears and says "Damn it we almost had the three-body problem solved and you hippies had to come and screw it up!"

I am on a college campus. It doesn't seem similar enough to mine specifically, but vaugely feels like it. I am chasing some kind of cyborg who has stolen information. This isn't a serious situation, its some kind of ARG. I have another dream character with me who is trying to help me with the chase but he is so unfit that he is unable to be much help. I keep telling him to run a different direction and head off the person were chasing but he stops being completely out of breath.

I continue the chase on my own. As I move I notice just how agile and floaty I am. I am no longer running, but kicking off walls and ceilings and hurling through the air like I'm in zero gee. The chase follows outside and into a large parking lot, then into the university library. I think I have him cornered but instead arrive in a room of random students studying. Its awkward so I quietly apologize and leave. I go back out in the parking lot and let myself float down.

Then I say to myself something dumb along the lines of "I know I've been dreaming for awhile. Maybe it's time I become lucid."

I then properly remember my dream goal. I decide to summon Manei, knowing that will help boost my odds of success.

"Hey, dream. I want to see manei, Right now please."

A classroom bell chimes and a whole bunch of college students come out in a big mass. I am able to spot her in the middle and get her attention.

"Hey, hey Manei. Did you... make friends with the whole class?"

"Yes!" She shouts excitedly. "The people here are so friendly!"

"That's great. Hey I-"

Very abrupt awakening.

-+-

My dad wants to visit his new church and it saking me with him. He says he doesn't want to influence my spiritual beliefs but that I do have to wear a uniform to go inside while he does his business in it and hands me a red shirt with a starfleet logo on it. He then explains that this is the church of Startrekism and they are rivals to the church of Jediism. It is a small and unassuming building on the outside but on the inside its a massive mall food court type location with a huge model of the Enterprise (I don't know which version) on a rotating stand. Its about the size of a large car.

He goes off and leaves me to hang out there. Everyone is wearing star trek clothing and some people look like aliens with pointy ears and stuff. I ask the guy at the counter what he has to eat and he acts like a robot. I see in one serving tray there is a double chocolate muffin. I ask for it but the guy is busy with another customer. I am mildly frustrated that he started attending to another customer before getting me the only item I wanted. I then become Lucid of the dream state. My father comes back, and tells me that lucid dreaming is borgonistic (which is the church of startrekism's way of saying something is satanist) and that I shouldn't do it. I decide that this will only lead to the dream becoming a pointless battle and decide to escape.

"Dream, take me to a new reality."

Bad choice of words.

I was in a dream location that felt something like the front of my old subdivision. There is no road leading into it though, just a grass clearing through trees where the road should be and maybe a paved walking path. I am walking around in the woods non-lucid collecting sets of glittering silver feathered wings. They flap slowly while remaining stationary in the air and sparkle while colorful wisps of glowing energy circle around them. I am collecting them as they are "elytra" or something. Items which are supposed to help with in-dream flight but also a reference to the dreamviews practice of getting "wings" for completing tasks.

I become semi lucid and set out to do a task. I have two tasks, one of them is a falsely-remembered DV task to seek out a nightmare and confront it. The other is (for whatever reason) to try and find DawnEye11 and ask her why she left DV. I fly to the front yard of my old house though this location is not an exact replica. It is much bigger and there are more plants in it. I ask the dream to show me a nightmare and it shows me a strange version of Toothless from HTTYD. Though he continuously gets more and more eyes and his body and posture become larger and more menacing. Even in its deformed state the creature still looks cute and harmless but I in my semi-lucid state decided to punch it anyway (old habits die hard, I guess). I remember i uppercut the beast on its jaw in a very cartoony fashion.

I then had a false awakening where i gleefully woke up and reported my "lucid" findings to dreamviews. DawnEye11 came back on the site. She showed me a comic about Jak's past, apparently shed had a semi-shared dreaming experience with my. In it the monster that i had just fought ended up seriously wounding him by cutting his stomach open. He, Jak, was depicted laying on a hospital bed with his father next to him. I thought it weird as she did not seem like the kind of person to draw a gorey scene, and though it was drawn in what sort of looked like her art style it had only flat colors and most of the gore was replaced with spaghetti with meat sauce and parmesan cheese. Though I think there was an actual intestine in there.

The dream begins and I am in a basement. It feels like an odd combination of the basement of my grandparents house and my old childhood home. It is very unfinished, mostly bare wall studs and some utility equipment. I am meandering around and I end up going through a door to find myself in a school gymnasium.

I become semi-lucid and resolve to find Manei. I find her in the crowd taking a fairly recognizable form. She seems even taller than usual and has a blonde streak in her hair, though the dream is not particularly vivid. I decide that I don't want to have a dream about a school gymnasium, it has too much of a negative schema associated with it. She agrees and we resolve to leave back through the same door I came in through. We go back into the house basement and then through another door on the far side which takes us up a flight of stairs and onto a beach scene.

This seems like a much better scene to set the dream in. But there are monsters roving on the beach. Two of them are about the size of a small house, maybe thirty feet in height. There are about a dozen more that are about human sized which are running around terrorizing beachgoers and there are a few skeletons being picked clean of meat beneath them. They look like the MUTO monster from 2014 godzilla or the cloverfield monsters. But their mouths look like a Predator or Sangheili in that they have a jaw that spilts open in multiple ways. Manei says we have to deal with them one way or another.

She pulls out a device, saying its a machine which can summon anything into the dream world and she wants to use it to summon weapons. However the device is built into an old flip phone (where one would have to type a number multiple times rapidly to get a certain letter) and in order to summon something she must text it using a 10-digit pad. This is certainly inconvenient especially with how dream phones and anything with text or numbers can be. She manages to type in 'dagger' and summon a small kunai knife. Then threw it out and killed one of the smaller monsters.

I then, quoting inception and said "you musn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling." and typed in 'railgun'. I don't remember if i was successful or not since I vaguely remember holding a railgun that looked like handheld railgun in the Halo games. But then I decided against using it and it faded away or it turned out I had typed it into the summoning device incorrectly before I was able to fire. Or I forgot to dream of a power cell for it or something.

Then, I ran out onto the beach. I must have gained more lucidity because I recognized that I didn't need a machine to summon a weapon for me, and summoned my own weapon. It partially failed because when I summoned it, it appeared translucent. But I planted one end of it in the sand forcefully and the sand rippled oddly in a sort of shockwave, drawing a wide circle around me to show power. This was in some convoluted dream-logic way a reference to the anti-sea-bear circle from Spongebob.

"End your threatening presence in my dream and tell me what you symbolize."

Ive had mixed results with getting nightmares to stand down. It seems about coin flip odds they just get angry and continue to attack me or the dream just ends up getting worse when I try the diplomatic approach. But I'm happy to say this creature seemed very diplomatic. All but one of the large monsters disappeared, and the one that remained swiftly shrank into a very harmless looking bright blue creature about the size of a large dog. It gave me the vibe of being half-elephant, half pig and it had two small trunks.

"I symbolize that you feel disconnected from nature."

I woke up.

There was another dream wherein I was in what felt like the city of chicago. I was watching two spaceships or large flying vessels do battle out over the water. One looked like the battlestar galactica. The other was a big sort of drab green zeppelin. The drab green zeppelin takes a lot of damage and begins to drop into lake michigan. When it collides with the water it explodes like a giant hydrogen bomb and everyone starts running anticipating a shockwave and nuclear will hit soon. Everyone starts running and looking for places to hide. I can't find a good place to hide that isn't already jammed full of people so I resolve to accept my fate.

I am standing still watching the shockwave approach over the water, and in the final few moments it gets onto land flattening trees and buildings. Then time freezes with it only a few meters away from me. The grim reaper appears and says something like

"Uhm wow, you're not even going to try to worm your way out of this one?"

"No. Life's got me feeling worn out right now and if this is how I'm going to go out, I'm going to face it with dignity and accept it."

"Dude... seriously, come on. You're no fun at all. Look I'll give you one minute to find a hiding spot."

I decide to try and survive anyway. I look for a large building, an apartment or condo of some sort and run inside. Then I try to get onto the lowest level. The dream completely drops the 'time is frozen and Im running from a nuclear explosion' plotline as I get yelled at by some woman for being in her apartment. I try to explain the situation about the nuclear blast but she doesn't believe me. I then try to convince her that I am a maintenance man and need to go into the utility room below her condo. She buys that. I go hide in the utility room and lose the dream.

I am staying with family in a resort hotel. We are staying in a very large city built up along a beach. There are fifty+ story resorts and condos on the beachfront. One image is of an orange concrete building with curved balconies overlooking the coast. It is built on a small island tightly packed with skyscrapers and surrounded on all sides by pristine beaches in the middle of a large city built on a bay with mountainous terrain behind the city.

I am watching from the roof of a tall building the construction of another building. The frames of the buildings they are constructing look very spindly and sway in the wind quite a lot, they do not look structurally sound at all. There are about a half-dozen people in large black inflatable balloon pants (I don't really know how else to describe them) dangling from construction cranes and building another skyscraper next to us. They are being blown around by the high winds. One of them breaks loose and the balloon carries him down slowly. I help him get out of it and he is thankful. He explains that the tubes are some kind of safety device for working at high altitudes but that his boss keeps asking them to modify the blueprints of the skyscraper to make it taller and he is frustrated.

...

I am in a much different location. I become semi-lucid and start flying low over the ocean I notice that like last night, I don't have my fire jets but seem to be churning up the water as I hover several meters over its surface.

...

I am riding in the passenger seat of a pickup with a dream character. i think it was my father. We are back in the costal city which is being shaken with earthquakes and volcanoes. The dream character wants to drive us through a tunnel. I state that is a bad idea because the tunnel goes through a mountain which is presently an erupting volcano. When he gets close we see lava coming out of the tunnel.

He then proceeds to drive along a river, driving the truck in a physically impossible manner such that only the two lefthand wheels are on the very lip of the river while the rest of the truck hangs off the side but stays more or less upright. I turn on the radio which states the government will not be sending disaster aid because they are corrupt and already gave all their money to corporate subsidies.

I was going through some dream about me having two jobs and being "on the grind" in a big way trying to pay off some debt. In the dream, my house was a mixture of my old and new houses in feel and location. Though it was structured more like my new house, it was painted white. I then realized that I could fly and decided to ignore the career focus in the dream.

I became lucid. Flying was easy and intuitive, and I had great control. I remember flying in a posture similar to me using my fire jets but there were no visuals of the fire. I flew up into the night sky through clouds and could see the stars. There were four or five sets of stars in oval-shaped rings of varying size, with maybe ten to twenty stars on each ring. There were also some stars scattered about. I thought about flying into space and checking out the star rings up close but I could feel that the dream was not particularly stable.

Instead I decided to land, sitting in a tall tree with pointy leaves overlooking a country road. I decided to eat one of the leaves to try and ground and stabilize the dream. I pulled one off the branch and started eating it. It had some texture but no flavor, working well enough to keep the lucid dream going.

A spaceship came down from space and out of the clouds. It was shaped like a cross which I interpreted to be religious iconography. The vertical bar of the ship was made of gold along its edges, with lightbulbs at regular intervals turning on and off in a pattern that made it look like pulses of light were traveling around it. The paneling was glowing bright red, orange, yellow, and green, with its colors also cycling in a wave-like pattern. The horizontal bar of the cross was framed in gold and had a windowed section allowing me to see inside to a single deck. Inside I could see casino games such as slot machines, a roulette and a blackjack table, and dream characters engaged in gambling.

The spacecraft was of such an absurd design I simply had to know why it had appeared and what it symbolized.

"Hey spaceship, what do you represent in this dream?"

The spacecraft landed upright by the side of the road. Various components of it folded apart and went through a complex transformation sequence which had little regard for the rules of euclidean space or how its internals were presumably set up. When it had finished it had become a very bland concrete building. The structure had an octagonal cinderblock wall around it with barbed wire along the top and guard towers at all eight corners and a dirt road leading up to a gatehouse on one of the octagon's sides. The inner building had a square footprint and was taller than it was wide, perhaps three or four floors and looked very sturdy. It had square windows which looked to be made of reinforced glass and a single set of double doors leading into it.

I flew down from the tree and walked through the gatehouse. There were bulky robot guards with high-tech looking weapons that let me through. As I approached the building I could feel the overwhelming aura of strength and stability emanating from it. Large bull horn speakers on the guard tower spoke in a clear and loud, but not overwhelming voice.

"I am the representation of the dream archive you should be making."

I go inside the building and find it to be full of server space with hard drives. It explains how I should make a new more organized dream journal. (This is actually somewhat true and something I have been considering. I actually have three dream journals in which I document different dreams. Dreamviews tends to get most of my lucid dreams, but I keep non lucids and dream fragments and the like in a private dj.)

The dream then transitions to inside my current workplace. Dream characters are sitting around talking about lucid dreaming. One of them points out how he will always dream that his son will come to work and tell him that he is dreaming, but that he always ignores it and doesn't get lucid. I laugh and say that my dream guide appears alot in my dreams but I don't get lucid upon seeing her.

I woke up, typed short notes to remember the lucid and went back to sleep.

I had another lucid dream, but I don't remember much of the content of it. It started on my college campus and I wound up going underground into a tunnel full of trash and losing lucidity.

This is from awhile ago. Probably sometime in late august of this year. I only remembered it because of the dream journal autosave function.

I was at the grocery store; my old workplace from 2018ish. I had just clocked off a shift when I was approached by a group of shady-looking people in a black pickup truck. They were a high profile drug cartel and had asked me to be a drug mule for them in exchange for a briefcase full of cash. I had completed the mission, delivered the drugs to the recipient and was about to get paid. They slammed the briefcase shut, and their leader explained they planned to turn me into the cops. Basically explaining how I was an idiot to think they would pay me, and that they intended to turn me over to the police for being a part of their operation, to throw them off the trail since I didnt have any connections to their group.

Nonlucid brain of course freaks out (instead of realizing that guy was probably screwing himself because I knew what his gang looked like, what car they drove, and where I had picked up the drugs from and who I had given them to, and that they had no evidence against me.) I start screaming and jumping up and down like a toddler throwing a tantrum.

Then Manei pulls up in an old rusty red pickup truck and I completely forget about that plotline. She's really upset, borderline crying and I ask her to explain wny. She tells me to look in the back of the truck so I do. Its about 20 black cats, including one litter of kittens. She's super worked up because black cats are seen as tokens of bad luck and nobody wants to adopt them so she had to rescue them herself.

-+-

I am involved in some sort of lucid dream war. The full story eludes me but I am in an OTD area that is mostly farm fields and forests, and I am partially lucid. Most of the combatants in the group are fairly typical soldiers with modern gear and standard rifles and stuff; a couple of tanks and other armored vehicles. But there are more exotic combatants rolled in there. One guy is a pyromancer or firebender of some sort wearing some kind of robe or gown. A few of the soldiers are wearing camo-painted powered armor and using more futuristic weapons. The leader of this group is like a big leopard in a power suit with a humanoid body weilding a plasma battleaxe.

We are fighting against hordes of black and gray zombies with glowing red eyes. They come out of the field which is some kind of burial ground like zombies and we are gunning them down before they can get close. Then a big three-headed dragon comes out, its stature and body structure reminding me of king ghidorah. One of the armored vehicles fires a volley of missiles and the dragon roars but doesn't seem to have taken any significant injury. It lunges at our formation, biting down on soldiers who are firing on it in futility. Its centermost head lets out a roar which carries with it an aura of terror. I feel this 'aura' of fear somewhat but resist the urge to run away. Most of the force scrambles away.

The leopard man isn't phased. He jumps onto the dragon's head and holds onto one of its horns. Then begins one-handedly chopping at its neck. He actually manages to get off one of its three heads before the dragon grabs his arm in its mouth and shakes him around before throwing him across the field into a tree. His arm had torn off and the dragon ate it. Leopard man prepares to make a last stand. I summon my amethyst bow and kill the giant dragon by shooting an arrow into each of its two remaining heads. It then begins burning away in a manner very reminiscent of how a dragon would die in Skyrim and I absorb some power from it. I go help the leopard warrior get up despite him being battered and bloody and missing one arm. When I do I get a feeling from him. That he is an exceedingly proud warrior that refuses to quit fighting until he either dies or wins. I wanted to tell him he did a good job and that he should go find a medical camp, but knew he wouldn't listen no matter how I tried to convince him.

The remainder of our battered group continues to advance. We get into this grassy field surrounded by a wooden fence with this old abandoned farmhouse and fog closes in. There is a bit of a creepy atmosphere. Then this bug Sauron looking guy comes out with a giant sword and shield. Raiah (yes my original character) says "I've got something special for this freak" and shoots a matter disintegrator bolt from her robot arm. He blocks with his shield though it does make the shield glow red and orange where it hits. I tell everyone to stand back and let me handle this.

I use my upgraded form. I'm very familiar with it now and I notice that. "I must have gotten used to it in dreams I don't remember anymore." I say to myself before I roar at him and then charge. There wasn't any real martial arts or strategy. I just rushed him and grabbed his hand holding the sword to prevent him from using it. We wrestle for a bit, as we twist and torque one another in various ways we get pushed through the farmhouse destroying the middle section leaving just the front and back wall and a little section of roof. His armor is covered with spikes and blades and its difficult to wrestle him without something poking or cutting me. Wrestling him is exhausting. Eventually I get him pinned and manage to pull his helmet off. He is just an old bully from junior high. I then grab him by the neck and pull him out of the armor, but do so in a way that doesn't injure or discomfort him. His body is normal sized and doesn't even fill a portion of the armor's torso, and all the armor breaks away when I remove him.

Last night:

I went to bed meditating on the idea that I seem to have developed a rather adversarial relationship with myself, and that since very early in my lucid dreaming career I have struggled with dream characters being directly and openly opposed to me being lucid. I think this epiphany was at least partially motivated by the "lucid dream war" being the crescendo of a very long lineage of dreams about fighting hostile dream characters. I have also struggled with myself reacting violently against dream characters when it is unwarranted. I resolved that it may be a roadblock that is keeping me from having more frequent and more enjoyable lucid dreams, and that I wanted to remedy this.

I was walking in a park. The park is on a big sloping hill overlooking a beach with neatly mowed grass and trees surrounding it on three sides. There is a large parking lot near the top of the open grass area with cars parked in it and a small modern/futuristic cafe style building made out of glass, curved steel tubes and suspension wires that sort of hangs out over the slope. It kind of reminds me of half of a suspension bridge sticking out over the steeply sloping park with two levels of decks with chairs and dream characters sitting on them eating and talking. There is also a black paved walking trail that snakes back and fourth heading down towards the beach.

I am walking along the black walking path thinking about how I should not be here, that it is a long way to get back to work. I then question where I am and become lucid. A family approaches me. Two children and two adults. They feel familiar and inform me that they have missed me and want to know when I might be able to come over and see them. Though there is an unspoken subtext that this implies they want to meet me in lucid dreams again. I respond with something to the effect of "I'll come see you soon" which similarly has an unspoken subtext that I have been seriously considering getting back on the lucid dreaming wagon. I acknowledge that I am accomplishing my goal of having positive interactions with dream characters.

Another dream character comes along with several dogs on leashes. They all look like labradors in various colors and are all quite large. As the dream character walks by the dream scene shifts. I am underneath a stairwell in a basement somewhere; the walls are plywood and 2x4 studs, with all of the dogs but not the dream character. There is very little free space and the dogs become agitated. I try to convince myself that they are just excited to see me and not aggressive, though I didn't thoroughly convince myself.

I am then back in the park scene, now on the inside portion of the cafe. I am holding a black and white cat with long fur, holding it on its back with belly and paws up. The cat is agitated and aggressive. It is hissing at me and trying to claw me and so I try to hold it in a different position. I try to put it down. None of these options work. My arms are not responding. Despite still being at least partially lucid I am now only an observer with no ability to act or speak.

The cat is still aggressive and hissing. But now it is breathing heavily and makes a sort of loud irritating squeaking/wheezing sound when it does. Each time it breathes in its eyes and paw pads, which are jet black, swell up slightly then shrink. But each time the cat breathes in they swell a little bigger and don't shrink quite as much. There is a fearful sort of tension, as though this sounds absurd, in the context of the dream it was a rather disturbing and grotesque phenomenon. I try to channel positive energy into the cat, sensing that it is suffering. I try to break free of the situation and just do anything on my own volition, but I'm now only a lucid observer. A dream character starts laughing at me. I pull my rip cord and tell myself that this is becoming a nightmare, and I want to wake up.

Too late. The cat's eyes and pawpads pop, splattering me and the surrounding dream characters with black tar. Everyone starts running and screaming. The black tar burns my skin and I am filled with a horrible terror as gooey sort of spider-like parasites crawl out of its eyes. I finally finish awakening and the dream fades out, though with the emotional intensity I probably would have woken up anyway.

I was vacationing with my father and stepsisters. We are driving/camping in an 18 wheeler gasoline truck and I am the one who is driving. We are on the interstate when we arrive at a section of road that is under construction and I am forced to turn off the highway in this massive and nonsensical spaghetti interchange. I am worried that I will end up driving off the end of an overpass/bridge as I see several that just end. Instead I somehow find myself driving into traffic that is going the other way. But I am a big truck and I lay into the horn. It is stressful but we manage to get out of traffic and onto a side road.

...

We are approaching in a small town about ten miles off the freeway. There are nothing but farms and forests all around I tell my father to use his phone GPS to get us back on the highway and towards our destination and he says that his phone isnt connecting. We then see that there is a cell phone tower but it fell over. There are three big black spaceships landed in a farm field.

The whole town is taken over by aliens. They are short and fat and look like gerbils or hamsters but are wearing military gear. Its kind of hard to take them seriously when two of them come up to the truck as we drive into town and tell us to pull over and get out. They take us into the town hall where they have gathered all of the humans and are holding us hostage.

My stepsister freaks out and gets into an ambulance and tries to drive away. There is an alien sniper on the steeple of a church. This one looks like a classic "alien" (skinny, gray skin, big eyes, etc) with a ray gun that shoots green blobs of plasma. Each time he shoots it he destroys like a one-foot sphere of the ambulance, leaving it molten around the edge. Most of his shots only hit the back part of the ambulance which doesn't stop it from driving but then my stepsister crashes into a fire hydrant and causes water to spray out.

...

We are in the supermarket. The aliens tell us we are being taken prisoner to become slaves and we must gather food that we can eat when I become lucid.

"Im dreaming. It's been a long time since I've been lucid."

"Hey buddy!" One of the hamster aliens yells, pointing his rifle at me. "Lucid dreaming isn't allowed."

Initially I was going to beat the crap out of him, but I have resolved to not annihilate every irascible dream character with powers. Instead I reach into my pocket. He tensed up and thought I was reaching for a weapon. I pulled out something that was like a business card though Im pretty sure it was blank and showed it to him.

"I have my lucid dreaming pass."

"Oh, ok then." And he walked away.

The fortunate thing is most dream characters dumb enough to attack a lucid dreamer are also dumb enough to fall for things like that. I tried a teleportation spell several times and had no luck so I decide to look for Manei. I call her name and one of the people in the supermarket comes up to me. She chides me for being unable to recognize her, but in this form she is much shorter and wearing an odd outfit that looks like a medieval bard with a lute and axe and stuff. She changes to her default form.

We go back outside where the gray alien is talking to two of the hamster aliens. The gray jumps up and down and screeches.

"Theres no such thing as a lucid dreaming pass you idiot! Kill them! Kill them right now!"

The gray alien is supposed to be their commander but he sounds and acts more like a tantruming toddler.

So after 10+ years of dealing with Manei I have finally figured out how I can get her to fly. Ive tried carrying her but that is logistically complicated considering I tend to fly by projecting fire jets from my hands and feet. Ive gotten really good at this over the years and its become a common schema. I still have problems sometimes getting enough thrust to get significant altitude or speed when i want. If I don't have all four limbs free to vector my direction of travel I tend to do a lot of crashing or flying out of control. But I intuitively discovered that by holding her hand I can somehow share the ability to project fire jets to her. Then as long as we can stay in "formation" we can fly much more conveniently.

We lift off. No real trouble with thrust or gaining altitude. Which has been an issue the past few years considering how out of practice i've been with this stuff. The aliens try to shoot at us but their aim is actually egregious. The gray alien screams again

"Shoot them! You have stormtrooper aim, you idiot hamsters!"

...

We are flying for awhile when the flying cut out. Ive had issues where it gradually putters out but this time it just immediately shut down for both of us. I grabbed onto her and landed on my back, even though I we weren't flying very high and I have seen her survive far worse than a fifty-foot fall into grass. To be completely fair I dont think the aliens were much of a threat once I became lucid, but it was better to not be distracted by them. When we land she begins sharing a power with me to walk across water as we have landed in next to a remote pond. When we get to the shore we see a long bridge in the sky. Its some kind of highly advanced mag-lev train system.

"You must be really out of practice if you can't teleport."

"What are you talking about? I was never good at it to begin with. Most of the time I would just end up waking myself up."

--we did discuss more after this but it turned into a highly personal discussion. I woke up not long after.--

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.

I am adventuring with some DCs through the dreamworld, which in this instance had a very backrooms aesthetic. Walking through a lot of empty liminal spaces like abandoned malls, empty industrial lots, unfurnished homes etc. Eventually we come across this DC who reminds me of A living in this abandoned warehouse by a fishing dock. There is a small office attached to the warehouse where he has a bed and some supplies. He explains that he has been stranded in this dreamworld for forty years (he has drawn many, many tally marks on the side of the warehouse). Proceeding to explain that it obeys video game logic. There is loot that spawns periodically in some nearby crates, its always the same few items every time like some canned fish and whatnot. Enemies in certain areas. He has never found a weapon or way to fight them off and thus is stuck in this small peaceful area away from any enemies.

He leads us around the inside of the warehouse where small fishing boats are stored and maintained in drydock. He explains that one of the loot that spawns is a spare parts kit that can be used to repair the boat but its a small one so each time it spawns he's only able to restore the boat by a little bit. I then notice that I've been separated from the other dream characters. He picks up a big pipe wrench and starts swinging at me. I become lucid and block the wrench with my arm. The metal becomes brittle and the wrench cracks in half. I then push him in the chest hard enough to send him through the corrugated metal wall of the warehouse. He's winded but still alive.

I find the other DCs that I was adventuring with are all dead except for Manei (who may or may not have been with us originally) was hiding underneath the couch in one of the boats. She explains that we're stuck here and cant apparate/teleport out, and I can sense the danger in her voice. I tell her that I'm going to fly around to explore and she should climb up onto the roof so I can see that she's doing okay.

I take off and begin flying around. I inspect my fire jets and they seem low resolution (like the fire is just a 2d image how its rendered in some low poly games). But they work fine that's all that really matters. Sadly this is video game logic and I bump into a lot of invisible walls trying to fly onto different rooftops etc.

I then point out there is a sailboat we could escape on but its way out on the end of the dock. I land and we begin running there, however we both see something moving under the water. It lunges out at us. The nightmare is black with red eyes. Its mostly humanoid in size and body shape with long pointy ears and oversize arms with huge webbed hands tipped in long claws. It has a sort of scaly texture like an alligator, and geeze this guy was fast. I flew up in the air the first time he lunged out of the water and he got Manei. His jaw unhinged and he bit off her head in one bite before cutting her stomach open and eating her guts like spaghetti. I wont describe too many of the details here but it was pretty vivid and grotesque, but also sort of comical in a way.

I threw a firebolt at him but all that did was make him angry. He then charged after me. I ducked out of the way, flying under the dock and up into the air once more. I summoned my amethyst bow, and though I didn't have a lot of faith it was going to put down one this troublesome, I decided to try. When he lunged up at me I fired, getting him through the shoulder. He did not take kindly to the magical amethyst arrow as he instantly dropped limp into the back of a row boat and then began writhing around in pain trying to get the arrow out. I transformed the bow into a spear and dropped down to stab him through the mouth. This seemed to be the killshot as the creature turned into a pile of black ash.

"That was weird. Haven't seen one of these things in years."

It is true. That particular form of nightmare was really common when I first got into lucid dreaming. Black and dark gray with red eyes, but they haven't showed up since I got into college. I saw that other areas had been unlocked and I was able to teleport. I was at Manei's house (though it didn't look like any previous depiction of her house, this time it was a big mansion in a tropical locale with a pool.) It was cloudy and raining a little but she was throwing a pool party. This big buff guy with a baseball cap brought several coolers of beer.

"I have an announcement to make. Everyone know that big black monster with the long claw arms?"

Most of the people in the party started chattering.

"I killed it."

Everyone gave an applause. I started getting in the pool to enjoy myself but woke up.

The dream starts out within minecraft. I am in a birch forest and come across a decently sized house built on a hillside. Its made out of different types of wood, logs, fences and such. I look through the chests in the house and find some mostly standard minecraft stuff. Bread, wood, cobblestone, lots of iron and a few diamond tools. The owner comes up, some other Minecraft player who greets me and invites me to join the server/community/etc. I follow them a short distance down a river and find myself on the shore of the ocean where the river flows out into the ocean and there is a beach party.

I become lucid. After briefly pondering what to do, I decide to meditate within the dream. I seat myself and begin my counting technique. This results in some very interesting effects on the dream as it begins to morph between realistic and the minecraft world. The beach goers change from minecraft people to real life people. The bank of the river which I am seated next to partially morphs into a realistic appearance, resulting in the diagonal river bank of blocks to resolve as cubes of realistic and tangible dirt with green grass on top. I could run my hand through the grass and pull it up. I could run my hand along the side, bust apart the packed dirt and feel the finely formed corner of the block. I mentally get up and investigate the beach which has undergone a similar effect. The beach is made up of one meter cubes of sand. But it is real tangible sand that obeys real physical properties and is just compacted enough to retain its shape. If you disturb it it will begin to crumble and come apart into a more naturalistic form.

Normally I find dreams pertaining to video games to often be extremely dull and bland but both in the moment and in hindsight I was fascinated by this effect. I continued to meditate, hearing some form of voice say to me that I should be sure to document this dream (well here I am) and attempt to lucid dream the following night. (Well here I go...)

As I have been meditating some clouds above the beach have lingered but are slowly dissipating with each breath. The number of beachgoers seems to be dwindling as well. Then I opened my eyes and saw my IWL room. I'm not sure if I dreamed this or not but I closed them again and by some miracle managed to return to the dream for perhaps ten or fifteen more seconds before I woke up for good.