lucid

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.

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.

I am outside this large estate. It's owned by this man who looks like Sherlock Holmes and a large group of servants, friends and family members. I have trespassed on his property or owe him some kind of debt and the only way that I can repay it is to hunt and kill the bear that lives on his property. The property he lives on is very expansive and very detailed for a dreamworld, consisting of rolling open fields and dense clusters of trees with the occasional pond or river running through. Gravel trails and roads cut around his property and his wealthy friends and family ride around on little cars like golf carts.

Regardless my only weapon in the hunt for the bear is a stack of cheese slices. I tried eating some of them but they didn't have any flavor but they were supposed to be my weapon. So I tried very carefully breaking them into the shape of throwing stars instead. I heard something rustling a nearby bush and watched as a large form rushing behind another bush. I started to back away but the "bear" came out. This is the only sequence of the dream that I remember clearly.

It turns out the bear was actually this mike tyson looking fellow with an abnormally large and muscular body and small (average sized) head who was about 8-9 feet tall, and was wearing studded armbands and a fur kilt like a barbarian. It didn't seem to be a play on "bear" as a body type as he had hairless washboard abs and a lot of rather lean muscle. He begins charging me. I throw my cheese slice thorwing stars and they are about as comically ineffective as it would be in real life.

When he gets close he assumes a boxing stance and throws a punch. I pull back. He throws another, and I block it. He's strong but he doesn't have that terrifying strength where simply blocking with my arm breaks it or even hurts that much. But I still want to be careful. He swings at me again and I pull back a ways then start charging him, jump in the air and try to kick him in the face and he ducks out of the way. I pass over him and pull back, primed to kick again. I throw a feint and then an actual kick, connecting to the side of his body which stuns him. He cries uncle and I relent.

The guy then explains to me that he's been trapped on this guy's property and been forced to hunt down people he doesn't like for his amusement. I argue that together we should be able to storm his mansion and bring him to justice, but he doesn't seem interested in revenge. Instead he shifts the conversation to be about his feelings and in turn the mike tyson character turned out to be this big softie.

-+-

Something to do with being in Toronto and there was a green Sharknado with mutant sharks inside of it and lightning. I was at least semi lucid and making note of how detailed the destruction caused by the tornado in the dream was.

-+-

Something to do with being in Florida with my father and some other assorted family members vacationing.

-+-

I got lucid and started flying through space at massively FTL speeds, arriving in a binary star system and landing on the moon of a gas giant where I meet Marcus. The planet has purple skies and lakes and large rock towers and mesas scattered about. The vegetation comprised of tall palm trees with paddle like leaves and small grass with nodules on the end. The plants all have jet black leaves with an odd oily sheen to them when viewed from certain angles can look like a dark bluish green or reddish purple.

An alien lifeform approaches me. Its body is slightly larger than a human head, and looks something like an exposed brain but made of a hard material like bone. It has 3 compound eyes in an inverted triangle and two long limbs with hands hanging below its body, and two shorter limbs which also have hands. On the sides of its body are dark purple fleshy organs, two to each side and an organ that beats very rapidly like a heart. There is a bioluminescent patterning across its body which is very visible in the dim light of the forest.

Marcus is there, in his robotic form, and explains that these are member of an alien race that we would call the Ta'grool. He goes on to explain that they have the levels of intelligence and societal development of early humans. The organ on the side stops beating so rapidly and the creature lands, using its longer set of limbs to stand.

Marcus goes on to explain that on this planet, many creatures have evolved an organ which functions as a lung, heart, and thruster system, and that is how these aliens are able to fly. (He gave this organ a name but I don't remember it). He explained how rings of muscle create a pumping action that forces air through the organ fast enough to create some measure of thrust. Enough that a lighter creature can hover for a short time. Since the organ also functions as their heart and lung it feeds oxygen through rapidly to sustain this intensive activity, and the oxygen doesn't have to travel far to get to the muscles which do the pumping.

I asked him why he was introducing me to this alien. He returns simply by responding how life is fascinating to him.

Spoiler for NSFW Sex:

In the dream I was a blonde girl wearing blue panties and a tank top. I was like moving into an apartment while fingering myself and streaming it on twitch or onlyfans or something with a smartphone. I get like semi lucid and think "hmm this is weird I have a vagiana and I'm like actually getting "correct" sensations from it." Though in dreams I've had extra sets of arms multiple times in the past so I guess not that weird.

I stop moving the boxes and stop streaming on my phone and just start playing with myself. I then decide I want to try it with an actual penis. As if on cue this guy walks in. He's like the owner of the apartment but like late teens brown hair very 'generic' looking but kind of wide shoulders, short, and a little on the chubby side. He immediately freaks out upon seeing me half naked on the couch and is all modest about it, but I can see his boner and I tell him to cut loose. He starts taking a condom from his walled but I tell him that won't be necessary.

So he undoes his belt and takes off his clothes (and he had spongebob breifs) and gets on top of me. He obviously had no clue what he was doing but it was still better than my fingers. It wasn't that good he had a really small dick and a mini beer belly that I was staring at the whole time. For some reason the folds on his stomach kind of looked like a face and that was really distracting. The dude gets through about two thrusts before he finishes, goes soft and basically passed out. I wake up after that but didn't have a wet dream.

-+-

In dream I was at work and I had a small tattoo on my left arm. In dark blue ink I had a dreamcatcher on my bicep and it was wrapped in plastic wrap. I couldn't remember why I had gotten it or how I had made it through (IRL I'm terrified of needles) but nevertheless I was showing it off.

-+-

Manei and I met in what seemed like a restaurant kitchen. She is telling me about a date she went on that went badly, that she saw some guy and he didn't like her. I don't remember her exact dialogue but she complained that the guy kept telling her she was too tall and looked too skinny from the side.

"First of all, that sounds really shallow. Second of all, this is a lucid dream, can't you look however you want?"

"Well of course I could. How one wants to express their truest self in a [plane of existence where such things are malleable, (this part was in dreamspeak and didn't translate, as is everything else in this convo in brackets)] is a form of self expression that nobody should deny or try to change, ever. If someone doesn't love you for who you really are then that's their problem not yours. I mean having an opinion is one thing but you shouldn't be a dick about it. But he didn't think that and thats why I didn't agree to a second date."

We left the kitchen and were at a fancy beachside resort at twilight. It had a tall hotel tower with a lot of balconies and large pool. There was a long sidewalk with dwarf palm trees on both sides leading out onto the beach. There were two suns, one smaller than the other and the big ringed Saturn planet so this must have been that dream planet. She asked me how my 'date' went and for some reason implied the earlier dream.

"Well it wasn't much of a date, not much emotional bonding." I said openly sharing the memories of the prior dream. "The guy finished in about 5 seconds, and he was wearing spongebob underwear."

She abruptly changes the subject. We sit down together in a large net hammock.

"I was born in [Either Hawaii or Southern California on some other timeline, so don't bother looking for me in records]. I got sick when I was about 12, and died when I was about 18 or 20. I never got to go out and meet people and fall in love. Even when I was at the end, when I so weak could barely move, the doctors would bring me out in a wheelchair or a bed to watch the sunrise in the beach and would tell me that I was smiling. When I passed the higher ups gave me a lot of choices since I had a short life and didn't get a chance to do what I wanted. I chose to do this, to live on as a fragment of someone else. Its one of the few ways I could keep my individuality and most of my memories."

"You know I can't truly believe that. It's hard to believe you're anything but a fragment of my own consciousness trying to justify its reason for existence."

"Science and physics as you know them does not explain everything, you know that. Its intentional, the higher ups intentionally constructed your plane of existence that way. They wanted it to be so convoluted and difficult to comprehend that humans wouldn't bother to try but yet you try anyways. Right now I think humans of your earth are close to some big breakthrough but the Higher ups aren't ready for you to make it yet, thats why they put that virus in there, to distract you."

"Here's the part I never understood. Why would god or the higher ups or whatever hide his true presence?"

"They told me but I can't comprehend or understand either. [Think like what Marcus said. The difference between a monkey and a human. Their cells and bodies are 99% the same but that 1% is the difference between a monkey that can break a nut with a rock and a human that can build a spaceship that flies to the moon.

The Higher ups are like just a few more percent, because to them we are monkeys looking up at the moon and not even understand it as a place you can go. Try as a might you cannot explain to a monkey how a rocket or particle accelerator works or the complex political and scientific reasons you want to build them. The monkey will just ask why you didn't spend that time getting food or having sex. Your motivations are so complex compared to them that they might as well be nonsense. Sometimes its seems like they are hurting you causing disasters and pain and killing humans. When someone who is Cristian says "the lord works in mysterious ways" they are not just trying to make an excuse why bad things happen when their god should be watching over and protecting them. Well... sometimes they are, but what they really mean to say is this.

You can not believe anything else I ever tell you but please believe this. Those higher beings are out there, you can call them aliens or gods or visitors from other universes; they don't really care what we call them but they exist.]

"Okay." I respond. I can tell the dream is destabilizing and I put my arm around her shoulder, feeling how solid it is. "Daymn, gurl. Your shoulder feels like steel." I say, completely shifting the tone of the conversation. She laughs and despite my attempts to stabilize the dream fades out.

I am assigned a project in a class in high school or college. For the project I am assigned to make a TV show in one weekend though it doesn't have to be high quality. Everything has all the hallmarks of very ammeter filmmaking. I pick out a few classmates. One is this korean girl, another looks like Jak and another is this elderly woman with one eye sticking out who looks like an old witch or shaman. (She actually looked like a character from a recent chapter of my book.) We get to talking and decide we decide to make a cop show, and I'm going to be a filmer/cameraman and everyone else will play characters.

Episode 1:

We get some policeman costumes, buy a box of doughnuts and ask actual police officers to film outside the station. Idr what happened here but Jak and another boy who had joined the project were sitting outside eating doughnuts and talking about a recent crime. The scene ended on a dick joke.

Episode 2:

The Korean girl is filming a scene where she is a private investigator hacking a companies' computers for signs of corruption. This was her scene idea and its super tropey (black hoodie, dark room, eating cheetos, like five monitors and her saying "I'm in" after typing on a keyboard super fast for like thirty seconds.). We spent a lot of time getting things set up the way she wanted it.

Episode 3:

Some kind of murder mystery and me (who was normally the director/filmer) got to guest star as the filmer. We filmed on my phone which we taped to the ceiling and applied a filter to make it look like security camera and Jak wearing a robber mask shot me with a nerf gun. Then cut to the old witch woman wearing a sherlock holmes outfit looking at me pretending to know forensics and me laying on the floor in a puddle of ketchup. (IIRC she just looked old but was actually a teenager)

Episode 4:

We went from a cop show to a cooking show. I was in the classroom where the dream started but it was now a kitchen, washing a big silver bowl and talking about what food I was going to make.

...

Someone found one of my old sketchbooks. They proceeded to publish all of the worst/most awkward or embarrassing things out of it online and make a detailed wiki more or less with the intention of slander. (Though they were supposedly some kind of semi legitimate media outlet they were clearly doing it just for story.) They constructed a detailed report about my characters and stories obviously cherrypicking specific scenes and lines of dialogue out of context in an effort to make me appear racist and bigoted. I remember seeing a drawing I made of myself as a cowboy shooting someone (that I actually made IRL, in like the 5th grade) and him saying that because of that drawing I was a school shooter. Then another drawing of dream characters where the article went on to say I was bad at drawing faces and had psychological problems because I associated with dream character. (This drawing was not one I made irl)

I then ended up running into the head writer in a wal-mart parking lot at night and asked him why he did it. I told him if he didn't write an article telling the truth and admitting that he just did it for story, and post it on his website with a video of him and his writers apologizing that I would try and sue. He just laughed at me so I went to wal-mart and bought a sledgehammer and took it to his yellow Bentley. When he came back with his friends started crying saying it was a gift from his father who died. Obviously I didn't care cause the guy was an asshole.

...

I was in the basement of my old house playing video games with a friend (IDR which friend if it was an IRL one or an OTD one). He was playing halo and got attacked by a xenomoprh came out and jump scared him then killed him in game. Then it broke through the glass of the TV and came out in real life, and started eating him. I wasn't particularly scared in spite of it being a gory scene but I still ran upstairs and tried to get outside. I ran past my father who was confused and seeing him caused me to become lucid.

I was still running and a quick glance over my shoulder showed me the xeno coming out the door and it had killed my father. Now lucid, I saw a useless construction in the middle of the yard. It was like a big ramp and set of walls made out of random scrap plywood and 2x4s and stuff. I affirmed that when I got around it there would be something to help me fight back. When I did I found it was an open suit of power armor and a railgun rifle. (It looked just like one I currently have in my WIP drawing folder) I got inside and all the panels closed sealing me in. I could still see normally but I had a HUD now with a radar and health bar like you do in Halo. Movement felt slightly sluggish but very strong.

The Xenomorph caught up with me and tried to kill me by vomiting dark green acid on me. The HUD gave me a warning saying not to exit due to chemical hazard but said that the armor was made of nonreactive metal and acid resistant and the threat level was "low". The xenomorph tried to stab me with a scythe appendage but it just deflected off the armor; though it pushed me back some. I punched it back, which seemed to crack parts of its exoskeleton and hurt it pretty badly, causing it to bleed more acid. I then managed to grab hold of its tounge thingy (the little inside mouth thingy xenomorphs have) and pull it out. As the monster recoiled I picked up the railgun rifle and pulled the trigger.

Nobody told me that thing was fully automatic with a machinegun-like rate of fire. One short burst and shots rang out on streaks of plasma with very noticeable recoil that I could feel right through the armor. The volley turned the alien to a puddle of green goo and black chunks and well as flattening the neighbor's house and four or fire cars completely.

I was in my gym from primary school. A male gym teacher was there and I was doing normal exercises with some other kids. Everyone else left but for some reason I stayed and Marcus arrived and said one thing.

"When aliens arrive they will be so different to us that we will not even understand them as beings."

Then, floating in the middle of the gym appears a large sphere, about five meters around. It is made of mercury or a metallic silvery material that is highly reflective; almost mirror like and his hollow with holes allowing me to see inside. The mirror layer has fluid properties and is constantly shifting with new holes opening and old ones closing as the liquid flows around but always maintaining a perfect sphere. Inside the mercury layer is a cluster of crystals; which had a distinct milky pink color and were constantly growing and shrinking, and glowed slightly with pink light. They mostly stayed inside of the sphere but every so often the crystals would briefly spike outside of the sphere before shrinking back in again. The being also had a bluish white aura of light surrounding it; somehow not conflicting with the pink glow of the crystals or the sliver mirror component.

In retrospect the level of detail and actual appearance were really good... better than I think I could ever perceive with my IRL eyes. I can't really describe it lets just say it looked really good.

The alien (who for the remainder of this entry I will be naming Mirrorball) opens a dialogue with me, communicating in dreamspeak with simple thoughts and no distinct words. Mirrorball tells me it wants to show me something. I become Lucid as it invites me to fly with them. They deconstruct the gymnasium, exploding it outward; each seperate brick, wooden floor panel, roofing panel, screw and support beam floating separately like an exploded view. The both of us take off through the middle, flying up through the clouds and into space. Accelerating exponentially faster with each second we quickly hit relativistic speeds and are flying past stars and eventually break out of the milky way.

We continue flying, seeing the huge sponge-like structure depicted in extremely large scale depictions of the universe. Mirrorball informs me we are going well beyond the current sphere of earth can observe of the universe due to the speed of light and expansion of spacetime. More filaments come into view as the universe seems to becoming more densely packed with galaxies and stars. We start to slow down, flying into a vast galaxy. I'm intuitively aware that its at least a billion lightyears across; countless 'smaller' galaxies wrapped into it into it. We fly in near the center to a vast star cluster in a dense nebula impermeable to vision but glowing with the activity of hundreds blue giant stars. These stars are ringed in vast constructs, rings and spheres drawing off matter and energy and surrounded in countless planets much larger than earth covered in the lights of cities. Some of the planets look odd, like sections of the surface have been detached or removed intentionally and are on low orbits nearby. Taking a low trajectory we fly very low over the photosphere of a blue giant star, beneath a huge arc of plasma. It was during this time that I felt the burning heat of the star, and a strange prickle of radiation permeating me.

We arrive at the center of this hub of activity; an immense symmetric mandala-like structure built around the largest of the stars at the apex of the cluster, partially shrouded in a cloud of glowing gas which fades from blue to purple to red to a muddy brown as it goes out. I'm positively awe struck, not necessarily by the sense of scale or what I'm seeing but in what great detail and color I am able to see it. I try to hide the fact that I think I am not ready for whatever this is.

Mirrorball senses this thought and reassures me that he would not have come had I not been ready. Seven other members of his race/civilization then appear in front of me seeming to slowly expand into existence. Six are in a hexagonal constellation with the seventh in the middle. Though the seventh is larger and has more variation in his crystals and aura which rather than just pink are pink, blue, cyan and green. His metallic layer is also tinted slightly blue, like liquid osmium. I immediately assume that he is some leader or authority figure for this civilization and am informed that this is correct. I can also sense that while the six surrounding him and the og mirrorball who is still next to and slightly behind me are separate entities each with slightly varied temperaments and personalities.

Leader Mirrorball informs me that his civilization has technically existed since before the big bang and when the universe was created his civilization "impregnated" the universe through a sexual metaphor. Explaining that their father civilization created a "sperm" which impregnated the universe and was now inserting its genetic material. He explains that humans are the genetic material of the egg and that once we have sufficiently advanced and our civilizations have made contact we will grow into a singular greater being. He goes on to explain a little bit about his civilization explaining how they are 0-dimensional beings of pure will folding the fabric of spacetime through consciousness and the constructs I see surrounding them are just perturbations caused by their immensely powerful souls altering spacetime.

I begin to wake up. OG Mirrorball informs me it is time to return home with this information in hand.

I am at my old high school, specifically in the weight room. Manei is there, demonstrating her ability to lift hundreds of pounds with relative ease. Though provided dream bodies don't degrade from inactivity (and the fact that everything is imagined, and just a construct with no physical limitations besides the ones imposed by my subconscious) this seems to be a rather pointless endeavor besides getting a dozen or so gym rats to oggle her in disbelief. I am spotting her and slowly becoming lucid as things progress. Eventually she decides she's done working out and the two of us leave.

We begin navigating a fairly faithful recreation of my high school though eventually arrive back in my bedroom in my new house. There is some unusual temporal stuff as this seems to be happening simultaneously with another event.

In it I am on the street in front of R's house at night, Manei and Marcus have followed me here. I am explaining an enhanced form that I had discovered my ability to access at some time ago. Manei doesn't seem convinced until I show her. How I went about changing forms wasn't easy and whatever I was trying to do, she thought I was just yanking her chain with the first couple failed attempts. But eventually I managed to get it. Now I would be lying if I said that I hadn't accessed this form before on a few occasions, but in the dream I expressed a familiarity with it that could only be explained by false memories or repressed memories of dreams that I haven't written down.

I first explain that this enhanced form comes with an extra set of arms; meaning that I have four arms rather than two. IIRC I documented another dream about the first time I experimented with an extra set of arms and how the first set of arms seemed to be my real arms and had much more intuitive control, where the lower set felt like extra and took more concentration to move. Since then I seemed to have developed an at least competent level of awareness and control for my second/third set of limbs. I also go on to mention that upon waking up I often feel as though a part of myself is missing and that I have "phantom limbs" where my second set of arms should be, at least for a few hours after waking up.

The dream transitions back to my IRL bedroom (though it seems to be an iteration of it before it was painted.) Rather unusually I'm in my waking life body (theres a mirror in my room to confirm that.) Manei is laying on my bed. This has come to define an entire genre of dream that has gone mostly undocumented on this site where I think she is expecting something else to happen here but every time it instead it turns into a therapy session for my personal grievances with life and existential dread.

Being in my WL body feels so restrictive, so lethargic, and slow by comparison. All of my dream control abilities that I would normally have access to seem restricted. My perception feels so linear and so fuzzy. This was something I've verbalized with her before. In dreams the world can sometimes seem so impossibly detailed, clear and vibrant that coming back to reality you sometimes feel like you're going through life with ear plugs in and looking down binoculars made of toilet paper rolls. I vocalize this by saying something to the extent of. "I'm trapped in a weak, fat flesh prison and every night my soul yearns to be free of its suffocating and claustrophobic embrace." Going on to explain that I feel like my body badly limits what my mind can perceive and do, and my mind limits how I want to think about the world and reality because its from a human perspective.

I can tell she thinks I'm being a bit overdramatic and waxing philosophical in my wording but seems to understand my plight. Though I cannot help that fact. In dreams, particularly lucid ones, I often find that when I commune with other dream characters I don't even say a particular dialogue. I communicate with concepts and ideas. If it does translate to a dialogue it can become stilted or somewhat awkward to write out. Hence why more and more my dream journals tend to omit this dialogue.

...

Second dream. Starts out in front of R's house as night. I remember having this device that looked like Captain America's shield but had a rocket engine in the center of it. Initially it seemed like a fairly useless contraption but I pretty quickly cobbled together that it could essentially be used as a hoverboard. Though it only has a single downward thrust vector and is thus very difficult to control. (Why my subcon seem to be so concerned with accurately emulating thrust vectors during flight for stability and maneuvering in the same dream realm where one can fly by sitting in a chair and then lifting up the sides is still a mystery but let's ignore that.)

Theres some flying. Theres a large OTD lake with dream characters swimming in it. Jak makes an appearance. Except he's comically muscular. His torso and arms are like the size of a house, but has a regular human sized head on him. He's trying to swat me out of the air but I'm dodging him for some time. Eventually I get careless and he lands a hit. I lose the flying shield and am stuck in the water.

...

I had yet another Lucid that started out in front of R's house at night. (This actually seems to be an extremely common dream location. I would make a note to mark it as a dream sign save for I always find myself lucid or at least semi lucid every time I arrive here.) This time around I decide to fly with my thrusters. Flying starts off low and slow but with a bit of encouragement I manage to ramp up the speed, impressed by how well the dream renders the nighttime clouds and lights of distant towns as I ascend higher into the atmosphere. Though rather quickly I begin to sense that I'm shooting off too quickly and start to fly off into space. Luckily I'm able to arrest this in time and begin orbiting earth.

I descend near a city in America, I believe it was supposed to be Chicago judging by the presence of the Willis Tower in the skyline but I landed in California. It was just after sunset. I began looking for Manei, making my way down the street to a beach. The dream was crowded with a lot of dream characters doing beach activities, buying food and concession stands, carrying surf boards and the like. Eventually I find her relaxing in a beach chair in a bikini. Though her form is minced with a male and has long curly black hair everywhere. Her pits, her stomach, her face, and a very noticeable bulge in her bikini bottom. I find this some combination of funny and just odd but try not to make a mountain out of it. If she had a dollar for every time I'd minced my physical form.

She gets up and we open a dialogue for a bit but the dream fades out pretty quickly.

I am outside my old childhood house. Daytime (though the sky is more gray). Colors are dulled out the dream world feels flat, blurry, and generally low quality. I am already semi-lucid due to a gradual climb through lucidity that has happened over the course of a long dream of which I am only recalling the tail end of. I recall flying around, having some rather typical trouble with my flying powers with them being slow and very low to the ground but with some concentration, I am able to work past them. (I don't know why this is. I always seem to have these difficulties when flying now, but I always seem to be able to work past them.)

I attempt to explain to some dream characters (this brown-haired girl who was moving boxes out of a house a few lots down from mine) that this was a lucid dream. At first she doesn't believe me but after flying in circles around her a few times; doing some loops and flying through the branches of some trees I manage to get her attention that something is off and eventually fully convince her.

At this point, I begin explaining the nature of lucid dreaming to her in a pretty imprecise and incomplete manner. I explain the basic concepts of MILD, DILD and WILD, dream journaling, and dream stabilization. I then start demonstrating some basic dream control by summoning small items by reaching behind my back and grabbing them. I summon an apple and a bottle of some kind of alcoholic beverage that comes in this purple and blue glass bottle with crystals growing off of it and give them both to her. The dream scene transitions to a very distorted cafe/resturant enviroment where we are sitting on a large sofa and there are a lot of robots/ andriods. The lighting in the scene is very harsh; light and dark coming in through a big vertical window.

At some point I sit down on the couch and sink into it until I fall through the floor. I look up and see the resturant enviroment above me floating in a white void with some faint clouds. (It sort of looks like in a video game when you clip out of the world and fall through the floor). I begin flying once more but wake up not long after.