Lucid Time!

I'm playing an old-school side-scroller type video game. You play as this ninja dressed in all black with a red belt and scarf. You can move, roll, crawl, jump, flip, etc, and the character, while everything is pixelated, does a good job of looking like he's animated fluidly. There is a magical talking punching bag that teaches you how to play. The talking punching bag explains how you can preform a fast attack with 'A' button and a slow attack with 'B' button.

I think this was the first video game dream to ever show a game controller or even reference the fact that it was a game, and that I was playing. I think it was a gamecube controller.

If you press 'A' several times, you fill up a combo meter, and the more this is filled up, the more powerful your 'B' attack will be. I also take note that the game handles range well, if your a little bit closer to the target you'll automatically use punches, while if your a bit farther away, you'll use kicks that have a bit more range.

...

I'm now on the third to last level. There are three temples (large pagoda styled buildings visibile from the world map.) The first one is green, the second red and white, and the third, gold. This one was a plant-themed boss. The next one was a fire and ice themed boss, and the final boss was in the gold temple. I also remember the game having some storyline about you rescuing your girlfriend/wife, but I think it was building up to a plot twist.

There were some platforming challenges, you had to jump on these mossy stone blocks to avoid falling into a pit of thorns. Then some green ninjas appeared and I fought them. I then became the character of the game and the pixelated reality became three dimensional. I started to become lucid and started to walk around in the third dimension. The path up to the temple was now a spiral. There were some more ninjas, but I think they disappeared before I could fight them.

I came up to the top of the spiral and the dream got really good in terms of clarity. I climbed up upon a mound of sand (dream sign), and looked around. The game world was still projected in three dimensions. I saw the other two temples, but the green one that I was at was now gone. The two remaining temples were atop rock towers that put them above the terrain. Below, the ground looked like a wasteland. Rocks, and a couple dry riverbeds with some mountains in the distance.

I turned my attention back to the area surrounding me. The cobblestone path that led up to the mound of sand. Around me were these large trees that grew straight up leading to a small, tidy canopy of pale green leaves. Below them were clusters of bamboo, vines and ivy, and weird bulbous thorny plants that had been hazardous back in the early part of the dream where things were two dimensional video game. I feel like there was a metal bench partially overgrown and swallowed by the ivy. I feel like there was this huge stone skull (15 feet across) with plants coming out of the eyes and mouth, and a huge broken stone teapot. (Bigger than the skull) buried somewhere in the woods.

I then turned to the sky. The sky graduated from bluish green on the horizon to a dark purple directly above. There was a ringed planet and at least two moons. I remember one of the moons looked farther away. It looked like Mimas with a single huge crater. The other had highly contrasted terrain. Light ground and dark craters. Closer examination caused my vision to zoom in and see active lava fields in the craters. The gas planet was pretty small compared to what I usually get where the thing takes up half the sky, and I didn't really focus on it, but even with its small angular size in the sky, I could see the cloud bands and rings.

I remember thinking to myself: "How can dreams do this? How is it that in waking life, I can hardly solve a simple math problem, but at night, I can dream up something as marvelous and complex as this?" After all, your brain is just a computer, with neurons in place of circuits. What kind of power do you need to synthesize a world like this?

Well I didn't come to any conclusion. I just wound up sinking into the mound of sand that had a tunnel under it. I remember when I was a kid, my parents told me never to dig a tunnel on the beach and crawl into it as it might cave in and I will suffocate. And sure enough, as soon as that happened, the cave fell in on my gut and I couldn't get out. I tried to reach my cell phone but couldn't. I remember thinking that I had this cool new holographic phone.

I woke up.