Nerefa

I was trying to break a kid free from a school that was imprisoning him. It was a long process of avoiding the campus police, as this was the largest campus I had ever seen, and I kept getting lost.

I eventually got him out of there, and he climbed one of the tall fences out onto the city road.

As I crossed the street, I turned into my dragon and spent time in the city.

I eventually went into a beautiful, massive building. I’m not well-versed in building architecture, so I’m not sure what type of building it was exactly. A cathedral? A monestary? The floors were a glossy white, surrounded by pillars decorated with blues, reds, and golds. There were multiple levels you could climb up, each hall winding along the walls.

I went through the front door for once! I had a respect for this building that I don’t normally feel.

I wandered up each floor all the way to the top, then back down.

I spent this time being mindful of my perceptions and body, feeling the numb, warm, comfortable tingling sensation of sleep. I’ve been thinking of using this to recognize dreams, since it’s a physical feeling that’s always present in sleep.

I took a moment to check in with my senses and perception, thinking about how surprising it is that so many people don’t expect dreams to feel real.

Everything feels completely real and vivid, identical to waking experience (aside from that sense of the body laying comfortably numb in bed).

I wouldn’t be able to tell it was a dream just based on my eyesight, touch, or other senses.

I exited the dream for a moment and sat in pure aware sleep. Then I re-entered the dream again, reappearing in the same spot.

I had atajen pictures on my phone and was amazed at how my mind could create these pictures, yet I can’t draw anything nearly that realistic.

A monk walked by, wearing orange robes. I asked him if he knew what lucid dreamers were.

He answered “Yes, I’m talking to one.” with a smile.

“Oh, excellent. Do you have any recommendations for me?” I asked, happy that he knew me. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, or what I should do.

He then turned and pointed towards the stairs. “Yes. If you walk up, you can get to the top. It’s a couple of stories, but there’s a nice spiraling staircase at the top that’s worth the journey.”

I nodded. “Thank you. I was just there. It was lovely.” I said.

I could feel myself about to wake up. It’s morning and my body is ready to get out of bed. I stayed in the dream a bit longer.
“I have a few minutes at most.” I said.

“Ah.” he replied, understanding what I meant.

He was going to show me something else, but as I was walking with him, I woke up.

This dream was not the most interesting. Normally I don’t bother writing these down, but wanted to touch up on my recall.

—-

Post apocalypse, me and a group of people drove away from our home town to escape an apocalypse.

Most of us didn’t know each other because we had just narrowly escaped disaster by squeezing into this vehicle last second.

There were three men, a newborn infant (belonged to one of the men), and a woman who was driving.

As we drove, we spotted a store that still had its lights on (not sure how because nowhere else had power) and wasn’t reduced to a pile of rubble like the buildings around it.

So we pulled over. It was a Disney giftshop of all things.

Turns out that despite everyone dying in the apocalypse and buildings going up in flames, Disney kept up with regular business hours.

The employees all acted like there was nothing going on outside.

They still took cash, even though money was pretty much useless now because of the apocalypse.

So we went in to purchase some supplies for the baby, which felt like a surreal contrast with how the world was outside.

Then we got back into the car and drove off, eventually reaching a city that appeared to be abandoned.

In this city, the buildings were all eerily covered in black and white striped fumigation tents.

We got out if the car because several of the guys wanted to stay here for the night, so we all stepped out and talked about our plans, speculating about why everything was tented.

An disagreement ensued because the woman wanted to leave, but her decision was outnumbered because everyone else wanted to stay.

The problem with splitting up the group was who got to take the car (the city had no cars in it, or they were under the tents).

Eventually the disagreement turned into politics (go figure) and got heated. I ended it by going with the woman and leaving everyone else with the car (turns out she just didn’t want to go alone, so she agreed to this setup).

So we set out on foot into the wilderness. The woman walked ahead of me and suddenly transformed into a wolfdog.

I was surprised because I didn’t expect her to have this ability, which I also have (guess we had more in common than I realized). So I turned into a wolf and ran after her through the forest. This made it easier to follow her because of my heightened sense of smell.

That’s all I remember for this one.

Had an ear infection on the same side I like to sleep on.

I used the throbbing pain as a gauge for WILD. After laying in bed relaxed for a few minutes, I paused my thoughts, abiding in present moment awareness. In a couple seconds, I felt the sensation of falling asleep. With it, the pain in my ear vanished.

So I dislodged myself from my body and flew over to my spouse, reaching through her and calling her name just to see what happened. She was asleep. I turned into my dragon while I was bothering her (in preparation for adventures to come).

My spouse and I have been doing little experiments like this off and on for months to test potential dream sharing.

Later, when I woke up, she told me that she had a dream in which I hovered over her in a video call saying something (in her dream). Apparently I interrupted something she was doing in her dream.

Anyway, in my dream, after bothering her, I flew out the room. My house had some warped spots. Rooms turned in wrong directions mainly.

I eventually flew out the window. It was night and our yard was bigger, full of dead trees, and one living tree (which we don’t have in waking reality). Our fence was gone, but the property was more isolated—away from any other homes.

I had to go to the bathroom in that moment, so I spring back to my body and woke up, went to the bathroom, and went back in with another identical WILD.

I flew back out again (dragon form) to the nearest neighborhood with lights on and snuck into a house. In the house, a creature was hiding and didn’t want me to see it. Apparently it used to live in the house, but it had been living outside since a recent incident that turned it into a mutant.

There were a couple of other mutants living with it, but this house only belonged to one of the mutants (the one with large fangs who’s body was chopped up into pieces, and crudely stitched together). Sometimes his body fell apart and he had to stitch it back up.

The mutants were visiting the house (the one I snuck into), wishing to live there again. It was a cute little modern house. Nothing too fancy, but just a bit upscale. Small home with tall ceilings.

The creature hesitated to stay here because it didn’t want to be seen by its community as a mutant. It used to be a higher status member of society. Beautiful, well off, and respected in the community.

I don’t know what happened, but the creature deeply bemoaned its fall from grace and seemed quite preoccupied by this, so it didn’t notice me lurking around at first.

I hid in the cupboards.

I ended up being spotted eventually though. When it saw me, I flew into one of the other mutants and combined with it. There were no words spoken, but a sudden consensual possession.

This being had crab-like mutations. While I possessed it, I worked on trying to shape shift it back into its original form (more human) since I’m good at shapeshifting myself. Didn’t really work, but I tried.

In the meantime, I befriended the other mutants and explored the house, tinkering around with all their cool stuff.

After I woke up in the morning, my spouse told me that she had a dream about beings that didn’t want to be seen. She caught a glimpse of mutated parts of them.

I’ve been training rigorously and am at a point now where I’m lucid all night in all dreams on most nights.

Last night, a dream entity representing my subconscious mind put me through long trials designed to test my endurance.

During these tests, the dream was designed to “trick” me into nonlucidity, hinting that I was being tested for mastery over lucid dreams.

My fears and discomforts were used to throw me off track.

I had wounds in my arms, stomach, etc. at some point, but since I knew it was a dream, I shut off pain and didn’t care.

insects swarmed me, but I knew it was just a dream and didn’t let the sensation get to me.

Ghouls and monsters would jump out at me from otherwise seemingly normal scenes, but jump scares didn’t bother me because I knew it was a dream and just found it to be silly. I jumped at the monsters in return.

Family members I stopped contact with in waking life appeared to antoginize me like they used to, but I regarded them like flies knowing it was a dream and ignored the pestering.

Dream characters sometimes turned demonic, but I didn’t care.

I wish I could remember the whole narrative with every detail, but this was one long dream that lasted from around 10 pm to 3am.

The dream was “restarted” in creative ways to try and throw me off, though. Initially, the world was a town made of speghetti. This was the easiest to be lucid in.

When I wasn’t fooled by speghetti town, a dream character led me to a door leading outside to a more realistic setting. This was a test to get me nonlucid, but I knew this was a dream too because walking through a door isn’t how “waking up” works. That’s not a proper state transition.

Then I had a false awakening into my home that mimicked proper state transition, but nope, I knew I was traveling out of state right now and I’m not home, so I knew it was a dream.

Next I was in a realistic thriftshop type of store. I noticed TY beanie babies (a dream sign for me) on a shelf and knew it was a dream again.

False awakening happened again.

I forget how many times I had these false awakenings and in what order, but it was so frequent after a while that I became lucid just off of the repetition alone.

I falsely “woke up” in the right bed at one point. The room was convincingly realistic, but I still knew it was a dream. My spouse was sleeping to my left, which was the wrong side from my physical reality.

As I laid there, I started to hallucinate. A ghostly figure formed. I knew my fears were being tested again and I didn’t get scared of it, rejected it from my experience and it faded.

A shadow figure formed next and I shrugged that off too.

Then I had sensations of sleep paralyzis (just like I used to get), but it didn’t phase me the same way real sleep paralysis doesn’t anymore (I cured myself of decades worth of SP a couple years ago).

I went back into my lucid dream of the same rural town and rode a horse into the hills where my remaining fear finally manifested…

Behind the hills, reality ceased to exist. It was just an empty skybox, like the edge of a video game. Out of bounds.

I promptly turned my horse around and went back to the center of town away from the void.

I almost went into one of the buildings, but there was a crack in the wall with a bright white light shining through it. I sensed that the inside of this building didn’t exist, it was an out of bounds void inside, so I didn’t open the door.

“Who’s in control now?” said a voice all around me. My “dream” was speaking to me. You could say this is my subconscious, or whatever you want to call it.

The voice was neither male or female and seemed omnipresent. It had a taunting condescention oddly mixed with compassionate concern. I could hear both tones combined. The words were the same, but it was like two voices (the same voice) speaking them with different tones.

Every time I turned around, there was another out of bounds crack in the dream reality. Even the horse had cracks in it, so I got off, feeling an intense fear start to get to me.

I was confident that I could run, though. I can always wake myself up, and I will without hesitation if I touch the voids. My ultimate escape. Knowing this helps keep me calm even when I’m scared in my dreams, and I try to stay in them.

My dream is well aware of this fact. We’ve had this dynamic with my fears for more than 20 years (I’m aware that my dream isn’t a separate entity, but it presented as such in this particular dream). The difference now is that my lucidity rate is almost at 100% and I’ve overcome most of my fears… Most.

I teleported myself out of there completely and was back at the speghetti town. But this time, it was from third person perspective. Obviously a dream, but then I zoomed out and I realized I was just watching a movie on my phone.

My spouse was standing next to me. I stood there looking at my phone and thought it was odd. I just dreamed about that place.. I started telling my spouse about the neat testing dreams and lost lucidity in the process.

But mid-talking to her, it hit me. I realized this was a dream because there was no transition between waking and dream state (again) just now. I looked around at the colorfully painted walls of the pavilion I was standing in.

There were dream characters walking around, going about their business as if all was normal.

“Hey, wait a minute. This a dream still, isnt it?~” I turned and said to one of them with amusement.

The world froze. All of them looked at me like zombies.

The one I spoke to transformed in front of me, revealing a gray humanoid creature with red cube for a head. It smiled back in amusement. “Nothing fools you, huh?”

I nodded knowingly, recognizing that this was the source of the voice earlier (a manifestation of my subconscious mind). “Nope.” I said confidentally.

I was slightly disappointed that I was nonlucid at all. I thought about how I’m totally going to tell my spouse about this dream when I’m up for reasies, though. What a saga!

I was proud of myself. This was implied to be the final round. My lucidity had been put through the wringer, and I passed most of the tests, but… not all of them.

“Your fear of the void still rules over you.” the cube-headed figure stated tauntingly with implication that it would continue to taunt and control me so long as I had this fear.

But I sensed the compassion and concern, too. It also wanted me to get better, overcome the fear, and free myself from… myself. This was all me being my own antogonist, creating my own trials.

Then, the whole scene around me vanished. No cracks, no running, no time for me to escape. It happened too quickly for me to properly react.

I suddenly found myself standing in the void.

I was about to wake myself up, but I didn’t. I held my breath, feeling tense as a brick as I stood in front of the cube-headed figure. All the other dream characters vanished, but this one stayed with me, still standing in the same spot, looking at me, waiting. Knowing it represented my subconscious and the dream, it felt comforting.It was still here with me.

I looked around at the gray void, which had a black frame that formed a box shape we were standing in, providing some slight amount of structure, which also helped reduce my fear.

I was braced for terror, but never quite reached it fully like I normally would. I was able to stand there calmly and feel the tension leave my body (well, dream body).

I did eventually end the dream after a moment, but not from pure terror.
I was scared, but not as bad. I gave myself a moment of dreamless sleep afterwards, then woke myself up.

I’ve never stood in the void like that for so long and felt so close to okay… But I was spent. Normally my lucid dreams energize me, but all the suspense and tension from the fear trials was tiring. Plus I needed a restroom break.

It’s 3:24 AM at the time of journaling this. I need to go back to sleep, but I’m too scared of void… I don’t want go go back in. Maybe I’ll just stay up.

Update: It’s now 4:35 AM. I’m ready to go back in. I feel less alone when I’m with myself in the void. Back to bed now.