Nerefa

The night before last, I visited an alien planet. There were no plants and no breathable atmosphere. The ground was covered in gray sand (which had the appearance of ash).

There was no life outside, but civilization existed within an indoor city. Because indoor space was limited, the city was very compact with buildings being closed together and no roads for wide vehicles.

It resembled a shopping mall, but with more businesses and residential buildings all packed together.

Because this planet wasn't naturally habitable, it had no native life. The economy was sustained mostly through tourism.

I explored the city for a bit, then turned into my dragon to explore outside in the uninhabitable parts. Eventually woke up in the morning.

The following night (last night), I came back to this planet and applied for the local college. I’m not sure what I'll be studying yet, but I took a bus to the campus and enrolled, so I'm a student now!

The admissions office directed me to a grassy indoor field, which had a large spiraling staircase smack-dab in the center of it. The staircase looked like it was once heavily polished and adorned with artwork, but it was now an archaic relic that had been restored.

This was where I would be taking a test. The admissions office told me to climb the stairs as high as I could to test my eligibility for classes. Weird, but alright. I followed the instructions and started going up the stairs. At first, it was just stairs, nothing peculiar. Maybe the test was at the top, I figured.

Then, as I got higher, creatures started emerging from nooks and crannies. They attacked me.
There were spiders, rats, bats, bugs, and other critters I had to fend off. It was mostly just an annoyance and I jogged my way through them.
As I went up further, more creatures came at me. Bigger ones. Tigers, wolves, alligators. This was more challenging, but I got through them, too.
Then I encountered human soldiers with military grade weapons. They attacked me on sight and I had to use my dragon to shield myself and get past.

I began to realize this was the test. Every student who climbed this stairway would face these increasingly difficult challenges.
For a while after passing the soldier level, I wondered what the next one would be... and I walked with more caution, looking around every corner.

The next trial wouldn't be around any corners, though. Instead, it was in my head. I heard a voice.
The higher I went, the louder and clearer the voice became. It cackled and taunted me demonically, threatening me with the trials ahead. It told me that it knew my greatest fears, and that's what I would soon face.
Knowing this is a dream, I don't doubt it. I seriously thought about going back, but decided that the voice in my head wasn't a deal breaker.
I continued up the stairway, ignoring it.

Eventually, the voice faded as I ascended beyond it.

But it was true that much worse things were higher up. The creatures that came for me next were supernatural. Zombies, ghosts, demons, and hallucinations of blood and other horror that personally disturbs me. However, I had already mentally prepared for it thanks to the warnings. I was determined to keep going and ascended past the supernatural scares. 


After getting past all of that, I stopped and looked up to try and see the top of the staircase.
There was no visible end. It seemed to go on infinitely, actually.
The stairs disappeared into gray fog in the sky.

I saw a glimpse of the stairway reaching into space and past the boundary of the universe.
This terrified me more than any other horror, so I stopped and jumped down from the stairway, declaring that I was done with the test. That's as far as I went!

I was a tourist visiting a shack in a swamp in the middle of the woods with my family. We chatted about things that happened in waking life. I was lucid, but the DCs weren’t, so I didn’t mention it to them, but I had good memory of waking details. Shared all accurate info.

We ordered some food, but it never came.

The barista said they’re out of an essential incgredient needed to make our dish, but they have a food cellar with more in stock and her coworker is currently getting it.

After a while, I walked over to the kitchen and saw that the food cellar was down a set of stairs through an open door. The lights wers flickering off and on.

“Yeah. My coworker hasn’t come back yet. It’s been a while…” the barista said with apparent concern. “Someone will need to go check on her, but it’s so busy in here with all the customers.”

She seemed far too busy as she served drinks to the shack tourists. So one of my family standing by and volunteered to go.

About halfway down the stairs to the food cellar, the lights flickered again and I was like “Yeah, no.”

I backed out and told my family member to not go down there. She went down anyway and, lo and behold, she never came back.

My spouse wanted to volunteer next and I dragged her away, telling her not to go down there.

But she eventually did anyway and it got her, too.

I thought to myself that I didn’t feel like having a nightmare tonight and would not engage with it, so I went outside.

I was curious though, so I confirmed just by “knowing” that it was a monster. Originally, it was a monster for children designed to prey on kids with unfinished homework (hence the flickering lights and being in a food cellar). It was supposed to be a silly kid’s monster.

But… as logic has it, you can’t do homework if you’re dead.

So it started killing people (kids, adults, anyone, even people without homework due). It wasn’t just a silly kid’s monster anymore.

That’s it. I didn’t engage with it further.

Originally journal on 06/29/2023.

Bizarre experience! I've never had anything quite like this happen.

I had a lucid nightmare the other night. Being lucid, I decided to stay in the dream. However, my spouse (in waking life asleep next to me) woke up in terror and started yelling.
Her yelling woke me up. I opened my eyes and she was yelling right in my face clear as day. She was looking straight at me, shouting "Go away!"
I could distinctly see the horror in her eyes. I told her that everything is fine, trying to calm her down.

Afterwards, she told me that she was NOT yelling in my face at all. That never happened. Not from that perceptive, anyway. She did yell those words, but not at me. She was looking at something red behind me and that's what she was yelling at. She had leaned forward to get close to it when she started yelling at it.

So, I saw from the perceptive of the red thing she was yelling at, not my body, which was facing a different direction in a completely different position in the room.
It was completely dark in the room as well. I saw her as though there was a bright light illuminating her face, but there was never any light.
This was an OBE, I concluded.

That's all for now!

Journal from 06/23/2023. This is one of my PR dreams that was especially fun!

Since I haven't been journaling my PR much, I'll include some backstory for what's been going on.

I started this particular dream in my territory, which is a dreamed replica of my childhood home (I really should come up with a name for it). The property spans about 2 acres. It's by the coast just outside of an isolated fishing town.

This place is dreary and full of death, guarded by my zombie hoard and packs of wolves. The whole place is surrounded by towering trees, which is where the zombies and wolves usually creep in from.

The home itself is a small two-story shack. The ground floor is half kitchen (with concrete floor), and half garage (which I'm pretty sure is haunted).

Recently, I've decided to put a portal to hell here. It was originally in the field, but I moved it inside the house to be the kitchen to go with my haunted garage (seems only right to have them be side-by-side).

Specifically, I made this a portal to the Helluva Boss universe hell, because that version of hell is fun. I figured it would help liven up the place.

And boy, it worked! Lots of terrifying entities have been coming through my portal ever since I added it, ranging from spicy to downright malicious.

This has resulted in a few lucid nightmares for me, but that's fine—it was my intention to expose myself to nightmares in a controlled environment like this in order to overcome my fears. I used to have a severe fear of demons, ghosts, and other hellish beings... *cough* This was pretty embarrassing and debilitating, since I live a good portion of my life in dream realms as the supposed Lucid Guardian.
What kind of lucid guardian is afraid of ghosts? Bah!
So this is why I've done this to myself, and I've since made breakthroughs because of it. I'm not easy to scare anymore. I can deal with zombies, ghosts, demons, you name it.

Anyway, I was standing in the kitchen looking at my nifty new hell portal. It's invisible now (used to be more noticeable). I can sense its presence, though. When I walk through it, there's no immediate signs that I've entered hell, but very subtle differences in the atmosphere clue me in. I can feel the emptiness in the air and something ominous.
Everything looks like a mirror image of the same location, but it's not the same.

There was a native mortal human visiting my house in this dream. She unknowingly went through my portal, so I followed her through. I crept behind her as a shadow while she wandered outside.

Human girl noticed the dark clouds rolling in and seemed rightly unsettled by the place. The sky was a mixture of ashen clouds and yellow fog lit by distant fires.
I revealed myself to her, telling her that she had stumbled into another realm. With glee, I warned her that she better turn back.... Unless she wanted to brave the demons and animated dead.
Only a fearless soul will survive in a place like this. So which will it be? I gave her the choice to go back, but I'll be honest that it wasn't without provocation. I was having too much fun!
I asked if she'd cave in to cowardice and flee for her life like scared little mortals do, or dance with me?

I drew flames up out of the ground, engulfing my home in a blaze to demonstrate that this was no joke. I began a musical number (yes, like a Disney supervillain!), dancing and singing to a variation of that "It's Tough To Be a God" song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZKE10BQlXY).
It was fun coming up with lyrics on the spot! This was my favorite part of the dream.
Through my own version of the lyrics (I forget the exact details), I conveyed my identity as a dream deity, revealing that her universe was my lucid dream. Isn't the nature of reality frightening?

Stolas (from Helluva Boss) came through my portal during this, so I pulled him into it without skipping a beat. He passively went along with the number as I used him as part of my demonstration to the human of the kinds of hellish beings she'd find here if she stayed.

Right as I was singing about being a dream god, I woke up because my significant other rolled over in bed and slapped me in the face, mumbling in opposition. lmao
She was half asleep. When I told her what she interrupted, she said (jokingly) that somebody had to put a stop to me because I was getting too cocky, and that's why she did it.

The dream god Achilles heel! One second you're singing about having unlimited dream god powers, and next thing you know you disappear because waking up is all part of the gig. That's so annoyingly hilarious! I love it.

I gotta do more of these.

From a draft I wrote on 06/21/2023.
Warning: gross.

Lucid dreamed that I befriended a parasitic bloodsucking tic. He was really sweet, actually! So naturally, like friends do, I let him suck my blood.
I figured, you know, it's a dream. No biggie. I was only able to handle it for 15 mins though. I told tick buddy I was done and he got off me. I asked if he wanted help finding another host, feeling bad that I quit so early. He was all engorged and couldn’t move on his own, because he was a tic, but he needed more blood to survive.

So me, tick buddy, and a brooding anime side character went on a small adventure to find a new blood host.

Yes, there was this lone wolf brooding anime guy with blond spiky hair who kept hanging around in the background, because he was a background character. I thought it was hilarious, so I went up and pestered him with questions like "Hey, what you think'n about? What's your backstory? Is it dramatic?"

Every time I went up to him, I turned into an anime girl.

Also everywhere he went, there was a fullmoon in his backdrop to make him look extra brooding.

He told me to go away. “You’re not supposed to know my backstory! It’ll ruin the mystery. I’m mysterious!” he said when I asked for details. He said “No! I’m supposed go be a background character! Go back to the main plot!”

So I did eventually go back to helping tick buddy find an unsuspecting new victim. We walked into a grocery store full of potential humans full of blood.
Why it had to be human, IDK. But I put tick buddy on a sandwich and told a random stranger that I'd buy it for him.
He was confused about why he was getting a free sandwich, but didn’t say no. I distracted him with pleasant conversation, he probably thought I was hitting on him. Whoops.

So we all stood in line with the sandwich, giving our tick friend enough time to crawl his fat engorged self from the sandwich onto the new host while I kept him talking and engaged with me.
New host almost took a bite out of the sandwich while we were standing there, but I stopped him, reminding him that he was still in line. Can’t eat it until you leave the store, silly~

Tick buddy was relieved, because he almost got eaten.

I looked over at anime guy while we were in the store and laughed because that full moon backdrop was in the store. In broad daylight, too. No matter where he went or what time of day it was, it would look like he was standing in a forest with a full moon at night behind him.

That’s it.

Was spending time with my dad and he said "It just occurred to me in bardo that, this whole time, you wanted to spend time with me..." and he and stared straight ahead in shock as the realization hit him.

I nodded. I wanted that more than anything, but gave up because he was cold towards me. I tried for years and he always shot me down.
One time I asked if he wanted to go to this festival we went to once when I was a kid, one of the few memories I have of him, and he said "No, that's for young people. I don't do that anymore." with bitterness as though he thought I cared about the festival.
That was when I realized he didn't cherish those memories. I don't know if he ever thought twice about me and the more I tried to spend time with him, the more it seemed he didn't.

"...No one ever wanted to spend time with me. Why?" he asked me, looking so shocked, confused, and heartbroken.

I lifted my hands struggling to come up with the words, but gave up. "I don't know. Your my dad. I love you. And... I thought you seemed fun to be around, anyway." I said but couldn't hold it together and started crying. I had to leave, so I walked away.

I saw it on his face that he finally understood.
If only it wasn't a dream. I cried for a bit as I put away the dream ice cream I was going to eat—but no longer felt like eating—and then woke myself up because I was only dreaming to avoid waking reality. It's like 10 AM...

Was listening to my grandpa tell a story about how he purchased a boat to escape enemy forces during wartime and helped a bunch of other people escape, then built his house out of the lumber from that boat.

The whole thing seemed pretty out there and I thought to myself "Am I really going to believe that any of this is even remotely feasible when I wake up."

But I kept listening and made a mental note to remember it, nodding my head until he was done. Blood started coming out of his mouth and he lulled his head onto the table when he finished the story.

So I was like "Alright. Later, GP." and exited the dream. I was still asleep with all my senses shut off but was thinking about the dream to make sure I'd remember it. Then I heard the noise machine in my bedroom and played around with the volume, making it sound louder or quieter, just because I've been practicing lately.

Eventually woke myself up and immediately realized how dumb that story was.

Before going to bed, I told my SO about a strange feeling I had. "It feels like we're not alone. Like there's something in the kitchen." I said and shrugged, going to sleep without a second thought.

--- The Dream ---

Me and my SO were organizing our house and I found a pair of child-sized dolls with real black human hair. They were in the same area that corresponds with our kitchen.

I touched the hair and noted how it stuck into my skin and started burrowing into my finger.

“Well, these are definitely haunted.” I said.

I yanked the hair out of my finger and we arranged to meet up with a professional who could get rid of the haunted dolls for us. We met up at a restaurant.

“My rate is $500 an hour.” he told me off the bat.

My heart sank a bit as I wondered what I would have to do to earn money like that. That sounds like a lot. Sure, I could just materialize $500 into my hands at any moment, but that’s only useful for native laypeople (who don’t know the nature of dream reality) to spend on normal goods in dream world.

This guy is a lucid spirit worker. He wants payment obtained through legitimate means, not cheaply manifested dream notes.

“Do you have any use for my services? Would you be up for a trade?” I asked, but he shook his head with a politely dismissive gesture.

“Shoot. Alright. I’m not sure if I can afford your help. Do you have any DIY advise for someone with my abilities to deal with this on my own? I’n a… I guess you could call it a dream deity. This is my dream state right now.” I explained.

“So like a time traveler.” his assistant commented.

“Well, I can manipulate space, too.” I added.

--- Awake ---

Then my SOs work alarm woke me up.

--- Back to Dream ---

We were back at the house again. Sigh. That’s kind of embarrassing. Just as I’m explaining my abilities, I disappeared right in the middle of a conversation.

That is so something a dream traveler would do.

So I wasn’t feeling particularly competent by then. We loaded the dolls up into the car and drove to my grandfather’s house to talk to him. He was living with his girlfriend and was putting up some cabinets when we arrived, so I helped him out while we talked.

He asked us things like how it was going, and talked about his house. All was going good at first. I told him about the dolls, and he criticized everything I did, of course— because that’s what he does. Criticizing me over the dolls eventually evolved into them both blaming me for everything else in their lives. Even stuff I was completely unaware of/had no involvement in was all my fault and they reveled in complaining about me at length.

So I took the dolls out of the car and left them there.

--- AWAKE ---

Woke up in the morning shortly after. I told my SO and she lost it, thought it was hilarious because she knows how malicious my grandpa gets. Haunted doll problem solved the DIY way, I guess. lol Also it dawned on me afterwards: I forget who, but either the realtor or a family member had referred to this house as "the doll house."

I was a young boy in this dream, sleeping on a couch in a room with the lights off.

A black ghost-like entity crept up from behind me and I felt a tingling sensation on my back, then an electric sensation in my spine.

Whatever this thing was, I felt a malicious femininity from it and got the impression that it normally targets children (it didn’t know that I’m not actually a child).

I wasn’t scared or intimidated, and don’t like giving into these things, so I sat there for a moment.

But the electric sensation in my back continued, so I woke myself up. The sensation persisted for a little bit after I woke.

Dreamed that I went to a family reunion with all my dead ancestors (whom I've never met).
I've been feeling sad about "losing my family" lately, but in this dream, I was told that those currently alive are only a fraction.

One of my great great something grandpas (don't know how far back he went) gave me a shell that was rainbow-colored like an abalone, but shaped like a conch and heavy as a brick. He said it was important and he wanted me to have it.

Some other family members told me he was sexist, but he never gave that heirloom to his sons and was stingy in general.

Well, that was a nice time.

Had a dream that we took the rabbits to a show and we were camping with them. Had lots of fun with them running in the pens. I was excited about the rabbits too. I originally brought them there by copying the parents from waking reality. So we took Ferrari, Leo, and some others that currently exist, and made copies into the dream world. we already raised a few generations of dream rabbits. This wasn’t just a regular animal show either, it was a multi dimensional one.

But then we accidentally left them at the campsite. I don’t know how I managed to do that, but by the time we figured it out, we had already driven away.

So we hightailed it back. We had to go through the front building and security first before we could get back onto the campsite.

This campsite was being used by a lot of animal raisers, and it was a much bigger deal because they came from a lot of different dimensions with their animals, so there were lots of alien animals, and a lot more security to go through.

As we were waited for our paperwork to be seem to get back in, since they have this whole quarantine thing on top of security, I saw a guy who just took a test to determine his eligibility for whether he could take some animals that had been left behind after the show.

I overheard him boasting on the phone about how this was his lucrative side gig as a fancy multidimensional pet store owner/breeder, he goes around to the big shows and does this every time, how he was going to swoop in and get them before their owners got s chance to come back, and he has gotten a lot of nice animals that way in the past.

This pissed me off, so I told him I don’t know if he was trying to get ours specifically, but we’re here for them. He’s too late.

He told me I probably wasn’t going to get the rabbits back because there’s others like him, and security doesn’t have time to petsit all the animals that people leave behind, so they’re probably gone by now. They were probably already picked up by the park authorities and sold to the highest bidder like him.

This place is so big that there’s a market just for people getting animals that were left behind by accident… Wow.

I looked back at my SO and sighed, reassured her that worst-case scenario they’ll probably wind up in a decent place and I’ll just copy the parents back in from waking reality. We’ll just start over.

Then I turned back to the guy and asked him if he existed in my waking reality or if he was just in this realm, with implication of the opinion that waking reality is considered more stable than dream realm, and therefore more reliable.

He just frowned.

I told him I still have those animals in the waiting reality and will just copy them again. We’re not going to be brought down by some scammy dream dimension vulture who makes a career out of stealing people’s dream animals.

I was really angry with him. I think he reminded me of those people who buy houses at auctions after foreclosures. One time I was with a mother of 10 who was about to lose her house, sobbing and terrified, but we served the paperwork at the auction last minute just as they started the bidding. There were a bunch of bidders standing around, waiting to capitalize off of her misfortune.

Anyway, back to the dream.

I went down the hall as we were cleared to go back to the campground, and started looking around the rabbit section. I saw a lot of carriers that looked like ours, some empty, some with animals. None of them were ours, though.

My SO thought she saw ours in the distance and we started jogging towards a stack of carriers near some bleachers. The sunset was in our eyes, so I didn’t see them until we got closer. It was a bunch of Blanc de Hotots. Lovely, but not our animals.

We then found the security guard station where they had a collected a bunch of animals who were left behind and currently being moved to the field where they did the bidding.

I told my SO to stay here and I would go check to make sure they’re not there.

I turned myself invisible to slip past security into their station. However, it dawned on me that they were used to dealing with inter-dimensional travelers, and will probably see through my cloaking.

So I turned into my dragon instead to blend in with the animals.

One of the security guards stopped and noticed me, but assumed I was just one of the animals left behind.

I can’t remember what he said, but I ended up waking up in the morning shortly after.

In hindsight, wow. Maybe I was the jerk in this situation. Am I wrong for taunting my dream characters about how I come from the waking realm?
As if that makes me superior.
Got some things to think about.

Met another dreamer in my dream last night.

We were at a party in a big barn full of people. There was music and dancing.

She told me “This is my dream. I’m lucid dreaming.”

She seemed hesitant, though.

I replied “Neat! I’m lucid dreaming right now too. How is it? How do you like being lucid?”

I kept my voice down so as to not draw attention from bystanders.

“It’s nice, but I can’t control anything.” she said with disappointment.

“Sure you can!” I responded and reached out towards a stereo that was sitting nearby playing music for the party. “Watch, you can change the brightness with this dial.” I explained and proceeded to demonstrate. As I turned the dial, the environment changed from night to day, causing the sun to come up and make everything bright both indoors and outside.

The other dreamer looked excited and tried it for herself.

I left her that and went outside to do my own thing after that.

The world was an interactive painting! My mom appeared (she loves painting) and we started painting reality together. I reached out and smeared the mountains into the sky, then started digging out globs of paint from the sky. It peeled away and changed colors, having endlessly deep layers of different colored realities/paint underneathe.

I decided to show my mom something, but as I moved in front of her, her arm broke.

If i was nonlucid or this was waking life, I would have been horrified, apologized, rushed her to a doctor, etc. but knowing this was a dream, I was more concerned about the implications of this shift in tone.

It being a dream, I chose that reality of dream mom breaking her arm because of my actions… We were having a great time, then something in me decided to change the dream scene to this. Of all things. Wallowing in distress and guilt for injuring her.

Nope.

Not wanting to let myself be emotionally manipulated by my own dream, I apologized and walked away, deciding to disengage before the scene could devolve further into the inevitable.

Then a scam text woke me up.

This was a lucid nightmare. It’s been a while since I had one, but it had impressive buildup. ��

I was in this house, a recurring location in my dreams. Got a video conference call on my phone all the sudden and tried to deny it, but the deny call button accepted the call instead and I was suddenly in a four-way conference.

All but one screen was jostled around in bedsheets. The fourth screen was also being jostled, but I saw a glimpse of a woman with an uncanny smile.

The hang up button wouldn’t work, so I turned the phone off completely.

Then I looked up, and the woman from the call was in the room with me, smiling, and looking around.

Startled, I asked what she’s doing.

“We’re ghost hunters! I can see ghosts. I’ll point them out for you, and tell you where they are~!” she informed me with cheer in her raspy voice.

She looked like she was on something, and I almost told her to leave, but then I remembered a place in this house from previous dreams that had always unnerved me.

I’ve never been able to go in the attic without being shaken to my core. I used to wake up with SP from going in there (have since learned how to overcome this), but I still don’t go in that attic.

I’ve always been curious about it, though.

“Oh. I can see ghosts too. But could you check out my attic?” I asked with interest.

She smiled and agreed, but as I went to show her where it was, she walked ahead of me so quickly, I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t even find her in the house after a while.

No problem though. I made my way towards the attic anyway. I didn’t plan on going inside it directly, just close enough to show her where it was if she hadn’t found it already.

I eventually found her near the attic and she was giddy, smiling and laughing. Practically dancing around.
“Organ!” she called to me in delight, seeming even more off-putting than before.

“What do you mean?” I asked, confused.

“It’s on your kidney~” she sing-songed.

I woke myself up.
Nope. Not sticking around for that.

A young girl was trying to play computer games, but the games wouldn’t load and she was frustrated. I went over to troubleshoot them with her, but when we couldn’t get them working, I offered her something else fun to do instead: swim in the pool!

There was an indoor pool in the other room, so I turned into my dragon and we went swimming. There were other adults and children, but they couldn’t see me and didn’t notice that the girl was seemingly by herself.

When I was done swimming. I didn’t want to leave the girl alone, so I made up an explanation for her parents coming back. They were in the other room signing up for a membership, I decided.

The dream followed my explanation and as the girl reunited with her parents, I walked outside.

It had just stopped raining and the sun peaked through the gray, cloudy sky. The streets were wet with rainwater. I walked down the muddy sidewalk and wondered what I’d find to do next.

As I went, I saw a group of people gathered in a line at a van that seemed to contain what felt like death. They sang as they waited in line:

I dont need it,
Need my body.
Gonna leave it all behind.
I dont need my body,
Or my mind.

I moved along to look for something else to do instead, and ended up waking up in the morning.