Things to Run Away From Really Fast

There's one area in the video games vs. lucid dreaming argument where video games come out ahead: dreams are terrible at providing a consistent gameplay experience.

I'm firing some kind of energy weapon down a rocky ravine at some well-armed and armoured aliens trying to board my ship. I'm getting frustrated because the leader's damned health bar isn't going down as fast as I think it should. I pull out a heavier energy weapon, dodge a blaster shot and look down the scope of my gun—FWOOM—and feel a moment's satisfaction when I see that the leader is down below half health.

It doesn't last long.

"Boarders!" one of the two crew members at my side shouts at me, "Revan, they're coming in the back!"

Three of the armoured aliens pour in through another door and I duck so that the enemies below can't get a shot at me.

"Where's the rest of the crew?" I shout back.

My brother's running the game. He doesn't say anything, but I realize that the gameplay mechanics only allow for two of my crew members to join the fight: the ones that I had in my KOTOR-sized party.

Sithspit. Three people won't be enough to hold off the invaders.

I dive into third-person mode which automatically pauses the fight, and float quickly through the ship. I'm looking for the rest of my crew, and I come across Mystique in her natural formsprawled out on the floor of a storage room. Keeping an eye out for the other boarders, I move towards her and think about what the gameplay mechanic for reviving a crewmate should be. I'm not actually here, so...

"Found you," says my brother from behind me.

I spin around. "Revan's on the other side of the ship," I argue.

"You're here."

I scoff at his character, a tall man in black, and then run out of the storage room before he has time to reply. A fireball hits the wall as I run past, and I run through a set of double doors, another door, and into a hallway that leads to a series of bathrooms.

Second door on the left. I throw myself into the room and click the door shut softly behind me, before plugging the sink and move my hand in front of the sensor so the water runs until it's full.

Silence. My body is tense as I hold myself in position, ready to fling the water at the door.

Click.

The door opens, and I relax when I realize it's Mystique.

"Any backup?" I ask her.

"Shan."

"Everyone else is down where the boarders entered the Ebon Hawk. We'll have to retreat for now."

We move towards the back of the ship, but we're inside a facility now, all industrial chrome and steel. Bastila Shan holds her yellow lightsaber at the ready, and Mystique and I hold complementary hues of blue and orange. I wave my hand and call up my Darth Revan outfit, looking up the steel grating as I do.

I jump up to the next level. Just as I expected, an enemy stands at the ready with another an lightsaber. They smile, and I give them a bloodthirsty grin in return. It's three against one, after all.

***

Other dreams: a hiking trip with a couple of guides and a group of people, trying to find a bathroom before we leave on the trip. Looking for a judge in Ixburg who can sign a cheque that I need to write to pay a fine.

My husband and I are visiting the UK. It's incredibly difficult to find a parking spot.

We're wandering through a series of buildings that are all interconnected, and I'm opening new doors, creating new spaces that sometimes lead back to the previous ones. We run into my grandmother.

There's a contest that we somehow become involved in, and there are little children hurling chunks of ice. I talk to their parents disapprovingly, and somehow win the contest, described as the "yelling" person.

We're fugitives now, trying to escape the UK. My attempt to get us free passage out of the country fails when I can't get the three images on my ticket to line up (like a slot machine), despite exerting dream control. There are dogs coming after me, and I send bolts of ice magic at them, freezing them in place, because they can run faster than I can.

I find myself in an empty field, looking up into the night sky. I start walking, and realize that there's a lunar eclipse in the sky. I'm flying towards it now.

I'm looking at a brick building, and decide to run up the side, Prototype-style. I'm having trouble with it, though. Instead, I run as far up it as I can and grab on, allowing the mechanism on the side of the building to buoy me up.

I look at the moon, which is a cube in the sky, and try to fly again. I can't.

A cabin in the country, where a man is offering lessons on writing a novel.

My husband and I are running through a parking lot, but the cars and semis keep trying to collapse on top of us. We're trying to get back to our parking spot.

I remember that a previous LD involved me having to report in to a jail (um, juvenile detention facility) for a day, and I decide that sounds like an interesting dream plot. I warp the road that I'm driving down until it leads to a fictional location.

This is a bad part of town, so I'm trying to chain down the bike that I'm now riding so that both the wheels are locked and it's attached to a concrete structure. I head inside and explain some of my health issues to the receptionist, and then I'm stuck in the waiting area with a book (a new fantasy series by J. K. Rowling!)

I have to go back outside, though, because I'm not sure that I actually finished bolting my bike down. Sure enough, when I go outside, it's gone. Now there's a gang of some kind attacking... not the facility itself, but the people around it. I think it's a raid to steal all the bicycles.

One of the gang members comes after me, and I pounce on him. "And what are you after, huh?" I ask, looking deep into his eyes. I take him down.

The other gang members back down after I defeat their leader. I let them limp away, and go back into the building.

I chat with Sadie, a friend from real life, and then I'm called into an office that belongs to the head of the facility. The warden walks into the room, and she throws down a series of print-outs that explain why the conversation that I was having with Sadie indicates that I'm a spy.

(I'm secretly a SHIELD agent. I wonder if Sadie forgot to add up her character stats correctly again... that would explain the flubbed deception check.)

I play innocent. And then I realize that somehow, I'm going to become the warden.

So now I'm the warden, destroying my own facility because it reeks of pure evil. It's an easy job once the building is evacuated: the warden actually murdered the people who built the facility, so their spirits are perfectly willing to unmake the place during their escape. I destroy the stained glass wards leading to the outside world, and some spirits are quick to flee.

Others will want their vengeance. I sit down, cross-legged, and calmly wait for them to find me.

I'm re-enacting the movie Soldier, where a ragtag bunch of crash survivors need to defend themselves from genetically engineered soldiers who've been ordered to eliminate them... with the help of a discarded genetically engineered soldier.

A friend (who was in the military at one point) wanders in and asks why we're watching this movie, when it's a stupid movie.

---

Last year for Halloween, I had black-painted branches decorating my walls. I had to throw them out when I moved, and I was kind of sad about that.

In the dream, I find these discarded decorations in a pile when I'm out doing errands, but I know that they'll be a little bit unwieldy to carry on public transit. I pick them up, but they've turned into a combination of a floor joist and some kind of beam at least ten feet long.

I'm in an alley, and I'm going through my wallet looking for my bus pass. A young man makes a quick grab for the wallet—and I stare him and his shifty-looking friend down. He hesitates for a moment, and says "I was going to ask if you needed help with that."

I smile brightly and say, "Absolutely. You can pick up this beam and help me get it on the bus!"

I'm at some sort of retreat, and I'm on a break outdoors, spending some time by myself. A van with a logo painted on the side stops at the side of the road, and I walk up to ask what's wrong. The driver says that he's making a delivery to the local Co-op, but he can't find it. I look over the hill in a couple of directions, and, as it's a dream, the Co-op appears on the horizon. I point it out to him and he moves on.

In a hall made of stone from the floor to the ceiling, Dumbledore gives instructions about the tournament. At the beginning of each round, we pick an element, and then we have to use that element in a free-for-all to tag the other players. If you're tagged, you're out of the round.

I start the first round with a more difficult element that I'm used to (air, I think). I'm mostly focusing on complicated defensive uses of the power, and I'm out of the round fairly quickly. Irritated, I prepare for the second round, bringing up a wall of flame.

I'm visiting the IT department, and I realize that they actually have a desk for me there. I tell them that I've had a desk upstairs for some time, and that I'm actually leaving the company in a week (in 2013), so they can probably give the desk to someone else. The desk has years-old mail that's been waiting for me, so I start going through it.

There's a certain type of fight that exists in fiction just to show off how overpowered the major players of a setting are, compared to the main character. This is one of those fights: Maleficent versus Dumbledore. Only... Dumbledore hasn't shown up, and I'm the only one standing in her way. I drop my hands to the side, palms up, and burn with power, until suddenly I'm Maleficent as well. (I have a moment where I go through: wand, wandless, crook staff, staff with bobble on the end—perfect.) I bang the staff into the concrete, sending up a shockwave at my opponent, and twirl the staff around into a ready pose, lime-green light streaming from the tip. Bring it.

My brother talks me into following him to a pool, but it turns out that once you've entered the pool area, you can never leave. I walk calmly over to one of the glass windows, face it squarely, and punch it. A crack appears in the safety glass. I punch it again, and again, until we're running over the roof of a park canteen/cafeteria to get away.

I realize that I forgot to post in the class discussion forums this week to get my participation mark (even though the class is over...)

I've left my glasses somewhere, but I know that searching for them the traditional way in a dream is a lost cause. "Accio, glasses," I say, and they fly into my hand from wherever they were hiding.

It's about five in the morning. The early morning sun shines onto the gravel of the parking lot, casting long shadows.

My brother and I sitting in a car. I'm in the driver's seat, but the car is parked, and the two of us are just looking at the houses on the street over.

There's some kind of argument, and idly, I imagine a spark near one of the houses.

Suddenly, there's smoke billowing from the windows of the house closest to the spark. Good job, me, bringing innocent bystanders into our argument.

I jump out of the car, shouting "Come on!"

My brother follows me to the house. I ring the doorbell twice -- come on, come on -- and a sleepy-looking woman answers the door.

I point out the billowing smoke, and she thanks me for my concern but tells me that's it's normal.

***

Later, I'm with my mom and brother visiting someone.

"We should get back home," I tell my mom, looking at the approaching storm.

The thunderstorm approaches at the speed of a semi truck, the first pellets of heavy rain hitting the ground in a continuous wave.

"Too late," says my mom, and we duck to the floor of the room (which is on the top of the house) and I'm holding up a floor mat to try to shield us both from the mud splattering into the room.

From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favour fire...

Infiltrating a sorority/fraternity and it's terrible. And my female SHIELD agent is covering for the fact that Captain America is terrible at undercover work.

Now I'm part of a group of three people who are living semi-harmoniously in an older part of town. We have some interesting projects on the go, like improving playgrounds and adding giant transparent red walls to sidewalks so that people have to zigzag through.

I'm looking through a catalogue that has sheaths for ritual daggers that are being advertised pinned to the pages. There are daggers for earth, air, fire and water, and unsurprisingly I'm interested in the fire one.

And then I remember that I already have a ritual dagger. I turn it over in my hand. The blade is pure silver in the dream, unlike the real one.

I'm walking down a road, trying to find my way back to the original path.I know that if it takes too long to get back, I'll lose the thread of the dream, so I hold out a hand to the end of the street and soar towards it.

The street I want to take is the second from the end, but I can't find it, because the second path is now an alley that goes into someone's backyard. I follow the path and find a raspberry bush, and I look around for a basket. I decide that there will be one on the deck when I go to find it, but there's only a box that holds some kindling. I empty out the kindling onto the pile of smaller pieces of wood.

I look around and see an old, dying tree, and all I can notice is that the branches are so dead that they'd make great kindling for the cabin owner's fire.

There are workmen in the backyard. Apparently there are signs saying that they'd be in the area.

I'm Dean Winchester now. Sam and I know that when you get caught somewhere, you pretend that you belong there, so we approach the workmen and strike up a conversation.

They're vampires, as it turns out.

There's a fight.

I drive a stake into one man's chest—

wait, that's zombies in this universe

—and my silver dagger appears in my hand. I swing it around and slice into the vampire's neck as I throw my weight forward. The vampire stumbles, still off-balance from the stake, and I'm behind him, slicing into his throat and grabbing at his hair so that I can fully behead him.

(There's an argument as to whether this works according to the rules of the game. I win.)

There are bodies all over the back yard, now. We're going to have to burn them.

I grab wood from the shed out back and set to covering our dead vamps with lumber and kindling. I'm lighting the shed itself on fire when I hear a shout.

The man who appears was a friend of John Winchester's, and he's angry that his property is going up in flames.

I'm trying to choke him out without killing him. He struggles, and it's not working, but then he changes tactics and tries to grab at my ears and pull.

I decide that it's a trope of the genre that you can hit someone over the head and knock them out without being at risk of killing them, so one of us hits him over the head with the butt of a rifle.

Fire burns, and the old tree from earlier provides us with as much kindling as we need. I go over to the cabin, and realize that there's meat drying in the racks along the outside wall. My stomach churns as I realize that it's cursed all to hell—I don't want to think about what kind of meat has gone into the ground meat patties that are sitting on the rack, but there's a telltale haze of angry spirits hanging around the meat. Somehow, at least one of them is an ancient, powerful indigenous spirit, how the fucking hell...

I set it all on fire.

A blonde, average-sized woman with curly hair enters the yard, looking curious. "What's going on?" she asks, looking genuinely curious.

Because all we need is another civilian to knock out and haul away before they die of smoke inhalation.

"Ma'am," I start—

She looks past me. "You know, certain spirits are actually freed when you burn them."

Witch, I think. Of the Supernatural-style variety. I run forward, brandishing my knife, and she laughs as I plunge it into her chest. Light explodes from the place where the knife stabbed into her, and she soars up into the sky, a being of pure white light and destruction.

I turn around to deal with the spirit, and I think I'm calling up an explosion of—hellfire, soulfire?—and it's enveloped completely.

My long black cloak trails out behind me as I crash into the other witch, tearing into her. I snarl as I grab part of her cloak—pull it away with part of her essence as a ripping, tearing noise fills the air—and shoot past her. There are three of us, beings of darkness and the night, tearing through the sky and tearing into the thing of light that wants only to destroy.

Darkness can be a force for good in the world just as light can, and both can snuff out life as well as they can extend it. All we need—I think, flying at the other witch—is for some idiot to think that the good guy is being outnumbered here just because they're burning with Light.

Waking up after a dream that your husband was kidnapped? Quite a relief.

Having to tell him that we might have been inducted as part-time members of the Wild Hunt? Maybe not so awesome.

***

Cernunnos (KER noo nohss): the Celtic Horned God.

Ravana (rah-vuh-nuh): antagonist in the Hindu epic Ramayana, follower of Shiva, king of Lanka, and depicted as having ten heads.

***

I'm standing at a window, looking out into the forest. It's midday, and sunlight streams down onto the meadow that leads from the trees to the house.

Movement. A deer appears, walking confidently from the forest. He has ten heads, all of them focused down the road beyond the house.

I'm kneeling at the window as the deer goes by, close enough to touch. He's almost gone past. I hesitate, then tap on the glass.

All ten heads swivel towards me, ten pairs of eyes focused on me, just beyond a thin pane of glass. I flinch at the idea that I'm getting the attention of this king of the forest the same way that disrespectful children get the attention of animals at the zoo.

I'm sorry to bother you, I tell him. I saw you, and I know I'm not supposed to. I thought you should know.

He stares for a moment. Then, a few of his heads dipping to look back down the road, he tells me:

Come with me.

***

We're at a bar. In the interim, I've learned more about our world's masquerade, been inducted into a secret society, and given my husband the necessary introductions.

"At one point," my husband tells me, "Four of his heads swivelled around to look at me." His implication, it was creepy, remains unsaid. This is a supernatural bar, after all, and the king of the forest is never too far away.

"He gave you half his attention," I say, tapping on my glass. "Imagine having one hundred per cent of it on you."

I shiver at the memory of ten pairs of eyes looking into my soul.

***

Not even 24 hours, I think to myself. Not even long enough for the police to get involved.

And yet here I am, asking for a god's audience—to demand help to find my missing husband. Because I know that they've taken him.

The king holds his court under the stars. He stands in the centre of the dais in anthropomorphic form, wearing dark maroon robes. I can feel the weight of his many eyes on me... but it feels like a weight has been lifted off of my chest. The decision has already been made. I can breathe.

I need access to the network of cameras along the highway, I tell the god. They may be a long way from here by now, but even they would need to stop for gas.

The heads that are looking my way nod in recognition, and the god raises a hand on his left side, a soft movement gesturing at the man behind him.

I'm standing at the railing, the scrutiny of the court no longer resting with me (but watching, always watching). The man in the suit (the god's left hand) looks down his nose at me, a faint sneer on his face. New favourites of the god already asking for favours, I can practically hear him think.

I'm calm, going through the motions with the mechanized precision of a person in mid-crisis. (Fight or flight or solve the goddamn problem.)

"Thank you for seeing me," I tell him, even though we both know he had no choice in the matter. And then I change gears. "I'll need one of your techs to go through the footage with me. I can't do it myself this time—"

this time, because that's the world we're now a part of

"—but next time this happens to one of our people, I'll be able to help."

A flash of emotion across his face, too quick to identify, and his eyes warm somewhat. "I'm {error

"-Anderson," he says, catching my hand in a firm handshake. "Welcome to �����."

We've bought a house, and we got a really good deal on a place overlooking the ocean.

The cats (usually M) keep jumping up into the windows, and the bottoms of the window frames keep collapsing under their weight, just like the drawer fell out of that old coffee table when the supports collapsed.

A woman is disapproving of the fact that we have cats in the condo. She doesn't live here, but she thinks we should follow the rules, and the rules state that we're not supposed to have cats. She asks what we're going to do about the windows, and I tell her, bemused, that it's actually pretty easy to repair them, and this is actually our house, that we own.

Sometimes during this dream, the person that I'm married to isn't my husband, but a woman (different from the rules lawyer above).

There are a series of beautiful houses and construction sites. My dad is doing work on his own house.

I'm a child walking with Wednesday and Pugsley Addams. I forgot my sunglasses, so hold up my hands and say "Accio, glasses."

"That should only work if you say 'sunglasses,'" points out Wednesday.

"I knew what I meant," I shrug.

The cast of the Addams Family now fused with the whole crew of lovingly dysfunctional people who raised me. It's weird.

Now it's the finale of this version of the series, and there's a wooden automaton that accepts that it's "his time." He sits in the mud bath and waits to fall apart.

(Except that this was all part of his plan, and the reason that he has bad eyesight is because his real eyes are hanging from the earrings of the trickster god who has been working "with" the bad guys. He has one last chance to take the band of bloodthirsty pirates out before he moves on to the next world...)

Wednesday and I are adults now, and we're talking about getting married.

I'm in my teenage home. I realize that I'm dreaming, and spend some time looking at how weird some of the angles and perspective are in this dream.

One of us will win the contest and escape, and the rest of us will be doused with gasoline and burned to death.

Oh, it hurts. It hurts a lot.

I'm a vampire that's hunting vampires.

Sam & Dean Winchester are hunting me.

The woman I killed was a vampire preying on the local townspeople, but you can always trust Hunters to not understand nuance.

Later, I'm using telekinesis on small objects around my grandmother's living room. I'm finding that I can easily lift objects that are within about four feet of me, but to move anything further away, I have to move closer. I find this frustrating, because I know I'm dreaming, and this is all about what I believe I can do.

It's a rubber band bracelet thingy, for gods' sake! This shouldn't be that hard!

The light rail car speeds across the desert, its tracks raised high into the air. An attack helicopter closes on us, and the tension of the people within the car is palpable.

The train is carrying civilians, and we don't have any way to fight back.

The wind whips at me as I stand at the open door, the grounday speeding past far below. What's the worst that could happen? I think, This is only a dream.

I jump.

I reach out and grab onto the landing skids of the helicopter, grinning wildly.

(Later, I'm Harry Potter taking on an army of conventional weaponry.)

We're at a multi-level restaurant, where you have to take a lift to get to your table. Each table has its own little balcony area, but there aren't any railings to keep guests and servers hemmed in. You just have to balance!

I'm having trouble with the lift. Our table is on one of the middle levels, but the lift wants to go to the very top or the very bottom. Eventually, I wait until the lift gets close to our level, and then jump—

My hands grasp at a chair that's bolted down on the level above (or below?) ours, and my feet kick out at the air until they find purchase on the scaffolding. I'm upside-down, and I climb steadily back to our table. I'm glad that my husband is sitting down at the table already, because he can keep the whole thing weighted down as I throw it off balance.

I'm looking for a place to stay for the next few weeks while I take a course in a new city. I know that a certain motel/hostel/dorm has spots available for students, but they also fill up fast. So I head over there as soon as I'm in town.

Luckily, there is a place available. Unluckily, it's haunted by the victim of a mean-spirited (and presumably lethal) prank by members of a fraternity or something. We don't actually have those here, but it was a group of guys and they were terrible people.

So now the ghost violently murders people who stay in the dorms.

There's a woman screaming.

I'm running towards her as she's being dragged into a fluffy duvet or pile of pillows. I really should emphasize that they were unabashedly evil pillows, with the electrifying reek of corrupted darkness emanating from them. I grab the woman by the elbows, and she tells me No, it will get you, too!

I can't hold her, and my arm ends up dragged into the rift. Excruciating, electric pain arcs up my right arm (the kind of pain that you only feel in dreaming, where it overwhelms everything and it hurts but doesn't feel like pain in waking life). I try to pull my arm away, but there's resistance, sucking me into the rift.

I rip my arm away—

But the bleeding, rotten darkness is still everywhere and there's nowhere to go—

I wake up. I reality check, tapping my fingers against the sheets. One-two-three-four-five. Genuinely awake. Damn ghost thinks it's gonna get the better of me, huh?

I slip back into dreaming. I'm back in the dorm room, and it's quiet. Shadows whisper along the ceiling and in the dark corners of the room. I hold out a hand, and the shadows still.

The ripping, tearing thing leaps into me, but I'm ready this time. I channel the pain, force the thing out of my body until it faces me, forced to its knees on the floor.

Let's solve your problem. My terms.