Things to Run Away From Really Fast

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.

"You thought this place was haunted," I tell the brown-haired child. "As it turns out, you're not the only one with powers."

I raise a hand and Matilda floats up off the floor, her eyes alight with excitement. I cut the enchantment, and she lands on her feet.

"So you're my teacher?"

I nod.

My husband and I are hiking around a lake. The sky is blue blue blue and the colours are crisp and vibrant.

In the dream, this place is actually Medicine Hat with mountains (but in reality it's more like Kelowna.) I'm looking at the glaciers up in the mountains as they melt and shift and change, feeling the warm sun and the cool breeze on my skin.

We need to get back to the town, quickly, but we're partway across the lake. I'm trying to use my phone and Google Maps to figure out the fastest route back to the town. We may need to hitch a ride on a boat.

We're back in the town, and a friend, G, is helping us load supplies into a white Beetle. He's supposed to drive it a little ways, but instead he drives off with it.

That would only happen in a dream, right? Well, at least that makes dealing with this easy.

I lift off the ground and fly after the Beetle, wondering if car speed counts as flying at superspeed. I'm trying to use telekinesis to latch onto the car, but I end up peeling off the back bumper instead.

I'm in an old, rickety wooden house with a group of friends. Each room contains a challenge, and when that challenge has been defeated, I can spawn a new room and continue moving upwards through the never-ending attic.

The trick is that it's always hard to control groups of people. In one room, simulacra of our personal bags, backpacks and purses appear, and we all grab them by habit, wondering why they're somewhere other than where we left them (the entrance of the house.) Unfortunately, the challenge in this room is to "not steal things," and the simulacra technically aren't ours.

I figure this out, and tell everyone to put the things back and line up to ascend to the next room. Everyone moves into the area that will allow the next room to spawn—but one person didn't listen.

I'm outside, and I'm mad at husband for GM'ing a game that didn't really allow our characters a possibility of surviving. And then I realize that the scenario is kind of silly, and I'm dreaming.

There's an algae-infested lake/creek behind the old house, but I jump in regardless, willing the water to clear and breathing in deep. I swim up the creek, underwater, marvelling at the beauty of the rocks at the bed of the creek, bright green aventurine and glowing orange citrine, and I reach down to bring some with me. And I remember that I'm dreaming, and I leave the rocks be.

I reach another house up the creek, and I wander its rooms. I feel static, and I turn around with a smile, asking a question. A woman has appeared behind me, and she asks me about the old house. I tell her about it, but I know that she had something to do with the whole thing.

To get to the oracle, who is in some kind of park or zoo, we need to walk through dozens and dozens of tents that belong to homeless people. (The homeless people are elsewhere at the moment.)

We face the oracle and explain our quest. The oracle's gender shifts at least once.

We get our answers. The number 100 is important. The oracle mentions that the previous dreamer wanted to go after a spirit or a murderer, and we should be keeping an eye out for that spirit.

Husband asks if, when our health accounts are charged for this, if it could not show up on his as something to do with the occult?

I might or might not be lucid. We're climbing up a rock face towards a valley that has a ship in it. We're beyond the ship and someone shouts to me which side I want the explosion on. I shout back an answer.

A maze. Changing my thoughts to make images appear in between the rows.

My three companions are unconscious, and I need to drag them through the sand of the labyrinth without waking the women in the centre. I'm almost to the exit, but one of the women sends a boa constrictor after the sleepers.

I'm running up the stairs, racing the snake, and then I'm one of the women fighting her sisters, running up paper blinds in the room beyond.

I'm moving through rooms that remind me of the Jedi Knight video games, all steel and sliding doors. I'm having trouble remembering which direction I need to go in, and I walk into a room and am unsurprised by the room spawning a Sentry Bot from Fallout. I've played this level before (it's a fun one, and I hold the high score.)

Prev night: stole a combine with my mom and tried to harvest someone else’s field? Attempted to escape on motorbikes and was cornered in a shop/garage of some kind.

---

My in-laws come to pick up me and my brother at my old apartment building to drive us to school. It’s a five-minute walk, but it’s nice of them to offer. When we get to the school, traffic is being redirected away from the parking lot out into the county. We drive a few minutes before getting to another school where their kids go, and we have to… walk back into town? Maybe there’s a shuttle?

---

I’m at my old apartment building talking to S. She’s apparently using the laundry at this building because it’s a nicer laundry facility than any other place in the city. I’m trying to work the laundry machine, but I’m having trouble sorting out delicates from the other stuff, especially because as I’m sorting them, the basket/machine is filling with water, soaking the clothes. I start finding monopoly money that looks really similar to real money, and I joke with S that it’s just like that fake million dollar bill. Apparently she’s brought a monopoly set so that people can play it while they’re waiting for their laundry.

---

I wake up lying in the street. I’m obviously not in the city I thought I was in. I hear fabric flapping, and I see that I’m in a valley of some kind. Near the top of a nearby mountain, there are a series of flags flapping in the breeze. I remember that I want to attempt to teleport, but I don’t remember where I want to teleport to, so I decide to just go with a previous dream, because it’s fresh in my memory. I aim for the apartment building.

Things are hazy, but I close my eyes and picture it. I open my eyes a couple of times and have wound up in the wrong place, but I try again until I reach the apartment building. Now that I know where I am, I continue with my road trip.

It's Halloween, and I want to check out a house that I haven't been to—a local social media personality is having a party there.

The dream turns into an Alex Veras-style adventure, except that I'm an exorcist, so maybe more Felix Castor. I'm casting an exorcism. I try a traditional Christian exorcism but almost break down laughing, and switch to one using "spirit" as the anchor.

Now we're on a road trip.

---

I'm at W Park (the one with the swans) with my family. Someone asks to have the water gun pointed at them while they're on the diving board because they forgot to shower before going in the pool. The pool and diving boards are within the park instead of across the way.

---

Fragment: phone call

We finish our coffee and the blonde conference-goer shakes my hand with a smile. I hand her my card and grin back.

The waiter walks up as the woman leaves. He leans over the table to pick up empty plates, his long hair swinging a bit as he moves, and I lean back, holding my coffee.

"These new age yoga nitwits are easy pickings," I tell him conversationally. "They'll buy anything if they think it will help them along a spiritual path."

The two of us chat for a bit, and I give the waiter my card and head out.

Perspective switch

I'm the blonde "yoga nitwit" from before. I'm looking into a mirror, changing my hair and appearance to match my character. My husband comes into the hotel room and smiles at me.

"You got him?"

"He's hooked."

Someone comes and knocks at the window of the fire escape, and my husband dives for cover so that we're not seen together.

The manager of the hotel is explaining to us that they ran out of space, so there's going to be a whole bunch of kids sharing our suite.

"That's unacceptable," I tell him or her. Their gender presentation keeps shifting.

They shrug. "You still have the bedroom. It's just the living area and the bathroom that you have to share."

I look at the line that's formed in front of the bathroom and narrow my eyes, but I can practically see the timer for our op ticking down before my eyes.

"Get out," I tell them. "I'll deal with this later."

We probably have to scrub the op.

I'm on another part of the same floor when all hell breaks loose. I'm pinned by a couple of girls from high school and a man is dumping cages full of dangerous things on me, which I'm deflecting. I break loose, wearing the guise of a brown-haired Samael.

"Get back, fiend!" says a booming voice, and Thor is swinging Mjolnir past my head. I dodge across the room, and the hammer comes flying at my stomach.

Oof. Confirming that sacred objects can still knock the wind out of you. Good thing I'm invulnerable, or this probably would have torn straight through my chest cavity. I still go flying, knocking down a wall behind me. Splinters of wood go flying everywhere, and I pick up the hammer.

Just as an enemy agent pops out with an AK-47. I'm swinging Mjolnir by its strap to ricochet the bullets back at my enemies, and then I'm letting the hammer fly—

And I throw myself through the door into the hotel room.

"Elhaz," I command, waving a hand at the wall and weaving protection into the doors and windows. Overwhelming force, meet immutable object. That should buy me a moment's peace.

I wave my hand in a pattern, more jerky than it needs to be, and glance up from the floor at Sandman's Lucifer, who's standing on this side of the door and looking at me with a nonchalant expression.

"You were supposed to be covering my back," I accuse.

I bicker with my counterpart. The two of us are the same person in different universes, or maybe opposite sides of the same coin.

---

I'm walking on the side of a highway in the mountains. A girl has stopped me to ask about backpacking, and I say that I'm just walking from inside the town to the campsite on the mountain.

"Really? I've never been there," she says.

"You should; it's the best climbing spot in the area."

My name is Honor Harrington, and I'm biking down a path in a valley. In the centre of the valley is a school, and I hop off my bike to go investigate.

I sneak in through an unalarmed pair of double doors, and look around the main floor.

The intercom is blaring something. My communications device is picking up another frequency.

Honor Harrington is there? says an alarmed voice. We can't let her get to the balcony!

The balcony. Interesting. I'd better get up there, then.

I still haven't been spotted; they just know I'm in the area. I pick the doors that I walk through and the shadows that I creep through carefully, and make it to the room by the balcony. There's a bench there, and I poke at it to find a secret compartment filled with papers; glossy, like a magazine. I feel a stab of betrayal; J at the church put them there.

I need to unravel what's going on here. But first, I need to make my escape.

---

I drive my car into the parking lot at the school and step out. It's a work night for a local club, where we all sit and chat and work on projects. I used to volunteer with them, but it's been a while since I've gone.

I'm inside, working on my project, but my hackles rise as a woman walks behind me. Apparently while I've been gone, one of the only really bad bosses that I've had has risen through the ranks of the organization. I try to ignore her, but leave soon after.

That stupid carpet. We're at a new house (again!) and we're talking about pulling up the carpet because it's in rooms that it really shouldn't be in.

---

Wanting to give a talk for authors at the library. My dream mixes up two people that I know in real life.

---

I'm walking through an American university campus. Apparently there's a new trend where entrepreneurs rent out chairs for five bucks. The chairs come with cherries, and there's something to do with cheese? You might be sitting on it, though.

The cherries look pretty meh, and a lot of the people around think it's silly because the whole point is to go for a walk with your chair and then find a good space to hang out. Who wants to walk? And they only take cash.

I go to walk away from the chairs, but the lady manning the chair-pile clears her throat and I realize that I'm hanging onto one of the chairs. I put it back in the chair pile, but she keeps glaring at me and I realize that I'm also carrying a chair in my other hand. I put it back.

On the edge of the chair booth, there's a short plastic fence blocking a steep, steep hill. I decide to hop over the fence, but I have a little bit of trouble with it. The chair-lady moves her chair a bit to let me pass. I get over the fence and I'm falling, bounce partway down the hill and land at the bottom, going into a roll. I have enough momentum that I keep running out of the roll, onto the sidewalk and—

Near miss. A bus almost hits me as it goes around the corner. I laugh, exhilarated, and keep running. If I run through the park, it will be cool enough despite the hot day.

I keep running, and eventually find myself at a library. I go into the building, heading towards the climbing wall (because there's always a climbing wall in libraries.) I'm going to climb it without ropes.

At this point, I stop and say "I'm dreaming. I know I'm dreaming," mostly so that when I do my challenges, my waking self will know that I'm allowed to claim the points.

I jump onto the wall and take the first few holds, moving upwards and then along a "ceiling" that juts out from the wall.

Up and around, and I'm counting as I go "six moves, seven moves, eight moves."

I'm two-thirds of the way up the wall.

I change gears, moving over to the "hard" side on the left. The final moves require you to move out from the wall and hang, unsupported by your legs. They look scary—the theme involves jutting teeth and wild colours.

I reach for the final moves: "fourteen, fifteen—"

And with a wild swing, I push out from the wall and barely keep my grip—

"Sixteen!" I shout, and let myself drop.

At the bottom of the wall, a man working for the library/climbing wall wants to know whether I thought it was too easy (but I tell him that I'm kind of playing on cheat mode, and it's fine). He asks about the first few moves on the "basic" side, and I tell him that they're perfect.

Next on my list: teleporting. I focus on the neighbouring house that I want to use for my Week 1 Comp task, and fwoosh—

Find myself pushed back into the waking world.

I'm at a networking event that's in someone's living room. In this dream, the very nice houses in the city are on a peninsula overlooking the water, and the host has a big house that fits everyone. It looks a lot like my house, but bigger.

---

I'm at the dumpster in our complex, and I've found a couple of really cool chairs that I could use in my studio. My husband is not happy with the prospect of dumpster chairs. I now realize that the chairs that were really nice a minute ago actually have broken lifting mechanisms.

---

I'm sharing a dorm with my mom and my brother. This is not a happy arrangement. We've just moved in, and the management is now telling us that we need to move to another one of their properties because they're renovating.

I'm arguing with my mom over whether we should rent a U-haul or take several trips in the truck. She vetoes my U-haul suggestion and says that we can make the truck work, but I say we have two hours to move and we need to take at least three trips in the truck.

A panel that we're loading into the truck snaps, and it flies with force towards my mom's throat.

Pause.

I realize that I'm dreaming.

With my mind, I catch the broken pieces as they fly towards my mom, absorb the kinetic force, and let them drop, harmlessly, to the ground.

I remember that my next task is to teleport—and that I want to teleport to a neighbour's house to fulfill two goals at once—but the dream is getting fuzzy and I'm starting to drift towards consciousness. Blearily, I think that it seems silly to teleport into a neighbour's house when it's right next door. I wake up.

---

Malfoy is sending a robot after me. It would be a physical threat, but as long as I pick it up and hold it on its side, it can't actually get to me, so that's a bust as far as evil plans go.

The robot follows me uselessly around the room.

We're in a playground, and I've hijacked Voldemort's followers by pretending that I, Harry Potter, am actually the next incarnation of Voldemort. (Or maybe I am?)

Malfoy is teetering on top of something that looks like the Cirque du Soleil-inspired stunts from Mad Max: Fury Road. He's trying to prove a point. He falls, but he's currently invulnerable.

The nice thing about dreams is that in the right circumstances, you can just fall forwards, and the air will catch you, like polar opposites of a magnetic field pushing you away from the ground. I float over the grassy hills, and then swoop down to gain momentum and angle my way up into the sky.

I land on a set of stones on a hill and kick back off. I'm in some sort of a competition with other climbers, or flyers, related to a memorial or military ceremony.

---

I have a blender, and half the components of the other blender, and they're both the same make and model. There's been a recall, and I'm disappointed, because I just swapped out a bunch of parts between the two blenders so one would work, and that means I won't be able to get the full return value of both blenders.

I leave the blender that I scrapped for parts in a "free to take" area in a local community hall. Later I come back for it because it turns out that as long as I still have the original boxes I can return both blenders, regardless of whether they're missing parts.

I box up the two blenders and bring them to the returns area. After I've returned those, I keep boxing things up and bringing them to the counter.

There's a good quality secondhand drill on the wall, and I think about buying it, but it's $125 used, and that seems pretty steep.

---

I'm in a farmhouse, playing with cats. There are a lot of them.

Outside. Sailor Mercury, swathed in shadow, looking sad. I'm trying to tell her that we can fight off the dark thing together, but she smiles sadly and says that she's going to hold it off until I can find a way to defeat it. There's only one way: to create some sort of black hole—something like the wind tunnel in Inuyasha—and trap the dark thing on the other side. When that happens, it will take Mercury with it.

Images of the dark thing tempting travellers into its lair and devouring them. Mirrors hiding the horror beyond. A woman with a seductive smile, waving a man to follow her (she opens her mouth to reveal sharp fangs and no tongue.) Flashes of the different temptations that they'll face. One almost turns away... but it catches him in its web.

I have to stop it.

---

Having done a set of dishes before I want to bed, I go to the dishwasher and unload it. I load one set of dishes into the dishwasher, and the dishwasher cleans them. And then I load another set of dishes into the dishwasher. Maybe I can get the place clean before my guest shows up later today.

Notes: I'm mad at my cat because he woke me up. I was chaining those challenges like woah.

My three-step goal for the Sensei Comp is to Reality Check, use Elemental Manipulation and Teleport. I shortened that to "Check, Fire, Port" so I could memorize it yesterday, or I never would have been able to carry that list into a dream.

Onto the dreams.

---

I'm driving through, across, around a series of nicely winding roads. There are some problems with traffic, but it happens. I'm just enjoying the ability to slalom through the roads and enjoy the drive.

There's something about me dating a woman.

Then I'm Tony Stark, and I've just managed to get the arc reactor removed. Apparently I was dying immediately beforehand, because I get a phone call that goes immediately to voicemail, and I hear my voicemail playing morosely -

I rush to to the old-style landline and pick it up like a hot potato. "Pepper!" I say, "I was just going to call you!"

So Pepper's here, along with the other woman I was dating. At this point, I'm no longer Tony Stark, but I am some rich guy who needs to have kids to... um... leave things to. (It made sense at the time; let's just say that if I was playing as myself, this idea would really freak me out.)

Neither of the two women that I am now dating want to have kids, so I'm talking to a third woman who my family had an arranged marriage thing going on with. All four of us are sitting in a guest bedroom, hashing out legal details. The arranged marriage woman thinks that I should actually get married to one of the other two women because I'm romantically involved with them, but Pepper points out that marriage is actually a protection for the kids.

---

(I wake up briefly and attempt to WILD. It doesn't work, but the dream goes lucid later on.)

My point of view is following a sky train car suspended from cables over a vast forest. Inside the train car are dozens of sloths, and they're crawling all over the inside and outside of the suspended car.

Now I'm inside a building in a downtown area, stone and brick and lots of windows. My hands are sore because I've been climbing the indoor jungle gym using only my index fingers... because that's what sloths do?

There are fireworks outside and I hurry over to a window to watch them with the three people I'm here with: my mom, a girl from my childhood who died a few years ago, and her mom as well. The fireworks aren't super extravagant, but they're inside the city over the square, so it's pretty cool to see.

Back inside the building on the lower floor, there's a grocery store. A villain—possessed Harry Dresden?—is threatening the people there.

I've wandered back inside, and while the grocery store is on the ground floor, I'm on the second floor despite having just walked in from the square. I remember the Sensei Comp, and think about how I've always had trouble phasing through a floor, even though walls aren't that hard.

I drop to all fours and focus on pushing my hands through the hardwood floor. Three inches down, four inches down.

I remember that in order to earn points, we do have to be lucid. OK, I think. I know I'm dreaming, I'm lucid, I'm lucid. I chant it as a mantra as I start to feel my knees sinking through the floor. I'm lucid, I'm lucid.

The floor has almost enveloped my torso and I blink -

I fly through the air and land on the floor below, coming face to face with Not Dresden. He turns from threatening the people in the store and looks at me with a wide grin. I ignore him.

Fire, fire is definitely a thing, I think to myself. Ah, reality check first. Then fire, then teleport.

"One, two three four five six," I count on my fingers. "Reality check done."

Then I throw a wall of fire at Not Dresden. He jerks back and dissipates the flame, but it's a close thing. The look on his face is something.

Also, apparently sending flames at your enemies counts as flirting.