The dream animal to protect one from nightmares: what a great idea! I will need to try that next time either of my sons comes to me after a nightmare. And hey maybe I should try it to, since I have recently had occasional nightmares, although in the past when I had lucid dreams I used to be able to overpower nightmares very effectively, but if I cannot become lucid, maybe at least I will remember to call forth my animal - I think mine shall be a lion too, since I am a leo, so why not. And I know my four year old would want a tiger, since he mentioned that someday he would want to adopt a tiger.

As for DCs: I think that it is a mistake to assume that one's mind can only create two dimensional, boring, hollow DCs - some people have this idea. I know my imagination well enough to be able to construct very realistic interesting personas, and I think that is preferable. We are social animals, and why would we want to spend our dream lives surrounded by boring DCs? I know my father has often featured in my dreams in the past, and his representation was very realistic. Recently one of my dreams that stands out in my memory, which alas was non-lucid, but it featured a very interesting elderly rich woman, whom to my knowledge I do not know in real life, but in the dream we had a striking conversation, which supposedly was a job interview, but ended up being about generational differences and about being accepted by another person despite my flaws.