"Remnants of Cerberus" - 12/23/2021 (Lucid)

"Remnants of Cerberus"

12/23/2021

(Lucid)

(This dream was pretty fragmented, and I could only remember a few, key moments of it. I had been playing "Devil May Cry 5", before bed, and I'm pretty sure my acquisition and usage of a 3-tier weapon of fire, ice, and electricity - that I got after defeating the boss demon King Cerberus - is what inspired these encounters.)

I was in my old neighborhood, at night, just roaming about the streets. There were a few other people out, but all was relatively quiet. Then, with absolutely no warning, a raging, flaming minotaur rampaged onto the scene. The top half of its body was set ablaze, as if it was sporting a flowing mane of pure fire that covered its head and upper torso. It was doing these rushing berserker-type attacks and mauled at least one person before turning its sights on me. It blitzed me and I had to brace against its charge with my forearms. Each impact felt like I was bracing against the heaviest lineman, running into me at full speed. After reeling from the intensity of each of its charges - surprisingly, never finding myself getting burned from its fiery headbutts - I was able to dodge a few of its attacks before it veered off toward another person. I don't how, exactly, it happened, but when it caught up to the other passerby, it immediately turned the man into ice, as if it had ejected frozen air from its snout, or something. The person literally froze in place, solid, into a strange, organic form like a nautilus shell made of ice.

Using this window of opportunity, I hauled ass and ran out of the entrance of the neighborhood, sprinting down the sidewalk next to the main road. I remember passing two motorcycle cops that were just hanging out on the side of the road, but the thought never occurred to me to stop and tell them what was happening. Instead, I continued running toward the shopping center that sat at the next major intersection. It was here that I notice something bright, filling the night sky, in the distance. As it loomed closer, I could see that it was a fire-tornado, whirling its way toward the shopping center and in my, personal, direction. 

Still not yet lucid, I don't know exactly what prompted me that I could even do this, but I suddenly decided to take flight, and I levitated off of the sidewalk and into the air. Getting a grand view of the town from above, as well as the imposing cyclone of flames that was still stalking up the street toward me, I instinctively decided to fly back to my neighborhood, feeling that I might rather take my chances with the no-less-fiery minotaur. The moment I touched down, though, just next to my home, I briefly contemplated what had been happening. I realized that - of course - this all had to be a dream.

I was no longer afraid of encountering the minotaur, but it was nowhere to be found. Instead, though, as if right on cue, I saw the bright glow of a monstrous fire coming through the dark streets of my neighborhood. The closer it got, the more I could see that it wasn't the minotaur. No. It was a machine. A crane, of sorts. It was as if an oversized backhoe was fitted with a massive, rotating sawblade on its telescopic arm, and that sawblade - itself - was also made of a supernatural hellfire. The tractor portion of the vehicle didn't have wheels. Instead, it was actively laying track, in front of itself, which constructed a system of x/y axes on the ground, for the tractor to shift toward me in an alternation of frontward / sideward movements.

Unafraid, due to my newfound lucidity, I just waited for the giant machine to approach. The flaming, rotated blade swung itself around in my direction, and I took to the air. The blade swiped just beneath me, and I could hear the loud whirring of the machine as its crane arm changed directions and brought the blade back around toward me, again. I was completely comfortable in my flight, though, able to zip through the air in short, lateral bursts, evading each subsequent slash from the crane and watching the flaming blade shred through the trees - and even some houses - in the neighborhood as it continued to try to slice me out of the air.

I don't remember anything after toying with this contraption, though.

"Politic.....tick.....ticks" 03/14/2022

"Politic.....tick.....ticks"

03/14/2022

The first thing I can remember is that I was lying in bed, in my old Lake Mary home. My bedroom light was on, and I couldn't tell whether I was drifting off to sleep or just waking up, but I had that sort of "in between states" feeling that tends to come when right on the cusp of sleep. Suddenly, the bedroom door slammed open, and a group of what I can only describe as "prominent far-right pundits and politicians" came trudging in. Apparently, they were being ushered in by someone who I'd identified as a "rival from work" (though I don't think this person represented anyone in waking life), and they all began ransacking the room, supposedly looking for something of value. By their hurried and almost cartoonishly-sinister demeanor, I could tell that they were right on the verge of some gargantuan plan coming into fruition and, for some reason, they needed something in my room to make it happen.

As they searched, I tried to pull myself out of the bed, in order to confront them. I found, though, that I could not move. I was pinned to the bed by some unseen force and, no matter how I tried, I could not come to move any of my limbs, or even raise my head far from my pillow. (It felt very much like sleep paralysis, though I couldn't make the connection, at the time.) All I could figure, was that these intruders had some apparatus of control over me, that was making me unable to move. I struggled against it, for the entire time they were in the room, and it wasn't until they all filed back out of it - leaving me unsure of whether or not they'd gotten what they were searching for - that I broke free. Now, able to throw myself out of bed, I ran to the door, to go after them. The moment that I opened the door, however, the scene completely changed.

I was, now, in what looked to be a hotel room. My fiancé and I were making the bed, and I was telling her about the events that had happened, as if they'd happened the night before. As I explained the events to her, she seemed to be familiar with the person that I'd supposedly worked with, from the story, and it was then that I realized the events I was describing to her never happened, because she doesn't really know any of my old coworkers. Because of this, I realized I was describing a dream to her, rather than a memory (though it wasn't enough to realize that I was still, in fact, dreaming as I told her this story). We hurriedly tidied the rest of the room, knowing that we were, apparently, running late to get to some important show or function, within the hotel, and that we had to leave as soon as possible.

My recollection of the dream skipped ahead, and we were coming back from whatever gathering had taken place. My daughter was with us (though she was younger than in waking life), this time, as we returned to the hotel room. Before bed, I'd noticed that she was writing something in her binders, quite intently, but I was unsure of whatever it was that had her so wrapped up in it.

Flash-forward, once again, and I was waking up in the hotel bed. (It wasn't  a full-on 'false awakening,' because it was still continuing the narrative of the current dream.) Just as the first time I'd 'awoken,' though, I found myself caught in paralysis and unable to raise myself from the bed. My fiancé and daughter were nowhere to be found. Suddenly, as before, the hotel room door burst open, and in flooded the same group of far-right provocateurs from earlier. The ransacked the room with the same fervor as they had in the first scenario, and one of them went digging ferociously through my daughter's papers. I kept trying to look over this one's shoulder, to see what might have been so important that could be found in a child's notes. However, I was still pinned to the bed, by an unseen force, and couldn't get a good vantage point.

Before long, the intruders gestured that they'd found what they were looking for, and that they were ready to "begin" whatever it was they were looking to set in motion. As if prepping for some sort of cult-like ritual, they all took up various positions, around the room - one of which was right next to the side of my bed - and laid down on the floor. They closed their eyes in unison, as if preparing to fall asleep, and remained completely still. Still pressed to the bed, I had no idea what they were doing, but I could not shake the feeling of dread creeping over me.

Abruptly, I 'woke up' again, still in the hotel bed. Though I was no longer paralyzed, I immediately knew that something was terribly wrong. My fiancé was nowhere to be found, but my daughter was asleep on her own bed. Fearful that something big was going on, I hopped out of bed and woke my daughter, taking her by the hand and rushing out of the bedroom to find my fiancé.

The moment we opened the door, though, everything 'stopped.' Rather, I should say that everything 'slowed to a crawl,' in terms of time, itself. No matter how hard we ran through the hotel hallways, we were objectively moving in slow motion. It wasn't just us, though. Everything in the hotel was happening in slow motion. People were rushing out of their hotel rooms with the same degree of urgency as we were, yet everyone was observably trapped in the same bit of temporal distortion as the two of us. Still able to think in real time, despite my limbs not following suit, I immediately knew that this was a part of whatever political masterplan was being put into effect. I noticed that the hotel architecture was changing, as we rushed through the corridors at a snail's pace. Normal hotel room doors were suddenly transforming into heavy, riveted metal doors with no handles or knobs. It was as if some entity was changing the landscape in order to try to either trap us or funnel our escape in one direction.

Up ahead, I could see the hallway opening that led to the central courtyard of the hotel. We were a few stories up, and I was pushing my legs as hard as I could, fighting through the debilitating sluggishness that we were somehow locked in, preparing to start a painfully-slow descent through the staircase. It was then that I noticed wave after wave of other hotel patrons leaping from their respective balconies within the courtyard - generally plummeting to their deaths as they fell in completely submissive positions as impacted the ground with the full force of gravity, despite their slow motion freefalling. Still in a belabored sprint, panic washed over me. I only had a moment to ponder what was happening, before I reached the threshold of the open staircase. Since I was still able to think in real-time, I felt confident that I had enough control of myself to take a leap of faith and, clutching my daughter's hand tighter, I took one leap, to clear the first section of stairway, landing with one foot on the pivotal railing before launching off of that one and descending the full four or five stories in a single bound. We touched down, softly, in the grass of the open courtyard and continued our slow-mo sprint toward the nearest exit, which would take us back through the corridors but, instead, on the ground level.

It was around this time - running into the closest covered hallway - that I began to notice the music that was permeating the environment, as if it were being pumped directly into my brain. (This dream took place in the middle of a Wake-Back-to-Bed attempt to induce a lucid dream, and I had meditative binaural music playing in my headphones as I slept. I believe that it was the slow, ambient tone of the music in the waking world that prompted the time distortion in the dream. It was very "Inception"-like.) Ahead of us, a young boy was standing outside of what seemed to have been his hotel room. Running in slow motion gave me a moment to take in his expression, and I could see that he was frantically confused, almost to the point of sobbing. In a manner that sounded like an audio tape played at a fraction of normal speed, I could hear the boy talking to himself about how he "had been in one position," and then found himself instantly shifted to "another position," as if he had witnessed a time-jump or teleportation of some kind, and could not figure out what was happening. It was in hearing this boy's bewilderment, that it solidified in my mind that this was some sort of time-loop or time-manipulation plot that was coming to pass. This was not real life. I had to be trapped in sort of "pocket dimension" or something (ala "Dr. Strange").

Continuing passed the boy, my daughter and I ran through subsequent hallways, unsure of exactly where we were going, at this point, but just running and trying to escape this horrible, surreal, situation. The further we ran, and through each subsequent room that we passed, everything seemed to be getting darker and darker, until we finally barged into one room that caused my vision to go completely black. The feeling of being in an enclosed area faded away, and all I could feel was a dark, empty void. I felt disembodied. Then, I remembered being paralyzed on the hotel bed. I remembered the invaders who came in and did their strange ritual of laying down and seeming to lose consciousness. I remembered that one of them had laid down right beside my bed.

With that logic, I had the feeling that this was a dream. However, I thought it was a dream that I was having while rendered unconscious by the political terrorists who might still be asleep, next to me, in the hotel. Still in the black void, I felt that wave of paralysis wash back over me. I could no longer feel my limbs moving, and I was surrounded by darkness. As last-ditch idea came to me: I figured that, if I could just break free of the paralysis, and roll out of bed, I might be able to land on top of one of the sleeping assailants and break whatever ritual they had going on. 

Fighting against the full-body paralysis, I started trying to rock myself over onto my left side, straining against the invisible force pinning me to the bed. Finally, with one desperate push, I jerked myself off of the bed that I could, now, sense beneath me in the void, and I got the brief sensation of falling before bringing an elbow down and feeling it smash down upon the body of the personal lying unconscious on the floor.

Immediately, I awoke from the dream, and back into waking life, still in darkness before removing my sleep mask from my eyes.

(When I awoke, I was somewhat relieved that I didn't actually act out that final gesture, which - even though she sleeps on the other side of me - would have a real problem, if I'd have accidentally rolled over and dropped an elbow on my fiancé, while she slept. LOL.)

"Shark Tank Hotel" - 11/08/2021 (Lucid)

"Shark Tank Hotel"

11/08/2021

(Lucid)

 My earliest memory of this dream was of being in a hotel or condominium hallway. After wandering, aimlessly, for some time, I realized that I was in a dream. There was a short, older cleaning lady making her rounds, through the hallways, and I decided to follow her out of curiosity. She was a pretty mundane, character, though, seeming to really have no sort of direction or purpose, as she stopped at one room or another, then just continuing to walk along without really "doing" anything. I noticed a few, small animal cages that lined some of the hallways, which seemed out of place for a hotel, but mostly uninteresting. The woman finally stopped a small storage room with a single toilet inside of it, and it was then that, feeling that this particular thread wasn't really leading anywhere, I decided to ignore her and wander off on my own.

Heading downstairs, I took a moment to look at my hands and focus on the details of my hands, to ground myself into the dream state. My fingers were a bit warped, as if being viewed below a watery surface, but otherwise unaltered, and the environment around me was brought into greater clarity when I looked away from them. Heading outside, to the parking lot, I saw that a number of people had gathered around, and that there was some sort of altercation going down. I don't really recall the details of the situation I'd stumbled upon, but I soon found myself being accosted by a group of 3 or 4 "bullies," who seemed as if they were just looking to start trouble with any and everyone around them. 

Since I was already lucid, I had no problem taking these guys on. Though I don't remember much of the actual fight, I do remember stopping, for a moment, to run my hands along one of the wooden tables nearby, in order to keep me grounded and prevent the dream from fading during the action. Sometime during this skirmish, the crowd he become aware that some kind of giant housecat had roamed onto the property. The animal - which was about the size of a lion, but undoubtedly an exaggeration of a normal housecat - began stalking in my direction, the moment it saw me, and I wasn't exactly getting a welcome feeling from it. 

Immediately, I shifted my attention from my previous, human attackers, and took a defensive stance against the approaching beast. Feeling a good bit of dream control, after taking on multiple opponents, I attempted a superpowered move against the cat, trying to conjure up a "Hadouken!" and throwing my palms out toward it to produce a fireball. Nothing happened, though, and the cat was still coming. I tried once again, yelling the command out, even louder, to try to really get the feeling of willing it into existence. Still nothing, though, and the cat was just about to encroach upon me, so, I did the very first thing that came to mind, instinctively, as it came within reach: I gave it a sharp slap across the face. Unsurprisingly, this didn't seem to faze the big cat, at all, and it simply chomped its jaws down on my hand, and held on tight. The bite didn't really hurt, at all, and it was more annoying than anything else.

Instead of taking the time to continue trying to fight off the animal, I simply turned around and attempted to ignore it, walking away from the crowded lot and back into the hotel. I could feel that the cat's teeth were still closed around my hand, but I noticed that there was very little resistance while I walked. When I looked back, I could see that the cat - which was still locked onto my hand - had shrunk, slightly. It was still big, for a housecat, but not quite as imposing as it had been, before. I passed a reptile tank, which had an alligator inside, and I placed the cat inside. In no time, the two creatures were battling it out, on their own, within the tank. Noticing that there were more tanks in the hallway, I saw one that contained a shark and - for no other real reason than curiosity - I reached into the gator tank, grabbing the two, quarreling animals, and dumping them into the shark tank. On cue, the shark joined into the fray, and all three animals started fighting in the tank that was far too small to fit them comfortably.

Another glass tank caught my eye, nearby, which held some less-threatening, tropical fish. Also inside was an intriguing miniature of internally-lit castle. The windows glowed brightly, in the dim water surrounding it. Since I had become a little tired of this - fairly mundane - hotel environment, I decided to try a scene change and see if I might be able shrink myself down to explore this underwater castle. I figured that phasing through the glass of the aquarium might be the easiest way to make the transition, so I pressed my palms and face against the glass and tried to 'push' myself forward. I encountered just a little resistance, at first, but then I felt myself pass through the glass like a thick, gelatinous fluid. Pushing myself further into the tank, I could see the castle coming closer, though the water was growing more dark and foreboding, the further I advanced. It still felt like my entire body wasn't 'inside' the tank, and I could still sense the discrepancy in my size to that of the castle. It didn't feel natural, at all.

Then, I started thinking about the animals fighting in the tank with which I'd just interacted. The thought of the carnivorous creatures, in an underwater setting, started making me really uncomfortable, as if they were starting to converge on me, in this enclosure, even though this tank was even smaller than the others. Now, unsettled by the notion of being stuck in the murky depths with predators, I reversed my forward progression and pulled my head back out of the tank, through the glass. Upon emerging from the surface, I could see the large head of a great white shark, filling up most of the inside of the tank, just near what my head had been, as if it was swimming toward me to bite my head off of my neck. Since the tank was so small, it was only big enough for the head of the shark. The length of its body, though, was sticking out of the other side of the tank. The head, it seemed, had phased through the glass wall of the tank, just as mine had done, and the body of the shark was just suspended in the air, horizontally, while its head remained stuck inside - as if a pencil had been stabbed a portion of the way into a plastic container.

I was in awe at this surreal image, and the last thing I remember was reaching out and touching the shark's body - which was leathery, damp and detailed - and remarking, out loud, at how cool it was. Unfortunately, touching the shark (although I was not focusing on grounding to the dream, while doing so) was the last thing I actually remember before waking.