"Mindsweepers" - 03/03/2009 (Lucid)

"Mindsweepers"

03/03/2009

Dream #2

(Lucid)

(This one was pretty interesting. I've had dreams within dreams before, but I've never had a dream where I was in someone else's dream. I don't remember a whole lot of it, but the whole concept of how this one played out was awesome. I happened to catch the end of Vanilla Sky, last night, which I hadn't seen in ages. I'm figuring that's probably what inspired this dream.)

I was with two other guys, and we were part of an operation that sent us inside the mind of a mentally-disturbed girl. We were supposed to locate some sort of blocked memory, from her childhood, that was going to help her psychological therapy along (kind of like the premise for the movie "The Cell"). I don't remember anything from the "real world," in this dream, but once we entered her mind, it was as if we were entering a warehouse. Instead of going through a surreal "dream world," with vivid landscapes and fragmented continuity, we walked through a massive storeroom with various objects and boxes filed away, all over the place. Each of these objects represented the girl's memories. What was most surreal was that some of them were gigantic in size, such as a very large, pink, children's bike that stood up in a corner, some 15ft tall.

After roaming around this warehouse of memories, we came to a huge 'docking area' door, at the far end of the building. I went over to take a look, and one of the guys told me to be careful, because this was where all of the girl's childhood nightmares were stored. Tampering with it in the wrong way could unleash any or all of her forgotten nightmare creatures, to run rampant within her mind, which could send her into an even worse psychological state. It was also, apparently, where we were going to find clues to the blocked memory.

The guy who knew the most about what we were doing here - a young American (judging by the way he talked) of middle-eastern descent - came over to a panel, near the door, where I was standing. The panel was very high-tech and had a screen on it with a scrolling marquis of all types of monsters and disturbing images; a display of the atrocities held behind the door. The apparent technician opened up a service hatch in the floor, under the computerized panel, and crawled down inside of it. He got to work, doing...something or other, and we just kind of watched him, from above, while he worked. He was supposedly able to navigate the contents behind the door this way, in order to find clues within the girl's nightmares, to whatever memory it was we were looking for.

A few seconds after he started, an alarm began blaring. The guy below us began panicking, saying that something had gone wrong, and the door was about to open, releasing something from within. He stayed below, in the hatch, and the two of us - left up top - scrambled backward as the enormous door hissed and ascended high over our heads. Immediately, a goliath of a monster stomped out from storage. It was 20ft tall, easily, and had a top-heavy, muscle-ridden body with arms like redwood trunks...and it looked really, really pissed off.

The tech-guy screamed out that we had to keep this thing from getting away, into the different corners of this girl's mind, or it could do irreparable damage to her. In a bit of a strange twist, I realized that this was a dream world, and that I was good at dream control. Not sure if anything was going to work, because this wasn't my own mind. (In essence, I became lucid, without really becoming lucid.) I squared off against the massive monster, and planted my feet, pulling my hands back to one side and trying to summon a 'kamehameha' energy blast (ala Dragon Ball Z). When I threw my hands out, in front of me, though, nothing but a pitiful wave of distortion shot out of my palms, doing absolutely nothing to the monster. He charged in, toward me, and I dodged off to one side, jumping toward a wall and running straight up it, vertically, until I was higher than the beast's head. When I was high enough, I did a twisting backward flip over the monsters head, throwing my hands downward, repeatedly, and trying to fire multiple blasts of energy at the monster's head as I flipped and twisted over top of him. Nothing but short puffs of failure bursted forth, from my hands. I landed the impossibly-high flip, perfectly, though, crouching and facing the towering creature, completely out of ideas.

Suddenly, just as soon as the action had started, it stopped. Time had rewound, and we were instantly back, roaming through the storage facility, again, just beginning to approach the large door. I began to notice that we'd done this, before. I remembered the monster, and I recalled trying to use powers. I, then, realized that this wasn't the girl's dream. It was mine. I was now actually lucid. The first thing I did was look at my hands, and everything was just about as vivid as it was, before. I had to actively try to visualize my hands as being distorted, before they began to warp and change shape. The DC's I had been with, previously, were still playing their roles, though, and they were going to work on the hatch again. I told them there was no need for that, because I was the one dreaming. It took some coaxing, but I got them to abandon the mission so that we could go and find something else to do. I distinctly remember one of them protesting - citing the importance of the mission - as we were walking away from the hatch, and me telling him to "just shut up, DC", feeling frustrated after my attempts at beating the monster before had been so futile. The thought crossed my mind, to try fighting it again, but I didn't really feel like wasting the dream on it.

(Unfortunately, that's all I remember, and I woke up shortly after that. I came to the PC to take down my notes and then went back to sleep.)