Wherein I Become Muad'Dib

    We were driving back toward the gates of the capital when we saw a woman riding the wind alight atop one of the towers.  People riding the wind was pretty common but there were blocks around the tops of the walls that should have stopped any normal person from going over the gates.  This woman must have been very powerful at channeling the wind god, but obviously also highly dangerous.  Adalia pulled our vehicle over and we watched, not really knowing what else to do, as a portal opened on the opposite tower and another woman stepped through.  I inhaled quickly; that was rare, someone who channeled the god of doorways well enough to port accurately.
    "Should we do something?" I asked.
    "The guards will," Adalia responded absentmindedly.
    But they didn't.  Instead, the two women waved their hands in the air unimpeded, turning various different shades as they channeled several gods at once; a feat of which is mostly unheard.  I saw the obvious ones: fire, air, earth.  But I also saw the less common crossroads goddess, the wood god, and more that I didn't even recognize.  Golden lines spread horizontally and vertically over the city and I heard a hissing sound followed by a massive choir of wails from those in the city.  The ground shook and the city promptly exploded.  It appeared that everything was engulfed in flames and destroyed except for the two towers that the women stood upon; they laughed.

No, not these ones.  Don't lie, I know this is what you were thinking of, nerds.

    Adalia put the car in reverse and once we were at a safe distance we turned around and fled.  While we're driving to the next closest city I should probably explain a few things.  Here, all the gods and goddesses of all mythologies and religions were very real and present in every day life.  There was one main god and all the rest were secondary gods; the main god does not come into this story.  Temples were a very key aspect of the world and were everywhere; especially since the nearer you are to a likeness of the god the easier it is to channel them.  Every person has a connection of some kind with at least one god to begin with and many people become connected with other gods if accepted.  Most people can channel only so much power before they become exhausted, so most powers are minimal while still making everyday life easier.  The elemental gods were the easiest to channel, so you'd see a lot of flying people, saves on gas, but all gods could be channeled, except for the main god and the god of chaos.  The chaos god wasn't necessarily good or bad, but whenever a person tried to channel chaos every fiber of their being would be ripped apart so successfully they couldn't be put back together again.  The chaos god was known to be incredibly powerful, the most powerful next to the main god.  I had just the basics of a few gods down, very average and not more useful than lighting a fire with my hands or essentially being my own gps.  

    As we got closer to the next city we felt the ground tremble violent and begin to split open around us; someone was destroying the entire road.  Adalia stopped the car and, panicked, we used wind to whip us off the road, leaving our possessions in the car.  As we landed the road collapsed, with the car, down into darkness.  

It was the world's worst pothole.

Neither of us having exceptional channeling abilities, we walked.  Many, many hours later we arrived dusty, hungry, and penniless in the closest city, which was a very large one.  We saw officials trying to figure out ways to fix the road as we passed through.  We dragged ourselves into a hotel that had a food court where we could sit indoors as twilight fell.  The walls had been windows, much like an airport, and tvs hung above them, all of which were reporting on the horrifying events at the capital and the road that led there.  We sat at some bar stools and watched the tv while casually and longingly glancing at a food stand next to us until finally the owner offered us some free food, of which we gratefully partook.  As we ate, the cityscape in the windows changed;  without any warning at all an explosive wall of fire split the city in two, knocking down buildings and setting everything nearby ablaze.  Sirens of all kinds filled the air and everyone in the room silently stared out the windows in shock. 

    "I have to go, I have to find my mom," Adalia said woodenly.  

    Without a word from me she ran out.  My family wasn't anywhere near this city, but I didn't know what to do next.  I stepped outside into the weird purple light the massive fire combined with the setting sun created.  There I ran into an old friend I hadn't seen in ages; he looked haggard and dazed.  He recognized me and started talking to me as if we were still friends, but in the same hollow voice that Adalia had used just moments ago.  "I hate my wife," he said, then he pointed in the general direction of the fire.  "My dad just died.  My dad died."

   Then he stepped away and walked briskly down the street.  I moved to follow him but down an alley I saw the remnants of a beam of energy that stretched up to the sky and then spread into a golden arc like I had seen at the capital.  Next to it was a still open portal, I probably had seconds, it was either die or go through the portal, and I chose the latter.

  

    I had never gone through a portal before and it was very disorienting.  It's what I always imagined it must be like for the Flash whenever he decided to travel super fast.  So many images whipped by me until the one step that I took landed in dim room that I recognized as a temple as soon as the portal fizzled out of existence behind me.  The main area of the temple was blue hued and completely empty, which is abnormal for temples; this meant I was in the temple of chaos.  I looked around and saw the chaos statue, a massive blue oval with several other opal rings carved onto the facade, crossing wildly over each other; the stone was worked so that the rings were constantly moving and the effect was dizzying.  I channeled the wind god and used the wind to see if there was anyone else in the temple and I found that there were two people on the open balcony.  The temple was huge and I quietly made my way toward the balcony.  I peered past the water-lined opening and saw the two women I had seen before.  Why were they here?  Had they somehow harnessed the power of chaos?  I felt my stomach rise in my throat until I calmed myself by recalling that the color of chaos is blue, and all the attacks had been devoid of blue.  They must have chosen this temple for privacy.  They had used some god's power to making hearing them impossible, but this also meant they couldn't hear me unless I got a few feet closer.  I could see a map that they spread between their hands; I could see that they were taking down everything across the country, like a wall of destructive tornadoes.  And if they were destroying entire cities they meant to kill everyone.  Anger and frustration boiled inside of me until all I could see was red.
     But through the red wall of my vision I saw blue on my fingertips that were pressed against the door frame.  No no no no no.  I had heard of this before, people with strong emotions in a temple could sometimes accidentally channel the god.  My rage turned into fear as the blue spread down my arms; I shook them uselessly to no avail and soon I was covered in blue lines.  Then they just disappeared.  I felt the chaos pulling at the organization of my body, my thoughts, everything.  I could feel my cells separating and the pain was beyond anything I had ever felt before.  I screamed and tried to think of everything I had ever learned in biology, how things were supposed to be, demanding myself back to order.  I had to destroy my animal fear to do this, I used the chaos power that was overrunning me to dissipate my fear so that I could focus on everything that was me.  I took one choking breath and the pain was gone, but I could still feel the roiling of the chaos; I controlled it.  

    My fury staggeringly returned and I caught my reflection in the water basin nearest to me, my eyes blazed an unearthly blue.  

I had tasted the spice.

Now was the time to end this monstrosity.  I stepped into their sound barrier and the two women turned around, thinking of spells with which they would kill me.  I didn't stop though, I continued walking at them and raised my open hand, fingertips collecting blue from nowhere, and then brought it down again, closing my fist which became enveloped in blue flames.  Their smiles dropped and one leaped off the balcony and fled on the wind; the other woman created a portal and ran through it.  I laughed bitterly as I used the powers of chaos to keep the portal open.  "I have the power of chaos," I laughed, "there's nothing to save you now."

    I stepped through the portal.

And how can this be? For I AM the Kwisatz Haderach!

And that's when I woke up.   

          

           

Concerning Magic: Not Illusions...Nor Tricks, Which Are What Whores Do For Money

    We were at war or, rather, the enemy was.  The peaceful kingdom didn't stand a chance, especially not when dark magic was at play.  I suppose you need a little background; you see, we lived in a world that was pretty much a standard fantasy book setting.  You've got your one really powerful kingdom that had recently gone on hard times, there's an evil force that had been gathering support from the surrounding lesser kingdoms and was prepping to take the former down, and one cannot forget that, of course, magic was a real thing.

Magic.  Not to be confused with illusions...or tricks, which are what whores do for money.

   As real as magic may have been it was also a pretty rare to be good at it; everyone could do simple magic like lifting small items, basically a lazy person's dream, but there were some who were quite powerful and helped each other learn more as a group; in classic dream style I was naturally part of that group.  Surprisingly (because my dreams never allow this sort of thing), I quickly went through the ranks and became the most talented and powerful with magic; I experimented with magic quite often and even found a way to be able to fly in a controlled hover sort of way.  I wasn't a magic miser so I, of course, shared the things that I learned on my own and we turned into a sort of flying, magical team for good which would eventually come in handy when the great and evil sorcerer Magnar decided he wanted to take over absolutely everything.

Not to be confused with Magmar, no matter how similar.

    And so Magnar created a massive following of evil henchmen and even created his own primitive, magical powered robots.  He did all of this in secret and so came completely out of nowhere; it was a huge, horrible surprise for the kingdom.  The peaceful qualities of the kingdom really did nothing for them in this situation and the war was more like a hostile takeover than anything else.  The kingdom's army wasn't remotely formidable and the king would rather surrender than lose thousands of lives.  But Magnar really reveled in killing people so the kingdom lived in terror while some brave few fought back with little to no success.  Then one day a huge shadow was cast across the capital of our kingdom; above was a giant chunk of land just floating in the air.  Upon further inspection by our magical group of do-gooders, what lay on top of the chunk of land was a huge city topped with a castle that Magnar had somehow built for himself.

Like this but on a much bigger scale.  Where's Link when you need him?

    We decided that this was as good a time as any to launch a massive attack.  We split up into smaller groups and went off in different directions to wreak havoc on the general evil population; I, however, went to take on Magnar.  I flew to the castle and battled my way throughout it, but Magnar was nowhere to be found.  I took a sword from one of the expired minions and used a spell that would track strong sources of magic; as it turned out Magnar was in the back courtyard.  He was looking through a book that I recognized, anyone could have by its appearance, as a book of dark magic.  The book was dark red and had symbols carved all over it that glowed an acidic green.  Instead of doing the typical thing and talking at him, I opted to just hurl a spell at him while his nose was in the book.  He caught on fire for a second but then appeared to absorb it as he stood up and threw the book to the ground.  Then the magic battle ensued.

I wanted to use Gandalf and Saruman, but let's be honest, their fight didn't have the visual panache
that Dumbledore and Voldemort provide.  

    I wasn't familiar with Magnar's spells and could really only defend myself with my own magic since he seemed to be just absorbing my spells.  I quickly decided that going on my own was a mistake; fatigue was taking over and I just didn't know what do to until I remembered that I had a sword and we were getting quite close to each other in order to use spells that weren't ranged.  So, I stabbed him; everything was over and Magnar and I didn't even have to say a word to each other.  I magically communicated with the rest of the group the incredible victory that we had just won and they informed me that everything was under control in the rest of the floating city.
    Then the city started shaking, like in any classic video game, the the evil city was falling to pieces as soon as the evil guy in charge was dead; not really a big deal if everyone steered clear of buildings.  But then the whole ground started rocking violently as well and I hovered above it to avoid wobbling.  Horrified, I sensed the magic that held up the piece of land suddenly let go.  The ground fell away beneath me; the entire chunk of land and city and screaming people plummeted downward.  Right on top of the city I was saving below.  My horror slowed everything down; I held my hands out in a useless gesture and saw the no longer floating city tumble over and over downward until it smashed into the capital, completely engulfing it in rock and dirt.  My city was gone, mostly everyone had to be dead, and it was my fault.

My brain does not give me a break; and that's when I woke up.

The Dream All Customer Service Employees Share

    Before you read this next post you should have a little background information.  My expensive BA  degree opened up many doors for me, doors that led to the glamorous world of retail;  I'm positive that many of you are in the exact same boat.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the working lives of those in the customer service industry, you should know that we pretty much see people at their worst; apparently most people think "service" is the same thing as "servant".  Long story short, working as customer service of any kind is rather soul crushing.  The following dream appears to be a manifestation of my unconscious desires.

    Marshall and I owned a decent sized, modern house that had a smaller, second house attached.  Apparently we were starved for more torture than our customer service jobs could provide us, so we decided to open up our own clothing store in the smaller house.  The small house was one floor and actually didn't have a kitchen, which made converting it into a store much easier.  We made some alterations so that we had a hall full of fitting rooms; the hall itself was very wide and at the end of the hall was a wall of windows with a clear door in the middle, but that door was always locked.
    One evening we were technically already closed but, of course, we still had two people in the fitting rooms.    Anyone who works in retail knows exactly how annoying that can be; so I was straightening things and grumbling about the customers when I heard some strange noises.

I like to think this references either the fate of rude customers or what working in retail actually is.

At first I assumed the noises were just regular obnoxious customers noises but then there was screaming.  I looked around but Marshall had already left the store to go do some studying.  I walked hesitantly toward the fitting rooms and the scream became two screams, so I ran.  The scene that unfolded before me was both baffling and horrific; the glass door was open, one customer was standing in front of his room screaming and pointing,  and fleeing the scene was a huge bear with the other customer in its mouth.  I stood there, doing nothing, and completely in shock as the oddly polite bear shut the door behind it.  

We tracked down the bear and had a conversation with him later over a picnic lunch.

    As the bear disappeared into the night so did the customer disappear into his fitting room; suddenly composed I metaphorically shrugged my shoulders and went back to straightening the store.  The remaining customer came out of the fitting rooms and asked me for some different sizes of various articles of clothing and I gently reminded him that we were closed while still grabbing the clothes for him.  He went back to his fitting room and I impatiently waited behind the cash register, furiously willing him to spend at least one hundred dollars.  As I mused upon my life's mistake of opening up my own clothing store to forever spend my life doing customer service I heard screams again.  This time I ran as fast as I could, right away, to the fitting rooms and a more grisly scene awaited me.  Heh heh, grisly.  

    There was blood everywhere.  The bear was back and held the top half of the customer in its jaws; it stared at me for a moment before loping out the door, this time leaving it open.  That's about when I lost it.  I ran to the main house and, in hysterics, told Marshall what happened.  What was I supposed to do in this situation?  Who do I call? 911?  But the people were missing except for two legs.  The police?  Animal control?!?  We ran back over to the fitting rooms and the first thing we noticed was that the glass door was shut again, the blood was gone, and so was the rest of the customer.  

    Marshall decided I must have dozed off and dreamed the whole thing, and he went back to studying.  I saw small specks of blood still on the floor and the customers' clothes were still in the fitting rooms.  Nonplussed, I sat down in front of the glass door and peered into the night; all I could think about was why the bear was so polite.  Does that make my dream self a sociopath?

And that's when I woke up.

The One in Which Benedict Cumberbatch Makes an Appearance

    My husband, let's still call him Marshall, and I had found our dream house; the only problem was that the property was owned by someone and rented out to multiple families at a time, because the house was so huge.  At the moment only one family of four lived there and they owned a couple of friendly, big dogs. The house was amazing and simply could not be passed up; it was a massive manor of stone with various carefully cultivated flowers and other plants lining the bases of the walls which sat in a clearing surrounded by woods.

The place? Downton Abbey...or Misselthwaite Manor.  

    So we moved into a bedroom on the first floor with windows that faced the front yard and drive.  The windows were door-sized  and every single room was beautifully and ornately decorated and furnished with the manor's original furnishings.  The house had more than two kitchens, countless bedrooms and bathrooms, at least three libraries, and a ludicrous amount of sitting rooms.  We were given our own kitchen, bathrooms, and guest bedrooms but the rest of the place was open to anyone, except of course the other tenants'  rooms.  You would think we'd run into the other family more often but the place was so massive we pretty much never ran into them.
    Each person had a special room assigned to them specifically as their own room, a private place to do whatever you wanted.  Marshall's room was a big library, which was very fitting for him and would have been for me too, but my room was different.  I had to follow a map the owner gave me to find my room and when I did finally find the place it was a huge disappointment.  First of all, I had to climb through a crawlspace to get to it; I found a light switch and flipped it on to reveal a tiny room.  When I say tiny, I mean tiny in every way possible.  It was like a small attic around 6 by 6 feet and the ceiling was about 4 feet high.  The floor was carpeted white and the walls were plain cream.  I sat back against the wall in disbelief.  What could I possibly do in this room?  Then I noticed the trapdoor in the ceiling; I pushed it open and climbed up.  It was a huge circular room completely empty and made entirely out of wood; the ceiling was high and cone shaped and there were large windows  in every section of the circular wall.  I stepped up to one of the windows and saw the front of the yard and beyond; I was at the highest point of the house.  This was pretty much the perfect room for a huge medieval geek who thinks trapdoors are the coolest things ever.

I blame you, Clive.

    Highly pleased, I eventually made my way back downstairs and went to bed.  I woke up earlier than usual; Marshall was still asleep and I got up and stood in front of one of the windows.  I peered out into the pale morning light and saw a big dog that was definitely not our housemates'.  I stared at it for a while before it starting barking, then it ran, right at my window.  As it ran it snarled and growled like it was going to eat me if it ever got inside.  I figured it would stop before it got to the window but it kept coming, it was going to smash into the window.  I moved my body into a defensive pose that would've made George Michael Bluth proud and flinched in advance for the impact on the window.  But it never came.  In an instant the dog disappeared from outside and appeared quite suddenly inside.

This is the first image that pops up when you Google image search "magic dog".
Surprisingly appropriate.

    Naturally, I screamed as the dog kept barking; Marshall woke up and asked me where that dog came from; the other family must have been nearby because they heard the commotion and ran in.  They had never seen the dog before either and nobody understood why I kept repeating that it came through the window which was obviously closed.  That was when the owner of the house silently appeared in the room and it would be the first time any of us had ever seen him in person.

Because his awesomeness almost made our eyes explode.

We all knew him and fell silent upon his sudden arrival.  Benedict reached out his hand to me and placed it on my shoulder; he gave it a gentle yet firm squeeze and said, "You're not making any sense.  Things don't just...go through walls.  You need to lie down."
    He looked at me knowingly but I didn't understand why.  He drew his hand back.  "Now, I believe this dog belongs to the new family.  I will be away for some time, by the by."
    He nodded toward the window and then looked at me again with a small smirk on his face.  We all looked out the window to see a man and a woman in their forties with a young boy carrying there things across the drive.  The man and the boy were dressed in black suits and the woman was in a black dress and hat; you would've thought they were just coming from a funeral, but they had smiles on their faces.  The others turned to go greet them and we noticed Benedict Cumberbatch had disappeared.    
    The new family, as expected, was downright creepy and they took liberties all over the place.  We would always find them in our rooms for no apparent reason and their dog was a menace.  One day I sought solace in my tower and was thinking about that crazy dog and that crazy Cumberbatch, as I was wont to do, when quite suddenly I heard a very loud crashing noise and my tower began to wobble violently.  I darted to a window and poked my head out.  The new family was standing around on the lawn watching someone with a wrecking ball take down my tower while I was still in it.  I would've screamed at them but the tower was so unstable now I had to leave immediately.  I ran to the trap door but for some reason it wouldn't open.  I pulled and pulled as the tower's state worsened.  Then I dropped through the floor and landed in the small room below.  I looked up to see the ceiling still intact and then took off through the crawlspace; I tore through the house and out the front door.
    "What do you think you're doing?!?" I screamed at them.
    Cumberbatch gave me the tower, they had no right.  Also, it was his property. I angrily informed them that I was in there and could have died.  The father's response?  "Why didn't you?"
    Just absolutely amazed I went to Marshall's and my bedroom and sat down.  My body felt like it was vibrating slightly then I fell right through the bed and onto the floor so that now I was lying underneath the bed.  Naturally, I began to panic.  Did Cumberbatch do this to me?  What did he know?  Did the dog do this?  What was "this"???  One thing was for sure: The new family was trying to kill me, or all of us.
    Suddenly, the dog's face appeared under the bed with a wild grimace.  I was vibrating again but I crawled out frantically on the other side right before blinking out of existence momentarily and falling onto the basement floor.  Then I started crying.  If I couldn't control this then where would I end up?  Probably trapped in sheets of rock somewhere in the Earth's crust and suffocating.  But if the dog could control it why couldn't I?  I ran for the stairs and felt the odd vibrations again.  I stopped and instead of ignoring the sensation I concentrated on it.  Cumberbatch was right, things don't just go through walls.  On some level I realized my atoms were separating just enough to be able to pass around other atoms, allowing me to pass through seemingly solid objects.

So, I had the more terrifying aspect of The Flash's superpowers.
And I didn't know how to use it.

But as it turned out as long as I concentrated and demanded that my molecules and things listen to me, because I'm the boss of me, I wouldn't disappear again.  So I very slowly, but solidly, made my way up the stairs where Benedict Cumberbatch awaited me.  His figure at the top of the stairs kept blinking like a bad VHS tape.

This is a VHS tape, kids.

"You're too late," he sadly said to me before completely disappearing.
    I didn't understand him but I felt like my organs all decided to twist themselves together in a fit of nervousness.  I passed through the doorway to find pretty much nothing.  There was no manor, no trees, no flowers, no Marshall, no nice housemates.  Everything was just grey rock as far as my eyes could see.  I heard a small, polite cough behind me.  And there stood that family of three, all in black, grinning at me.

And that's when I woke up.

Ghost Like Swayze

    As you can see dying is a common occurrence in my dreams, but I don't usually get much farther than that.  But recently, for the first time in my dreaming history that I can remember, I dreamed that I died and became a ghost.


    I was in high school again and it was a snow day; myself and a few others had gone to a friend's house, her name was Kelley.  She lived out in the country, real middle of nowhere place, surrounded by woods for miles.  Their driveway was a dirt one and very long and narrow; when it reached the clearing the house was in the driveway split and became an oval.  We decided to go hiking and build a snow fort somewhere in the woods like any normal teenager would do; we went past the driveway and deep into the forest.  As we built an epic snow fort the snow continued to heavily fall and the day got later and later.

If you think about it this is a pretty plausible snow fort.
Which means the White Witch did a really, really bad job.

At around twilight we realized how late it was getting and decided to head back, but our tracks were gone and ,soon, so was the sun.  You'd think it would be easy to find out the way back but if Mythbusters taught us anything it was that lost people tend to go in circles and that explosions are always necessary (but was that ever a myth?).  So we got lost.  It would've been better to stay in our fort but we didn't know we were going to get lost.  As the temperature plummeted what seemed like a blizzard arrived and the five of us started  dropping like flies.  We were tired and cold and hypothermia was setting in; it was too hard to not give up.

We definitely went the way of Casper.

And we died quite peacefully out in the woods where we turned out to be just a stone's throw away from the oval part of the driveway.
    The first few days of being dead was most like being asleep.  We were aware we were dead but we didn't know what was going on or where we were and we weren't really conscious of anything else.  We didn't become ghosts until our bodies were buried, and it was only me and Kelley who were left behind.  We materialized where we died and in the light of day saw the travesty of how close we were to the driveway.  We found out pretty quickly that our strongest emotion was melancholy, also that there was no leaving Kelley's parent's property.  When we tried it was as if there was an invisible wall around the perimeter.  We also discovered that there were entities in charge of ghosts, Voids (no relation or resemblance to Warcraft's Voidwalkers), as well as entities who helped ghosts even though they weren't supposed to do so.  You see, there were ghost rules and if you disobeyed those rules you would be punished.  Things of the dead world could hurt each other, in extreme cases the Voids would do bad things to your living friends and/or relatives, and in most extreme cases they would devour you, rendering you absolutely gone.  The Voids were humanoid and all black except for their completely white eyes and lamprey mouths.  They had large torsos and very skinny limbs that ended in jagged claws.

 
All these things combined.

Breaking the rules was absolutely no joke.  But we had to do it anyway.  Kelley's mom was taking her daughter's death too hard; she had quickly sunk into depression and was considering suicide, but nobody else in the family seemed to notice.  Kelley and I decided this was why we were still here, but since this was a time sensitive issue we needed to cheat in order to stop her mother from killing herself.

Ghost Rules:
1- Do not move anything in front of a living being.
2- No writing messages.
3- Do not cause physical harm to the living or their property.
4- Do not seek assistance to be able to speak directly to the living, success in such an action will result in termination.

So basically, even being dead wasn't fair.  This is why there are so many poltergeists.  What are you supposed to do if your reason for being a ghost dies or leaves before you can do anything?  You're stuck.  So many ghosts just get frustrated and flip out while many others do as much as they can to just commit ghost suicide.  How do you not get filled with rage and just take it out on anything you can?

Seriously?  This is our only means of communication? Screw this.

    What you may be asking is why doesn't a ghost just break rule number 4 is they're done with being a ghost.  Number 4 is more difficult than you think because you cannot simply contact the help you need, they contact you.  But we were desperate and the powers that be knew it.  They didn't have a name that we knew of and we never saw them, they were more like a feeling than anything.  These entities told us that they had hidden small pearls of life all over the house and we needed to collect all 25 in order for one of us to be alive for 25 seconds.  They were hidden so that the Voids wouldn't find out about it until it was too late for them to stop us.  We had to slip sleeping aid into Kelley's mom in order to get her to sleep at all and whenever everyone was asleep we would search the house frantically, quickly collecting the pearls and hiding them away until we gathered them all.
    The day came when we found the last one and all the living were still awake so right then was a perfect opportunity.  Kelley's mom was sitting outside alone, unbeknownst to the rest of the family, with a bottle of sleeping pills that she would consume soon.  I told Kelley she had to take the pearls now, but when I looked at her her face was scrunched up in fear.  She was afraid of the Voids, she didn't want to blink out of existence.  I couldn't believe her selfishness and I screamed at her for it.  She ran inside the house as her mother poured the pills into her hand.  I had to do it, I couldn't let this happen.  Maybe, like in the movies, because of my sacrifice I would be saved.  I consumed the pearls and I suddenly felt different.  Kelley's mom saw me and dropped the pills on the ground, letting out a small shriek.  I lied to her that Kelley was fine; I told her that Kelley could see her and was with her, that Kelley didn't want her to kill herself, that it would leave her daughter in everlasting pain if she did so.  I told her that Kelley just wanted her to be happy.
    Then my 25 seconds were over and I was a ghost again.  Kelley's mother ran inside and I followed her as she almost told her family what happened but decided against it and sat down with them.  Kelley and I stood in front of them and she asked me what I said.  I started to tell her but then she vanished.  I heard a noise down the hall and saw a Void turn the corner, it was coming for me.  Why wasn't anything ever like the movies?

And that's when I woke up.
  
                          

I Am...Batman?

       My ward was the son of a very important, wealthy political figure in an alternate universe where there were people who could accurately tell the future for the right price.  My ward, Will, was eight years old and a seer had foretold that he would overthrow the current government, which was oppressive, when he grew up.  Because of his parents' political status this information was easily leaked and made public, putting Will in danger of losing his life very early.  This is where my job came in; I was your classic skin-tight, black leather wearing, multiple guns toting bodyguard.

I'm very talented in my dreams.

I had some small seer power in the category of danger happening in my vicinity; I could see things that would happen in the next minute or so, giving me enough time to get out of the way.  My services as a bodyguard fetched a high price because of this, but soon it was discovered that there were also people who could dispel seer powers for a few seconds...
    Will, his nanny, and I were on top of the roof of the building the family lived in where Will had his own personal playground.  From there I had  a good vantage point of our surroundings; there was only one building nearby that was higher than ours, but I wasn't too concerned about that.  What I was concerned about was the scaffolding that scaled the front wall of our building for a facade treatment.  The door to the stairs was near the front of the building so if I sensed something was going to happen and there were more then just a couple of people, escaping would be difficult.  So I decided to keep my attention toward the scaffolding to watch for any extra movement.

Actually, I was more like a paid Batman with super powers.

    Suddenly I felt a vision coming on; they usually lasted just a couple of seconds, but instead of a vision the feeling faded away into nothing.  That was not normal at all, it had never happened.  I felt a buzzing sensation of nervousness at the base of my skull and pulled out a gun, running to Will.  I screamed for them to go as I spun in slow circles, still making sure I was blocking at least one shot of Will, trying to find from where the attack would be coming.  The first shot cracked and I felt the bullet punch into my back, apparently I didn't feel the need to invest in some Kevlar.  I stumbled and whirled around to see a gunman on a balcony of the higher building behind us.  I shot at him but a person in the shadows stepped out and pushed him out of the way just as I pulled my trigger.  I abandoned my first idea of killing the gunman and made sure Will got through the door.

Of course I gave up, I was obviously up against Emma Frost and Bane.

He did and I the second shot came; it hit me directly in my spine and I fell forward onto the edge of the building.  I wasn't able to move myself and my body helplessly slipped forward off the building and onto the scaffolding below.  I crashed and slid down until I rolled out onto the street, a bloodied mess.  People ran up to me and told me everything was going to be fine, I was going to make it.  But their words may as well have fallen on deaf ears, because I wasn't listening.  All I could think about was what my spine looked like.  Was it split?  Were the bones shattered?  Could anyone reconnect the broken spine or fix the damage?  It must have been a mess, I thought to myself just before I died.

And that's when I woke up.

The One Dream Where I Win. Because I Cheated.

    Apologies to any readers out there on the extended delay of a new post.  I was out of a state for a while and then had a parental visit and all that made me a busier person than usual.  Anyways.  
    As you may have noticed my brain doesn't provide me with many happy endings, but a friend suggested I write up one where I win for once. So, without further ado I present my one and only lucid dream, because typically when my dream self demands I wake up my brain says "Screw you".


    I was in an odd Old West style alternate reality where we still had some present day, real-world technology.  One of the bigger differences was that the trees were all dead and it was perpetually twilight.

This is pretty much exactly what you should be imagining; 
you'd think I had played this game before  I had this dream.

And also there were magical beings running around, like griffins and grim reaper types.  My dream landed me in media res; a war was raging in this land of supernatural cowboys and automatic hand guns.  I was a soldier in one of the armies and none of us footmen actually knew what we were all fighting about, which probably meant my brain couldn't come up with something creative that night.  All we knew was that we must take this town that had been quickly abandoned at each troop's approach and that our lives were at stake.  Most of us didn't want to be involved in this and were actually conscripted in the most browbeaten sense of the word.
    We each wore combat boots and Kevlar underneath our dusters and only the higher-ups wore cowboy hats.  We sported clunky looking guns that were very reminiscent of the RCP 90 and as far as I could tell, weapon-wise, that's all we got.

If only our ammo was as inexhaustible; things probably would have gone better.
I obviously play too many video games.

We marched toward the town bathed in purplish light in silence, we were not a troop with great morale, and could you fault us?  We each had an ankle bracelet that would inject us with an incapacitating poison if we were a certain distance away from our commander; to be fair it was a pretty wide circle but that fact still didn't instill us with confidence and loyalty. well, maybe the lying through our teeth kind.
    Luckily I was not in the front lines; I was nearer to the back, fairly close to our line of griffins which are few and far between because they are incredibly difficult to train.  As we walked through the extremely wide main street of the town we began to see lights moving very quickly around the borders of the town, akin to waving a flashlight very fast. They became faster and faster until it silently solidified with a flash of light into an almost transparent wall.  As a group we faltered, everyone knew what that meant.  We all started talking immediately and in classic mob fashion some people in the front took a few steps back causing every last person to be pushed backward and become panicked.  The enemy had spell casters and we didn't have a lot of options.  We couldn't be sure what the wall would do but it was safe to assume it would be impenetrable and too high to somehow get over.  And even if we did get over the wall our commander would have to as well or we would just collapse out in the barren land of twilight; it would be like shooting paralyzed fish in a barrel, but easier because they wouldn't have to deal with that pesky water part.
    Suddenly our enemies began to materialize out of the mist on the opposite end of the main road.  Small balls of red light came at us and we all shifted out of the way, but the light ignored us completely and went straight at the griffins.  The light didn't seem to do anything but disappear into their skulls; that's when each griffin turned around as fast as a whip and snatched their riders, all of those in charge, by the necks with their sharp beaks and rip them to shreds before going to town on the rest of us.  Well, that was it.  We had guns, but so did they, and they had spell casters.  But we hadn't quite lost it completely yet.  Not until we saw those grim reaper beings I mentioned earlier.

Never had I been able to say, "I know exactly how you feel" to Bastian before now,
even though his fears were stuffed wolves and responsibility.

They weren't "Death" so much as harbingers of death.  As far an most people knew nothing could harm them and they loved killing slowly with their scythes.  So as soon as we spotted those black-robed killing machines float out towards us everyone ran everywhere else with no goal in mind except to survive.  Guns were being fired all over the place and constantly and those bullets would have helped a lot if everyone wasn't so panicked and use up their ammo so fast.  But there was nothing for it.  At this point I knew I was going to die, but that didn't mean I had any closure at all.  The primal part of me was sure I could get away if I just kept running in circles.

Exactly like this.

    Finally I opted to go inside one of the houses and it turned out to be completely empty.  But I didn't even have time to hide in a closet before a grim reaper floated in and spotted me.  Screaming, I ran through a hall and out a door that opened to an outside porch which I fell off of, since I didn't know it was a porch.  As I looked back I saw the grinning reaper heading down the hall at top hover speed.  I cried out in frustration.  "This isn't real!" I yelled.
    Then, with everything continuing exactly as things had been going, I quietly repeated, "This isn't real."

My new confidence level.

    I decided I should have the most powerful magic at my disposal and a beam of red light shot out of me and knocked the grim reaper over.  A flash of blue and he exploded into dust.  I laughed with disbelief and got to my feet, brushing myself off.  Then I thought to myself that I should be able to fly too, which turned out to be a little trickier and less cool because I wasn't sure how I wanted to make myself fly.  Since only part of my brain was aware about the dreaming I guess it wasn't working at a great capacity so what I got was a mix of Angel and Rogue from X-Men, but lacking any and all grace.  I didn't give myself the wings for some reason, but in order to actually start flying I had to flap my arms like a lunatic and jump in the air correctly.  There were a few false starts but when I got it I didn't have to flap anymore.  

Obviously this woman is just falling with style, but you get the idea.

    I got rid of the magic wall and destroyed the spell casters, grim reapers, and insane griffins, then left everyone alone to figure it out for themselves while I flew toward a twilight mountain range.  They were dream people, after all, they didn't need me.

    And that's when I woke up.
        

"Prepare to Enter: The Scary Door"

    My husband, let's call him Marshall, and I were shipwrecked and the only people left alive.  All we could see was a high, muddy cliff surrounded by a swampy mire, much like the Swamps of Sadness.  

I would've liked a better picture but all the Internet had was Artax
giving up on his horsey life and letting himself die while his best friend begged him not to.
Too depressing.

We were trying to decide what to do next when a horrifying deer appeared and started moving slowly toward us.  It looked slimy, like it was rotting, and had red eyes.  So we frantically began to attempt to climb the muddy cliff but it wasn't really working out.  Yet our furiously scrabbling caused something to shift and we fell through part of the cliff, dropping about ten feet, landing on a polished wooden floor.  As we stood up we saw we were in a long, very neat hallway basked in very dim light.  There was an ajar door very near us and we decided to take a cautious look.  The room was dark but some daylight seeped through from behind some curtains.  The room was very large and had several beds and plenty of furniture; is also had several dead people.  One was hanging from a ceiling fixture, another had his throat slit over a sink, someone had been strapped to a bed frame and carefully tortured; the list went on.  Horrified, we scrambled back to wear we had fallen and decided we had to try and get back out.  I climbed onto Marshall's shoulders and scrabbled for the hole; it was gone.  "That breach is gone now," said a voice that made me jump and fall to the ground.
    Behind us stood a group of men dressed in black and red uniforms pointing imposing guns at us.  "It was an accident!  We didn't mean to!" I blurted out uselessly.
    The one who spoke smiled grimly at us and then nodded.  Two others grabbed us and forced us down the hallway while the rest of them filed into the room of dead people.  They led us up several floors and into a vast, stately room whose walls were mostly windows.  Behind a large and shiny desk sat a man in a suit and off to the side there was a leather couch occupied by two bored-looking, brunette women in their late twenties.

Like this but with more windows.

The view of the window was of downtown New York City, but something about it was awry.  First of all, there were hover vehicles, like in The Fifth Element except with bigger windows.  All the buildings were curved and the Statue of Liberty was a nude statue, just the way the French intended.  The man introduced himself as Mr. Frederick and explained to us where exactly we were.
    Mr. Frederick decided that he would like to start his own version of New York City, so, in secret, he built an island, then a dome, and created an indoor New York City that he liked better.

This would've happened if  I had gotten my hands on a boat.

Then he populated New New York City by pretty much creating a cult that promised a new and better society and he also brought his family, his two daughters, the ladies sitting on the couch.  His laws were very specific and very tedious and must be followed day to day; the rules were strictly adhered to by the aptly name Enforcers, those were the guys in black and red.  They implemented physical torture to keep people in line; the rule book was as thick as an Oxford English Dictionary and had many rules that made sense, but were unfair given the punishment for breaking it.  Adversely there were also a lot of rules that just didn't make sense.  Marshall and I were then sent back to pick up groceries for our new home in the same building; we were to begin to assimilate.  But before we were escorted out of the room and to the ground floor shopping market, Mr. Frederick said with a smile, "Those people you saw in that room, they were trying to find a way out.  We see everything."

"I see you."
Mr. Frederick's portrait and favorite saying.

    Marshall and I roamed around the grocery story, too stunned to say anything, when a middle-aged woman ran her cart right into Marshall.  "How dare you!" she shrieked.  "Apologize this instant!"
    We were flabbergasted and stammered out mixtures of protests and apologies but she continued to shriek her outrage.  Quite silently an Enforcer emerged from behind the woman and gracefully and gently carved a thin, bloody line across her throat.  "It was your fault," he said monotonously, "and you will apologize."
    The woman stood completely still and her face turned white as she expressed her deepest apologies.  The Enforcer pushed her away but left the knife where it was so that it cut her more as she moved.  "You can't do that!" Marshall exclaimed, looking around at the fellow shoppers.  "You can't let them do this to you!"
    "Stop it!" I begged him.
    But the Enforcer was there and he grabbed Marshall and dragged him away.
    This can't be happening, I thought to myself.  This can't be happening.
    I needed to save Marshall, I had to find him and find a way out.  I figured if I could find him, a way out of this building, and a vehicle, we would be free.  So I decided to find the very first room we saw, and eventually I did.
    The room was still dark but the bodies were no longer there.  I sneaked around the room checking under the bed, in desk drawers, but found nothing.  I was going to move on but I heard a bizarre slurping noise punctuated by crunching.  I looked around until I saw it; two glowing red eyes and the faint form of the dark, rotting deer creature from the shore.  It was standing among the bloodied, cut up body parts of the former tenants and eating them.

You can't tell me you would not have been scared of a zombie deer
which also had odd supernatural powers.

It saw me and in the horrifying yet slow trot came after me.  I can't even begin to describe the terror that this thing instilled in me but I couldn't even think straight and ended up in a closet instead of going to the main door.  I climbed up racks of clothes and onto a top shelf where I found a hole which I squirmed into without even pausing to think.
    I held my breath as I crawled through layers of insulation; I had no idea what direction I was going or how long I was in there.  Suddenly something grabbed my arm and yanked me out; all I could do was scream and thrash around.  When I finally opened my eyes I saw that Mr. Frederick's daughters had yanked me out.  "We thought you might try this," the shorter one said.
    "We didn't tell daddy about that breach because we wanted to see if you'd find it," the tall one said.
    "But there's some bad news.  There's no way out.  Well, there is, but only we know it.  Daddy was so impressed when we found it."
    "You'll never find it, so go on and try.  Your husband will be dead soon and it's fun to watch you scurry around."
    So I did.  But while they weren't paying attention I was able to find out where Marshall was by watching the Enforcers log reports.  I caught an even bigger break when I found out that Enforcers were controlled by some kind of microchip that was easy to shut down if you knew how, but it did result in the death of the host. So instead of trying to find a way out I made a way out by shutting down Enforcers.  Soon enough I was out of the building and found the platform that has the hover car Marshall was in; it was guarded by two Enforcers but I shut them down easily.  I saw Marshall of the hover car and yelled, "Start moving the car! If you go straight up there's an exit!".  And he did, so as it was moving I leaped in through the open window and landed quite hard on my head.  Exhausted and relatively safe I fell asleep.
    I awoke to a pounding headache and looking at the back of Marshall's head.  I breathed a sigh of relief.  "Are we home yet?" I asked.
    I sat up and looked out the window and saw New York City.  But wait, those buildings are curved.  We hadn't gone anywhere.
    Marshall turned around, fresh microchip imprint on his neck.  "We are home."

Rod Serling should've narrated this.

And that is, no joke, exactly when I woke up.
   

Jubilee's Colony for Mutants with Crappy Powers

I hate her so much.

    Imagine, if you will, being on a lovely, relaxing vacation; you're walking down unfamiliar streets alone and doing some light souvenir shopping.  This is is where my dream begins.

    I felt that sensation you get when your back feels bizarrely exposed and vulnerable.  Someone was watching me.  Several times I peered behind me to find the same person following me; at first I thought it was just a coincidence, I was being crazy, but every turn I made they made.  I began to panic and kept making wild turns without even thinking about where I was going and eventually I was hopelessly lost. 

My dream self needs to pick better vacation destinations.

Finally I stumbled into a small, deserted square with a fountain in the center and two other passages that led to it.  At the same time two other frightened looking people came out of the other entry ways.  One was a boy of around fourteen years and the other was a man who looked to be in his thirties.  All we could do was stare at each other imploringly as we watched a shadowy person come up behind each other and shove a rag into our faces.  I smelled a vaguely sweet scent as I fell into unconsciousness.  

    We each awoke at different times in a small room lined with cushioned benches and the one door was, unsurprisingly, locked.  The boy's name was Will and the man was George; none of us knew each other but we were all on vacation.  The stories of our captures were all incredibly similar.  We deduced by the gentle movement of the room that we were on a boat of some kind but we were unable to find any clues to help put together what exactly was happening.  We decided that when someone eventually came to get us we would attack them at once in hopes of escaping, much like the heroes in The Three Ninjas.  

This is exactly what our captors saw and they ran away in terror
while simultaneously knocking each other out.

Somehow we were successful and the ship has also conveniently been docked.  So we took off together into a tropical paradise of sun, sand, and palm trees while being furiously pursued.  Our escape was still going quite well until our path was blocked by a some very weird sculptures.  We navigated around them to our best abilities but they were enormous and the wooded areas beyond the paths were just too thick to even attempt to go through without a machete.  After we made it past the sculptures there was an outdoor set of upside down and somehow inverted sets of staircases all connected.

Did...did I watch Labyrinth before this dream?

But we got around those eventually too, they didn't slow us down too much.  Ahead of us the path was wide and clear and at the end was an equally wide rope bridge.  Suddenly, my limbs felt like they weighed dozens of extra pounds a piece; Will and George looked to be having the same trouble to, we all appeared to be in slow motion.  Soon enough, we actually began to be dragged backward.  I felt compelled to look behind us and saw a blonde woman with angry eyebrows in a suit with a hand outstretched to us.  It was at this point that I somehow also noticed the three of us all were wearing a shade of red shirts.  I slowly took my own red shirt off, and since my dream apparently had a G rating I had a white tank top on underneath.  As soon as the red shirt was no longer touching me I felt normal again and almost face-planted at the suddenness of it.  I helped Will and George shed their red garments and we were off once more.  I didn't think of it then but this woman obviously had a color-based power, which was lame, but good for us at the time.

Her power was much like the Power of the Red Shirt on Star Trek.

    But shortly after we were stopped for one last time by a wall of bones.  This guy was basically the Magneto of bones that were not attached to any living organism.  So he just stood there in front of us and used his power to find any and all bones in the area and ripped them from out of the ground.  I imagine it took some time to amass the whole wall since a lot of the bones must have been very deep within the ground, unless of course there was a cemetery nearby.  I had thought it was the end of us, we were doomed.  But like the son of Poseidon Will blasted the wall with a wave of water.  

Will does NOT belong in this colony.

George and I were baffled, since we didn't have an powers that we knew of, but apparently Will knew of his all this time.   Boneto essentially waved a white flag and requested to have a chat and Will consented.  Boneto told us about the colony that our captors belonged to and explained that they were recruiting us.  We wouldn't exactly call kidnapping "recruiting" but we listened on anyway and he showed us around the place.  We saw people who could control books, eat rocks, and one who could turn into a working fountain at will.  Apparently this colony was competing with another colony for extra special recruits, except apparently the other colony didn't know it was competing.  Boneto insisted that George and I would eventually come into our hidden powers and also asked that we stay with them.  None of us wanted to, but in the end we decided to stay for a day or two, just to check it out.  Everyone was really nice but we began to notice that the place was more like a prison for us, because they kept extending our stay.  What made it even more terrible was when someone tried to make no-bake cookies, but with rice instead of oatmeal; it was disgusting and we just wanted to go home.  

But we could never leave.

    And that's when I woke up.