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.