"I shouldn't just jump to what I want to do. I have to take things step by step," I concluded, and took a left turn into the boxy white house that stood beside the lines.
I remember waking up in the house itself, on a mattress so long that the foot part had to be curled up by the wall and ceiling. A dark-haired little boy with Calvin & Hobbs precocity was trying to talk his mother out of worrying about something-- it wasn't me she was worried about, though she stood by the bed. I could hear people moving around and talking in the other rooms. The mother then saw that I was awake, and invited me to join their party.
They had kumquat noodle soup, but the pot had a slit opening like a mailbox. My spoon couldn't seek-and-scoop the parts I wanted. This made sense when I overheard one of the guests being lectured on the politics of bird flocks. Some red finch had to be given the best parts of the soup, or else spring or autumn wouldn't come.
So that's why this soup bowl is so weird, I thought, These people are birds, so this is made for their beaks. Then I realized that these were anthropomorphized flocks of birds. Wasn't that this month's Quest on LDall?
The next thing I remember, I was approaching the host, who didn't join the party himself but sat in his study.
"Can we get you anything?" he offered, still with his back turned. He seemed like a busy, distracted guy-- but a gracious host. Also, he looked suspiciously like Locke from Lost.
I can't remember if I thanked him for the hospitality and asked to pass on my thanks to the rest of the family. I meant to, but the first thing I remember actually saying was, "I need to get out of here. I have these tasks... I have to fly out a window."
He gestured to the paneless windows, long up-and-down rectangular cuts in the wall in front of his study table, and said, "Those are LCD screens."
"That's perfect!" I gleed, thinking it would put me in a video game for the Lucid Challenge but somehow not expecting it to.
Sibling popped up, then, and told me, "You can catch a cloud-ship from the street just across the field from this place. I've been thinking of buying one for us, but try it out for me!"
I waved goodbye, hopped out the window (or into the screens,) and kept flying, losing altitude as I approached the electricity and telephone wires. Luckily, a pirate ship made out of a stormcloud bobbed down the street, floating. It looked like a CGI effect. I hailed it as if it were a taxi.
I was the only passenger, and thought that it would behave like a bus or train, with stops that I wouldn't have to direct. As I sat on the edge of the cloud-ship and watched the dusk stain the sky, I became more lucid.
There was a member on LD4all, named Arne, that set out a more focused challenge, to ask a question of a dream character. I approached the driver of the cloud-ship and passed it on.
"I don't know..." answered the captain/driver, sounding annoyed, and then repeated with a surprising amount of anger (considering I hadn't even said anything more, yet,) "I DON'T KNOW! GET THE HELL OFF MY SHIP!!"
In a blink, it was night. It was like snapping back after a daydream. Two dream characters had finished lecturing me on our zombie/vampire avoidance plan. We stood on someone's suburban lawn.
"They're coming!" one of the dream characters gasped, the one that looked remarkably like a much younger Jennifer Love Hewitt.
"Let's split!" said the other dream character, who I didn't see because I was scanning the night sky for flying zombie-vampires, but he sounded like a guy. I manifested an archery set and took to the sky.
"Oh, no," said one of the dream characters. "She's flying."
"That means she was one of them all this time!"
In mid-air, I turned back to laugh, "What??" just in time for my face to meet a rock one of them had hurled at me. Angered, I chased after them to sneeze over them, because zombification/vampirism spread by way of viral infection.
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