Yoshimi, They Don't Believe Me

I think it started with a dream of being in a video game. It was some fantasy world exploration McGuffin game, graphics looked around FF8-era. I watched a sidequest opening play out: the groundskeeper in some hedge maze had to be offended or attacked, and he would call his mecha up from over the wall, along with five other mecha with color coding like the Power Rangers. The player would be given one tiny fighter jet to evade and shoot at them with three specific kinds of ammo.

The controls flowed like a dream. By that, I mean quite well. But, somehow I kept losing. Something damaged my jet, and I ran out of ammo because I kept shooting the wrong kind of ammo at a target and missing because it was the wrong kind but I'd run out of the right kind, so I landed my jet in a deep labyrinthine canyon and made my way into some secret headquarters under a mountain. The mecha surrounded the mountain, and I realized that we didn't hide any ammo here. I considered pressing square to try again, and then it began to rain.

Of course! I thought, The stormclouds will hide me, the mountains will make it more difficult for the mecha to move. I can still do this--

But before I could get back into the action, I dreamed of waking up, in a room that was mostly white. Not glowy, blindingly white-- more like the interior designer just wanted it to look clean and professional. The sparse furniture had brown wood legs. My bed here was narrow, with a quilt for a mattress.

I made my way to a balcony that faced the atrium, and the other side of the same building. Through the window I could see people in suit-and-tie outfits, or blazers and pencil-cut skirts striding purposefully past. I knew, then, that this was a research facility and we had been invaded by some professional competition. There was a mecha shaped like an oversized Ironman, with a gold head and no face waiting on the roof. I flew to beat them there, wondering why one of the pencil-cut skirt wearing invaders ignored me when she caught sight of me flying-- maybe she was a mole, on our side? I decided not to use the mecha for total destruction, based on that possibility. I snuck in to operate it, and negotiate with the invaders, and it was in there that I began to suspect that this was a dream.

So, after negotiating through the mecha, the invaders figured out that it was a trick. I got out of the mecha, dropped off the roof, and into the quarters of an alien. She was gray, with a humanoid face and hands, but a forehead shaped like a Triceratops. I ran past her and jumped out her window, which unlike mine faced the outside world--

Lucid! I thought, upon landing safely on the sidewalk. I don't know why I felt that I needed to get out of that building to stabilize my lucidity, but here I was.

The rest is disappointing, but only mildly for me, and even more disappointing for how mild it is. I just don't have dream goals anymore, which is annoying, but not annoying enough to me to try to fix it.

It wasn't like that one time where I wracked my dreaming mind for lucid goals and the information just wasn't there where I left it. I just wasn't motivated to make anything of my lucidity.

I have a foreign language exam coming up, so I know that I really should have used this lucid dream to study, but even in waking life I feel too confident to "waste" time with that, even though I know that feeling is wrong.

It crossed my mind to do this month's lucid quest, but I already had wings and just didn't feel very musical tonight. Lucid Crossroads? Been there, kind of. Arne's other challenge? Forgot the exact phrasing by now, and the requirements were that the questions had to be word for word. Sky Island? I flew a lot in the nonlucid dream before this, so I was all flown out and would just like to walk.

All other goals became a mere curiosity. Snuggle with dreams of my crushes? I can fantasize about doing that in waking life. Meet my fictional characters? I can think their characterization through more carefully in waking life. Meet someone else's fictional characters? Ehh, that means I have to decide on a fandom, and I'm too lazy to think. Not too unlucid-- too lazy.

Somewhere very deep inside, I was shouting, "It's been so long! Do something that you've always wanted to do! Do something!" But it just didn't carry. I'm in such an unmotivated, indecisive phase of my life right now that I consider all this and most of me just accepts it. Which is frustrating to the rest of me.

Back to the dream: I flagged down a jeepney, and rode on its roof out of the city and into the mountains. These other men who were riding with me on the roof appeared to be in high spirits, and teamed up to try to pin me down and reach around under my clothes, but, still being lucid, I ripped their arms off and threw the severed body parts into the jungle. They became very offended at being unarmed like that, and challenged me to a mecha battle, which I accepted so that I could get off the jeepney, sit in the beachside restaurant that it stopped at, enjoy the food and the sea air, and never show up for the challenge. Somehow, I felt certain that the invaders or the hedgekeeper's mecha would meet with the rude commuters instead of me, and all of them would finish each other off without my having to bother.