Lucid Dream 2

Photo by Jonatan Pie on Unsplash

This is a piece in a growing series of mine about dreams and lucid dreaming. In these stories I give first person accountings of some of the dreams that I have each night. Identities and locations can shift around with little to no warning and the narratives don’t follow typical plot structures. For more of these stories, click here.

Here we are again. We’re driving through a sprawling, luscious jungle and the trees are towering above us. I’m with my mother and my father; we’ve been here before. We drive past abandoned and long-forgotten factories that stand beside transparent pools filled with rainwater. They’re overrun with wild koi. These are no ordinary koi though… they’re human-lengthed and probably quadruple our weight.

The gargantuan, colorful creatures leap gracefully, almost weightlessly, in and out of the water in a way that cues me into the fact that I’m dreaming. As I sit in the back of the car, I struggle with exhaustion. Even in the midst of a dream, I’m struggling to keep my eyes open. Odd.

What I’m seeing is beautiful enough that I try my best to fight against fatigue. It helps that at precisely this moment, my dad decides that he has no regard for any of our lives and begins accelerating over steep, winding, mountain passes that meander through a sprawling ocean.