Lucidly Dreaming (Part II)

(You'll either want to start with Part I or just revel in the lost, confused feeling. Totally your choice.)

I've never figured out the why, who, or anything else about the Violent Bad Guy dreams. I can never see the face. There are no features, just dark, like a shadow, like just nothing there. He's big. Deliberate. He never speaks. Like when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come won't say shit to Ebenezer Scrooge. Silent, scary motherfucker. He chases me (of course he does), and I can't run or scream. I mean, I try, but my legs are congealed oatmeal, they just won't work, and I fall down and my screams come out with all the force of a weak kitten, despite practically herniating my diaphragm with the effort. He doesn't hurry. He doesn't have to. He knows I'm not really going anywhere, even while I claw at the grass and scream my nonfunctional throat raw. The thrill is in the chase, and he likes it nice and slow. It's terrifying. Pins-and-needly prickling in my bowels, my organs go slack, like they're going to slip out of me.  The grass comes out by the roots in my hands, and my feet keep slipping. My muscles won't fucking work, and he's coming.

Could it be any more "classic nightmare" here? The only thing I'm missing is an escape route through my school locker where I can't remember the combination.

He never actually catches me, though. I wake up. Every time. Which tells me that shit must be scarier to the lizard part of my brain than splatting onto the concrete was in the falling dreams.

The Violent Bad Guy dreams would come maybe a couple of times a year. I could never tie them to any real-life event or person. I mean, I had a pretty idyllic childhood. My biggest trauma was probably when that deranged German Shepherd tried to rip my face off but had to settle for a goodly chunk of my arm when I instinctively blocked my face with it. Pretty interesting, having the deep tissues of my arm hanging out there on display, but nothing some stitches and a good plastic surgeon couldn't fix. I never had bad dreams about it, though, and besides, Violent Bad Guy was a two-legged stalker, not a berserker dog. Other than that, my most tortuous ordeals were mowing the lawn, toting firewood up the hill in the snow, and wailing tragically when my dad unplugged the phone without warning during my Very Important Conversations. He also made these annoying kissing sounds when I was talking to my boyfriend. Even so, not really the stuff of nightmares.

So fast forward a couple of decades and change, from the nearly forgotten falling dreams to me closing in on thirty, still occasionally dream-fleeing Violent Bad Guy, but not giving it much thought. One day, in a rare conversation on the subject, someone asked if I'd ever considered lucid dreaming. I had to ask what that was. "Pfft, oh, that's some bullshit," I said. "Please. Like I'm going to magically be able to run now because I decide to. Gee, great idea, why didn't I think of that? Sure, okay: I decide I can run now. Poof!" My friend opined that maybe it wasn't about running. Maybe I should consider confronting Violent Bad Guy. Ask him what he wanted with me and who he was.

And I freaked the fuck out.

I did not want to know who Violent Bad Guy was, what he wanted with me, or anything else about his creepmeister ass. I mean, do you really want to know Jeffrey Dahmer's motivations when he comes a-calling? No, you just want to get the fuck away from his ass. You're not going to ask him to tea for a nice chat, you're going to run, Forrest, motherfucking run. Or at least claw the grass till your nails bleed and low crawl like an Airborne Ranger in the kill zone after you fall down. Ask him what he wants, my ass. I don't give a fuck what he wants.

My friend quietly suggested that I may want to investigate my extreme reaction as well as the lucid dreaming idea, to which I emphatically replied, "Fuck that."

Some time later, at the library, one of the display books was about lucid dreaming. Weird. What are the odds? Flipping through the book, I realized that turning the falling dreams into flying dreams had actually been some form of lucid dreaming. Cue Twilight Zone music. I checked out the book. (This was before Wikipedia had emerged as the foremost authority on life and everything in it.)

The next time Violent Bad Guy showed up in dreamland, I was vaguely aware of it being a dream. I still didn't want to ask him shit. The idea of hearing whatever voice he was packing ... too much hell no to even contemplate. Darth Vader would probably sound like Dora the Explorer by comparison. No. But I felt calm. Controlled. I think it's about the control. The deciding. It felt like things change now. I remember that calm from way back when I decided I wasn't going to fall anymore in the falling dreams. It's like things have already changed, even before you've actually done what you've decided to do, even before you know if it's going to work, because you feel different. Resolute. You're not afraid. It's really an incredible [what the fuck, you mean this was all I had to do all along?] feeling. I wish I could duplicate it in real life, feel that sure and solid, but I guess in real life you know way down deep that there's no out, no waking up. There's no locker combo to remember and no National Geographic (Reader's Digest) article assuring you it's physiologically impossible for the worst to happen.

He was coming, like he was always coming, but I didn't have that fear where your organs go all loose and tingly, where your muscles go soft and weak. I didn't run or scream. He was getting closer -- I told him to stop. I told him I wasn't going to run. That I wanted him to leave. That I wasn't afraid now. I even threw in some hokey, woo-woo shit about him no longer having power over me. Hey, it was an intense moment; I went with it. He kind of expanded, genie-out-of-a-lamp style, like he was going to just envelop me, absorb me without chasing me at all [oh, fuck], but he didn't.

He just walked away.

Yeah, kind of anticlimactic, but that's how it went down. Sorry.

I'm not really a woo-woo type of person, but I do believe there are things that we as humans don't fully comprehend. Dreams are still a mystery to me. I don't have a clue why they're so bizarre, and I don't know how they relate to our lives or or what purpose they serve. What I know is that I've never again experienced the terror of falling in a dream since the night my I made my little-kid self fly instead. And that it's been nearly two decades since I told Violent Bad Guy to leave, and I have not dreamed about him since.

I know. Woo-woo, crazyass shit. I swear, I'm lucid.