Back when I first heard about lucid dreaming in 2001, I wrote a short story called “Lucid Dreaming” about a lucid dreamer named Meyra Jax. I’m curious if this is an accurate representation of a lucid dream, considering I didn’t know very much about them when I wrote the story:
[com]“How could you do that, Meyra?”
“I-it seemed like the right thing to do…”
“…The right thing? Making an exemplary student’s work and sacrifice completely for naught and throwing his life away in his prime is the RIGHT THING TO DO??”
“BUT HE BROKE THE LAW!!”
“HE HAD HIS WHOLE LIFE AHEAD OF HIM AND YOU DESTROY IT??”
“…What am I talking to? I’m talking to NOTHING! I’M TALKING TO THIN AIR!!!”
“HOW CAN HE FINISH HIS EDUCATION FROM A PRISON CELL, MEYRA?? TELL ME HOW!!”
The bedroom door burst off its hinges and a girl tore across the floor, tears streaming down her face like a river. She leaped over her bed’s backboard and hit the bed face-down, sobbing sorrowfully. She cried herself to sleep on a tear-soaked pillow.
BANG!
“I’M AWAKE!!”
Meyra sat bolt upright, waking up with a start and out of breath, but not in her bedroom. She was laying on a cold metal disc sitting in a dank mine tunnel. Propane lamps lined the ceiling, lighting the room with a dim and disturbing glow. She was wide-eyed and doggedly confused. She stood up on the disc platform and looked around.
“Where am I? What is this place?” she speculated.
But she had no time to gawk. With a silent ‘click’ followed by a mechanical buzzing hum, the disc Meyra was standing on began to slowly slide down the mine tunnel to a dark hole at the end. She wanted to jump off this platform, but she didn’t know where she was and didn’t want to risk getting lost in this unfamiliarity.
The disc moved its way to the end of the tunnel to this doorway, and no sooner had it approached than it took a quick flip and Meyra slid off before she could realize that she was falling through a completely lightless and bottomless crevasse.
The dim light of the mine was retreating upwards quickly and Meyra was screaming in panic as she soared downwards into this bottomless pit. Before long, she hit bottom, face-first. She pushed herself up cringing, looked up, and was completely stunned by what she saw.
This black chamber she was in were suspending in it large colored elliptical pods with snaking conduits flowing every which-way, wrapping themselves around other conduits and pods. All over this immense space, tiny balls of pure white light were zipping about back and forth around the blackness.
Meyra stood completely agog at this sight, but she was suddenly distracted by a sucking sensation behind her. She peered over her shoulder and saw that an open end of one of a cyan-colored pipe was advancing towards her, and wanted to inhale her into its warped depths. Meyra dashed away from the tube, which was rapidly catching up to her. She ducked under and hopped over the psychedelic channels and evaded the balls of light drifting about, but the cyan main snaked around the other pipes with equal precision. Right before this hose managed to suck her in, she fell through the black floor like it was soggy paper and fell again into a small, brightly lit bedroom. Meyra fell on her bed face-first, and when she had some time to collect herself and look around, she recognized this as her bedroom.
“I’M TALKING TO THIN AIR!!!”
The voice thundering up the stairs was Meyra’s. From just outside the door, she could hear someone stomp quickly up the stairs. Her door flew open instantly and she saw herself thunder across the floor to her bed. As soon as she locked looks with herself, the Meyra that was already sitting on her bed shrunk instantaneously until she was an inch tall on her pillow. Meyra continued to barge towards her bed. She was about to crush herself!
“Meyra! Wait! WAIT!” she squeaked desperately at the top of her lungs while waving her arms and making a ruckus, but it was for naught. Meyra leaped over the backboard. Darkness.
ZOOM!
Meyra sprung awake again at the sound of a jet flying by her ear. She was looking up at the night sky, twilight dimly lit by the lights of the city. The crescent moon sat directly overhead. She was sitting on the roof of her house, just above her bedroom. Meyra stepped down from the roof to her windowsill and tried to open her window, but her hands passed right through the window, like she was a ghost. She took this lightly and just decided to slip through her window into her bedroom.
Meyra’s bedroom light was the only one left on in the house. The night was late, and Meyra lay askew on her bed on her sopping pillow, dampened by her cries. Cautiously and nervously, Meyra inched towards her bed and tried to wake her up, but her hands passed right through her sleeping body and she didn’t respond to her own yells. Meyra was worried.
“…Am I dead?”
Her response was a book sliding off her bookshelf against a wall of her room. Meyra turned away from the bed and picked it up. The book was titled “Lucid Dreaming: Waking Up in Your Sleep”. She opened the book to its introduction.
“Recently, a new scientific study has arisen in the field of neurology that revolves around dreams. This new study is to analyze a recently discovered phenomenon where certain individuals can, so to speak, ‘wake up’ in their own dreams and live and act in it. This new discovery is called lucid dreaming. The dictionary definition of the word ‘lucid’ is-”
But before Meyra could finish reading the introduction the book fell through her hands and onto the floor, closing itself with a deaf thump. She tried to pick it back up but her hands passed through it, like everything else.
Meyra looked over at her bed.
“So, I’m… dreaming?” she perplexed. “But this doesn’t feel anything like a dream.”
Meyra walked over to her bed and peered at herself, then turned her head towards the window, with a look of curious whimsy.
"If this is a dream…”
Meyra began to run for her window. She picked up speed, crouched deeply and leaped through the window. She braced herself for a fall, but when she opened her tightly clenched eyes, she saw that instead of falling to the pavement, she continued to rise, faster and steadily faster, higher and still higher. Meyra was in flight!
Meyra managed to level off her flight and took a sharp nosedive to the ground. Her eyes were watering from the intense speed and she pulled up and over the rows of close-packed homes just before she collided with the asphalt. She soared high into the dark blue twilight, pulling off jaw-dropping maneuvers through the cloudless sky. Meyra was ready to fly across the curve of the earth and was heading full-speed into the far horizon, when her face suddenly collided with a loud thump against an invisible barrier. It was clear that Meyra couldn’t go forward, so she doubled back, but another blockade prevented that. Meyra felt all around her, and saw that she was surrounded on all sides. She was trapped!
As if it couldn’t get any worse, the cyan conduit from the black chamber was closing in again, coiling in from far off in the distance. Meyra desperately tried to break open this shell that she was trapped in, beating it and kicking it savagely, but she could feel the pipe sucking her in, like every molecule of her being was being pulled off of her. She was thrown up the tunnel, flying every which-way around the wildly erratic bends of the channel at what seemed like near-mach. Before long, she was thrown out of the pipe and rolled head-over-heels across the floor from the lingering momentum. Meyra struggled to get back up and gawked again at where she was now.
She was in a huge dome, the curved roof lined with strange symbols and shapes, glowing with an eerie illumination. On the floor was an intricate pattern of lines snaking around each other, with trails of electric light flowing rapidly along these lines; it looked almost like a glowing fractal. The lines were all converging onto a black monolith of a computer, which was playing a game of Space Invaders on a monochrome screen. Meyra approached the towering pillar, confused and scared out of her wits. With a jolt, the Space Invaders game fizzled and flattened into an oscilloscope line.
“I’m glad to finally see you, Meyra Jax.” The computer said, the oscilloscope jittering to its synthesized words. This did not help Meyra’s courage.
“H-how do you k-know my name?” she stammered with acute fear.
“I’m part of your brain. You’d think I know everything about you.”
“Part of my brain?” Meyra speculated.
“Yes, I control your dreams. I’m your dream inducer module, your DIM. I’m glad that I finally got to meet you in person.”
“…I’m glad to, um, finally meet you.”
“I can probably imagine that you have a wealth of questions to ask me.” The DIM said. “What’s on your mind?”
“…I would like to know what’s going on.” Meyra inquired.
“I thought you would. You remember that book you read in your bedroom? Well, tonight, you have become a lucid dreamer, a person who resides within their dream while they sleep.”
“Why did you wait until now to let me do this?”
“You’re suffering through an emotional episode, or so I’ve heard from your emotion module.”
Meyra hung her head. “I am…”
“Yes, well I’m the one who grants lucid ability to you, and I decided that you could cope and deal with this incident best in a dream world that I create for you, so I decided to let you dream lucidly from now on. But I will, of course, instate limits.”
“Limits? What sort of limits?”
“There are three levels of your lucid dreaming strength, ranging from zero to two. You, at the moment, are a Lucid Dreamer Level Zero. I’m in charge of when you lucid dream and I have control of your environment. I might advance your level if I can see that you can handle this power you have responsibly.”
“Mm, I don’t see that happening.” Meyra joked.
“…What’s that crack supposed to mean?” the DIM remarked.
“Well, if I level up, you lose control. I know I wouldn’t want that.”
“…Um, I know that, but, uh…” the DIM stammered in a worry. “I can’t answer any more questions.”
“Aw come on, I was just kidding!” she pleaded. “I still have questions!”
“NO MORE QUESTIONS!” DIM yelled, the oscilloscope jittering wildly. It then fizzled away and turned into some kind of fly-swatting game.
Meyra was a bit stunned by what just transpired, bute she knew that she was done here, so she walked back to the conduit’s entrance and dived back in to be returned.
Meyra flew through the contorted passage back to where she started, trapped again in this invisible capsule.
“OK, what now?” she asked herself.
Suddenly, a large ball of light flashed in front of her. More of them flashed down to the ground, forming a trail of light pointing towards Meyra’s next destination. She flew down the light’s path, which approached a sprawling mansion in a more well-to-do district of the city. The lights stretched down to beside a window on the mansion’s side wall. Meyra sped up to follow these lights further.
She continued to follow the lights, not taking into account at how fast she was going. As she neared the mansion, she noticed a figure clad completely in black, camouflaged inconspicuously against the night. At the speed Meyra was flying, she was going to hit this person head-on! She tried quickly to veer off to avoid a hit, but she caromed off another barrier and toppled straight into him!
But instead of hitting him or passing through him, Meyra instead stopped. Curious as to why there wasn’t a confrontation, Meyra looked at her hand, which was covered in a skin-tight black glove. In her other glove-covered hand, she was holding a glass cutter. Meyra picked up her head to stare at her reflection in the black window, but her face was concealed in a black head mask. She had realized what had happened.
“I’ve become Kev!” she gasped to herself, in a man’s voice. “And I’m breaking into this house!”
Meyra looked around her surroundings. “Whose house is this, anyway?”
After scanning the sprawling property, Meyra stared at the reflection of Kev’s masked face staring back at her from the window.
“I should really do this.” Meyra said to herself. “This is just a dream. No action, no consequence.”
With that, she cut a round hole into the window’s pane, which fell soundless to the carpet. Meyra reached through the hole and opened the window. She jumped silently through the window and began to slink around the halls, looking for something good to loot.
Though the rooms of this mansion were loaded with expensive bounty, Meyra felt compelled to go into the den. She peered over and noticed a picture of a middle-aged man playing catch with his son hanging on the wall. Meyra sneaked over to this picture and noticed that it was on hinges. She swung the picture slowly back and saw a wall safe under lock and key. Meyra felt around in her pockets and pulled out a stethoscope and a lock pick. She then carefully pressed the stethoscope against the dial, jimmied the lock with the pick and managed to unlock the safe. She clicked open the handle and swung the safe open with a hollow, metallic groan.
Nothing was in it. No cash, no stocks, no precious stones, nothing of any apparent value, except for a plain-looking burnt disc sitting in a thin jewel case. Meyra pulled out the disc and gave it an “I went to all that trouble?” look. Then she saw what the disk said.
“The Links 2 Beta?” she stated to herself. “Wait a minute, The Links 2? This is John Marshall’s next game! This could be worth a fortune!”
With those words, Meyra was blasted out of Kev’s body by some invisible seismic force and she was flung at blinding speeds out of the mansion’s roof, which was quickly receding downwards. She was a ballistic projectile, whizzing helplessly though the air. When she eked out the courage to look, she saw the sun and moon rise and set rapidly until several weeks had passed. Meyra then peered over and saw that she was heading straight for the municipal courthouse. She flew straight through the wall into the witness stand.
“Place your hand here, Ms. Jax.” A bailiff said to Meyra. She placed her hand on a bible that the bailiff was holding.
“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” the bailiff recited. Before Meyra answered, she looked over at the defense and prosecution tables. Kev was sitting at the defense table, and the man who was playing catch with his son in the picture was sitting at the prosecuting.
“I do.” she finally said. The bailiff took the bible with her and stood next to the jury box.
The prosecuting lawyer stood up and asked "Ms. Jax, can you please tell the court where you found Exhibit A?” the lawyer was holding the disc that Meyra found in the wall safe ten minutes ago.
Meyra stalled for a few moments. Of course, when she was awake this all made perfect sense, but all that was upon her at the moment made her confused. Finally, Meyra replied. “Um, that’s an original copy of the Links 2 beta. I found it in Kevin’s room.”
“Yes,” the lawyer replied. “And what are exhibits B through F?”
Meyra scanned the evidence table to see what they were, and said with some shame “Those are the… the unsold copies.”
“Let this court know,” the lawyer began, “that the prosecuted attempted to sell these five CDs on iBay with a starting bid of approximately $100. iBay documentation has shown that during it’s overnight listing, the price has accentuated past the $2500 margin. It’s clear that the demand for this game is astronomical, but as well as breaking and entering my client’s property, his game piracy is heinous and will cost my client millions of dollars in losses.”
Kev whispered something to his lawyer, who then stood up abruptly and cried “Objection!”
“Sustained, let’s hear it.” The judge replied.
“As you all are no doubt aware, the video game industry loses millions each year from piracy like this. Someone rents this game, burns it for his friends and family, they burn the game again for their friends and family, and so forth. Exhibit A over there also seems to be fully complete and ready to be released to retailers, but it is, in fact, being held back for another six months for undisclosed reasons.”
“Objection!” John’s lawyer yelled out.
“Overruled,” the judge responded.
“Thank you, your honor. Anyways, game players the world over are extremely angry with Mr. Marshall here for taking such frivolous setbacks for no apparent reason. Kevin was one of them, and he wanted to give the world what the prosecutor simply won’t do.”
The prosecuting lawyer again cried “Objection!”
“Sustained, this time.” The judge responded.
“The reason my client is holding back the game is so that he can develop and install an anti-pirating software so that it cannot be pirated and illegally distributed. If Kevin committed this crime today with a retail copy of the game, we wouldn’t all be here debating this situation and his charges would be far less grave. But Kevin couldn’t wait, he had to jump the gun, he had to break into my client’s home, break open his safe, and take his property. Meyra was fortunate enough to bring this case to the court so that justice can be dealt. Nothing further.”
“Thank you, Ms. Jax. You can step out now.”
Meyra sat on the bench outside the courtroom, her head in her hands. She peeped up at the clock hanging across from her as it whizzed forward another two and a half hours or so. The courtroom door creaked open and the members of the jury stepped out. After they all left, Kev exited. Meyra stood up and confronted him.
“Thanks, Meyra.” Kev remarked. “I’ve been fined $5,000 and a five-year sentence in minimum security.”
Suddenly, Meyra was blasted away again, soaring through the courthouse roof and was rocketing uncontrollably through the sky again. The sun and moon were rising and setting even faster than before many more times, until several years had passed as She continued to jet through the air over the city.
Things began to slow down, and Meyra’s flight began to drop. She was careening straight for a high school. She passed right through the wall and skidded across a freshly mopped floor before colliding against the back wall. Meyra struggled to her feet and dusted herself off, and noticed an old janitor scrubbing the floor with a scruffy old mop and a bucket of mud water. The janitor turned around, and she could see his shady face depressingly staring at the floor he was mopping. It was Kev!
“…This is what will happen to him?” Meyra asked herself. “So… what would have happened if I had never found that disc?”
Nearby, a door creaked ajar slowly. Meyra slowly pushed open the door, to see what Kevin’s livelihood would have been like without her interference. Behind the door was an office that was extravagantly large and decorated. On one side of the room was Kev sitting at a large desk that looked like some sort of coffee table, typing away at a computer mounted with a web cam.
Meyra was agog with sorrow and was about to sit down on the floor to sob, when Kev pushed a button on an intercom sitting beside him.
“We need to make a dispatch,” he said to the intercom. “I think John might be up to something.”
Meyra’s emotion shifted from shameful sorrow to confused curiosity. Kev got up from his desk and left the office, and she walked over to his computer to see what he was looking at. The computer was displaying a web cam picture of John Marshall dressed in decrepitly dirty clothes sitting at a card table in a derelict apartment. She shrugged this off and walked away, but she was no longer in her brother’s office. Now she was in John’s cramped apartment, her back to the image on the web cam. Meyra turned around and saw that John was frantically sketching on a heap of paper, with another heap sitting across from him. John put down his pen.
“This is it!” he said to himself. “This will get me back on the top! This will teach that Jax punk that nobody steals from John Marshall and gets away with it!”
With those words, the door to the apartment burst open, and three shady men in dark green suits threw John off his chair to the ground and stole all the paper sitting on the card table. John begged the men to stop, but they left the apartment without acknowledging his pleas. Another man entered the doorway; a round man dressed in a T-shirt and faded gray jeans.
“I need my rent, John.” This man said, outstretching his hand.
“Wait, but I thought you said I had until the first of the month! I don’t have my rent!” John reasoned. The landlord didn’t seem to care.
“Something came up,” he said. “I need that rent now.”
John scanned the room frantically, and saw Meyra looking across the way from him. Realizing what was about to happen, she about-faced and tried to make a dash to a hiding spot, but John had dove over and grabbed her legs, causing Meyra to trip and fall down. John looked back at the landlord while still clutching Meyra’s shins.
“Can you use this?” he asked the landlord. Meyra was going to be used for rent payment!
Meyra managed to wriggle out of John’s grasping arms and she made a break for a door on the far end of the apartment. John quickly stood up and chased after her. She quickly opened the door to a pitch-black room and quickly slammed the door. A voice somewhere in the darkness cried “Meyra! Meyra, wake up!”
Meyra’s eyes blinked open to see her father’s face looking back at her. With a snort, she moaned, “Dad, what are you doing in here? It’s 1AM.”
“Yeah, I know that,” Meyra’s dad said. “But I need to get this weight off my chest. Meyra, I’m really sorry for the fight we had. I was being so completely irrational that I just didn’t see what your brother did. I was just in such… such a panic that Kevin was going to go completely to pot that I just didn’t realize anything.”
Meyra sighed. “Yeah, I see where you’re coming from. It would probably be emotionally scarring for me to know that I cut off all of my brother’s opportunities, you know? That would be so difficult to live with…”
“Who says you have to?” Meyra’s dad reassured her. “Kevin only has a month of his senior left. He might still be able to graduate, and when he gets out of jail, he’s going to be able to go to secondary, and the world will be his.”
“I like that thinking,” she yawned, “but I’ve got to get to sleep. Rough day, you know.”
“Don’t I ever.” Her dad joked. “Anyways, sorry again, goodnight.”
“Yeah…” Meyra whispered. “’Night.”
Meyra eventually opened her eyes again, and she was in the DIM’s spherical chamber.
“You did well.” The DIM said. “You’re very good with this ability.”
“Yeah,” Meyra consented, “thanks for letting me have it. This is amazing!”
“I’m glad you think so, because I’ve decided to advance your privileges.”
Meyra was intrigued. “What do you mean?”
“I’m moving you up to Lucid Dreamer Level One! I’m not in total control of your dream’s environment anymore, but I’ll still determine what nights you will lucid dream. You can’t have this every night, just nights when you need it.”
“Well, so long as I have tonight.” said Meyra. “Anyways, the night is young, and I want to go out and have some fun!”
“You do that, Meyra.”
The End[/com]
I wrote this six years ago (my writing has gotten less cheesy since then 
), and since then I’ve written a sequel, a side story, even a concept for an ongoing spinoff series. If there’s interest in any of those, I’ll post them up here for all to see. 
© 2001-2007 John Marshall.
Interest from the rest of the forum seems slightly muted. All the same, here’s the spinoff story.