spellbee2

After my WBTB, I WILD into my living room at home. I realize that I’m an idiot and didn’t pick anything to do for this lucid (maybe because I wasn’t entirely expecting another lucid so close to the last one). I try to think of anything that might be interesting to try out. I somehow recall a lot of people on the forum saying that meditating in a lucid is an awesome experience, but considering how I don’t meditate in real life (and when I try to, I get too distracted by my ADD thoughts), I’m not sure if I should try. But, no better options come to mind, so I figure, what the heck. I sit down in the classic meditation pose, and I actually start to levitate off the ground a bit. The sights and sounds around me seem to get much clearer. So far so good, I guess. Surely this’ll be easier than in waking life with all of its distractions.

In this case I was wrong. My dad walks in the room. (Story Time: Whenever I’m home on break from school, I’m basically full-time tech support for my parents. Apart from fixing computers/phones/TVs/cable boxes/etc., my dad will often interrupt whatever I’m doing about every 10 minutes to ask me some question about his phone/computer/Facebook. The answer is always something so simple that he could’ve Googled it himself, but he insists that I help him. As you’ll see, this habit of his has carried over into my dreams…) He sits down and immediately starts blabbing something about his phone acting up. I remind myself that this is a dream and try to ignore him, but it seems to make him louder. I finally get up and walk out of the room, but he follows me out, still talking about his phone. I run upstairs, go in my room, and lock the door. I can still hear him outside the door, now raising his voice to a shout. Ugh, this is ridiculous. I crack open the window, get a running start, and jump outside, flying off away from the house. Unfortunately, before I can get back to meditating, the dream destabilizes and I lose lucidity.

I’m now in this movie theater with a couple friends to see the latest Disney-Pixar movie. It’s supposedly an IMAX movie theater, even though it’s really just a really wide curved screen that stretches across the entire front of the room. The room is much larger than an actual movie theater, and it looks like it seats a few thousand people. Me and a couple friends are off to the left side, about 10 rows from the front. For some reason, though, the seats are angled off towards the left wall, so I only see a small portion of the left side of the screen until I turn my head really far to the right to see the rest of the picture.

We sit through the first few minutes of the movie, when the movie pauses. Some lady walks to the front of the theatre, and 3 more flat projector screens lower from the ceiling, showing a slide about some charity organization. I can somehow see her nametag from where I’m sitting, which says Hanna on it. She introduces herself as Hanna Montana. “I know what you’re thinking, but I’m missing the last ‘h’. So no, I’m not a widely-adored pop superstar.” I turn to my friend next to me. “To be fair, neither is Miley Cyrus.” My joke made 3 rows around me start cracking up, and my friend even spit out his drink from laughing so hard.

We sit through the movie (which amazingly is only about 10 seconds long), and me and my friends kind of hang out in the theater for a few minutes afterwards. A police officer walks up to my friend Joel and tells him that he’s gonna have to come with him. I try standing up for him. “What seems to be the problem, officer?”
“Well, this hooligan was spotted last night causing a ruckus during a showing of Star Wars, and so he’s been banned from the building. Yet somehow, he managed to crawl his way back in here past our security.”
Joel walks out into the aisle, with the cop behind him. He gets to the top of the stairs, and suddenly makes a run for it. The cop quickly pulls out his taser and shoots him before he even gets out the door. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see Joel falling to the ground (because man, that would’ve been hilarious to see IRL).

After the movie, I head home, jump on my computer, and play some Minecraft. It’s a weird version of Minecraft in that it’s played from a top-down perspective, making it kinda hard to see what you’re actually building. I somehow discover a secret passageway that leads under this nearby lake, but when I travel down it, I get stopped by this massive scorpion. I’m now fighting it in first person, but I realize all my weapons are gone. The scorpion has pretty strong armor too, so it’s gonna be impossible to fight him in this state. Still, I give it my best shot. I run around him, dodging his tail strikes. He charges towards me, knocking me down, though I do manage to land a few punches on my way down. It doesn’t hurt, obviously, since it’s just a video game, though everything else about the experience feels pretty realistic. After a trading a few more blows, I’m down to one health, while the scorpion has barely taken a scratch. Oh well, it’s not like I had anything valuable in my inventory, guess I’ll just die then.

Suddenly, a glowing arrow shoots from the entrance of the passageway, one-hit killing the scorpion. I look in the direction the arrow came from, and see this guy with jet black hair and a leather jacket standing at the entrance, bow extended toward the monster. I go to thank my mysterious savior, but he just raises his nose at me. “Ha, how could you even come into a level 12 cave without any weapons? Maybe you should go back and do the tutorial levels, you noob!” The world around us fades out before there’s a bright flash of light.

Fair warning, the next part reads like a novel. It was a pretty long, detailed section of the dream. I don’t remember all the dialogue that occurred, but I do remember most of the emotional connotation of it, so I based the dialogue on that.

I’m now in this huge wooden cabin, getting out of this strange white capsule on a metal track. As I get up, I have a rush of false memories in my head that give me a context of what’s going on. I don’t really know how I know these facts, I just kinda suddenly know them. I’m somehow 50 years in the future - I have no clue how I got here, but I’m here. Much like in the book “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline, the world thrives entirely off of virtual reality. People basically live their entire lives in their personal VR capsule. The cabin I’m in is an “access point”, a place where people can bring their capsules and connect directly to the “hub”, the worldwide center of VR activity. The tracks on which my capsule was positioned were used to physically take users to the hub, and during the journey, the capsules would begin the boot-up process before finally being connected at their destination.

Speaking of capsules, mine wasn’t the best. I seem to recall getting one of the cheaper ones - it was enough to successfully connect to the hub, but it wasn’t meant for the incredibly realistic experiences boasted by VR companies. The screen in the eyepiece wasn’t that high of a resolution, and haptic feedback - the equipment that simulated a sense of touch - was pretty terrible. Everything you touched, from a hard granite countertop to the soft fur of a kitten, registered as the same stiff poke - there was no variance on how hard it poked you, you just knew you had touched something because you were poked. But I was fine with it, I couldn’t really afford much more than that.

And of course, my “mysterious savior” was Johnny Blade. Of course, that wasn’t his real name, but he had used that username to climb the e-sports ranks, so it was what everyone knew him as. Because of his gaming success, he had a ton of sponsorships from all the major e-sports advertising companies, and was on the cover of just about everything. He was a pretty big celebrity. Unfortunately, he was also a pretty big douchebag too. His hair color - which was reflected in all of his video game avatars - was an obnoxiously dyed shade of black that apparently made some sort of fashion statement. That, tied with his signature leather jacket, made him look like a mix between a 1950’s greaser and Biff Tannen from Back to the Future - with just about the same attitude. Lucky for me, he exited his game of Minecraft shortly after I left, and just so happened to exit to the same access point as me, conveniently on the track next to my capsule.

“Well, the least you could do is thank me. I saved your precious level 1 armor,” he sarcastically remarks. “We all know you must have spent a long time on acquiring it, so I didn’t want you to have wasted your life. Lord knows you don’t have much of life to waste.”
“Oh, rest assured, if I had half as many sponsors that you have kissing all over your disgusting feet, I could’ve just bought all the armor in the shop. And I guarantee I wouldn’t be half the snob you are about it, either.”
“Jealous, much? Maybe if you spent as much time practicing as you do whining, you might be able to make a name for yourself. Anyway, I don’t have time for this. Network interviews, photo shoots, you know how it is… Oh wait, no you don’t. Adios, peasant!”

Oh man, I want to slap him so bad. I don’t care if he has lawyers at his beck and call, someone needs to teach him a lesson. I walk back over to my capsule, ready to go back into the hub, when I spot Johnny’s capsule still on the track, unlocked and open. I hesitate for a moment before walking over to inspect it. As to be expected, his capsule was state-of-the-art. Stater-of-the-art than state-of-the-art, in fact, as his sponsors often gave him plenty of new equipment prototypes months before they hit the markets. Well, if someone needs to teach him a lesson, I think I just found my curriculum.

I size myself up - we have pretty similar builds, even though I’m about an inch shorter than him. I lay down in the body-shaped contours of the capsule. It’s a tad snug, but it’ll work. I sit up to press the launch button on the side of the track. I always thought that was kind of a design flaw - that you or someone else had to press the start button on the track outside the capsule before it would launch. I guess I never had that problem on my capsule, since the door closed pretty slowly on it anyway, giving me plenty of time to position myself correctly. Unfortunately, the capsule door shuts almost immediately once I press the button, shoving me into it in a weird, squatted position. My head didn’t even make it to the head portion of the machine.

This is bad. For one, I’m quickly feeling uncomfortable, as the cramped position I’m in is putting a ton of pressure on my arms and neck, so I don’t know how long I can stay stuck like this. Second, I can feel that the capsule has already launched down the track, meaning in a few seconds I will be connected to the hub. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but in my current position, I have no way to get to the controls to close the connection, return to the access point, and exit the capsule. Meaning I will most likely be stuck there a very long time, with no way to escape.

I manage to tilt my head upwards towards the head hole, and push upwards with my legs until I can kind of wiggle my way upwards. Thanks to the anatomy of the human body, and the human-body-conforming shape of the capsule, I can’t squeeze my head through the neck hole. I can barely look up through the hole and see the boot-up screen on the display. It’s fairly simple - a plain black screen with some green text in the top left corner, probably to show version info and all that. I also manage to see some kind of emergency-release latch in the neck area. Hoping that the latch will help enlarge the neck hole so I can slide my way up, I pull it. The capsule door flings open, and I’m quickly thrown out of the machine. I quickly realize what’s happening, and try to grab onto the door as I’m flying out. My hand just barely scrapes the edge of the door, but I ultimately miss and watch as the empty capsule continues rolling down the track out of view.

I take a moment to assess the gravity of the situation. Or rather, the lack of gravity, because I soon notice that I’m just floating, almost like I’m helplessly drifting through space. The track that the capsule was on simply fades away, and I’m left floating in a sea of black, with nothing around me. Until I notice up in the sky, off in the distance, floating green text. The boot-up screen? But, I’m not in the capsule. And even if I was, I shouldn’t be able to see this, I’d still be cramped in the bottom half with the display out of sight. Yet here I was, floating in a surreal sea of nothingness. I pondered this until a bright flash of light brought me back to my senses.

I’m now riding a motorcycle down this street in a suburban neighborhood. Behind me is a cop car with its lights on behind me. Oh great, they found out I stole Johnny’s capsule, and now they’re taking me in. I contemplate running, but I decide to play it cool, it could just be whatever game Johnny was playing last (besides Minecraft, I guess). It’s probably best to just wait it out and see what happens. I pull over to the side of the road, and the cop pulls up behind me. He exits the car and walks over to me.

“Johnny Blade?”
I stay silent. I don't want to say anything that might give me away.
“Your presence has been requested. Follow me.”

He gets back in his car and pulls ahead. I follow behind him for a bit, until we pull into a driveway in front of this red and white dojo, which seems somewhat out of place in a suburban town. The cop gets out and motions me towards the front door. I dismount my motorcycle and walk up the stairs of the porch, and slowly open the door.

The inside is a bit of a pig sty. The carpets are covered in cigarette burns and assorted stains, some of which look to be of questionable origin. I walk into a room to the right, where there’s a group of men wearing white suits and sunglasses. The leader of the group, who looks slightly like Mark Wahlberg with a beard, laughs and motions to his cohorts, who quickly point their weapons at me. “Well well well, Johnny Blade.” Why does everyone keep calling me that? “I haven’t seen or heard from you in years. Didn’t think you had the nerve to show your face around here.”

He stands up and walks slowly towards me. “Did you finally decide to hold up your end of the deal? Or did you already forget?”
Holy crap, what did Johnny get himself into? I have to keep up the charade, since everyone seems to think I’m the real Johnny Blade, just because I stole his VR capsule. But I have no clue what he’s talking about. I should probably play it safe, just say something non-threatening to disarm the situa-
“Well it was kind of hard to remember it in the first place, considering all the bull crap you were spewing last time I was here.”
Of course. Let me just piss of the first guy I meet here, with all his friends ready to blast holes in me with one innocent flick of a finger. I rest assured in the fact that I’m still in the VR capsule, so any “pain” will be nothing more than a few shocks or prods to my chest from the haptic feedback.
The guy laughs again, and motions to the guy next to him, who pulls his trigger, firing a paintball into my ear. Paint splatters all over the side of my face, and my ear starts ringing from the impact. I wince in pain - that actually did hurt quite a bit. “That was a warning shot. Kind of a warm up for my men. Rest assured the next bullet will be very much real.”

I reach up to wipe the paint off the side of my face, when a very scary thought crosses my mind. See, VR capsules, no matter how advanced, don’t have haptic feedback around the ears or face. This is both a safety measure (you don’t want people poking each others’ eyes out in VR) and a technical limitation of the equipment (there’s too much stuff like visual/audio/olfactory equipment and oxygen tubes in the way for there to be any haptic equipment there). Yet I definitely felt that paintball hit and splatter, I definitely feel the paint running down my face, and my ear is definitely ringing. There’s no way to simulate that. This has to be real.

But wait, what about Johnny Blade? They all called me Johnny Blade. I definitely don’t look like Johnny Blade; how could anyone make that mistake? Plus the whole boot-up screen. This couldn’t be real - I’m still in the machine. Aren’t I?... aren’t I? I am saved from answering this question, as I soon wake up.