Ask Lemmy

I've had a series of continuous, hyper-realistic dreams in which I encounter bizarre god like beings. The weirdest part is that I've been into lucid dreaming for more than 2 decades after learning it to combat nightmares, despite knowing I'm dreaming, I can't change anything during these specific dreams. I have full control of me, but all the tricks I use to change the dream world don't work.

The first was about 8 years ago. I found myself in a dream zone I created to look like my ideal pizzeria surrounded by the usual characters but outside this lady in blue keeps getting closer to the window and it's creeping me out so I go to leave. As I'm going down the hall to the kitchen, there's a mirror on the wall but it shows a stone tunnel instead of a reflection. As I'm staring at it, I realize I'm staring at the hallway and I'm now in the tunnel. I don't like it, and I try to change venues but there's no way out. Eventually I decided to follow the tunnel and it takes literal days of time. The stone is this waxy smooth rock descending slightly but with too much of a curve to see past. Everything is dimly lit with no apparent light source.

I finally get to the bottom and it's a giant domed room. Same stone, still dimly lit, maybe 500ft across. There's a 10ft walkway around the edge of the room and the rest is a huge pool of what looks like basalt, but it's moving and ripling like water. There's this constant low grinding noise echoing all around. I suddenly feel like I'm not alone, I turn and it's the blue woman. Before I register, she plants both hands on my chest and shoves me full force into the basalt pool.

I hit it with a thud but immediately begin to sink. I can't swim in it, it's pulling me down. It washes over me with the grace of fluid and the texture of stone. I feel it flowing around me, scouring my skin like sandpaper, it's in my mouth, my nose, my eyes, seeping into my pores and joints, and I feel it scraping every inch of me inside and out. Just as the pain becomes unstable the grinding of stone becomes coherent. It's not a voice, it's an understanding.

Thousands of memories flash through my mind. Knights throwing peasants into the pit, their skin melting away and their bones twisting into wretched things. A Mongol band stands at the edge, when their horses refuse to near the pool the light their tails on fire. The plunge in only for a second before rising from the pit, half skelital, half stone, galloping around half submerged as they scream in ways animals never should. The woman, sorrowful and scared, dressed in hides with brilliant red hair. She cradles a stillborn baby in her arms and lays it gently into the pool. It's skin blues be its features contort before it cries out and sinks into the basalt pool. Her arms bear the same blue where she touched the pool. These and thousands others fill my mind and as I witness I understand that the pool does not want the innocent's it's been fed but the cruelty of those who stand on its bank and cast others in. Eras immemorial of being forced to sup on the insubstantial while true neurishment stood just out of reach. Starving in a prison as a feast waited just beyond the bars.

Finally the visions receded and I realize I feel no pain. I understand that the torture was an unfortunate necessity to allow me to understand and that I am different now, changed inperceptibly. The pool raises me first to the surface then up to stand on the stone lip of it's bowl facing the tunnel I entered from.

Before me stands the blue woman and I take her in for the first time. She is nude from the waist up, her skin a sickly mottle of pale human and that corrupted ashen blue spreading from her arms out across the body, but her vibrant hair and green eyes are the same as the day she came to the pool. What I had though was a tattered skirt is actually the skin from her hips down, flayed away from the body in Evan strips and left the hang from the waist where a braided leather belt seems to prevent the lines from running further. The muscle of her legs raw and exposed. Our eyes meet and the expression she gives is apologetic, embarrassed, and understanding, for both her role in this event and the grotesque image that she knows herself to be. We nod to each other in silence understanding before she steps aside so that I may leave.

The tunnel that took days to follow is now less than a few steps and as I reach the end the mirror is simply a frame, allowing my exit back into my family pizzeria. I wake.