h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

People who lucid dream regularly tend to use one of several induction techniques (ways of inducing a lucid dream).

The most common of these is the wake-induced lucid dream or WILD. In order to do this, you have to have an alarm clock with a snooze button, or a housemate who is willing to wake you up twice. After you wake up the first time, allow yourself to fall back asleep. If you're lucky you will return to the dream you were having before you fell asleep, only now you will be able to control your own actions or even the dream itself. I learned this technique on my own as a very small child, as a way of dealing with recurrent nightmares.

Another method is auto-suggestion. This is quite simple but less generally effective than the WILD: before going to sleep, repeat some simple command like "I will be in control of my dream" to yourself. Hopefully, this will have the same result as, say, the suggestions of a hypnotist, and you will indeed be in control of your dream.

You can also try meditation or relaxation excercises before going to sleep. This is on the theory that the more composed and well-ordered your mind is, the more aware you will be of what goes on in it while your body is in low-power stand-by.

Regards,

Babylon the Small

Often I find that I gradually become aware of my dreams as I wake up. Then I start to "instant replay" events in my dreams, but with each "replay" there is some subtle difference that I have "consciously" created. The more awake I get, the more control I have until I have gradually passed the point of dreaming and it becomes more of a daydream.
I think I started doing this as a way to control nightmares. Things that were too shocking or frightening for my mind to accept was edited to make them less and less frightening. I find that I still do this. It's kind of a rational interjection from my mind that says, "no that's just too much" and I dream it over again with a more acceptable version.

I don't know how I do it. I just notice that I'm dreaming, then I take control. Usually I
decide to wake up because it happens during nightmares, and it's usually faster than
other methods of control. Hmm.. I'll get back to this one maybe.

Whenever I realise I'm dreaming (rarely) I tend to wake up very soon without having much chance to control. I don't always remember my dreams but I remember I had one this morning but all the details slipped out of my memory one by one after I woke up, I can't remember what it was about.

I usually wake up when I realise I'm dreaming. Or more likely realise I have been dreaming when I wake up and rationalise it as having woken up because I realised.

The closest I have been to lucid dreaming was on one occasion when I fell asleep during the day. The dream was fairly close to reality but I somehow suspected it was a dream. So to test this I spotted a book I was reading lying on a table (I seem to recall is was a translation of Das Kapital) and decided to read a bit further, figuring that if it was a dream I wouldn't be able to know what happened next. Sure enough I picked the book up but all the text appeared fuzzy.

The I woke up.
Z

I used to wake up when I realised i was dreaming, this is the biggest hurdle. I found that the most effective way to have your fist lucid dream was to associate the dream state with an emotion. The most effective being fear, every time you are scared check that your awake. If this can become a habit there is a good chance it may hapen during a nightmare, when you check your awake you should realise that your not then you are very close to lucidity and will naturaly wake up. You have to wrap the dream around you, imagine it is the bed you are sleeping in and make your self comfortable. Try to check your breathing, deep breaths are normaly used by the body to flood the blood with oxygen forcing you awake, shallow comfortable breaths are what should maintain but dont spend long or think to much about your body or your environment outside your dream state, this can make it hard to stay asleep for your first attempts.

Merangadan

Two suggestions which worked for me.

During the day, every time you look at your watch or a clock, keep looking at it to make sure that the hands move, or the digits change, in the way that they are supposed to. When you start dreaming, it should occur to you to look at your watch, bedside clock etc - and you will find that it behaves very oddly. This will alert you to the fact that you are dreaming.

If you're in a lucid dream and feel yourself starting to wake up, try spinning round. it sounds strange, but it works.

Oh, I find that I just realise I'm dreaming and get on with it. As mentioned in other conversations, flying is the easiest and most common thing to do.

The scariest lucid dream I had: I was in a familiar place and I didn't realise I was dreaming as it was all so normal, then surreal things started to happen and I twigged. The moment I knew I was dreaming, the "people" in my dream turned menacing and all started towards me. At this point I started to try and wake myself up. My 1st reaction was to scream in the hope that someone in RL might hear me and wake me. Then I realised I was only screaming in my dream and not in reality. One "woman" was getting very close, and I thought that if I couldn't wake up she would get me. I woke up, straight into sleep paralysis, so couldn't move myself to make sure I was fully awake. Then I slipped from the sleep paralysis back into sleep and straight back to the dream and the menacing woman. Then I managed to wake myself successfully and stay awake for a while before I fell back to sleep, just to make sure the dream was over.

I have never bothered with a dream diary. My dreams are usually so vivid I have no trouble remembering them. I could give detailed accounts of dreams going back years.

*Tries to look like Sigmund Freud*

Sparky, it vood seem your brain has a mediation seestem. Maybe you haff leetle Zaphodista-thought-thingies protesting in zere also, eh?.

Has it ever happened to you that you aren't reading a book but you think you are? It's happened to me a few times. One such time was when I was awake in the dark and i decide to do some reading. I had been in the middle of an animorphs book by KA Applegate. So I rolled onto my stomach and looked at my pillow. It was dark. I saw the words in my mind, even the type font, unaware of the booklessness. It said "And then Darth Vader followed Visser Three out of the..." Darth Vader is not in the animorphs books. My mind went "huh?" and the words in my mind went "poof!". It was really wierd.

It's a bit like trying to fly, ain't it?

I've been able to induce these dreams with some success lately...i'ts real easy to get in some good practice when you're on summer vacation able to sleep in til 10 everyday. Usually, I'll wake up at 8 o clock or something, decide it's too early, and fall right back asleep. I think the light that filters in through the curtains helps induce the control I have over the dream.... it's weird though, because I never realize exactly how much control I have. In fact, it IS a lot like flying.

six X sept = quarante-deux

Here's the prize dream of my collection. It happened about 5 months or so ago. All my dreams are pretty elaborite, but I've never been able to control them.

I was working as an archeoligist in a team of three, and we were excavating Sick Bob's front garden (he's a real life friend). It was possibly early evening at the start of the dream, and we were finding a number of artefacts - broken pottery, trinkets, that sort of thing. As the evening wore on, we discovered a grave that had been covered over with concrete beams (yes, I know they didn't have concrete in the iron age, but this is a dream, okay?). Anyway, I made enough of an opening in the grave/tomb to see in, and there was the usual array of bones and burial ornaments. At this point, it was getting dark, so we decided to leave the grave until the morning. One of the guys I was working with left and went home, but the other followed me into Sick Bob's house. When we got into the house, it had suddenly become my house (don't ask). For some reason, I looked out the window into the front garden (which was still Sick Bob's garden) and saw a number of zombies approaching from the street and coming through the gate. I then went into frantic 'close all the doors and windows mode'. I told the other guy to shut the front door, and I went into the kitchen to close the back door (which looked out onto my back garden). As I closed the back door, I saw even more zombies lumbering towards me (just for completeness, they were the naked, highly decomposed, 'I've been dead for a year and I'm not going to take it anymore' type, rather than the fresh, clothed 'I've just died! Look at me!' type.) When I'd closed the door (an act which seemed to take a very long time), I looked over to the front door and saw that the guy (let's call him Tony, for convenience. He looked like a Tony.) had failed to shut the door, and was right now being eaten alive by the zombies. I then had to struggle for a while, since the zombies were opening the back door and I had to fight them off. It was at this point that I realised that the zombies were made of Heinz Spagghetti in tomato sauce. When I grabbed at the arm of one of them to remove it from the door, I ended up with a clump of spaghetti in my hands. The spaghetti was alive and writhed about as I held it. Only with vigorous shaking was I able to remove it from my hand, and I then watched it as it crawled through a small hole in the floorboards. I then found out that 'Tony' was still alive, completely free from tomato/spaghetti/zombie stains and had even managed to close the front door. There was then some sort of an incident where the zombies were coming through the back door again, because I found myself standing in the doorway, facing into my back garden with bugger-loads of zombies lumbering towards me while staring up into the face of a 2 story high cyborg zombie thing with rocket launchers for arms (actually, it was the final boss from Duke Nukem 3D, but with Dream Knowldge TM, I knew that it was a cyborg zombie.) I then fought a couple of zombies (geting an entire armful of spaghetti this time) and ran upstairs to the bathroom. I shook the spaghetti/zombie stuff off my arm and flushed it down the plug hole in the bath by turning on the taps. I then found myself wearing a hands free comms kit, and recieving instructions via the comms kit from General Munro from the 5th Element (another don't ask unless you're really interested) on how to kill the zombie/spaghetti stuff that was down the plug hole. He suggested using bleach, disenfectant etc, so I ran down to the kitchen, got some from under the sink, ran upstairs again and poured it down the plughole. As I was pouring it, 'Tony' appeared behind me. He was absoloutely wasted and slurred "Use BEEEEEER!!!" as he handed me a 6-pack, which I poured down the plughole as well. 'Tony' then made himself inconspicuously 'absent' as I looked out the bathroom window (in real life it's misted, but in the dream it was clear) and saw the 2 story tall cyborg zombie raise its arms towards me. I dived into the hall as the entire wall was blown away by a barrage of rockets. At this stage the ever useful 'Dream Knowledge TM' kicked in again and I suddenly knew that I was a special forces military guy and that my house had a self-destruct mechanism and a secret underground bunker. I returned to the downstairs scene and spent a while futiley battling the zombies as they streamed through the front and back doors ('Tony' had dissapeared completely from the dream.) before I concluded that I had lost the house to the enemy. I ran back upstairs and went into the back bedroom, where I activated the self destruct mechanism. A computer voice message announced "BFB activated". I assumed the 'escape' position, which was meant to take me down to the underground bunker via a lift. Unfortunately, the 'escape' position consisted of lying flat on the floor of the back bedroom. There was no lift, since it would have to have cut through the middle of the kitchen on its way down. A while passed as I waited to be lowered into the bunker, and the dream switched to some fancy cinematics. The view panned out to take in the house and the zombies from a side on perspective (for some reason, my neighbours house wasn't there, and the gable end of my house was just bare brick with no paint. Usually my house is a semi-detatched.) With the brilliant new 'fly anywhere' camera, I watched as the house filled with zombies, the cyborg zombie crashed through the kitchen and saw myself being mysteriously transported through 10 feet of solid brick/concrete and 30ft of thin air to the floor of a huge cavernous area (the actual transition looked a lot like the bit in Fight Club at the beginning, where the camera decends through the floors of the tower block from the main character to the explosives in the basement.) I then found myself back in my body, looking up at a ceiling composed of bricks and girder supports. The ceiling cracked and caved in a bit as the house exploded above with a deep rumble. I then got up and started wandering around the cavernous space. It was basically a huge square underground room, but there were some old disused escalators leading upwards on one side. There were a lot of other people there - drug users, homeless people, punks etc. Eventually, I found an old object that looked like the deformed child of a vacum cleaner and a car exauhst pipe. I picked it up and said "This is my fear. I have my fear." I then started walking about the place, showing people 'my fear' and saying "Look at my fear. This is my fear." Even the really bizzarre, insane people avoided eye contact and walked away briskly when they saw me.

Well... that's pretty much where I woke up. There was a bit where I saw the cyborg/zombie on it's way to my house, but that sort of turned into a completely unrelated dream after a while.

*Note* The last part of the dream, the bit with the underground space, was bloody scary! It was pervaded by the terrible fear that the zombies would come after me if I ever left the underground place, and that I was doomed to spend the rest of my life there. That's much scarier than any mere 2 story tall cyborg zombie with rocket launchers for arms.

Awright this is one I had this morning-really REALLY wierd. Bear with me. Me and a few old friends (we were kids in the dream) were at Callaway park (amusement park in southern Alberta) , specifically, the roller coaster. It is red and small enough that you get to go around it twice. For some reason, the train stopped with a jolt. Then the dream took on a... a... sort of red-tinged militariness-like the messed up colours in some of those of those old colour movies. Then I became aware of the fact that the girl next to me had had lego cyborg bricks embedded in her back in the jolt. We had to go down the stairs that went along the initial slope down to the platform. Then I yelled, "Surround it! She's a cyborg take the legos out of her back!" (the legos (I think) are from a previous dream or idle thought.) We surrounded but she broke free and ran. As I ran, my friends slipped out of my field of vision and dissapeared for the rest of the dream. I chased the cyborg to the suburb I currently live in where I ran into a house. (It had the upstairs of one of my little brother's friends, the ground level of my house/one of my friend's houses (it changed) , and the downstairs of my cousins in Ontario's house.) Then began the long part of my dream, in which I searched the house for the cyborg (this part of the dream took on a laser quest/1st person shooter computer game quality, somehow retaining the red-tinged militariness) , running upstairs, downstairs, everything turning nightvision (green & black) when I went downstairs into the dark. Also, scary music played when I went downstairs and I felt my prey was near. Then I went upstairs, into one of the bedrooms, where a flat TV showed a Borg from Star Trek (the cyborg legos had put nanobots in the cybborg's bloodstream, Dream Knowledge TM told me.) and an LED readout that said in letters that kept blinking into different letters "CYBORG MUST KILL DIE GO" I ran into a closet with closed door. The door splintered like dry cedar, and there was a paperback book titled "The Knights of Talanghar" and the cover of Pierce Anthony's "Dragon's Gold" on the bottom, which was littered with winter clothing. Suddenly, a knight in shining armor jumped out of the book, but it suddenly became a knight-droid, with visor shining blue, etc. We ran downstairs, roaring battlecries and ripped open a closet. The knight droid raked the junk at the bottom of the closet with his vibro-sword. Then I turned and saw a baby wearing a diaper crwaling throught a tiny arch in the living room. "The cyborg's offspring!" I roared "Kill the infant! Kill the baby! the baby!" I caught up with it (seeming to enter a time-slo pocket just then) and jumped on it until I found that foam was coming out of it. I saw that it was a porcelain model full of packing foam. The knight had disappeared. I suddenly knew that I was an agent for the Hoffman institute (a secret organization in a role playing game) I suddenly saw that the lego motherboard that had been originally embedded in the girl's back at the beginning of the dream was lying on the living room floor saying in LED, "THE CYBORG MUST KILL DIE GO" I then knbew that the cyborg threat to the human race was gone-the cyborg had vaporized and only the cyborg lego remained. I breathed a sigh of relief.

I TOLD ya it was wierd.

That is pretty weird. I had a dream last night that was entirely about my dog, but it wasn't particularly weird (although I did see my hands properly for the first time, though it was only so that a coyote (I'd been watching a documentary about pack hunters) could sink its teeth into it. It's all worth it for the nice dreams...

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I had another dream that involved Captain Kirk, Captain Picard, Luke Skywalker, the APC from Aliens and a jug of whipped salmon, but it was a bit short and vague.

cool dream scottish guy.... very well-described! i'm sorry but i skipped over the next person's dream with the cyborg and legos... short attention span used up by scottish guy's zombie dream...
I just wanted to try to talk about the scariest dream i ever had... odddly enough it is nine inch nails-related, so i must be deeply obsessed.. i am currently collaborating on a NIN entry...
In this dream, I watched the angel of death take Trent Reznor to hell, to the sound of 'happiness in slavery' playing backwards. I don't usually have dreams that horrifying so I never forgot it. Besides, it was beautiful in its way as well.
The angel of death was dressed in flowing brown rags. he was tall, and carried a scythe (how original). He had big, beautiful, soulful eyes with thick eyebrows, but his nose, mouth and chin were like that of a pug dog or some kind of ape. He had light-brown/sandy-blonde human hair, dry and wavy, almost shoulder-length. The descent took place in a single empty room with hardwood floors. This is what would happen: both trent and the angel would simultaneously leap into the air, and in a flash the surroundiings would dematerialize and then rematerialize, looking exactly the same. They did this several times before they had reached the bottom. At this point I was no longer watching; I was there, too. It took on a kind of scooby-doo appearance; there was a number of people arriving together and I think we were supposed to be the rest of the band. It was basically over by that time; some hellish suggestions of impending torture ensued.. a pretty clear indication that if i continue listening to this evil music I will go to hell. but after being awake awhile i congratulated myself on a very fine dream, one of the best i ever had, visually-speaking.
More recently, sometime in the past summer, I dreamed I had a daughter. I was in a park with her, a beautiful little girl with blonde hair. The sun was setting, we were walking over grassy hills. She started pulling me down a brick path that led towards some woods; I didn't want to go but she insisted. Soon, though, she was tired and wanted to go home, but I was now dragging her along, saying that if she wanted to go this way well, we were doing it. I told a friend about it and she said it had to do with my going to college. I just remember it as very beautiful; I made a picture of it on my computer later... I also have a drawing I made of the angel in my other dream.

Everybody should have dreams like mine!

Dream 2 – 20/07/01


No zombies this time. These were worse.

It started off with me wondering around all these corridors (suitably fitted out with steming pipes, cables and metal grill floors) in a big facility thing. After doing this for a while, I suddenly found myself in a control room, looking at a computer screen. The screen displayed 2 small icons which I could control and move around the corridors. The camera then switched a few times between the computer screen and the actual things (you know those robots that you plug in to a BBC computer and type instructions into? They kinda look like a tortoise with no legs? That's what they were). The dream quickly turned into a running battle, where I had to guide the robots out of the facility while fending off attacks from aliens (as in the acid dripping, chitin armoured H.I Giger aliens). This was actually quite easy, since the robots were equipped with machine guns and auto-targeting systems, and the dream provided some really dramatic views of the aliens being torn appart by the hail of bullets. After that, I found myself in a sort of industrial cage lift. It wasn't in a lift shaft or anything, it was just a lift, sitting there all by itself. There were a number of other people in the lift with me (one of them was Morpheus, from The Matrix), and there was a sort of heavy tarpaulin forming the ceiling of the lift. You know how the aliens are different depending on what species they burst out of? Well, we all came under attack from this bat winged alien, and 'Morpheous' got killed. I pulled out a pistol and fired 4 or 5 rounds through the tarpaulin, then I ran out the door and checked the roof to make sure it was dead (It was. Very dead in fact.) There then came a bit where I hijaked a car and went driving about some city or other for a while (with the occasional appearence of an alien or two). After that, I was suddenly in my room, packing all my walking gear for the Nvigation and mountain skills course that I'm booked on. After a bit of packing, I went to the train station, waited a bit, looked at the train tickets and found myself at Glenmore lodge training centre (note that I hadn't actually got on a train). I then found out from the staff at the lodge that I'd have to hurry up or I'd be late. I looked at the train tickets again and realised that I was already an hour late, and that I'd have to drive back home so that I could get the train here (I know it's confusing, but it's a dream, ok?). On top of that, there was a penalty for being late, and I found out about a whole, bizzarre monetary system that was running at the lodge. Apparently, being an hour late meant that I owed them 6 buttons (the type you use to button up your shirt. I don't know what happened to using coins and notes.) It was at this point that it occured to me that driving back home just so I could get a train to where I already was was a bit silly. This seemed to trigger another sudden change in the dream, and I found myself trimming a hedge because some park ranger guy had arrested me. I spent quite a while trimming the hedge and formulating an escape plan before... (nah, I won't tell you that bit.) Anyway, just a minute or so after the hedge bit, I woke up.

Dream 3 03/08/01

I was looking across a dirt track thing, and Kirk from Star Trek was standing at the other side. Through Dream Knowledge ™ I knew that I was Captain Picard, and I even looked like him, right down to the red uniform and bald head. (I was able to see myself with Dream Vision &#8482). A dune buggy (one of the lightweight things you see racing around beaches and deserts) pulled up in front of me and Luke Skywalker leaned out of the window. I remember thinking to myself ‘Is that really Luke Skywalker?’ at which point Dream Vision ™ kicked in, and I was presented with an image of Luke somersaulting with his lightsaber and stuff, and I thought ‘Yep, that’s Luke Skywalker’. I then flicked to another location (it looked a little like a section of my back garden at one of my old houses, only bigger and deserty and with lots of medium sized armoured buildings and stuff. Also, I was now Captain Kirk.) There was a sort of limo jeep thing (it looked a little like the APC from Aliens) on the dirt road, and I got into it. There were 2 other guys in there, and I suddenly knew (Through Dream Knowledge TM) that I had been sent by the federation to save the outpost from a siege. I started talking about strategies, and one of the guys said how they had been using level 7 bombardment defence strategies. I responded by saying “Level 7?!? You should be using level 9!” I then went on to say how the most important thing to remember about level 9 was that you had to keep on the move all the time. There was then a very brief driving scene before I got out and wandered across the courtyard of the armoured buildings (which in real life was a small lawn surrounded by trees, a hedge and a tree house) before the dream abruptly flicked to a view of a jug of whipped salmon, where it lingered for several seconds before I woke up.



Dream 4 – 07/08/01


I was looking out over a minefield in a wooded area. The mines were visable as small black circles arrayed in three rows circling an area of woodland. I threw some stones into the minefield and detonated a few of them before I noticed a wolf walking through the mines. The wolf then stepped on one and was blown up. A strange floppy sort of thing (it’s hard to describe) started flopping through the minefield, but it was too light to set off any of the mines. An army jeep then appeared and followed the line of mines round to my position (without actually driving into the minefield) and a scientist guy got out and told me to follow him. I did so, and he led me along a winding path through the mines, all the while talking about how the mines would be deactivated in a moment, which wasn’t very comforting considering that I was walking through the live minefield while he was saying this. We arrived at a concealed helipad, and I got into the back of the helicopter. The doors were locked behind me, and there was a sheet of bullet-proof glass separating me from the pilot and co-pilot. There was a bag on the seat beside me, and I looked in it to discover two half-full 10-litre bottles containing some miscelanious high explosive liquid, a foot of curled copper wire and a steel pencil sharpener. We took off and the pilot told me that I had 5 hours to make a bomb out of it or it would explode (don’t ask). I spent a while buggering about with it, wondering how the hell I could make a detonator out of some copper wire and a pencil sharpener (I had a hunch that I might be able to make an electromagnet out of it, and that that might do something useful), but I eventually gave up and resorted to punching the right passenger window, which shattered after a few blows. I then remarked on how satifying that was and returned my attentions to making the bomb (I don’t know why I didn’t chuck the bomb out the smashed window). I started to wonder how the pilot and co-pilot would escape the blast, but I settled on the idea that they would bail out before the bomb went off. The dream then flicked to me standing outside a big palace type thing. I entered and found myself in the main foyer. Everything was done in beautiful polished marble, and there were plants all over the place, which I had to water for some reason, sicne they were all wilted and dry, but every time I spilt any water, servants would come to mop it up. Through Dream Knowledge TM, I knew that it all belonged to me, and that I was a king or some equivelent. I wondered around the many rooms and was accompanied by some friends, who stayed out of view and on the verge of perception for most of the dream. There were old musical instruments in the rooms, hung on the walls and set in the corners, and I eventually arrived in a small, musty room with an old guy sat in the corner and ancient BBC computers hung on the walls. Some were recognisable as BBC micro computers, but others seemed to be from a pre computer age (although I still knew they were BBC computers). The oldest model looked like an old typing machine that had had an unfortunate encounter with an old vacuum cleaner, and now had one of the old fashioned vacuum cleaner dust sacs coming out of it. Shortly after this, I woke up.

Dream 5 – 09/08/01



My mother had booked me on a train to Edinburgh via Glasgow central to the start of a walk I had planned (it actually started at Port Patrick, but this didn’t occur to me in the dream). I was worried because it was Wednesday, and I wanted to be at my friend’s party on Friday (which would be difficult if I was on an 18 day trek), but I decided it was ok, since I could just get the train back to go to the party and then go back to where I was. I was walking down the street at this point to get the train to Central station, and I passed by this hair salon. I decided to investigate and I ducked in the door a few times to glimpse at the chalkboard displaying the avalible options and prices, each time receiving giggles from a group of girls sitting in the shop waiting to get their hair done. Finally, I went in and sat down in an empty chair, and this guy came over to me and started poking me in places and massaging my calf muscle in a very uncomfortable manner. He then signalled to an assistant (a rather attractive girl) who took over the massaging (which, incidentally, became a lot more pleasant). She washed my hair and my face (a process that for some reason involved her pressing her entire body against my back), and pushed my head forward towards the washbasin to rinse it. At that point the dream went balls up, and I found myself suspended over a fiery pit in some sort of iron foundry/torture chamber place, with some guy going on about exactly how he’d tortured my father (who I don’t really like, so it didn’t bother me much. My parents are divorced and I live with my mother.), before hoisting me into position above the pit so that the flames licked across my chest, searing the flesh. After quite a period of being roasted in this manner in a myriad of positions, I was brought down to stand at the side of the pit (by this time I very much wished I was dead). In the pit were 3 iron squares, each about 4 inches across and bearing a letter and the chief guy said something about how I had to be marked. There were other people there, although I couldn’t see them, and they held my hands and pressed them against two of the iron squares, making my hands sizzle. As they did this, I wondered what the third square in the middle was for. Without warning, they grabbed my head and thrust it down so that my forehead contacted with the third square, and the rest of my face was emersed in the burning coals. The pain was terrible (fortunately it was only Sim Pain TM), and everything went black, at which point the dream flicked to me downstairs in my house, feeling very hot and in considerable pain. I went into the kitchen to get something to drink, and poured some white Ame into a glass, but when I tried to drink it, I couldn’t get more than a dribble from the glass, since there were balls of ice in it which kept blocking the liquid from getting into my mouth, and also gave it an unpleasant stale taste. I paced around the living room for a while feeling extremely distressed by the heat (unlike Sim Pain TM, Dream Distress TM is indistinguishable from the real thing), when I heard my mother and her boyfriend come down the stairs. The boyfriend was laughing and telling me how it hadn’t really been that bad, and I suddenly knew that it was him who had tortured me (in real life I have an intense dislike for him for a number of reasons). I needed to empty the ice out of the mug, but I went upstairs to the bathroom sink to get away from my mother’s boyfriend. When I got there, the mug had disappeared and I was loking at myself in the mirror. To my alarm, I was covered in all sorts of biomechanical intrusions, and I looked like the deluxe version of a Borg from Star Trek. What little I could see of my skin was pale and covered in greenish patches, and I was worried that I would be stuck like this (although there was a brief moment where I was excited about the prospect of upgrading and adding lots of neat little bits and pieces to my partially mechanised body. I already had caterpillar tracks instead of legs). The dream then flicked to me (still in cyborg state) rolling through a corridor in a sort of hotel/covert advanced research place, with a scientist woman walking alongside me showing me pictures of this virus thing that was turning me into a cyborg (an idea my subconscious obviously gleaned from a computer game I have). She showed me to a room that had a sort of whirling vortex/wormhole thing in the floor, and I jumped (or rolled) onto it and was sucked in. I landed in this really strange circular room that looked like it was part of a giant living organism, and had a great big pillar of living tissue in the middle and was floored with what looked like spaghetti (no sauce or anything, just plain spaghetti). There was this dog type thing (it might have been an alien dog) that was very friendly, and the scientist woman appeared to tell me that the dog would find a cure for the virus. The dog then bounced around a bit and started eating the spaghetti on the floor. Through Dream Knowledge TM I then knew that the spaghetti was the cure, and I started eating it too. The dream then flicked to this guy who had come from the hotel part of the covert research place and wondered into the vortex room. He remarked on how cool it looked and jumped in, appearing in the spaghetti room. I then asked him what the f**k he was doing there (I was cured of my cyborgosis by then) and looked for a way to get rid of him. An alcove appeared in the wall, and I went over to it to get a terminator to bludgeon him to death with (don’t ask). When I arrived at the alcove, the terminator was on a sort of pedistal, and looked like someone had tried to turn it into a JCB (the big yellow things that dig up the road on Sundays). It’s legs were missing, and it had been attached to a caterpillar track thingy (just like I had been). I suddenly knew (through Dream Knowledge TM) that I had to catapult it to the hotel or something. The room opened up like a telescope conservatory, and I saw this massive building that I knew was actually a person/cyborg/thing. I catapulted the terminator/JCB over to it (it was about 2 kilometers away), and watched as it extended a massive claw to catch it. It then extended a small pincer out of the tip of one of the claws, and I thought to myself ‘That’s never going to work.’ It caught the terminator with the pincer, but it couldn’t take the weight and the metal deformed and snapped, sending the terminator crashing to the ground. There endeth that dream.

i'd say the hedge trimming and the drink-obstructing ice probably have some profound symbolic significance.

The scariest dream I've ever had involved me getting a 2 year jail sentance. Incarceration is far worse than 20ft cyborg zombies or flaming pits.