For some reason, I dreamed this one entirely in Ocarina of Time assets. I found myself in a grotto, think one of the browner dirt textures in the game. It was an open space maybe 60 feet square, ceiling maybe 20 feet up, no visible exits. The middle of the room featured a stone pedestal probably 6 or 8 foot square, maybe a foot high, easily stepped up onto, near the front of which stood a thin man in a blue shirt or jacket holding his head at a strange angle, only his eyes were visible. Palette swap a redead into street clothes, basically. Near the rear of the pedestal stood a heavy wooden gantry, which dangled a noose a foot or two directly over the man’s head. The man started trudging toward me, and the gantry moved and telescoped to keep the noose directly above him, making that tigtigtig noise the castle town drawbridge makes. He slowly chased me around the enclosure while I looked for a way out, and then my girlfriend woke me up, she noticed I was breathing heavy.

I’m not in this dream. My perspective is like a nature documentary camera. I was watching these dragonfly-like creatures fly around, hunt, go about their lives. Some of them were sentient, they could think in language, others couldn’t, they were just animals that ran on instinct. Apparently their conscious mind existed in a piece of brain that was kind of exposed on the backs of their heads. The ones that could think, I could hear their thoughts. One of them got hit there and it kind of concussed it in a way that made it unable to fly, the damaged thinking brain was like, shorting out the animal. And I heard it thinking things like “Oh well, I guess it’s been a good run. Nothing lasts forever I suppose. Not like I have much of a choice now. I wonder” as it was reaching one of its limbs behind its head, its claw snipped, the little bit of exposed brain fell away, and it flew away, silent. It cut its mind off to survive.

This was the first time I experienced a lucid dream. My family was having one of the once every few years gatherings on my grandparents’ deck we’d do, I started to say something, and my grandmother’s dog Ginger started barking at me. Ginger was this hideous little creature with an annoying bark, and I would often be sarcastic back to the dog. Ginger started barking, and I said “Ginger you shouldn’t bark at me, because…” mid sentence I vividly remembered taking that dog to the vet to be put down for cancer. “Because you’re dead…and dead dogs don’t bark. Huh, I’m dreaming.” All of the people vanished, I started walking around the yard and the world just faded to this dark teal color and I woke up.