Lost In Lucidity

Nothing But an Echo

That night, I have my first lucid dream, start to finish.

Upon falling asleep, I somehow feel my consciousness roll over into unconsciousness, and I ride the feeling straight into a shoddy recreation of my house. The layout is wrong, and the appearance is nearly unrecognizable. Still, there's that dream logic where you know where or what something is supposed to be without it matching its real-world counterpart. Upon recognizing its strangeness, however, the walls shift, doorways and halls appearing and reappearing as I connect it back to my actual home. Clinging to the thought, the house fully snaps to its usual design, and I stand alone in the living room. That's when I realize that I'm in total control.

'I want to see Mom.'

The thought comes effortlessly, a desire that never leaves me. As if on cue, she begins to start down the steps.

"Oh, hey, honey. Welcome home." She says with a warm smile.

"Hi, Mom." I beam before running over and hugging her. For once, I can feel her clearly. Thinking about what it felt like in the waking world, it all becomes manifest in the dream.

"Oh," She says, seemingly taken back by the gesture, "You must be feeling better. How was school?"

"Good." I quickly answer, not wanting to focus on such arbitrary details. On the thought of school, the door opens behind me.

"Jeeze, thank's for leaving me in the dust." Leigh scoffs. "I get the school is down the road, but I still don't like walking alone."

I'm to her by the time she finishes the sentence and pull her into a hug. My brain clearly finds this weird as it struggles to make the flow organic, but I quickly ride along with the feeling so as not to let this bubble I've created pop.

"Sorry." I say, holding her tightly, "I was just really excited to get home."

"Oh, well, I hope it wasn't for the house itself," Mom says from behind me. "I thought we could go out and grab dinner. If you two are hungry, that is."

"Yes. Yeah, that sounds great." I rattle out with excitement.

"I'm pretty hungry." Leigh smiles.

"Well, good. I thought we could go to that Thai place you really like, Leigh. The one in Portland?"

"Oh, heck yeah! Let me throw my stuff in my room," she says before running up the steps. My mom follows her with her eyes until she's out of sight, then turns to me.

"Is that alright with you, Wes?"

I stare for a moment, just feeling the relief in my heart to interact with loved ones again. Even if it's all fake, I'm willing to pretend to for a while.

"Yeah. Yeah, that's perfect."

I have a while with the two of them as I guide the dream through what a night with my family was like. The city is lit like a golden paradise as we walk through its sparkling streets, and I set the sky above to a dazzling starfield. I make tweaks when needed and change small situations that I don't want to waste time with, but I don't do anything wild for the most part. I don't need to fly or explore whatever world lies on the edge of my subconscious. I just want to be in a happy, ordinary moment. My last lucid dream with Leigh in the woods was nothing compared to this. There are a lot of details that I know I'm not getting right, and there's that ever-present dreamy haze that never goes away, but nevertheless, I laugh and smile and talk endlesslessly with the projections of Leigh and my mother. Despite the flaws, it feels so real. Once I get into the mindset of automatically making adjustments without thinking about it, I'm fully immersed in the world I've created. It's everything that I was working toward. Everything that I wanted.