THE DARKNESS!
This was no longer a dream. It was a nightmare! This whole time, I thought I was hunting the darkness. My lucid powers had made me overconfident. Now the dark had surrounded me. It had been waiting outside this whole time. Preparing for a chance to attack. The PE teachers had left and so had the other schools. Only my team, our opponents and one referee remained.
I saw a black, warped, vortex-like demon holding the ref with a knife to his throat.
"Blow the whissstle..." it hissed.
Multiple, similar looking demons possessed the team we were up against. Black fire poured from their eyes like furnaces embedded within their skulls.
The referee blew the starting whistle panickingly and the demonic team came at us like a unit. The confident, intelligent, good looking peers that were having fun, trying their best to win and congratulating each other were now cowering.
Everything was looking bad for me right now but I wasn't going to let that deter me from what I came here to do. Anger rose within me. A sudden passion set on fire. This entity had put me through hell. For starters, it had killed my friends.
Although they only existed in the dream world, they had still meant something to me. Secondly, the darkness took my precious memories of them away. The only proof that these extraordinary people had existed in the first place! To top it all off, the dark threatened the entire dream world. Every creature, thought, idea. This was unacceptable.
My body moved without my realisation. If they were made of darkness, it would take a blade of light to vanquish them. Being lucid allowed me to summon in a heavenly sword of white light. Jumping left, right, up. Spinning, twisting, slicing every demon.
The sword passed through them to purge only the darkness inside. They were no match for someone like me. When lucid, you are only limited by how big your imagination is and how strong you are mentally.
The players were a bit shaken up and left immediately to join the other schools fleeing. So did the referee. My teammates were panicking but they were also staring at me.
They latched onto me with their eyes knowing I was their only way out alive. I didn't know how to escape though! The players had run into the darkness to perhaps the outside world or maybe to their deaths.
Desperately, I tried to imagine myself outside. It worked for a second but every time I was brought back to the sport's hall. Instead, I attempted to make the darkness disappear with my mind. After my fifth attempt, I gave up. It just always seemed to bounce back. The entire process felt like playing with an elasticated goo.
There was no debate about what I was supposed to do after that. My only option available, was to fight it head on.
Being quick about it, I spawned in some gear for my team to use in the fight. It was easy to equip them like video game characters. Tough armour that was still easy to move around in, assault rifles that fired bullets made of light, light grenades and two small daggers also made of light for each person.
I told them to only use the daggers in an emergency. Their job was to support me, not take them on. Fighting the darkness with my imagination was one thing but to control multiple people like puppets required a lot of brain power. Keeping them in the background with just enough to keep them from dying was all I could accomplish.
Wraiths came down from where the roof used to be. Bullets flew but most of them missed. Each one flew past me and tore at my soul. After one swept up from underneath me, knocking me to the ground, I swept my hand accross my vision to eliminate them in a wave of light.
My hand seemed to be burning though there was no pain, just light. Flying was difficult and I hadn't yet mastered it yet so I rose up by continuously double jumping from panels of light.
Every wraith I reached, let me increase my kill streak so I leapt from each square of light to the next. Now I wielded two swords of light. Spinning in a flurry, my blades cut through the veil that kept us here. Until something knocked me back down.
The defeat was infuriating after I'd managed to get so far...
My comrades crowded around me to help me up. I was their lifeboat and only path to freedom after all. Drums echoed around as though the hall was still intact. Each emphasis of the beat held a powerful force stronger than the last.
It resembled the forces I had encountered when in a sought of sleep paralysis. Dream 002. That's when the dots started to join revealing more of the bigger picture.
Dream 002 was a common dream I had when I was younger. A conflict I always fought in nightly. The whole time... it was the darkness banging on the dream world doors... trying to get in... they'd only managed to get in this time because... because I'd finally given up and let the forces throw me around... it was MY fault that everyone had to suffer...
This explained why I'd stopped having the dream. Every beat of the drum struck fear into my being. This was it. A true chunk from the darkness's heart had shown up to put me through torture.
'Cheers to an endless night!' I though morbidly.
When it revealed itself, a final thump of the drum sent a wave of darkness into us. The equipment I'd given to my friends shattered to pieces. Armour disintegrated into sand...
My perspective appeared to be horizontal as the blast had thrown me to the ground. Picking myself up, I prepared to send my teammates to a safe location. At least I could prevent their deaths.
When people from the real world became a part of my dreams, they felt more like copies except they were slightly different to them in real life. This was probably due to the fact that what I knew of their character was not the same as who they really were when they went home at the end of the day.
However, before I was able to teleport them away, their bodies turned to dust just like their armour. My will had not been strong enough to hold them together...
A particularly vivid detail I still remember, was the way one of them clung to me as they died...
I wanted to go full blitz on the darkness after that but I was too slow. As soon as I lunged into the air, chains dragged me back down. Since your real strength can be altered in dreams, it was again a battle of will power. I truly tried everything to break free:
Going against the chains, destroying them with magic, teleporting, snapping them with my hands etc. The entire time I was only doing what the darkness wanted me to do: Struggle further until my will had all been used up.
A powerful wind or stream of darkness pinned me to the ground and pressed on my mind to subdue it as well. All I could do was stop it from crushing my mind in a constant state of pain. After writing down the details of my failure, I realised I could have simply let them crush my mind so perhaps I could break out as it wouldn't actually kill me.
In the heat of the moment, all my instincts screamed against it. Maybe letting them crush my mind was so overwhelming, it wiped my memories of the people who had helped me. Otherwise, how would I remember the fun we had together in the basketball tournament?
During the entire period of REM sleep, all I felt was pain throughout the night. I would call it sleep paralysis if my alarm hadn't broke me out of it. The darkness had won tonight.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
My breathing was still heavy after writing down last night's encounter so instead of letting the memory fade, I used it to fuel my drive to keep fighting. Every video, blog, anything I could get my hands on that explained how to increase your will power, mental exercises, more lucid dreaming techniques and so on. I dedicated the majority of my time to preparing myself for the next battle. Whether that was tomorrow night or in a week's time, I would be ready.