Shadowfiend23 @ Wrocław

This dream of is one of the most literal embodiments of good vs. evil that I have ever experienced. Frankly, I found myself incredibly surprised when I awoke this morning and realized how grand and cliché-d the dream had been. Here it is, in all of its archetypal glory:

My backpack slapped against me rhythmically as I pedaled madly down a crowded avenue early in the morning. Drivers whizzing past honked their horns at me; a vain effort to get me off of the road so they could get to work minutes earlier. I ignored them. Panting heavily, I paused after having reached the peak of a steep concrete hill.

Ah crap! I know I’m gonna be late. I shoulda taken the 4, which would’ve dropped me off closer at least. I hope my boss doesn’t mind…

I looked at my destination – a school around the corner (in reality it was my old high school, but I didn’t recognize it as such in the dream. Not yet…) – and realized that I had been going the entirely wrong direction. I needed to turn around and bike several blocks away to a school I had passed a few minutes before.

Just great! What a perrrrrr-fect start to a Tuesday morning!

(As a side note, I had this dream on a Tuesday morning, which happens to be the first day I work each week)
With squinted eyes and gritted teeth, I quickly biked down the hill to the other building.

I locked up my bike outside the building and bolted inside. I ran into the meeting room and threw my backpack under the long boardroom table. My boss and my colleagues all turned to face me, their faces contorted in disgust.
“Aaron! Thanks for joining us!” my boss barked at me.
“I swear, I didn’t –“
I stopped cold. I started to think about the day I had been having. I had thought about the bus system in Clermont-Ferrand, passed by my high school, was riding a back that was back in America, and I was back at a job I had had in college. I realized I was dreaming.

I laughed heartily.
“See you later, everyone! I’m done wasting my time here. I’m dreaming, I’ve got better things to do.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Aaron?” my boss retorted.
My brow furrowed.
“What do you mean, ‘what am I talking about?’ We’re obviously dreaming.”
I looked around the room for further proof. I spotted two clocks mounted on the wall. Knowing that clocks were usually laughably inoperable in dreams, I had found incontrovertible proof.
“Look at that!” I said while pointing vigorously towards the nearest clock. The hands were moving backwards, the numbers were in all the wrong places, and the clock itself seemed to be stretching downwards as if it were melting plastic sagging under its own weight.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about! Sit back down right now, or you’re not going to get paid for working this week!”
“Whatever. I don’t need to listen to this. I started to run towards the nearby picture window, as I intended to activate my lucid dream flight power and fly away from the dreary scene in which I was trapped.

Just before I reached the window, I started hearing a harmony of low-pitched, droning chants. I stopped dead in my tracks. Something was wrong. I slowly turned around. My eyes went wide as I found myself staring at my (former) coworkers standing in a large pentagram, necks craned to the sky, hands clasped together, chanting in an unknown language. I made a run for the door.

(By the way, it gets VERY dark from this point on)

As I reached the door, out of the corner of my eye, I watched as my colleagues fell to the ground. But they didn’t fall in the same state they had been moments before. Their innards (including their eyes) had disappeared, leaving only their skin and clothes to fall to the floor. I noticed that their faces had been frozen with mouths agape and eye sockets stretched impossibly wide, as if they had gazed upon unspeakable horrors. I left the room and began leaping, one flight at a time, down a steel stairwell to flee the ghastly scene I had stumbled onto.

I heard an earthen, croaking bellow emanate from the room above as a flying red monster swooped overhead, leveling the flight of stairs above me, scraping off the top floor of the building with a thunderous crash of twisting metal and creaking wood. Satan had entered our world. I ran back up the stairs and peered over the wreckage to watch the monstrosity start to fly off into the unsuspecting city around us. He was a cross between a dragon and a pig, having the torso, wings, and appendages of a dragon and the head and corpulence of a pig. Four black goat horns adorned the top of his scaly, greasy, hairy head. Even though I knew this was a dream, I felt that I needed to stop him.

(To tell the truth, I was a bit happy to see an antagonist arrive in my dream. Obviously I abhor any kind of human-destroying/world-ending demon, but having something to accomplish with lucid dream powers is usually preferable to the alternative. It feels all the more satisfying. After all, who watches a movie where the heroes have no conflict? Bad guys are the backbones of movies, and sometimes they end up far more interesting than the heroes. In other words, I am fond of being the hero.)

I flew out of the building and down to the street below. I raised my arms above my head, closed my eyes, and prepared to become a demon-fighting demigod. Satan was several stories tall, so I figured that I needed to be many stories taller. I strained and strained, gritting my teeth and pushing with all of my dream-Aaron resolve. I opened my eyes and smiled contentedly as I lowered my head to gaze upon my new body. I was taller than the building I had just left, and I was at least four to five times bigger than the devil I had intended to fight.

With several strides, I caught up to Satan and snatched him up with my house-sized hand. I repositioned my hand so that I was holding him by the neck. He began to claw viciously at my hand as he screamed incoherently in a dark, foul tongue. I transformed my other hand into a massive sword made of blinding light and decapitated Satan in one fell swoop. I let his head and body tumble down to the ground, crashing meteorically into the pavement below. I started to incline my head, believing the combat to be over, but suddenly I saw movement in the crater where his head had fallen.

I knelt down and watched in horror as spider-like appendages started to slither out his neck and form a grotesque arachnid skeleton. I realized that there was only one way to permanently defeat him – I needed to obliterate the head. I swooped up his body again, feeling a stomach-turning crunch as I broke the legs he had sprouted. My eyes narrowed and began to glow white as I called forth thousands of shining holy beings (maybe they were angels, in the dream was merely wishing for help) who were wielding massive steel chains. Simultaneously, the beings whipped their chains towards the monster. As the tips were sent forth, Satan began bellowing the same way he had when he was first summoned earlier in the dream. Every chain wrapped around him, encasing him in cold, brittle justice. The beings began to glow with light, and the light traveled down the chains in waves. When the light reached the subdued Satan, his cries intensified tenfold. In equal measure, my field of vision was being bathed in light as Satan was disintegrating. The dream ended with a sea of brightness laid out in front of me.

As a note, try not to judge my actions too harshly in the dream. It sounds incredibly conceited to say that I made myself a god and fought off Satan, but the dream had a natural progression to it that I didn’t create. I didn’t make Satan appear, but once he did, I felt that I needed to fight him.