Asklemmy

I had a nightmare once made mostly or entirely out of assets from Ocarina of Time.

I found myself in an underground room of some kind, just a large space made out of that brown dirt wall texture. There was no entrance or exit, the room was maybe the size of a large classroom or two, maybe 30x40 feet? Along one wall was a low rise, with the light grey stone wall texture behind it, two braziers providing the only light in the space, and a kind of gallows/gantry thing made out of those large wooden beams you see Beneath The Well. One upright member supporting a horizontal swingarm, and from the end of the swing arm dangled a noose.

Standing beneath the noose was a tall, thin figure. Thinking about it now I picture it as a ReDead enemy but I don't think that's what it actually looked like. It made no sounds at all. It walked like a ReDead does though; that slow labored trudge. It started trudging toward me, and as it did, the gantry moved to keep the noose hangling about a foot directly over its head, making the noise from the Castle Town draw bridge as it moved.

It followed me around this room for a bit, I couldn't move very fast, like my body wouldn't respond right. I tried to say something but I couldn't summon up any power.

I woke up in a cold sweat with my girlfriend asking me what was wrong. Did I mention I was 27 years old at the time?

The novelty of my brain using N64 graphics for this, along with the weirdness of the noose hanging over the figure and not actually around his neck, burned it into my memory.

I'll also never forget the first lucid dream I had. I was on my grandparents' back deck, talking to several members of my family. My grandmother's dog Ginger started barking over us, as she constantly. I started to say some smartass line to the dog, starting with "Ginger, you shouldn't bark because..." and then a thought occurred to me. "...Because you're dead...we put you down last year, and dead dogs don't...bark I must be dreaming."

The dog and the people disappeared. Just...despawned. Everything got less vivid and my peripheral vision disappeared. I could see what I was directly looking at, or a blank beige color. I walked around the yard for a minute in a perfectly familiar and yet empty world, everything simultaneously had a kind of dark "before an afternoon thunderstorm" kind of look and that blank beige color, and after a minute or two I woke up.

I hadn't heard of lucid dreaming before this, and in fact not until a couple years after the fact. I spent a couple years really interested in the subject when I did, and managed it a couple more times. Some people talk about having "control" of the dream, for me, I usually realize I'm dreaming, it immediately starts to fade, and I'm able to just walk around and look at stuff for a little bit before I wake up.