Last night, March 31-2020, I dreamt that I was at university (a commodity only in our dreams taken the current environment), taking classes and working hard to learn new material, yet; the university I attended was not the familiar sprawling open-aired campus I had grown to know and love, but a mixture, of the classrooms and teachers I knew, and the indoor design of the famous magical college, Hogwarts. The hallways were made of stone, with many winding stairs, yet none of them floated, the layout of the halls similar to that of my real university, and the classrooms similar, yet a touch more mystic than the real-life college that I attended. Sconces lit up the dreary damp hallways in warm lamplight, the rooms had large bay windows facing a central green courtyard, and stairs were the predominant aspect of this towering unnamed university. I attended most of my similar classes, with some translations. My chemistry course was the same, with the same professor, but the lab course that was required alongside it featured a new professor, a short woman with long wavy black hair, the sign of age and prestige on her face, and eyes that could pierce through you if you made contact for longer than the time needed to say hello, goodbye, and thank you. Her name was Elizabeth Redding, a renowned research professor known to make several groundbreaking discoveries in the world of chemistry, and a laureate in several different distinct awards She taught the lab class equivalent, also known as Potions 1A.
I showed up to my class as per usual, sitting in individual desks, unlike the setting a normal laboratory, listening to her introduce the topic for the next set of experiments we were going to make. The class included about 19 other students, one of them being Kim Namjoon from the popular Korean band BTS, yet in this dream, he was just Joon, a college student, and top of his class. The class had large windows, with plants growing underneath the sills and many bookcases all around. The general lecturing area had the desks, in four rows of five, behind which were 4 rows of bookcases, that once walked past, led you to a back area in which many class materials were kept, and a lot of the research that Professor Liz (as she asked to be called) kept.
The room had a second door at the front that led to a smaller room in which more dangerous, possibly flammable experiments were performed by more advanced students, classes, or the professor herself. This door and the entrance door to the room both flanked a brown chalkboard at the front of the class, which is where the professors stood to teach. I tuned back into her words and heard her say
“—we will be administering this potion solely for the intent of quality enhancement of personal attempts. In order for you all to know what to make, you must know what
you’re looking for—”
as she held up a small glass vial filled with a viscous clear golden brown liquid, like honey, yet holding more threat in its contents as I stared at the light filtering through the bottle. I recognized this liquid as a lucid dreaming potion (you the reader would recognize the Inception (2010) chemical injected in Leo DiCaprio and Ellen Page in order to control and investigate dreams) and immediately felt alarms go off in my head. Perhaps it was reality rushing back to me subconsciously, but I knew I couldn’t agree to consciously go into a deeper dream. The class was silent for a few seconds before I spoke up:
“I won’t be taking it. I do not agree on being drugged and nowhere in the syllabus did it say that this would be occurring.”
The rest of the class slowly nodded their assent, realizing the true implications of taking the dreaming potion, and murmured in agreement. A few people began to speak at once:
“You can’t make us—”
“I’m okay, I don’t think—”
“No, maybe not—”
“Haha, I don’t know about all that…”
I looked around at the class and saw people looking confused, and caught eyes with Joon, who nodded at me with a concerned look, as if to say “It was the right thing to speak up”. The professor slowly nodded at our rejection and apologized quickly, with understanding words, and moved on. Soon, the class period ended, and we all left to go to our other classes. I walked out of the room, heading up a set of stairs before taking the turn towards my next course, watching the students pass me by. As I walked, I noticed a set of eyes following me through the crowd. A girl, clearly an older student, watched me as I wove through the crowd past her. In a clearing of the bodies walking through the halls, I saw that she wore a royal blue lab coat that fell to her knees and had her hair tied up in a tight bun behind her: the flame resistant attire of advanced lab assistants to professors or larger classes. In the midst of this clearing, she quickly walked towards me and blocked my passage, stopping me in my tracks. She handed me a neon green/yellow card with the words “With Love from Liz” printed on the front on top of a splotchy filigree design and she curtly said:
“Your professor wishes to apologize for today’s incident.”
I nodded in confusion, wondering how Professor Redding got these printed and delivered so quickly, but I took the card and opened it. Inside there were what appeared to be words of apology, but I couldn’t read the words as the dream started to lose its focus, the card and hallway spinning before fading out to black.
The subconscious voice in me justified this as just a shift to the next dream that I was going to have today, as occurs so often in our night time adventures. The dream fades out, and a new story begins.
I looked around and I saw a wide, vast ocean stretching out around me, with no land or life in sight, except perhaps the deep-sea creatures far below me. The sun beat down upon my neck as I turned to see that I was on a wooden boat the color of an ochre stained birch. I was surrounded by a crowd of people, all standing around as if waiting for something to occur; movement, a journey perhaps. The tone of the dream was calm, almost washed out by the sun’s intensity and mind drying heat. As I looked at the people around me, I realized that the dream was filled with the students from my lab class, plus a few extra. The only new people were a woman, her child, and their small dog. I smiled at them, as they obviously were traveling with the rest of the people on the boat to whatever distant location we were going to. I faced back out to the ocean, ready to patiently wait for the boat to begin moving. As I stood next to the railing, I saw the ocean begin to be choppy, and rolling. Confused, I stared at the ocean’s water, wondering if there were animals underneath causing this. Staring at the water, I heard a howling wind, and snapped my head back up. Clouds had formed within the dream, and a heavy storm was brewing in the previously calm scene. The boat began to buck like a chained bull, as the ocean began to form huge waves, and it began to rain around us as thunder and lighting struck the ocean nearby. The people on the boat began to quickly move around, tying down whatever loose materials were on the top of the boat, and trying to put people in the hold in order to brave out the storm.
Since I dream lucidly, I decided that this dream was too intense and stressful, and thought “I don’t want this storm. I don’t want anyone getting hurt.” I mentally wrestled with the storm, straining my thoughts until I saw the storm receding. I finally felt the dream listening to me, and the storm calmed, and the dream returned to normal: calm ocean, hot sun, and everyone there.
I happily turned back to the ‘crew’ of the boat, who were all relieved and joyous at the storm dissipating, and looked around. The woman and the child were overjoyed, and I watched their dog bounding around with a wagging tail. The dog ran past a few people, and as I watched it, it ran behind someone’s leg, yipping. I waited for it to come back out, but I felt a cold chill running down my back as I realized I could no longer hear the dog. Every nerve in my body was tense, goosebumps raised and a ringing in my ears as I horrified ran up to where the dog was supposed to be, and I realized the dog disappeared. I looked up at the woman and child, but they showed no sign of realizing their dog was gone, as if it never existed in the first place. I slowly walked back towards were I was standing previously, and stared at where the dog had disappeared. With another roaring rush of blood to my head, I understood I hadn’t left the first dream, that the dream had taken me hostage, that the card that the professor gave me, had been laced with something to put me under. We were all in a lucid dream caused by the potion, and she took us here against our will. We had been drugged. I turned towards the nearest person, Joon, and tapped him on the arm with the back of my hand.
“Don’t be obvious, but the dog is gone.”
Joon looked at me with an indescribable look in his eyes and then discreetly swept the boat with his eyes, looking for the puppy. As I watched him look once, again, and again with increasing panic and disbelief, I murmured, watching the lady and the child, who were unknowingly playing in the corner,
“It’s a dream. She fucked up and took out the dog.”
Joon widened his eyes and cast a furtive glance towards the woman before turning and facing me. He hurriedly whispered,
“She took out the dog because it didn’t fit with the simulation…she drugged us with the cards… we’ve been trapped here.”
“We can try to escape. If we die in the dream we get taken out,” I said.
Joon nodded silently, before surreptitiously turning, and whispering that the dog had disappeared, that we needed to leave, in everyone’s ear. The whole boat began to whisper, and the woman and child looked up at us. With a blank stare, they turned directly to me and just watching me unnervingly. I spoke up
“We know it’s a dream,” I bravely said, barely disguising the fear in my throat.
They froze, unnaturally still, as if machines that were told to stop performing. I realized that was a sign that the dream was about to collapse, and took the signal. I looked directly at the woman, and with a running start, jumped into the ocean. I sunk down underneath the boat, watching the trail of bubbles of my classmates following suit, falling into the darkness.
We woke up in a hallway of a hotel in Vegas. I guess you could say we were lucky in realizing that we were in an induced dream from the get go, because we knew that unless we woke up in the school, we weren’t truly out of the dream. I nodded at the class inside the luxurious hallway, seeing the familiar faces lit up in golden light reflecting off of gilded furniture, and took a running leap out of a hotel room window in the room directly open in front of me. With the sound of glass shattering, I felt the wind blow through my clothes as I hurtled towards the ground below. I hit the pavement in a heartbeat, and was jerked into consciousness at a farm. Looking around, already disoriented from dream jumping, I saw my classmates appear, more and more simply showing up every time I blinked. We all looked at the dried out farm, standing in a tall field of brown weeds with a barn in the distance. With a sigh, I looked around and saw a well. I walked over to it with the class trailing behind, climbed the rim, and dropped once again. I woke up in an abandoned church, staring at the decorated wall paper peeling away as my classmates reappeared around me. Seeing them all, I found a hole in the hardwood floor rotting away towards a deep cellar. Again I fell, over and over, on a beach, in an apartment structure, on a city sidewalk, each time more desperate, dread filling my gut as I realized that the dream continued on way past the usual amount of dream stacking that this potion commercially advertised. We had reached eight or nine levels, and it clicked that we were the guinea pigs for my professor’s potion research on expanding the chemical’s capabilities. She was testing advanced dream stacking on her students, and we unknowingly were drugged into one of the trials. I smirked as I realized that this particular trial would be useless and a waste of her prototype, because we were aware from the start, and were actively trying to ruin the simulations she had created.
On the eighth or ninth fall, we fell into our original classroom. I groggily groaned as I rubbed my eyes, picking my head up from the desk and looking around. My classmates seemed to wake up, all in our usual seats. It seemed that we were awake. I felt unsettled, as if something was not right. About 30 seconds later my professor walked in, and congratulated us on our experience with the potion. The class sighed in alleviation, and she began to talk about her research on a new set of potions. I watched as the class visibly relaxed and listened to her talk, wondering if it was just me who felt out of place, but I dismissed the notion. It seemed we were out of the thicket, yet I was still guarded, as I had just been through the most intense lucid dreaming scientifically up to date. I wondered if she was legally allowed to do this to her students. Nonetheless, I sat through the class, planning on how I would report her actions to the head of her department, or the dean of the school. The class separated into groups, told to discuss the events that occurred and how this would help in the chemical synthesis. I turned to my groupmates, but before I could speak, I felt Professor Redding come up next to me.
“I noticed you were the first to realize that the dream was fake, so if you could come with me, I would like to show you some artifacts related to my research, to see if you would be interested in the opportunities to work with me?”
She walked towards the back of the room, behind the bookcases, and I grudgingly followed, not wanting her to believe that I was plotting to report her and ruin her career, at risk of being drugged again. She pulled out a set of old clothes, describing how they belonged to some historical character that allowed her to pull properties from the clothes that enhanced the potion; an explanation that I quickly began to tune out. As she spoke to me, I stared at the class through the bookcases, and back at her. I noticed the door to the classroom was open, with the hallway empty, as she droned on about the extraction process. I looked back at her, in the back of my head acknowledging that she had just asked me a question. In the haze of this, it finally clicked. It was silent. The only sounds I could hear was people talking. Not the birds outside, not the buzz of the university, not the countless students that should’ve been walking through the hall at that very moment. Even the clothes didn’t rustle when she moved them. She called my name again, confused at my blank staring.
“It’s a dream again, isn’t it?” I said.
Her face paled, her eyebrows furrowing in anger. She grabbed the clothes she was showing me and a few other artifacts hastily. As she grabbed them, she hissed,
“You need to stop skewing the experiment. It is impossible to do anything with you useless students—” she spun around, her hair wildly trapped around her face, “—I will trap you here forever, if I have to,” she spat at me in disdain.
She rushed out of the room, leaving through the open door. I chased after her, but losing sight of her in between the bookcases, I realized she had disappeared in the hallway. I rushed to the front, panicking now. I felt myself losing control of the events, and began to genuinely fear the dream. In a frenzy I yelled,
“We never woke up!”
The students gasped, as I sprinted for the window and shattered it in my jump for the courtyard. I hurtled towards the cobblestone below, jolting myself awake in the same classroom, this time, with ambient noise. However, I didn’t trust it, as I assumed Redding knew how I saw the last dream was fake. I immediately shot up from my seat, walking around and shaking my classmates awake. We needed to find a way out, now. If this one was fake, we needed to leave and wake up, and if it was real, we needed to escape the professor’s clutches, or we would be trapped in the dream forever, subject to whatever nightmares she thought up. As I shook up Joon, I noticed that the second door in the room, to the flammable experiments room, was propped slightly ajar. I pushed the door open, and saw 3 lab assistants in the middle of a conversation
“—she wants us to keep them under until she knows how to handle them. They’re being a difficult group. She intends to dominate their dreams, or else she won’t be able to show this experiments to the providers—”
The assistant cut off as she looked up, seeing me in the doorway. She cursed, scrambling towards the door,
“They woke up!”
I took off sprinting, leaving the room and running up the hallway stairs. Running, I saw my lab professor walking with my chemistry professor, animatedly speaking to her about coming to her class sometime. Knowing that my chemistry professor, Dr. Alexis, would never participate in such a dirty scheme like Redding’s, I realized that Redding was plotting some sort of event to trap Dr. Alexis so that she wouldn’t report her antics to authorities and ruin Redding’s chances for notoriety in the world on chemical endeavors. I ran up, grabbing Dr. Alexis by the arm, and pulling her aside. I rushed out:
“She’s drugged us with the lucid dreaming potion, we escaped because we saw a glitch in the dream, she’s trying to drug you too, don’t let her give you the green thank you card, she’ll trap you. You have to leave. Right. Now.”
Dr. Alexis’s face lit up with concern and fear, obviously shaken by my mad rambling about her colleague, yet seemed to listen and began to quickly walk away. I watched as in the distance she was soon approached by a lab assistant, much how I was, and upon seeing the color of the card, began to run full speed away from the assistant, in the direction of the dean’s office.
I looked back at professor Redding, wondering if this was all still some ploy to keep me trapped, but feeling accomplished at warning Dr. Alexis, I pushed away the thought. I watched her purse her mouth unhappily, as she opened her mouth to say what I assumed to be cutting words. Yet, before she began, I noticed a tingling sensation on the back of my head. I turned around, and noticed everyone in the dream was staring at me. The entire hallway had stopped moving, and were eerily watching me, standing stock-still facing in my direction. Sending chills down my spine, I saw that this was not normal. Alarms began to ring in my ears, and my head spun as I slowly turned back to Redding. She smiled mockingly as she read the fear in my eyes. I looked at the people behind her, still watching me, and heard a high pitched tone as I saw that their pupils were unevenly dilated: one was entirely closed, almost full color of their iris, and the other entirely dilated, full circles of black. With terror clogging up my throat, I frantically turned behind me, and saw everyone in the room had their eyes dilated like this. They eerily stared at me, expressionless. I turned again, hoping that by turning, their eyes would change. Another crowd of these motionless dolls with broken eyes. I turned back to the people behind me, and they seemed to have moved closer, circling in on me like a sheep trapped in a pack of wolves. I stared back at my professor, who leered at me with a terrifying smirk.
“I told you that I’d trap you here,” she said with the smug grin of a predator that caught their prey.
I stared at her in fear, and at that moment, notice that one of her eyes had ripped: The iris was broken, a coloboma in her left eye that left the pupil looking like a raindrop, while her right eye was normal. I stared at the abnormality, knowing, swearing it hadn’t been there before, that I didn’t put it on her, that the dream was changing and I lost control of it. My subconscious began to scream at me, that this wasn’t my dream anymore, that we needed to leave, or we would be trapped here, forever. My heart pounding in my chest, I stared back at her in fear, panic clogging every vein in my body, before shooting up into a sitting position in my bed. As I stared at the world outside my window, I slowly calmed down enough to be able to assure myself that I was really awake. Reality finally came back, my panic subsided, and I thanked the stars that I was finally back into the real nightmare of the quarantine.
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