Chapter 1: The Beginning Inside the End, Inside the Closet

"We have to leave NOW!" I yelled, as I grabbed my brother's hand and dragged him up behind me on the dragon's back. "Dragon-back is the only way we can reach the space station fast enough. We must stop Ganondorf from reaching the Metroid!"

The dragon turned its head around and winked at me, before flexing its wings and shooting into the air. As I grabbed hold of the reins, I remembered something… I haven't done my dream check in a while. Nodding to myself, I looked at my hand, and thought back on my day, just like the guides said… and froze. I looked at my hand, examining my fingerprints, the lines on my palm, and the old scar from trying to catch a falling pickle jar at my old supermarket job. At that moment I realized several things:

1. I had no idea where I was or how I got there.

2. I was flying through the sky on a dragon, but I couldn't feel the wind in my face, or the cold of the upper atmosphere.

3. I was FLYING through the SKY on a DRAGON!

Ok, There are 3 possibilities here:

Either I have been kidnapped and sedated with a hallucinogen, I have been kidnapped by an actual real life dragon who can use magic to keep a warm temperature and breathable air on his back,

or... I blinked and found myself in the basement of my childhood home, sitting on my favorite couch. Then I blinked again, and looked out over Lake Powell in Utah, as the sun rose over the horizon.

Or the test actually worked.

"Holy Shit!" I gasped. "It actually worked! I'm actually lucid dreaming!" I couldn't believe that the stupid hand test thing had actually worked. Trying very hard not to freak out or stress, lest I wake myself up, I looked over the shore and saw a rock. I pictured in my head the rock flying through the air and landing in my hand. It happened. Grinning to myself, I pictured a realistic version of the 1st gen pokémon Magicarp, being similarly tossed out of the lake into my hand. It also happened. Numbly, I dropped both rock and fictional creature, and started laughing, maniacally. A deep red long coat draped itself around my shoulders as I threw up my hands dramatically, a ball of fire appearing in my left hand, and a ball of lightning in my right. Still cackling, I threw them both behind me and walked away as they exploded behind me, a sudden gust of wind blew through my hair and whipped up the hem of my longcoat behind me like a badass from an 80's movie.

Hey, don't look at me like that. What's the use of infinite, godlike power if you can't bring internet memes to life?

One last thing to try.

I jumped as high as I could. Then kept going. I flew up above the lake holding my hands out like superman as I sped off into the distance. Since I had no real grasp of geography, and everything here was a function of my mind, the ground below me was blurry and confusing. I caught momentary glimpses of all sorts of places from my memory as I tore across the metaphysical landscape, howling with joy.

On a whim, I decided to go back to my old dream. I remembered something about Ganondorf on a space station. Beating up a Zelda villain, this sounded like a lot of fun, given that I now had UNLIMITED POWER! I jerked, as suddenly the sky around me was replaced with the scene from Revenge of the Sith and I watched briefly as Emperor Palpatine lit up Mace Windu, channeling not one, but an entire supermarket's worth of large hams. I shook my head and put myself back on the dragon from the first dream. That was going to take some getting used to. We flew up for a short time, the sky darkening to the black of space as we ascended. In the distance, I could see the Purgatory, the for-profit prison space station from Mass Effect 2 where you find Jack.

Then something odd happened.

Up ahead of us, space tore open in a flash of neon green light with an accompanying boom of thunder. When the flash cleared, I saw what looked like a giant version of a fade rift from Dragon Age: Inquisition. Now, in the real world, that would be a big deal, but here in my dream, it shouldn't have been all that noteworthy, especially since it was familiar to me. There was just one problem.

I hadn't done that.

Granted, I was pretty new to lucid dreaming, but I was pretty sure this wasn't how it worked. I had even chosen the form of the space station in the distance, since I already knew its layout from the game and wouldn't need to waste dream time designing the interior portion of my little adventure. Unlike before I had "awakened", this dream was now little more than an amusement park ride I could direct with my brain. I knew everything that was supposed to happen. Except that rift wasn't part of my ride.

Feeling curious, I flew off the dragon's back and approached the anomaly. What was there to be afraid of? I was literally inside of my own head. Everything here was made of ME. Maybe the rift was supposed to be a portal to my subconscious, or my instincts or something. As I approached, I began to hear music emanating from the rift. Now thoroughly engaged, I approached the rift slowly. I noticed that the rest of the dream had faded away, leaving blackness. Frowning, I put myself in my childhood bedroom, the place I knew better than any other location on the planet. The rift was still there, in my closet. Interestingly enough, the rift wasn't the only irregularity in the room… On the far wall, between the windows, was a poster that had never been there. I looked at it and laughed in delight. It was the movie poster for 300, except instead of absurdly buff guys, there were a bunch of giant spiders wearing spartan helmets and wielding swords and shields of ancient Greek warriors . Fascinating. This wasn't just my room, it was my Mind Palace. I had put that poster on that wall in the palace in high school, to help me remember my locker combination, 8300, since spiders had 8 legs and the movie was named 300. But the poster didn't physically exist! This is great, I thought to myself. I can use this ability to create better and more complex mind palaces! My mind raced and thought about all the ways I could use this to help me memorize different things, but as I stared at the imaginary poster, the music from the fade rift started to get louder. The sound was impossible to describe, and it wasn't just auditory. It sounded like the disappointment you feel after you finish a really great book, and you know that you'll have to wait till the next one comes out to find out what happens next. Like the sadness you feel when you reconnect with an old friend, only to discover the relationship isn't quite the same. Like the flicker of annoyance you feel when you put a lot of time and effort into a large jigsaw puzzle, only to find out that you could never finish it because some of the pieces were missing. It was… incompleteness. Entranced by the strange flood of emotions, I walked across the room and reached out to touch the edge of the green window of light. There was a bright flash of light, a sensation of falling…

and darkness.

I came back to consciousness slowly and begrudgingly. As I opened my eyes, I realized I still couldn't see anything, not even my backlit clock. In retrospect, that should have been my first warning. However, for the first 15 minutes or so after I wake up, I barely qualify as a sentient creature. Having decided that I could go back to sleep without consequence, I closed my eyes again. Drifting in my semi conscious state, I started to hear the music that I faintly remembered from my previous night's dream. It was sad, but beautiful, and, like most of my dreams, FAR more interesting to me than whatever the hell I had to do today. Attempting to recapture the dream, I became vaguely aware of vast clouds of different shades of glowing green, from the color of grass, to a green so dark it was almost black. In the distance, I could one of the clouds was so bright, it looked like a green sun.

Then my hand brushed through one of the clouds.

There was a flare of energy in my body, along with an odd, aching numbness in my right hand. Now fully awake, I sat up and went into my bathroom to splash some water on my face. Or tried to. The green cloudscape did not vanish. Unsure what was happening, I blinked my eyes several times, and waved my hand in front of my face. Still the green clouds did not vanish. I was not on my bed. I was floating through the air, seemingly without gravity. Also, though it was very slow and gradual, I could feel the energy leaving my body, making me groggy again. Something told me that if I allowed myself to fall back to sleep again, this time I wouldn't wake up.

It was at this point that I began to panic. I flailed my arms and legs around in an attempt to move, but it did nothing. I screamed for help at the top of my lungs. No sound came out. All I could hear was the music. It was a horrible, lonely sound, full of longing and grief. Something it needed was missing.

Then my hand drifted through another one of the clouds. I felt that same flare of energy, coupled with pain. It was as if I was drinking scalding water. But drink it I did. As I took in the energy, I felt it move through my body as if it were searching for something. I could feel the energy dissipating as it moved through my body, causing aching pain in its path. Then something clicked. The energy found whatever it was looking for, and something inside me absorbed it.

I gasped in happiness as something awoke inside of me that I had never known was there, something vast, and hungry. And it changed everything. Suddenly I was overcome with an overwhelming NEED for that energy in the cloud. I hurriedly stuck my hand into the nearest cloud, and instinctively began to absorb all the energy in it.

Instantly the energy roared through my system. It hurt more than anything else I had ever felt, and it kept getting worse. I understood that my body was grossly inefficient at taking in this energy I wanted so badly. I could feel the emptiness inside my soul growl in impatience. For all that I was taking in, I was absorbing very little of it. Howling in rage, I reached out for more of the energy.

The pain was beyond anything I could have ever imagined. It felt like I had lava flowing through my veins, hollowing my body from the inside out. But still I continued to gorge myself. I couldn't get enough. As that empty place inside me slowly began to fill, I felt a song burst from my mouth, almost a mirror image of the other song, somehow. Both were crying out in longing and pain, but when they, for lack of a better term, heard each other, both songs picked up, flowing into and through one another to form a joyous anthem of triumph. I had a momentary vision in my mind of the 2 halves of a yin-yang snapping together and beginning to spin. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, and tears fell from my face, even as I screamed in more and more pain. I held on for dear life, clinging to the music like my life depended on it, as I felt my body begin to change itself to accommodate the river of power coursing through it. Then, just as suddenly as it had started, the pain was gone. My body felt hollow and empty, as if everything inside my skin had been burned away. The sudden lack was so shocking, that I momentarily stopped taking in the energy. Everything was still for a moment, and for the first time since I woke up, it was also silent. I could no longer hear any music. Silence reigned. In that moment, I could see all the green clouds frozen around me in a spiral above me. It looked like I had been trying to inhale a tornado. The green sun was much closer now, for some reason.

Then, with a roar of triumph I raised my hand into the vortex and pulled.

Pure power washed through me like a tidal wave. My body no longer resisted the energy. I had adapted to it, and now I welcomed it inside myself like an honored guest. I felt like a million bucks. Like I could lift mountains, part seas, break armies. I was like a god.

It was Good.

The problem was that the vortex was still spinning. My new capacity for this energy was vast, but I was starting to hit my limit. I felt overstuffed with energy, and lightning began crackling around my skin as I tried to find an outlet for the power. Desperately, I cast around with all my senses for options. It was at that point that I realized that the bright green sun thing was not merely another energy cloud, as I had assumed, but some kind of window/portal thing. I propelled myself toward it using the power and shot through the gate. I emerged into what looked like a blast crater. Still crackling with the power, I took in the scene in front of me quickly, only processing enough info to register the fact that I was looking at a fight between a group of people and some kind of large black monster thing. I needed to dump some of this excess power fast, or my head was going to pop like a balloon. I had just decided to let it out into the sky, when a small voice in the back of my head told me that this scene was familiar somehow, and that I should unload on the monster thing. So, I threw my arm out in a line that wouldn't hit any of the other fighters and let loose. A torrent of raw power blasted out of me in a rush, crashing into the monster and enveloped and bypassed him, carving a ravine out of one of the crater walls. The blast went on for a good five seconds, and from the way in looked, I wish I'd had enough energy to yell "KAME-HAME-HAAA!" before I started, it would have been perfect. As the last of the energy dissipated, everything in the crater was still and silent. I looked over at the fighters, all of whom were staring at me in shock.

"Well…." I spoke calmly into the silence. "That was fucking awesome."

Then all the energy left me, and I collapsed into darkness.