Last night I put my powered nightmare armor to the test. If I’m lucid dreaming and I start to have a nightmare, I envision myself encased in an eight-foot-tall mecha-style suit. I could not sleep last night at all — there’s a dream state where I’m semi-controlling the dream, but it always goes in directions I don’t want it to go, and that’s where I was last night.
I started dreaming about this man made up like a clown, with a broad smile and pointy chin so exaggerated that the lower half of his face looked like a huge letter T. When he appeared, he did so with a violin flourish, and proceeded to shake the bejeezus out of someone in the scene, to shake them so hard that eventually their neck broke.
I was getting to the phase of sleep where that was going to be what I dreamed about with no control over it, so I put my armor on. The entire building turned on me then, and what originally was a collection of monsters invading the apartments turned into this amorphous, tentacled sea of ichor and shining eyes. The armor had lots of tricks built in to keep things off of me, but the floor gave way, and then the earth itself, and I started flying up and up.
I ended up in low Earth orbit, flying higher and higher, as the entire planet revealed itself to be this dark mass in space with a gigantic, accusing face on it. Nowhere was safe anymore; there were no stars, and everything was cast with this dim red light. As I flew away I thought, “what’s the endgame here? I’m going to get exhausted. Eventually I’m going to be unable to avoid this nightmare and actually have it.”
I imagined myself flying towards another object, a swirling void, with an impossibly huge man at the center. It was Azathoth! I would have to jet into the open end of his mad flute and destroy it from the inside! With the image of his pale, greedy eyes on me, I went out a shockwave that shattered his flute, and at that point forced myself awake while I still had the power to do so.
