I found myself in a park nearby my house, walking over a bridge when my boyfriend approached me, being happy and all. Without much fuss, he shared that I had been banned from a friend group Discord server without any prior warning.

I was furious – I didn’t even know I was banned! If only he hadn’t informed me, perhaps I wouldn’t feel so enraged.

I demanded to know why I had been banner from the group. He said he didn’t know.

I insisted he comes up with an answer, after a brief pause, he explained that it might have been due to my usage of the word “zijn,” a common term meaning “to be” in Dutch, claiming it was considered a grave slur within the server.

This revelation filled me with disbelief, I told him it was just a Dutch word, but he couldn’t give any other answer.

As I wrestled with these emotions, I suddenly jolted awake, finding myself in my bedroom, but it wasn’t entirely familiar. The bedroom layout remained mostly unchanged save for one striking difference – the positioning of my bed, normally with the head-end against the wall, was now rotated 90 degrees to the left!

Confused, I reached for the remote controlling my ceiling lights. They didn’t work. I then saw that the ceiling light was moved to the wall opposite of my bed!

While turning it on, I recognized I was dreaming. Struggling initially to recall my intentions, I eventually remembered I wanted to turn into a dragon and meet other dragons in an abandoned city.

With newfound determination, I quickly got up.

However, upon attempting to execute my plan, the sound of female crying caught my attention. Looking back, I discovered a young lady hunched over, concealing her tear-stained face behind trembling hands.

Approaching cautiously, I asked, “What’s going on?”

Through muffled cries, she revealed she had publicly posted content of some sort on social media she deeply regretted sharing.

While wanting to help her, I also saw this as the perfect opportunity to leave the house and execute my plan!

Together, we descended the staircase leading toward our next encounter.

My mom was there with my dogs, who are dead for years now. But here, they were alive – barely, but alive.

I told my mom what happened, and that she needed help.

To set my lucid dreaming plans in motions, I told her also: “Hey, I will get some supplies for the girl, I’ll take the dogs with me, so I can walk them right away!”. My mom agreed, and I got the dogs on the leash.

To pay homage to my asshole dream boyfriend, I told my mom: “Oh, and Ruben is an asshole!”, and I walked out the door.

It was still night outside, making me wonder why my mom was even downstairs. As I got a better look at the dogs, I noticed how deteriorated they were – bald spots, a dog with half its tail cut off, and another barely able to walk. No surprise, I thought, they were at least 30 years old now!

I used a magic gesture to grow fur on the bald spots, something that just came to mind. It didn’t work at first, but after I touched the bald spot, not hovering my hand over it, fur started to grow. It looked really weird on the cut-off tail, and I realized I could have used a spell that made them younger instead. “Well, you two are going on an adventure with me, sweeties!” I told my dogs, who didn’t respond.

I thought it would be easy to find a wall of some sort to use as a portal to walk through to another world. However, I soon encountered obstruction—each home lay demolished or obscured by a construction site.

Desperate for progress, hope emerged when discovering wall, half white-painted, approximately 200 meters away from my home.

I wanted to go through like a portal to find the place I wanted to go to, but I heard noise from behind me,

My dogs looked back and I followed. I saw a man and a woman holding papers. They didn’t seem to pay attention to us, rather going door to door. “Relax, it’s not mom, they are just strangers they won’t come for us,” I said to the dogs to calm them.

Just as I wanted to go through the wall by simply closing my eyes and focussing on my destination (a trick I learned from Michael Raduga’s book “The Phase”), the couple we saw earlier came to us.

The woman asked “Hey do you want to support the-”. I interrupted them and said “YES!” and grabbed the paper out of her hand and went through the portal.

Because of the distraction, I didn’t focus on the abandoned city and instead ended up in this square room.

The room had yellow-orange striped wallpaper covering the entire room. The floor had a carpet that I didn’t notice the color of. Instead of a brick wall, there was now a large door.

The door opened, and a man walked in. I got angry and told him to get away, as I needed to be alone. I pushed the man outside and closed the door using a spell that locks it.

To my surprise, the man opened the door again and came inside. I decided to let him pass so as not to make any fight or drama. Yet, I wondered how it was possible that a man could ignore my spell and just go through the door as if nothing happened.

I asked the man that had entered after me, “Hey, is this the portal to the abandoned city?” The man replied, “Yes, it is, don’t worry.” I don’t know why he said that.

More people began to enter, each one looking stranger than the last. Some had purple skin color, others had markings on their face, elf-like ears! All of them had something, but they were all humanoid in some way.

The first man that entered after me was stunned and said, “Holy shit, you found a Hub!”

“A hub? What’s a hub?” I asked him with an expression of confusion.

“Dude… a Hub is an area of bi-location in dreams. People across universes come to Hubs to socialize… These people are not dreamers, they’re travelers…”

“Oh my god, what did I get myself into…,” I said softly, realizing that more and more, control was slipping through my fingers, yet at the same time, it started to get far – FAR more interesting. Even the potential to be in a place of boundless knowledge was something I couldn’t pass on, whether it was real or not.

Another door opened, hidden in the wallpaper on the other side of the room. Everyone started walking as if they knew what to do. We decided to do the same. My dogs had faded from existence, probably because they weren’t a real ‘being’ dreaming in its bed, or some other weird parallel universe travel stuff like that.

We entered another, much larger room. Music was playing, there was a bar, and throughout the room shined purple lighting that faded to and from varying colors of blue and purple.

Everywhere I looked, there walked, stood, or talked beings of varying appearances, from furred to reptile to alien-like, even regular humans!

Amongst the crowd, servers offered tantalizing refreshments designed meticulously for maximum visual appeal. I bet they taste as good as they looked.

One particular dish caught my eye – the server said it was hand-crafted popcorn.

While there were varying shapes and colors, there was one variant that stood out – shaped like human skulls coated delicately with lustrous blues and purples, complete with pitch-black pupils fashioned from food dye.

Instinctively reaching for a piece, as it lay firm between my thumb and index finger, I marveled at the effort and attention to detail that put this otherwise every day snack into a piece that you’d look in awe at before you eat it.

I couldn’t wait to put it in my mouth and tried to chew, but something pulled me out of the dream – I was chewing in real life!

As I realized I was chewing air, I tried to think, “nooo please let me taste it” while forcing myself back into the dream, but it was no use. It was a fun experience, that was sure!

What’s weirder was that as I woke up in real life, I pointed my remote to the wall where the light was in my dream… Realizing it didn’t work, I quickly pointed it to the ceiling. It was as if I have somehow taken the memory of my dream back into real life!