💾 Archived View for obsessivefacts.com › fiction › 2024-07-28-shinja.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:11:44. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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2024-07-28
I was back at University of California Santa Cruz and at an astronomy lecture hall (that doesn't exist in the waking world) in the Porter meadow. The instructor adjourned the class early so students could find three items that were pertinent to the lecture, but we had a time limit to find them all.
The first one was easy to find and right outside in the meadow. I don't remember what it was.
The second one, I could see a bright light off in the distance indicating where it was, but it was really far away, and I would have to find it by 6:01pm (it was already almost 6 and the sun was setting).
In fact, it was across the Monterey Bay in Monterey. I'd have to go really fast if I wanted to get there in time. But I remembered I used to have "super powers" in dreams, and I should be able to move at nearly the speed of light.
So I focused my attention and charged across the Monterey Bay closer to where the light was, but stopped at the foot of a cliff. I would have to climb it to find the place.
I then remembered I could fly but the ability had become very unreliable in recent dreams; I could barely control it and landing is a big problem. Again, I focused my attention and clumsily and slowly flew up to the top of the cliff. As I was landing, I saw the destination - it was one of those after-work martial arts academies for adults and teens.
I clumsily and slowly tried to land while a mom in an SUV pulled up to the parking lot at the edge of the cliff. Her eyes bugged out as she saw me levitating but otherwise didn't say anything and headed towards the academy with her child. I successfully reconnected my foot with the ground and followed her.
I got in just as the master was about to start the class. He was a middle-aged Filipino guy and kind of cranky, but he said I could train with the class if I changed into a novice uniform which consisted of pants and fingerless gloves. The pants were easy to fit into, but the gloves were too small and pinched my hands, and it took me awhile to get into them. I just wore my black T-shirt up top since he didn't give me anything else.
it's hard to look at your hands in dreams
When I entered the gym it was very large and spread out into different sections, some with workout equipment and some areas for sparring. The master told me to go to the newbies section and do some basic stretching since I clearly didn't know any martial arts.
I went over to a couple of other novices and tried to start doing the stretches but I kept accidentally levitating and was having a hard time keeping my feet on the ground. The master wasn't paying any attention to us or giving any instructions so I was on my own. Eventually he came and yelled at us to work harder or something but then left again, after informing me that this session would be no cost since I was new.
I decided to try to practice my levitating since the gym had a lot of vertical space and I had nothing better to do, getting no martial arts instruction. So while everyone else was sparring or using the gym equipment I clumsily tried flying up to the top of a small house on a cylindrical cliff jutting up from the center of the gym. There was a girl student doing some martial arts moves up by the house and I felt like showing off (since none of these students have any special powers).
But she and the other students largely ignored me clumsily flying around, like it wasn't a big deal. I finally made it up to the roof and successfully "landed," which required a lot of concentration, but then a bird started giving me grief and flying around me angrily because I was in its spot, so I flew back down to the gym floor.
Still with nothing to do, I decided to practice "charging" (moving really fast) again since I have a hard time controlling it. I tried experimenting by focusing on different students and trying to charge up to them, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes I would stop short of my intended landing spot, and in all cases I was slower than I wanted (much slower than when I charged across the Monterey Bay), but I felt like I was slowly improving.
I found another instructor (a hispanic guy, the master's assistant) and wanted to show him another trick, something I haven't done before. I took the trainee's gloves off since they were still uncomfortably pinching my hands. I put my hands in front of me, as if I was holding an invisible sphere, and focused all my attention into making a ball of light or plasma appear in front of me. It started out blindingly bright but quickly cooled into a solid mass of sticky gunk. As soon as I stopped focusing my attention it fell into my hands and got all over them, slowly absorbing into my skin.
The instructor was freaked out and took me to another instructor in another part of the gym, an older Asian lady named Dasha. He told me to show her what I just did and he would time it with a stop watch. When Dasha said "GO" I started again, focusing my attention into a ball of light. This time it didn't cool off right away and for a couple of seconds got much brighter and much hotter. I held on as long as I could but moments later I was exhausted and the light dissipated and I was completely worn out and sweating.
the power to create a universe
The whole thing seemed like just seconds but Dasha informed me I had been holding it for half an hour. I expressed incredulity.
I then found myself in a well-appointed office in a stereotypically Victorian old building with a stereotypically British woman named Mrs. Wellington. She opened a box full of metal tags, each tag engraved with a defining personality trait of me, as a person, some larger than others. She was saying something about reviewing all my life's choices but I wasn't paying attention. I was more interested in the fact that, even though I was in a dream state, the text on the tags wasn't changing as I shifted my attention around the box. In dreams, usually text changes when you look away, but the words on these trait tags were well-defined and constant. I don't remember all of them, but there was one about how I like playing tricks on people with the Internet.
It seemed like I could re-do the whole experience and slightly change the contents of the box, which I don't remember if I did or not. It was kind of a time warp situation since tons of different choices and permutations of causality coalesced around this room with Mrs. Wellington.
Then I was sitting in a chair in the waiting room of a poorly lit DMV-like government office. I was waiting for my turn to get a name. The woman in front of me was having her life evaluated in an office cubicle by a worker there, and I forget what name she got but it was a man's name. When it was my turn, the worker evaluated my life and said my name is "Shinja"
The rest of the night I couldn't tell if I was asleep or awake and would try to activate my dream powers to prove to myself whether I was dreaming or not. At one point I was walking in Santa Cruz and started charging over Highway 17 towards San Jose. But at other points I was lying awake in bed and failing to activate any powers.