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There was fighting. I had a cape, maybe. When I dreamed and the dream happened to be visually concrete the aesthetics would usually be industrial. Perhaps the world consisted of brutalist concrete buildings on a sea surface. Perhaps it didn't. It wasn't memorable. There were perhaps pipes and there were perhaps weapons.
I was chasing somebody. We ran outside, I right on her tail. There was a concrete floor and an open sky. There was a pool of water in the center of the floor. Impossibly above the pool was an indistinct pillar. By "indistinct" I mean that it was difficult to see even looking right at it; in fact it was very sharply contrasted with the normal space around it. The pillar reflected no light and was irregularly shaped. Jagged. It was not an object but rather a lack of material.
She shot me, or I was shot. I fell to the ground. I died.
But not really, because I was dreaming. That is, I was aware, and perhaps not aware prior, that the events I had been party to were unreal and imagined by me. Whenever I've seen lucid dreams brought up people say they are fun. That they are endowed with control over their imagination, and briefly act like gods in the dreamworld. Lucid dreaming is of course marginal in popular culture, but it's nonetheless very strange to me that I've never seen anybody deny this picture, other than myself. I do not have control in lucid dreams, which I have reasonably often, or did before I stopped dreaming entirely.
I was struck with the awareness that I was dreaming and equally struck with the idea that I should make no move and continue to (not) act as though I was dead. In dreams of course you sometimes "just know" things. This was such a time. Maybe the normal machinery of internal debate and decision and weighing of evidence is disabled while you sleep.
I couldn't move. I was capable, in some sense, but incapable in that the idea of breaking the rules and moving although the dream had declared me dead was implausible, an action with no living continuation. I laid there. I couldn't see my fictional quarry or the fictional pillar or much of the fictional anything.
Instead I saw a castle. A stereotypical European affair. There were suits of knights' armor lining the hallways. Pillars. Thin carpets. And a dining table. Around the dining table sat, or floated, living creatures. One was perhaps a levitating mass of tumors with three or four tendrils for manipulation. One was a suit of armor. One was nothingness. One was the pillar.
They were discussing my dream. They found it amusing. Perhaps they found the twist that the viewpoint character died especially amusing. They perhaps laughed about their friend's cameo.
I knew just as I knew that I was dreaming the chase and my death that I was only partially dreaming this castle and not at all dreaming the living creatures. With a certainty alien to me, usually afforded by society only to belief in gods, I knew and truly knew that the living creatures were there and laughing at my simulated exsanguination and that if I were to move, it would be a move against them, and that immediately my mind my self or portions of it would be bludgeoned out of my head. An affront to their entertainment would not be tolerated and they would separate my will or my imagination or whatever these things understood my mind to be made out of. I knew and truly knew that I was not the only entertainer and that these living creatures had more knowledge of the human mind than I could ever have of anything in my medical life, and that they knew exactly what parts of my mind participated in dreams and when, and that I could see them. I knew and truly knew that I could not would not move.
I woke up. I can think rationally, now. We believe all sorts of mad things while dreaming. But no homily or reminder that I am irrational now or then will fully quash what I knew.