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Just woke up from a dream in which I was following Google Maps and somehow got so lost I ended up in Europe. I was in an airport, and somehow wandered into a high school. A very helpful young lady gave me a secret password to get into the breakfast buffet, and I went in and took a whole bunch of various fruits as well as some donuts. One of the others sharing my brain with me was like "Isn't that stealing?" and I was like "That girl invited me to take some." "But it costs the school money!" "Schools get paid by the government, and that was a pretty swanky looking school, they'll be fine. Besides, do you honestly think I respect any government." (Not an exact quote, except the part about me not respecting any government, but you get the jist.)

When I left the school and wandered out into the outside still holding most of my food, Google Maps told me I was an undocumented alien, but by then I had realized I was dreaming and was like "Meh, whatever." (How I figured it out: before the buffet, I had dropped some of my things and couldn't find them, but managed to summon them back again. I had tried conjuring them first, but all I could do was make faint, flickering outlines of the items. But when I turned around, there the items were. That scene was when I figured it out, and knowing it was a dream is probably why I was fine taking food from a school I'd never been to in a country I'd never been to before.)

Walked out into some wilderness while drinking something I had gotten from the buffet. When the cup was empty, I had nowhere to put it, and didn't want to litter. At first I tried banish it out of existence (opposite of conjuring). Nothing happened, probably because the clear plastic cup looked and felt too real, and maybe my mind was like "You play around with things too much, and this whole facade could come crumbling down." My mind does have a history of the rules of dream reality breaking down if I push things too hard in my lucid dreams. Like the time I played god with dream people and they rebelled and it turned into a nightmare. But that's another story.

So instead of banishing the cup, I focused on imagining a funny creature living in a burrow in the ground that could eat plastic. Turned around, found the creature popping up out of the ground. Fed the creature the plastic cup. Then I may or may not have done something else, I don't remember, before waking up.

I have to say, while I don't miss dreams so realistic that I couldn't always tell if I was dreaming or not (and this was not one of those; the physics were pretty good but the colors were too dark and weird to be realistic), I do miss lucid dreams. And yes, that means my lucid dreams used to be hyper-realistic for a long time. But I also mentioned it because the physics in this dream were pretty realistic, but not too much so. And my phone actually worked pretty well, too, which doesn't often happen in dreams. Admittedly, it did get me lost in a country on a whole other continent without a passport or any idea how I'd gotten there, but whatever. At least nobody came to arrest me, and it didn't turn into a nightmare.

Well, I call them nightmares, but I haven't had any truly scary dreams for a couple decades now. Not because the content doesn't ever go in dark directions -- I am a goth and a monster-fucker after all -- but I tend to emotionally dissociate in dreams. So while I can still recognize situations that are nightmarish in dreams, my general reaction to them is to experience them like they're entertainment. And if they get too uncomfortable for me to handle for some reason, I just concentrate and pull myself awake. The one exception so far is that I sometimes get really, really sad in dreams, to the point of crying while dreaming. There aren't any signs of tears when I wake up, but otherwise it's the same experience when it happens.