Betwixt Dreams and Reality

by GeekyGami

5

In an alternate reality of Equestria where the Castle of the Two Royal Sisters is in pristine shape...

"... You're absolutely sure this creature had a mane on its head?" asked an impertinent teal royal guard adorning winged dark purple armor.

"Yes, we've said so time and time again. Keep looking! If it is here, we want it brought to us immediately." replied a black mare adorning royal blue armor and a mane of stars. "Now go!"

"Yes Ma'am!" saluted the loyal guard.
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Obsession.

Such an ugly word.
To obsess over something, to yearn for it to the point that all else takes a backseat.
Interest taken to the levels of a disorder.

While I can certainly not say that I was ever obsessive to the point where my life was put on the line, I can certainly say that most of the things I have been passionate about have come close to that.
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'... Dildo.'
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From Legend of Zelda to drawing, to My Little Pony, and then back to drawing and illustration.

There were the few times in-between where I was completely in love with cameras.
That, however, did not last as long.
It didn't leave much of an imprint on me,
especially considering I lost photos of cats whom we had to let go of due to financial constraints at the time.
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'Anal vibrator...?'
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I never let go of anything I ended up obsessing over, so to speak.
To this day, I still wear a Triforce belt buckle.

I can certainly say that my passion for what I had once obsessed over has died down, to a level where I come back to it from time to time, but never fully get back into it.

What I was passionate over is still part of who I am to this day.

It's hard to say if appropriating the works of art of others is merely etiquetting for the sake of identity, or if I really am the imprint of a mere consumer, but I certainly feel that I owe some of who I am to those games, shows and hobbies.

In the end, it's most likely that the experiences I've lived through those mediums helped me grow into who I am, was and will be, but no more than that.
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'You gotta be kidding me, now it's an actual honest to god vibrator.
What is going on, I've never seen so many kinky instruments pass in one day!'
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Pardon the tangent, I digress.

What it boils down to is that I've always had an obsession over the course of my days, a passion of sorts, taking everything else out of context.

My current passion was everything to do with lucid dreaming, for instance.

Under the guise of dreams, so much can be achieved.

I recently found out about a method of meditation called "hypnagogic meditation" wherein one sets themselves in the state of mind you would find yourself in were you to be falling asleep, more specifically, the moment when you start hearing strange noises, and seeing what appears to be plasma in your vision.

I had once managed to do it a few years back, as I laid to rest at home after a hard day.
It was unfortunately interrupted as my mother came into the house, creating all sorts of noises that did not otherwise occur.

I counted on attempting that when I'd get home,
if solely for the purpose of tulpa forcing like I've never forced before.
Good thing the day was over.
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I went to the cafeteria, and signed for the week.
Headed off to the parking lot, got in the car, and we headed home.

On the way there, an interesting conversation was brought up.

Apparently, on the days we had off, one of the workers on the pre-categorization conveyor found an entire dead boa constrictor with its head smashed in.

The conversation then proceeded to derail into previous cadavers found there.
One interesting thing that had passed there for instance was not only the pelt, but an entire specimen's worth of bear, intact (beyond decomposition of course.)

As we finally arrived to my home, I paid Pete my due, and we left on our merry way.
I ate dinner, took a shower, shaved, and took care of my internet routine.

I had plenty of time as I needn't work the next day.
I tried performing hypnagogic meditation for about an hour, to no effect.

I worked on some unfinished soundtracks, and it was time to head to bed.
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I was in a small room, the size of my bedroom, but it was empty, save for a very ornate, small round table in the middle.

Seated on a chair as I was, I noticed that there was a laptop on the table.
I took it to me, and checked what was on it.

It was running Windows 98, if any of you are old enough to remember that thing.

There was but one file in the center of the desktop, labeled "DONTPANIC.EXE"

'... That looks like it came right out of some cheesy creepy pasta, what the hell.'

Intrigued, I decided to launch the program.

It launched in fullscreen, showing a background of an 8-bit star field not unlike the backdrop of Metroid 1's title screen.

There were banana people floating all around the game's screen.

They looked like eldritch human-faced, half-peeled bananas that had small, black legs.
If Cyriak had decided to make a video about bananas, it would have probably looked like whatever those things were.

My heart skipped a beat, for some reason.
They were incredibly disturbing to me, despite having seen much more terrifying things in the past.

I pressed ALT+F4 to close the program.

'There we go, no more creepy bananas.' I thought.

I had been wrong. The Metroid landscape was gone, replaced with the desktop...
But now the bananas were taking over the desktop!

I opened Task Manager using Windows 7/8/8.1/10's shortcut, CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, and looked for the program's process.

Bingo, it was running once per banana instance.
I selected one of the rampant "DONTPANIC.EXE" processes.

Two more appeared!
I couldn't kill them all at once, I was out of options.
I was starting to panic slightly.

I took the laptop, unplugged the mouse from it, closed it, and removed the battery from the back.

'Alright, I should be safe now.' I erroneously conveyed to myself.
The bananas were now in the "real world!"

As panic began to set in, I remembered the name of the program.
'Don't panic... That's it! Don't panic!'

I decided to accept the bananas as being a benign presence.
Their feeling of hostility slowly faded, as I began to slowly relax completely.

Even though they were horrifying moments ago, their disgusting appearance somehow appeared much less menacing to me now.

It was at this moment that everything faded to black.

When I opened my eyes, I was in a secret passage in one of the levels of the original Doom,
in a zigzagging portion.

I looked around, and noticed a lady to my left. She was probably a head shorter than I was, with short, wavy hair.
I don't remember what she was wearing unfortunately.

"That was fun! Let's do it again some time!" she told me, while smiling at me and waving goodbye.
It was then that I understood the game we had been playing.

The goal was to make the other panic.
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I was slowly waking up, in my bedroom at my father's place.
I sat on the bed, and looked around.

I noticed that everything was no longer placed properly.
My room setup had changed back to how it was before.

It was then that I caught on that I had been dreaming.

'That lady, she said we could do it again some time. I should try summoning her.'
And try I did.

While I did not manage to summon her, red text in the font of the Descent franchise spelled to me her intentions.

We both knew the name of the game.

It was right before reading that I noticed that I could casually feel that I had morning wood.
'... Ah. Well that's wonderful.' I thought.

I read her message.
"I can now read every one of your thoughts." it said.

'Fuck, she's gonna find out about my morning wood! That'd be super embarrassing, how can I turn that around?'

... I had the perfect solution.
I would use my wood as a pretext for finding her very pretty.

... Let's be honest, now that I'm writing it, that sounds incredibly strange, but bear with me here, men don't get a choice in their morning woods.

'I love you, I love you so much!' I thought towards her.

"No!" she wrote back.
It was working!

'You look like an angel fallen from the heavens!' I "told" her.

"No no no no no!" she replied.

'There is no one prettier than you in this entire world!'

"NO!"

I was sure at that moment that I had won the game.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, what I was seeing changed entirely.

I was looking at a pixel art rendition of the lady with green hair holding my head with her left palm.
I could feel her palm on my actual head as well.

"My love, live freely." she told me, with an almost maternal look of love in her eyes.

She had managed to win.
I expected this reciprocation so little that it took me completely by surprise.
I panicked on the spot and woke up.
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As I woke up, I heard a pleasant melody in my mind.
I whistled it in my phone, and went on to eating breakfast.

I finished transcribing that song, and posted it online.

'You know, I should probably start thinking about looking into tulpae more. I haven't checked relevant guides in years, better ways of doing things might've been found.'

Author's Note:

Sorry it took so long to release, I was a tad blocked on what subject to start with.

The next chapter should flow much better, as I've already decided on a subject that'll work much better for it.

There'll probably be one or two more chapters around the subject of tulpamancy as a whole, before we head off into the final phase leading to our second story climax

This entire dream sequence was two dreams I had on the same night originally.