sùzù said:
Dream

One morning after everyone left, I didn't have anything better to do while waiting for the bus to arrive - it was easy to tell when it was here because the engine is extremely loud for whatever reason, and I can usually hear it even through the (closed) window of my room.

So not having anything else to do I flopped onto my bed and lay there pretty much just waiting for time to pass and not really doing anything. At some point I lost sense of how much time had passed or how long I was laying there for, and suddenly I was self-conscious because I wasn't sure how much time I had left before the bus got here. So, I bolted up and looked at the clock to check.

The clock read about 5 minutes before/after the bus usually stopped by the house. This is bad because the time it gets here is really variable, due to people not taking the bus on certain days or delays due to weather, it's a little random and you can't really count on it.

However the real problem was I could tell that I was obviously looking at the clock in a dream (!!). I knew it was a dream. I knew the 'real life' me was asleep or laying on the bed. I didn't know how to wake up from it. I knew I was going to be late for the bus (if I hadn't missed it already).

I tried making myself more body-conscious. Tried running back and forth ( note: in the dream. ). Someone told me once if you move one of your fingers while dreaming, you'd wake up from a dream or a nightmare, so I tried it, stupid me for believing it because it didn't work. Me moving my finger part felt very real though and that was all. lol.

I was getting really worried about the time and had no idea how to get out of that dream.

I started second guessing myself on whether it was a dream or not, I was sure but I wanted some confirmation because the longer it went on the more I (wanted to?) doubt myself.

I remembered reading or hearing at some point that one way to tell if you're dreaming is to look at a clock or some writing on a piece of paper and if it appears garbled or unreadable you'd know you're in a dream. Well I tried it again and nope, the clock was both readable and advanced several minutes since I last looked at it, just as it should be. So that didn't help abate my doubts all that much either.

I wasn't sure what would happen if I just opened the door to my room and left it, but I didn't try it because I was worried that if I went travelling around my house I would end up in a dream sequence, get really into it and then loose track of time even more. How would I know what to expect?

I had a sealed plastic bottle on the floor in my room partially filled water in it ( pretty normal to have stuff like that laying around for me... ) so I tried to pick it up. For some reason I was thinking maybe I wouldn't be able to pick up a tangible object while in dream-mode, but nope, I easily picked it up and... up-it-was-picked... and no longer on the floor where it was once laying, as far as I could tell anyways. All very convincing.

So I opened it and dumped the water out over myself ( in the dream, ofc ). The water did pour out but when it "hit" me I didn't feel it, no cold or wet. So that was some confirmation I was looking for that something was weird about all of this and to indicate the dream was for sure, a dream.

I tried pretending the bottle was filled again with water. I thought maybe since it was just a dream, that sort of thing would be easily possible. But, nope. No dice. I don't know if I just lacked convincing enough imagination or what but nonetheless it stayed quite empty despite my attempt to tell myself otherwise, so that didn't work and I was disappointed. lol

I tried some other things ( I don't remember them all at this point ) but eventually I sat down in the dream room/sequence on the floor cross legged, where the bottle used to be and started doing visualizations over and over again ( like trying to dream while dreaming ) and that was what actually worked and made me bolt awake in real life again, then I looked at the clock and I had ~45 minutes before the bus normally arrives. lol.

In reality the entire thing only lasted a few moments. Probably less time in real life, then I thought it looked like passed when I was glancing back and forth at the clock during the dream. (It felt like a lot of time had passed.)

The end.

Edit: no idea why the spoiler tags don't work whenever I use them. =_=