Before I came back to where I live now, I went to school in New York for a year. It's my favorite city in the world, and it frequently appears in my dreams as a result — but altered, different. I've come to call my dream-version, creatively, "Other Manhattan", and you'll probably hear about it a lot.
...
In my dream, I had finished college and was going to move to New York with my friend K. We were packing to leave, and there was some confusion about what I was going to do with all the stuff in my dorm that I wasn't taking with me. Something happened involving a guy that had — I don't want to say stalked, so let's say bothered me a lot during the year. I don't remember much, but I guess we got all my stuff packed, because next thing I knew K and I were on the subway, leaving the airport. I remembered that we had to transfer from Jamaica Station to get to the hotel, but I couldn't remember what line we were supposed to transfer to. We got to Jamaica Station and decided to go to the surface so I could call up a map on my phone. We came up near this beautiful fancy hotel, which I remembered in the dream my previous visits to NY, but I knew it wasn't the one we were staying at. [I'm not quite sure why we had to stay at a hotel if we were moving. Dream logic, I guess.]
I went to get my phone but realized K and I had left our luggage on the train. There wasn't time to go back down through the station, so I ghosted down through the street into the train. There was a bit of delay because to get the bags I had to un-ghost, grab them, and go incorporeal again while holding them, because my hands just went through otherwise. I managed to get the bags right as the train pulled away into the tunnel, and came back up to the surface exhausted by the effort.
Then the dream skipped forwards to K and I walking down an avenue — it had to be 7th or 8th, since it led to Times Square — but we were being followed by someone bad. I didn't know I was dreaming, or become lucid, but I knew I had powers, so I told her to link arms with me. We took tight hold of our bags, and I closed my eyes and imagined the Other Times Square: flashing hotels more like Vegas than NY, the dazzling Broadway theaters, the black glass towers, the incongruous Big Ben-like clock tower. I took one step, eyes closed, picture held, and we blinked dozens of blocks in that single step.
We must have found the hotel, because then I was using my teleporting powers to sneak K and another friend, M, into a theater where a musical was playing. We were all excited, but there was a woman onstage talking about how there had been such a problem with break-ins that the theater would send people to each seat to check people's tickets. The doors had already closed so we couldn't just leave, and we didn't want to get caught. M had an invisibility cloak, though, so we threw it over the three of us and we snuck out through the walls.
...
I haven't had a dream that vivid — or one involving Other Manhattan — in a while. I'm going to try using it as a visual/mental "spring-board" to try and go back intentionally — focusing on it before I go to sleep in the hopes that it will manifest. If I succeed enough, deliberately going somewhere might work as a device with which to become lucid. Wish me luck!
~Darcy
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