Ah, it’s sort of a blessing and curse sort of thing. I have aphantasia, so I can’t see stuff in my mind. Dreams don’t work the same way, apparently, or at least not for everyone with aphantasia, and I get those, incredibly vividly (tho thankfully not all that often, maybe once or twice a month), but because I have absolutely zero experience with “seeing” things that aren’t real, dreams throw me solidly for a loop and I struggle big time with differentiating them from reality. That makes stress dreams and nightmares really really difficult, and I’ve struggled with them for many years.

The well-trodden dream town helps with that because I recognize it as a fictional place, so I choose to spend time there when I can, which reinforces the smaller details of it making it more vivid. It’s why everywhere I dream of repeatedly ends up being part of the town somehow. Not always because I want it there, but because I recognize the place as fictional and part of dreaming. Incorporating all these different places makes them safer; most of them started as bad places, even the glass gardens. That was a college social stress dream originally. I was probably playing some final fantasy type game at the time for the imagery. I got really lucky on that one; it’s a great place to go now.

I did a lot of work, and had to deal with a lot of wildly unpleasant false awakening experiences, to lucid dream enough to get to this place where I have familiar comfortable territory, but I don’t really control things now because taking control tends to backfire… so I let them happen and use god mode to get out of situations I don’t like. Or sometimes to change zones if, for example, I end up in the dungeon labyrinth or mother’s sections of my house (repeated nightmare content that had to go somewhere… now pocket floors between other floors, to make it easier to avoid) Sometimes it’s fun to go dungeon diving, and see what’s actually in there (it’s just basements, one after another, full of boxes of stuff and old furniture and shit, super mundane really except it never ends… like that scene in labyrinth where she meets the trash goblin who keeps loading her up with junk because memories), but sometimes it’s a really unpleasant place to find myself and I just… need to take the quick route back outside.

But I remember these places and events like they are completely real, and that’s really unnerving. I really want to build it into vr so other people could explore it, and it could actually -be- a real place, but I have no idea how to do that. If I ever figure that out though you are absolutely invited to visit!!