Hi there!
I’ve been working on polishing a draft of Project Lucidity, which is the codename for a novel I wrote during NaNoWriMo last year. I say codename because I’m not sure that I am fully sold on that being the title. Regardless, it’s what I’m calling it right now. This particular story is set in the modern day but has a sci-fi/fantasy feel to many aspects of it. Bottom line: It’s Inception meets The Magicians with a touch of Lawnmower Man in a tale about a group of college students in a sleep study that can join other people’s dreams lucidly.
Work is progressing well and soon I’ll need to recruit a few beta readers to give it a critique. In the meantime, I thought today would be an excellent day to share the first chapter. It’ll give you a better taste of what I’ve been working on and perhaps make you just interested enough that you want to read the rest one day soon…
In this chapter, you get to meet Felix, the main character who gets swept up into a whole larger world of dreams that he never knew existed. He can dream lucidly, but he never imagined that somebody could join his dream and be lucid with him. His world is about to open up wide, but perhaps not in ways that you might expect. You also get to meet Lucinda, a no-nonsense Latina who doesn’t have time for yours or anyone else’s BS. She’s a lot of fun and a bit of a wildcard. Oh, and there’s a bad guy, explosions, gnarly creatures, magic, and so much more.
If you love it, hate it, thought it was so-so, have a criticism or question, please leave me a comment and tell me all about it. For more regular updates on my writing, you can catch me on Twitter @packysmith. I’m really active on their, so feel free to follow me and say hi.
Ok. I’ve typed enough. Without further ado, please enjoy the first chapter of Project Lucidity!
Project Lucidity – Chapter 1: King of Pain
Felix’s breath went ragged and erratic as he beat a sound retreat away from the scorching pangs of electric blasts that were exploding mere inches away from his feet. Splinters burst from the surrounding trees within the darkened forest as the sizzling projectiles narrowly missed their intended target. A dense fog covered the landscape and the moonlight shone eerily through twisted tree branches that looked as if they had long since given up on life. Felix pushed the contorted branches out of the way, some snapping easily at just even the slightest touch, as he continued his valiant escape effort.
A shadowy figure of immense supernatural power hovered above the lush grass, slowly, like a menacing horror movie villain somehow always just behind its fleeing prey. Dubbed by Felix “the Unseen,” this macabre creature operated from the shadows and hid their visage behind a tattered black leather cloak whose movements seemed to defy the laws of physics. This master of dark magic had chased Felix before, numerous times in fact, and had often succeeded in violently killing the young raven haired man.
This was only a dream. Felix knew this all too well as he had been able to remain lucid in his own dreams since he was fourteen-years-old. Now nineteen, the lucidly dreaming teen had learned to cope with some of his personal problems through introspection within his own dream realms. Falling into a deep imaginative slumber often was preferable to being awake in Felix’s troubled mind, except for occasions like this was, when his life was almost certain to be forfeit. Thinking that this was only a dream did not make the imminent threat that the Unseen posed go away. In fact, it tended to have the opposite effect. The more deeply Felix got wrapped up in his own nightmares, the closer the villain came to ending his life.
The teen attempted to throw the dark mage off by veering left and sliding down a small hill of crushed dead autumn colored leaves. Pivoting on a dime, Felix made a mad dash for a clearing that could be seen just past the wooded horizon. There was a small beat-the-hell-up shed just fifty paces from Felix’s location and it might hold an item of value that he could use. This flying-by-the-seat-of-his-pants logic proved to be hit-and-miss but it was the best that Felix could hope for in this nightmare. Besides, he knew he was going to die but he didn’t want to make it too easy for the cloaked bastard.
No longer content to fling Zeus-like lightning bolts, the Unseen summoned and let loose a pack of ravenous hellhounds to pursue the teen. These three monstrosities looked like oversized mangy coyotes, almost zombie-like, that appeared to have been starved for weeks on end and just caught their first scent of fresh meat. Just over three feet tall on all fours, skin and bones, with steely red eyes and fits of ferocious steam spewing from their rabid mouths between strides, the hellhounds were gaining significant ground on Felix with each passing second. Thick, heavy globs of frothy saliva leaked from the hounds’ lips as they snarled in determined pursuit. Speed was not one of Felix’s strong suits but nevertheless, he made it to the shed with only seconds to spare. Once inside, he barricaded the entry with a long two-by-four that wedged perfectly against the back wall and door.
This kind of nightmare had become the norm for Felix as of late. Wherever the teen found himself in a dream, regardless if it was a beautiful serene lakeside cabin or an interstellar starship flying through the cosmos, the Unseen would arrive like the Terminator searching tirelessly for Sarah Connor. Felix had no idea why this character was reoccurring in his dreams, only that the Unseen was laser-focused in their quest for Felix’s life and that all attempts to reason with them had ended in the teen’s demise.
The hellhounds rammed the ramshackle walls with their bodies, but even still, the shed offered a tiny modicum of safety that would allow Felix to calm his mind momentarily. If this luck would last, he could force himself to wake up in his bed safe and sound without the need for a painful death to kickstart the process. For a brief moment, he considered doing precisely that, but something nagging inside his brain urged him to fight back. To be strong. To face his fears and defeat this nightmare once and for all.
The ambient moonlight within the shed was nearly nonexistent but what little there was soon illuminated a stark inventory of tools for the teens adjusting pupils. His options were extremely limited and the structural integrity of the dilapidated shed was quickly faltering. With no time left to think about it, Felix grabbed a rusty three prong pitchfork in one hand and an old ragged worn-out spade in the other.
The wall to his left collapsed first and instinctively Felix thrust the tips of the pitchfork into the first lunging hellhound. The downed beast yelped in agony as the young dreamer slammed the spade into the back of its neck, ending the creature’s twisted life. The other two hounds regrouped and started to circle the newly confident teenager. Fastening down his grip on the rickety tools, Felix spun himself in counter-rotation to keep an eye on his dual aggressors. The hellhound in front of Felix rushed in with its jaws wide open as the hound from behind sprung in for an attack in unison. In a broad sweeping motion, Felix tagged the forward facing hound with a solid blow of the spade across its face. His attack on the rear attacking hound was not nearly as successful as the mutt had gotten a tooth hold on the teenager’s left calf and was shredding the skin down to the muscle like it was nothing more than slow roasted pulled pork.
Off balance and having fallen on his backside, Felix rocketed the pitchfork into the side of the hound which finally forced it to loosen its bloody-fanged grip. Felix stabbed at the beast two more times and then landed a death blow against its skull with the spade.
The last remaining hellhound was back in the fight as it made its first move by pulling the pitchfork out of the teenager’s left hand. Down to one weapon and with his left leg in searing pain, Felix gripped the spade like a baseball bat and squared his body upright in preparation for battle. A fight that was more like fencing than a carnal struggle for life and death ensued as the hellhound would appear to lunge forward in attack and then suddenly feint back before Felix could land a quick swipe with his spade. This tedious game of cat and mouse continued for a couple of minutes and the experience was wearing the teenager out. Nearly out of strength, Felix readied himself up once more. He noticed a plush brown hued, black-haired doll in a purple dress fall from out of nowhere roughly twenty feet to his immediate right. Felix cataloged the event but decided that the child’s toy was not an immediate threat and drew his focus back on the snarling canine that was in front of him. This time when the hellhound made a move to fake an attack Felix met the beast halfway with a lunging blow that knocked the vicious fiend to the ground. You could hear the wood in the cracked handle creak in misery as Felix dropped three successively heavier smashes of the spade upon the snarling beast’s cranium. With all three hellhounds successfully felled, Felix used the spade as a walking stick as he struggled to move toward his true villain.
The Unseen had been watching the battle play out from a perch in a particularly large sideways winding branch in the tree line thirty feet out and was impressed with Felix’s newfound grit.
“I was wondering how long it was going to take you to finally grow a spine,” the Unseen hauntingly stated in a voice that sounded obscured but eerily familiar to the teen.
“I’m not running from you,” Felix replied resolutely, “not anymore. This ends tonight.”
“Such confidence, I love seeing it course through you” the Unseen cackled with an obnoxious glee as they slowly glided to the ground in front of Felix. “Its taste will be divine when I drink it from your marrow.”
Felix made the first move, hoping such boldness would allow the spade to come crashing down onto the Unseen’s obscured head, however, it was not meant to be. In a move that appeared impossible, the Unseen had moved completely out of the path of the spade, caught the tool with their right hand, and simultaneously sent a bolt of lightning into Felix’s chest with their left. The dangerously high voltage blast sent the teenager flying backward into a thicket twenty-five feet away. Not wasting any time, Felix recovered from the attack and started clawing his way through the brush and trees in order to evade the dark mage until he could come up with a better plan.
“I think we’ve made some real progress tonight,” The Unseen said as they twisted their fingers to perform a spell. “But perhaps it’s time for you to accept reality once more. The only way you’ll ever defeat me is by killing yourself in the real. You can’t touch me here. You’ve never been able to and you never will.”
“Leave me alone, ya’ psychotic freak,” Felix snarled as he fought against the bushes to continue moving forward.
The struggle to continue on through the forest was becoming more difficult for the teenager, who soon realized that the plant life surrounding his body had revolted against him. Bowing to the dark enchantment of the Unseen, the tree branches had become full of life, now wrapping themselves around Felix’s arms and legs. Soon the teenager was helplessly held suspended between a convoluted series of branches, vines, and leaves coming from three other nearby trees.
“Psychotic? This is your dream. Why would I even be here if it wasn’t truly you who were psychotic?” The Unseen snapped in response. “You will be made to understand. We aren’t truly all that different. Not really. After all, we both want you dead.”
The Unseen threw their right hand out to the side and motioned with spell-casting fingers toward the pitchfork. Seconds later the tool flew into the villain’s right hand.
“Same time tomorrow?” The Unseen asked as they began to plunge the pitchfork toward Felix’s chest.
Out of nowhere, a solitary punch from an unknown third party slammed the shaft of the pitchfork and splintered the handle. The prongs veered far off its intended prey and pierced deeply into a nearby tree trunk. A second punch by the lithely athletic woman landed squarely in the Unseen’s gut and sent them flying backward over forty feet away into the thicket.
“You ok?” Lucinda asked Felix.
She was a young Latina with flowingly wavy long black hair, wearing a jet black blazer with the sleeves rolled up, fingerless black leather gloves, and a pair of jeans that had been shredded all up on purpose. Lucinda glared intently at the imprisoned teen as if she were already bored waiting for his answer.
“Someone ate their spinach today,” Felix deadpanned, still ensnared by a litany of constricting tree branches.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she replied, the annoyance fresh on her tone.
“Watch out!” Felix hollered.
A mighty bolt of deadly electric volts had been hurled by the Unseen and instead of avoiding the attack, Lucinda smirked and a second before the projectiles could strike, her flesh and clothes took on a translucent sheen as if like a hardened diamond. The bolt scattered in all directions, refracted by the new form of invulnerability she had taken.
“Cubic zirconium? That’s a neat trick,” Felix complimented the super-heroine before him.
“Yeah, it’s helpful in a pinch,” she answered as her skin and clothing reverted back to their normal appearance. “But I can’t hold it for long. We have to get you out of these branches, quickly!”
Lucinda grabbed the tree branches wrapped around Felix’s right arm and reduced them to kindling in a matter of seconds. Then she used her ample super-human strength to free Felix’s left arm and leg. As she knelt down to free the captive teen’s right leg, the Unseen shot another bolt toward her. Felix instinctively doubled over to take the hit for his new found ally, and in doing so his body hardened and became translucent just as Lucinda’s had. The tiny electric currents sparked off of Felix’s body and dissipated, absorbed into the soil and plant life around them.
“How the hell did you do that?” Lucinda asked, almost offended that Felix had somehow mimicked her ability.
“I have no freakin’ idea,” he answered, clearly exasperated by the whole experience.
Now free from all of the leaf-bearing shackles, Lucinda pushed Felix away from the Unseen.
“You’re free. Get out of here. I’ll handle ol’ sparky here.”
Lucinda sprung forth and landed a devastating right cross to the Unseen’s face. The impact of the initial blow forced the villain face first into the dirt. With a series of targeted strikes, Lucinda laid into the Unseen heavily before they could pick themselves off the ground. The fiend shrieked in frustrated pain with each bashing blow suffered. The Unseen summoned up a dagger and blindly flailed it about until it finally connected with the Latina’s flesh. The gash wasn’t fatal, but Lucinda was bleeding profusely and knew that if she was going to save Felix in this dream she needed to do it quickly.
After a rapid assessment of the scenario, Lucinda opted to break off from her fight with the Unseen and focus instead on waking Felix up. The teen, who was still barely hobbling with his mangled left leg, wasn’t difficult to catch up with. The Unseen was hot on her heels, throwing all manner of magical attacks that continued to ever-narrowly miss Lucinda by fractions of a second.
The Latina tackled Felix down off to the side and held the teen tightly as they both slid down a steep ridge full of dead leaves and broken branches. The experience was harrowing for Felix, as errant dirt and bits of twigs stabbed into his gaping leg wound. It caused another problem for him as well, one he had experienced in real life but never in a dream. When Lucinda grabbed him, he sensed her on a psychic level and was able to glean a small amount of information from the contact. The plush doll was her toy when she was a young child. There was also the impression of a woman, dark skin, exotic, and gorgeous. The Latina and this mystery woman were friends, perhaps more.
Eventually, the connection was broken as they reached the bottom and spun over each other’s body numerous times before crashing into a rocky nook that offered a small measure of cover, enough so that the Unseen had lost their immediate trail.
Lucinda looked Felix square in the eyes, her body just over his in the tiny rock shelter, and whispered, “This is just a dream. This asshole can’t really hurt you. Wake up already, idiot!”
“I can’t just wake up,” Felix snapped back quietly. “I’m too involved in this dream. Too worked up. Feel my fucking heartbeat! At this rate, I’m just going to have to die again in order to wake up.”
“Wait. How did you know that would work?” She asked.
“Because I always wake up when I die in my dreams.”
“And how the hell often does that happen?”
“Lately? All the damn time,” he answered with a half scoff. “Although, I’ve been trying for a while now to stop this freak-bait from killing me every night.”
“What do you mean trying for a while?”
“As in ‘hi, my name is Felix and I’m wide awake in my own fucked up dream right now.’ I’m fully lucid. I’ve been able to be awake in my own dreams for years.”
“Ok, this is going to sound crazy but I need you to just shut up and believe me. I am awake within your dream as well. I am able to project myself into other people’s dreams and experience them. Case in point, I’m here right now in your dream trying to help you.”
“Ok?” Felix quizzically replied.
It was clear from his facial expression that he was not sure whether to believe an attractive but considerably rough-around-the-edges character that randomly appeared in one of his dreams or not. She was likely nothing more than just part of the dream that his mind had created. Even still, when she touched him he felt a connection that was too real to have been purely imagined.
“I’ll prove it to you,” the determined Latina declared. “Felix, my name is Lucinda Gutiérrez. I am a student at the University of Texas in Austin and I look exactly like I appear in your dream right now. When you wake up, look me up online and send me a direct message on social media.”
“Oh really. Social media. Could you be more generic? Just, what, choose any of them and that’ll be fine?”
“I have an account on pretty much all major social media sites and yes any of them will be fine. Just don’t go looking me up on Tinder, because I will swipe left motherfucker. Now listen, send me a DM and I promise I will arrange a time for us to meet in person tomorrow at O’s Campus Cafe.”
“So, I’m just supposed to believe that you hopped into my dream to ask me on what, some sort of date or something?”
“Ay Dios mío,” Lucinda muttered to herself. “No, dumb ass, I could see that your aura was all fucked up. I knew you were having a nightmare.”
“Aura? What kind of horse shit are you trying to sell me now.”
“I’m telling you the truth. I can read auras and yours was bad.”
“Define bad.”
“Like, you should have worn the brown pants to bed bad. I saw that it looked like you were having a rough dream, so I projected in to try and help you. Now that I’ve seen that you are able to emulate my temporary invulnerability, I think that you might have a similar knack for what I am doing. If you meet with me tomorrow, I can take you to meet the Professor and we can find out for sure.”
“Uh-huh,” Felix sarcastically responded. “You could see why I might find it hard to take you seriously when you keep grinding your hips into me like that.”
“I said swipe left, just like this,” Lucinda snarled as she landed an open palm slap across Felix’s face. “I’m being quite serious about this.”
“So what? You really think I’m potentially some sort of lucid dream hopper as well?” Felix asked as he rubbed the ever-reddening area of his left cheek.
“Anything’s possible.”
An uprooted tree flew past the hidden youths as a small brush fire was started by the Unseen in an attempt to smoke their prey out.
“That poorly designed D&D reject is going to find us any second now,” Lucinda stated bluntly. “You need to make a choice. Quickly.”
“Ok. Say I take your claims at face value, what happens next?”
“Do you trust me?” Lucinda inquired as she pushed her semi-wavy long hair back behind her ear to reveal a devilish smirk on her lips.
“About as much as I do any random super chick that magically flies into one of my dreams.”
“Just remember, my name is Lucinda Gutiérrez, a student at U.T. Austin like you. Find me in the real world. What’s my name?”
“Lucinda Gutiérrez.”
“Remember me,” the Latina said as she violently snapped Felix’s neck with her super strength.
Felix awoke in his bedroom in a total panic, sweat dripping all over his body. His shallow breathed pants and sudden jerking movement into an upright position woke his slender dachshund, Doop, that always slept at the end of his tiny twin bed. The dog lifted up his head, looked at Felix, and determining that there was no immediate cause for alarm laid back down and closed his eyes.
“Remember me,” Felix muttered under his breath. “How could I forget?”
The frazzled teen scribbled Lucinda Gutiérrez’s name on a sticky notepad that was on his nearby nightstand and then laid back down to try and reconcile what had just happened in his dream.
