Recently I've been experimenting with something known as lucid dreaming. What triggered this is that I had a dream that a rattlesnake had bitten me. Obviously I wanted to know what that could mean because it was pretty freaky. I started searching around and the I rediscovered lucid dreaming. The easiest way to explain lucid dreaming is that it allows you to consciously take over certain aspects of your dreams and alter them while still not being in total control. Lucid dreaming is not hard to do, but it does take some practice. I had done some lucid dreaming in the past when I was in middle school and high school so I knew how to get back into the swing of things. The easiest way to make yourself lucid dream is to keep notes on every dream you've had as soon as you wake up and repeat a mantra in your head until you fall asleep. The mantra I use is "I will have a lucid dream tonight," or I'll specify what I want to dream about.

While I was doing some more research on lucid dreaming I was looking around for things that were interesting to do. What stuck out the most to me was to play around with mirrors and your reflection. The reflection that is supposed to be shown to you is your subconscious perception of yourself. I got hooked on the idea real quick and I was determined to incorporate a mirror in one of my upcoming dreams.

It took me a week until I could actually get a grasp on getting some control in my dreams. One of the closest times I got was when I literally took the main idea from "Inception" and had a dream within a dream. I woke up once from one dream just to realize I was in another when my alarm actually woke me up to the same place I was dreaming about. I was convinced I was ready after having that mind-bending experience, so I was finally going to attempt to play with my reflection. I repeated my mantra and dozed off.

In my dream I was in a place that was a mesh of places that I had been: my living room, the beach and one of my friend's houses. I was stumbling around with someone that I can't remember looking for a mirror. For some reason or another, my living room was inside my friend's house. This made the quest for the mirror a lot easier since I knew where one was hanging in my living room.

I walked into the living room towards the wall where it was hanging. There I was staring back at myself- but something was off. My hair was longer and some of my facial features were enlarged, specifically my already huge eyebrows and my nose. My reflection was also wearing different clothes than I was. So I did the only sensible thing to do; I tried to pull my reflection out of the mirror and into my realm.

I put my arm into the mirror which had now turned into a liquid-like substance and pulled myself out. My reflection stepped out reluctantly and stood next to me. I looked back at the mirror and neither of us were in there. I looked at my reflection again and he had grown two more pairs of eyes below where the originals were. I started to get nervous, and he could tell. The being that was my reflection began to grow and tower over me. He had become twice as wide and long as me. He got right up into my face and we were making eye-contact. I was starting to get really freaked out. He bellowed with a voice that was deeper than mine and told me to "Hurry up and decide which eyes you're going to make contact with." I was panicking, but frozen stuck in a state of indecisiveness. As he was still towering over me, the corners of the room began to go black until the entire room had turned dark. The only light was just illuminating my insanely distorted reflection.

"Why?" It began to ask. It kept asking over and over as if that was the only word it knew. Dumbfounded, I replied with "I don't know." He began to grow larger and larger and even sprouted a scorpion's tail. I couldn't fathom what in the world was going on anymore. I finally broke eye-contact and turned around. The room became illuminated again and I saw the mirror. Neither of us were in it, just the room and the furniture. I turned around and looked back at what had been my reflection. I pointed back to the mirror and I said "Maybe you can go figure it out in there."

The beast shuffled its way back into the mirror and transforming into a being that resembled me again. He slid back into the mirror ever so slowly. I walked towards the mirror again to see if anything else had changed. It was just myself now in the reflection of the room. The reflection was now behaving normally, copying every one of my gestures and features.

And then I woke up.