The night before last, I entered an Airstream trailer of sorts, except not quite. It was parked in the middle of a fairly open field lined with only a handful of trees. The sun had just set for the night and the sky was still a reddish-orange hue.

I entered the trailer with its owner, a man who hadn’t aged very gracefully and was obviously a hard laborer. He had a pungent body odor, his gums were receding from his yellowed teeth and he wore thick glasses and a stained mustache. He was hard-selling the trailer to me, yet I had no intention of buying it and didn’t even know why I came. I tried to excuse myself, but the man realized my disinterest and became irrationally offended. He hurled deep insults at me with a backwoods twang and loomed over me, keeping me from the door. As he showered me with insults and saliva, he nodded over my shoulder towards a young girl I hadn’t noticed was behind me the whole time. Apparently she was his daughter, but her beauty alluded to her being from a totally different gene pool. She seemed embarrassed and intimidated by her dad, but receptive to my gesture suggesting we get the hell out of the situation. She squeezed by me, grabbed my forearm and led me out the door without saying a word. This also shut her father up.

We walked past the front of the old trailer, but not far into the night before the man grunted and stopped the girl in her tracks. He had stumbled out of the trailer and was about fifteen feet directly in front of its open door, slightly bathed in the dim light that shone from it. The girl’s grip on my forearm tightened. A lot. She seemed to be getting forceful, too, and when I looked in her eyes she began to morph. Her skin tone tanned and her clothes turned to hides and feathers. In her free hand sprouted an ornate, antique rifle that didn’t quite fit the rest of her attire. I had a deep sense that my life was threatened. I looked to her father and he transformed as well. From the ground beneath him rose a horse. Upon it, his muscles toned and his years fell away and he was fully dressed as a majestic warrior of an indigenous people I couldn’t quite place. His posture straightened and his chest expanded as he drew an arrow back in a large bow and aimed it at me.

“I’m going to die,” I thought, “or maybe this is just a dream.”

The girl pushed me away and pressed her rifle to my throat with her finger on the trigger. I was all nerves.

“Wait. Is this just a dream?”

The girl stood poised, glaring with suspicion, only one synapse away from ending my life. My heart began to pound against my ribs as I realized that, lucid or not, there wasn’t enough time to wake from this dream before one of these two killed me.

“Whoa… I am lucid dreaming!”

I whipped my head around to look at the figure on the horse when – thooop – his arrow woke me up!