Had a really messed up dream last night
I was a member of a cult, and the leaders had somehow brainwashed us into believing that we had to impale ourselves with sewing needles and leave them beneath the skin as like either a cleansing thing or a way to increase our spiritual status. Basically my mind was rewired to think it was a really good thing, maybe the best thing ever, so I and other members of the cult would begin to do it at all times kind of instinctively.
At some point a resistance started growing in the cult and the brainwashing weakened. I realized I was messing myself up by putting all of these needles in my skin but at this point there were hundreds. And so I flipped the behavior and started removing them, first consciously, then unconsciously, and it had that good feeling associated with it as when I had put them in. The people who I used to admire and be jealous of, those with many needles, began to look more and more like they were being marked for ownership by the cult, and by putting in the needles, they were doing it to themselves. It was pitiful and delusional and painful to see.
I kept thinking I got them all then finding clusters of two or three in random patches of skin. It's like cleaning up every single crumb on the floor when you have to pick them up one by one. Very frustrating, but once they were all gone I felt so much better. Towards the end the cult was out shopping in the public world and we started to vote for whether the needle pushing should be abolished. It was called proposition 170 or something. More and more people were voting to abolish.
The cult leader, who was normally beautiful, transformed into a pig demon lady and picked up a huge bag of salt to throw at us, because when I looked at my skin it was a lot more porous and damaged by the needles, almost hanging off of my arm. So the salt would have been very painful if it had made contact with these many small wounds. This was when I went semilucid because usually danger or threat of pain does that, so I teleported away and imagined a shield so she couldn't follow me.
People in the resistance on the other hand learned how to make fireballs using technology and not magic to fight back.
At some point someone made fun of my taste in music in case of an alien invasion from a list of songs I would listen to in such an invasion that I had apparently posted online. They called me a fucking child, I got upset, they apologized and tried to defend their character, and I replied by telling them they literally just did the thing they were claiming they don't do in their defense. Left bad feelings all around.
I know this a necropost but I just searched dreams in the bar because I wanted to put this down. I almost never catch a break from these kinds of dreams and it's just really exhausting.