The Lab Notebook

(This is a catch-up post. This dream took place on the night of August 22-23, 2012.)

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

My mom and I are watching a play together. The play features a girl and a creepy, life-sized puppet that is designed to be a body double of her. I see that $OfficeBoss is there, watching the play with his family. Then, my mom and I go out to the parking lot and drive away in the same car together, even though we both have cars there. We can only start one of our cars, not the other one, because neither of us has the right key for that one.

I'm in the Phoenix, Arizona metro area on vacation, visiting my good friend, JM. I have my own car [which I never do when I go to visit him, because I always fly there and get rides around town with him and his friends - this should have been my first clue that I was dreaming, but it wasn't], and I'm driving east along the freeway, heading in the direction of JM's house. The scenery around me is incredibly beautiful and lush, with lots of desert plants.

JM and I are hanging out in a bar together, totally chilling out on a sofa. I'm drinking a beer that someone else abandoned on a table. We walk out of the bar, which is located in a shopping mall. As we're on our way out of the mall, we find another friend of ours, ET [a human - yes, those are his initials], in another of the mall's shops. I realize it's him when I hear his voice. A bunch of our friends are with us now. ET hugs everyone in the group (myself, JM, CF, and a couple of others), except for RD. RD doesn't want to be hugged, and uses her fingers to climb up the side of a door to get away from ET. ET tickles her on the small of her back instead.

I'm walking through a beautiful Arizona landscape of desert farms, and at this point, I finally realize that I'm dreaming. I focus on the fact that the guard dogs that many of the farms have cannot really hurt me when I'm in a dream. I run away from one of them by flying straight up, and then start flying over the lovely scenery, admiring it. Looking southwest, I can see downtown Phoenix, which has skyscrapers and a giant stone head with a big, wide-open mouth. Just after I've started flying, my alarm goes off and wakes me up.

I'm in a big building of some kind. I'm high-school-aged, and I'm walking around in the building as part of a group of other high-schoolers [none of whom I recognize individually]. There's a tall table with a bunch of half-sheets of paper on it. They're sign-up sheets where we can sign up for the activities we want to do at an outdoor camp we're going to go to. I and several of my friends sign up for tennis. I think, Since when am I interested in tennis? [I'm not, in real life; I haven't even played it since high-school PE.] I also notice that one of the activities we can sign up for is beer pong. This strikes me as odd, too, since we're high-school students. Then I recall that in a previous dream in this setting [which, once again, I don't recall at all now that I'm awake], I learned that either the drinking age here in this setting is 18, or there isn't one at all, I'm not sure which.

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Side notes:

I managed to have a lucid dream last night, despite having drunk wine several hours before going to bed. I think the fact that the last thing I did before bed was writing and posting a dream journal entry helped a lot. In this dream, I was aware that I was dreaming, but the thought of going off and doing my own thing, rather than going along with the dream plot, didn't even cross my mind. I don't know why not. I also don't remember why or how I became lucid.