• Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views




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    The Lab Notebook

    Like many others, I was attracted to lucid dreaming by Inception. Unlike some others, I was very quick to let go of the misconceptions it offers, and to learn and embrace the lingo, the practices, and the understanding of dreaming that are accepted by the community of real people I found here.

    I titled my dream journal "The Lab Notebook" because of the way I'm naturally inclined to write the portions of my dream journal entries that are commentary and side notes on my dreams. I always write with the vocabulary, style, and mindset of a scientist recording the observations she's made during her experiments. That's the framework in which I can best make sense of what I'm learning about dreaming.

    I always write about dreams in the present tense, because I remember reading somewhere that doing so helps the events of the dream seem more immediate and real to you, and helps you recall them.

    The color-coding system I use in my dream journal is:

    Dark red: Things I did while awake
    Teal: Non-lucid portions of the dream
    Deep sky blue: Semi-lucid portions of the dream
    Dark orchid: Lucid portions of the dream (because it's my favorite color)
    [Black within square brackets:] Commentary added by me while I was writing the dream journal entry

    1. What are *you* doing in my dreams already? I've met you *once.*

      by , 10-28-2010 at 04:44 PM (The Lab Notebook)
      There has been a contest to choose the guests who will attend a dinner party with a friendly, very easy-going, gray-haired woman who makes letters out of soft wax. I am at this dinner. There is another woman there who collects little figurines, including one that looks like a classic Hollywood actress. I mess up the top bar of the wax “E” that the first woman has made, making it all bent and chewed up so that she has to redo that part, but she doesn't mind because she loves doing her art. [It wasn't until I woke up and was writing down this dream that I recognized this woman as former Survivor contestant Gillian Larson, who was the guest speaker at a lunch seminar I went to last week.]

      Third-person perspective. I'm watching a teenage girl walk around in a mall or a department store. She rides up an escalator, and I can see the bright-green lights glowing from the spaces between the steps. All the time she's walking around, I can hear a voice narrating her story. The words of the story are written in the first person with the teenage girl as the point-of-view character, but the voice reading them is Scott Sigler's. [Not surprisingly, as I just finished getting caught up on the latest episode of the Ancestor podcast an hour before I went to bed.] According to the narration, this girl “eats, sleeps, and breathes TV:” she has a name very similar to that of a specific, well-known TV character, she watches a lot of TV shows, and other aspects of her life are very similar to the situation on various TV shows. I'm aware that what Scott is reading is the first chapter of Ancestor. [The actual first chapter of Ancestor is absolutely nothing like this.]