The Lab Notebook

I adopt a large, black dog from a shelter, and take him home to my apartment. I find that the responsibility of taking care of him is more than I can stand, and I don't enjoy it at all. I feel like a horrible, awful person, but I decide take him back to the place I got him from to ask them to find a different home for him. He's too big for me to pick up and put in my truck by myself, though, so two of my neighbors help me.

I get back to the shopping center where the shelter is located and walk through it, but by the time I get to the shelter, the dog has wandered off on his own, and I don't know where he is. I was such a lousy owner that I didn't even get a leash for him.

[This dream stemmed from an ad I heard on the radio yesterday for a kennel that really does find new homes for dogs. By the way, I don't even have a truck in real life, just a car.]

[Different dream, later in the night.] I'm playing Hidden Chronicles and I notice, for the first time, that the river on the main map continues further up than I had thought, and there are all kinds of buildings on the other side - a whole town for me to explore. There's a sailboat dock across the river from my estate - obviously, you're supposed to get to that part of town by sailing across the river - and a second bridge for me to repair.

Suddenly, I'm standing among the buildings of the town on the far side of the river. When I turn and look back down the river, I gasp - from this ground-level point of view, looking in this direction, I can see that there's a whole city over there to explore, complete with its own skyline of skyscrapers. I'm really excited to explore it, but I think, Looks like I'm going to keep playing this game for the next couple of years.

[Different dream.] I'm with my parents, and my mom needs me to translate some text from Japanese into English [or vice versa, I don't remember] for her. She needs it right away, and all I have is my phone, but I plug away at it anyway. We're visiting the home of some friends, and we're sitting down to have dinner with their large family around the light-brown, round table that my parents have in their house.

Color-coding key:
Awake, Non-lucid, Possibly lucid? (not sure), Lucid, Lucid 'dream within a dream,' [Commentary made while awake]

[This morning, my alarm went off at 7:30. I had planned to get up and write, but I still felt so sleepy that I decided to sleep in. I believe I had all these dreams during the extra hour I slept in. Again, I don't remember the transitions that connected them, if there were any, which is why this entry may seem fragmented.]

I'm out somewhere with my parents and T&P [some real-life friends of ours]. We're in a gravel parking lot, getting into our cars to go somewhere. I'm driving my own car by myself. I follow the other car, which has my parents and T&P in it, out of the parking lot and along a narrow, gravel-covered alley. There are two big rocks in the middle of it. I watch the other car drive over them and worry that my car isn't high enough off the ground to clear them, but it does, with no problem.

I have a small patch of thick, dark-brown hairs growing out of a mole on the right side of my chin. I want to pull all the hairs out with tweezers, but I look for the tweezers and can't find them. Later, I look in the mirror again and have a short, but thick beard, with only a couple of long hairs straying outside of the beard zone. I still can't find the tweezers, so I try to pull them out with my fingers, but can't; they're too solidly rooted. I continue playing with those hairs with my fingers as I go about the rest of my day. [Funny how at no point during this sequence did I think to question the situation; I'm a girl! I do, however, find and pull on stray hairs like that often in real life.]

I'm explaining to someone, over the phone [I think], that J&L have passed away. The conversation continues, and I say something about how hard it must be for the other person to find this out. [J&L are the original owners of the house I'm now renting. I've had this conversation over the phone at least twice in real life. Even though I never actually met them, it's still hard to tell people that news.]

I'm in a body of water, and there's this little cartoon guy swimming in the water. He has a mask and a snorkel on. There is a song playing: “let's go swimming under the sea!”, it says, or something like that. I'm following the little cartoon guy as he swims through the water. I have my own snorkel, but no mask. I don't really need it, though, because when I duck my head below the surface, I can see underwater just as clearly as if I were wearing a mask, and the water doesn't sting my eyes at all. Then, the little cartoon guy starts diving deeper under the water. I think to myself, It annoys me when cartoon characters do that when they only have a snorkel. [Somewhere toward the beginning of this dream, I became aware that I was dreaming, but I don't remember precisely when, nor what triggered it.] I want to continue following him under the water, and I think to myself, I can breathe underwater in dreams. My known dream ability to breathe water activates at this thought. I abandon the snorkel and continue following the little cartoon guy. We're in what looks like an ocean. The water is deep blue, and there are sea creatures of some kind swimming in it.

I'm in an unfamiliar bedroom, going to sleep. I even feel sleepy. While I'm getting into bed and falling asleep, I think about the fact that I'm going to be in a a dream as soon as I fall asleep, and that I'm going to be lucid and take conscious, intentional action while I'm there. [I remember having a specific mission in mind, but I don't remember what it was.] After a few seconds, I roll sideways out of bed and know that I'm in the dream world. [I think some kind of dream followed, but I don't remember it now. After that dream ends,] I'm back in the same bedroom again, and I go through the same sequence of falling asleep and knowing that I'm about to enter a lucid dream. This time, I sit up in bed to enter the dream, and then climb out of bed and step away from it, towards the door of the room. I cast a sidelong glance over at the bed and get a glimpse of myself, lying asleep. I quickly look away. I think, I know this is a dream room, and that that isn't actually my real body, but still, it's creepy. [I'm pretty sure I was aware that I was dreaming throughout this entire sequence, even the parts where I was falling asleep.] The reason I know that the whole experience is just a dream is that the bedroom I'm in isn't mine. The walls are painted a dark, cool color, the bedclothes match the walls, and the room is longer and narrower than my real one.

From that unfamiliar bedroom, I walk out into a plaza surrounded by buildings. It is a sunny day. There are signs in the plaza directing people to an area where a birthday party is being held for a child. I walk into that area and find a table with a bunch of party food set out on it. From that table, I take a cupcake and start eating it, without bothering to take the paper off first. I want to take advantage of the opportunity to do that. I know that this is my dream body, so I don't have to worry about the paper doing me any harm, and in addition, I don't have to worry about what the DCs around me will think if they see me eating the cupcake paper. The cupcake itself feels and tastes exactly like cupcakes do in real life. I walk around while eating it, observing all the people walking around and the kids running around and playing in the courtyard.

As I continue to explore the dream environment, I come upon another sign reminding everyone that it's time to go and complete the paperwork to register their cars. I follow the directional arrows on the sign, and end up entering a building that contains an office with a reception desk front and center as you walk in the front door of the building. I go up to the reception desk, tell the woman there my name, and ask for my car registration form. It turns out that the form is filed under my old address from when I was living in Florida. She gives it to me to update. The sheet of paper she gives me is the top sheet of a piece of carbon paper. It's a sheet I already filled out back when I was living in Florida; it has all my information from those days on it, in my handwriting, in blue ballpoint pen. I start working on bringing the information on it up to date.

The top section of the form contains several multiple-choice questions with checkboxes below them. These questions are all about your religious beliefs, and they're really only on the form as a formality. They ask about whether or not you believe in the Bartel Water Bug, and the boxes indicating non-belief are already checked. I read over this section and then start updating the form with my current address, but then it occurs to me to think: Why am I wasting dream time filling out a form? I look up from the paper to see what the woman behind the desk is doing. She has turned away to do something else. I set down my pen, turn around, and walk quickly out of the building while she's not looking.

Back in the courtyard, I discover that the item I've decided [in real life] to use as a totem, which in my case is a thimble, behaves in a very interesting way when thrown or tossed in a dream. Namely, it acts like a magnet. Whenever it comes anywhere near another person [yes, even if the other person is just a DC], it flies away from them as if it were being repelled by their presence. Then it flies back toward me, straight into my hand, as if it were magnetically attracted to me. I encounter a family that I know in real life, walking along the edge of the courtyard. I say something like, “You're gonna get this thing thrown at you,” to the 7-or-8-year-old daughter in the family, and then I throw my thimble at her. When it gets within about a foot of her, it flies away from her and back toward me, and I catch it. [That's the last I remember.]

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Side notes:

When I woke up for real and reflected on the part of my dream where I kept dreaming about waking up and falling asleep within the dream, I thought, "Cool! My mind came up with a kind of hybrid dream experience, incorporating characteristics of the lucid dreaming experience that I learned from Inception (the knowledge that I was about to fall asleep and immediately find myself in a lucid dream, the experience of entering that dream from within another dream), as well as characteristics that I learned from DreamViews and from EWOLD (the perception of rolling out of my dream body and the knowledge that that room was itself a dream)." To those people who looked down on the newcomers who jumped on the lucid-dreaming bandwagon after Inception came out: I was one of those bandwagon-jumpers, even though I tried not to be too obnoxious and annoying about it, and I believe that we newcomers are perfectly capable of learning and growing into the world of lucid dreaming as it is actually experienced outside of the movies.

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

I'm driving through the parking lot of a shopping center, at night. There is a violent physical altercation going on in the parking lot, and it turns into a gunfight.

I'm now riding my bicycle through a nearby residential neighborhood, where there is more violence going on. It's still nighttime. As I ride, I pray that I won't get hit by a stray bullet. I also reflect that I could be driving to my destination, which is my old church, but I like bicycling better than driving. [This is true.] I miss the turn to get to St. Mark's.

I'm no longer riding my bicycle; I'm now standing in a black nothing. [I suspect that I might have DEILDed here, but I'm not positive.] I think of the destination I was just trying to get to, the parish hall at my old church, and cause a knife from the parish hall's silverware drawer to appear in my hand. A second later, the parish hall appears around me.

I walk through the room, appreciating the dream environment, as usual. A lot of people are there, including my parents. My dad comes up to me and offers to give me a hug, and I accept it and hug back. All the people are there for a big reception, with a lot of food laid out on tables.

After the reception, when everyone has left except me, my parents, and two or three other people, there is still a huge platter of thinly-sliced roast beef left over. I try to give it away to those two or three other people.

I wake up in my current bedroom, very pleased to have just had a lucid dream. I remember to grab my phone, which is running Ev's Lucid Dreaming App for Android, and draw a star on the screen with my finger to indicate that I just had a lucid dream. I draw the star, but very sloppily, with one point much bigger and longer than the other points. I'm concerned that the program won't recognize the gesture, but it does. It displays the gesture I just drew with the caption “lucidity!” underneath it, in the same font it always uses for those captions.

When I woke up for real, I thought to myself, You know, I bet I didn't actually record that lucid dream. The app wouldn't recognize the star if I drew it that poorly, and the caption always just says "lucid dream." I checked my actual phone and, sure enough, no "lucid dream" mark on my graph. That had, indeed, been a false awakening. I felt slightly frustrated, as well as highly amused that the app had shown up in one of my FAs.

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Side notes:

Wow. I'm pretty pleased with this DEILD, if that is indeed what it was, and with my sudden mastery of changing the dream scene. To be fair, though, I did change it to the destination I had been trying to reach in my non-lucid nightmare.

I didn't realize until after I woke up that the part where my dad hugged me was day residue. On the evening before I had this dream, I hadn't bothered to get up and hug my dad when he left the house, and I had regretted it. I thought it was awfully nice of my subconscious to give me a second chance to do that.

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

I'm in my family's house [it doesn't look anything like any of our real houses]. P. has a terrible secret that she can't stand to tell our parents, so she's making me tell them for her. She actually cries when she tries to talk about it, because she feels so bad about it. Information about the secret is hidden on the computer in a file called “Sisters.nxt,” which is the type of file that contains programming instructions for the toy robots we use at my teaching job.

Our parents come in, and I gather my courage and tell Mom the terrible secret. Everyone is upset, including me.

When I woke up, I was quite stunned that it had just been a dream. It had been incredibly vivid and realistic. I actually made mental notes to call my sister and ask her if she was okay, and to to check my real computer later for a file named “Sisters.nxt.” [There was none, of course.]

I'm in my car [my new-to-me one], on my driveway. It rolls backward down the driveway, even though the parking brake is set. [Anxiety. I am afraid of this happening.] As I turn around to look behind me, I see JM backing a big truck up to our driveway. I smile and wave at him.

I'm back in the same house from earlier, with my parents. My mom's hair has suddenly turned gray, and is short and fluffy. It has two parts that come to a point on the top of her head, which she is feeling with her fingertips to find out how they go. My dad's hair is also turning gray. I realize that I'm back in the unfamiliar house that appeared in my previous dream, and therefore, that I'm dreaming.

I turn away from my parents and walk around the house, observing. The rooms are spacious and empty in the middle. Thoughts about how all this is a dream and not real just won't leave me alone, even though I try to ignore them, for fear that thinking about it too much will cause the dream to fade and me to wake up. I remember that I should try to stabilize and ground myself in the dream by engaging more of my senses, so I go looking for something to eat.

One of the rooms of the house is a kitchen. I open the refrigerator and get out one of those little plastic, single-serving cups of applesauce. I open it up and eat it directly out of the cup, by sticking my tongue into it. It tastes just like applesauce, but the flavor isn't as strong as it would be in reality. I also find that my lips are all tingly and semi-numb, as if I'd had a Novacaine shot that was wearing off. I think, That's happening because these sensations of eating aren't real.

[Dreamskip.] I'm outside, and I remember that I wanted to fly in this dream. I try to take off twice, and both times, I succeed only in jumping about six or eight feet and then falling back down to the ground. The first time, I end up on my butt. After the second time, I think, Wait, don't I usually do this just by thinking about flying? So I do, and it works. I fly around the beautiful scenery of a bunch of ocean harbors and inlets with towns on them. At one point, I fly through some power lines [?] intangibly. [I don't feel any sensation associated with it, though.] As I fly, I go, “Wheeee!”

I'm outside a big church building at night, still flying around.

I'm inside a shop full of shoes and other fashion items. It is owned by Yusuf, who is minding it. I fly through the shop and out the front entrance, into a street.

I'm now outside that same big church building during daylight. I say to myself, “It's daytime now because my real body says so.” I say this because I know it must be light outside by now, and I'm sure my body clock knows that. I decide to just walk across the grass to get to the entrance of the church, but then I use a small burst of my flight powers to get up all six steps in one leap.

There is some big event going on on an outdoor lawn, with tents or shade covers set up. [I don't really remember this part very well.]

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Side notes:

Last night was the one-year anniversary of the night I had my first substantial lucid dream. That fact made me really motivated to have another cool lucid dream, and I succeeded in having one. I was really pleased and proud of myself that I had. I wasn't quite as euphoric about it as I was that first night, but I was pretty happy. I'm really happy with what I've experienced in my dream life this year, but, of course, there's much more I want to do and learn. Here's to many more years of lucid dreams!

Non-lucid, Possibly lucid?, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

I'm trying to drive to a destination, and I go through an intersection and end up on a winding road that leads down the side of a mountain to a lake. I recheck my directions and realize that I was supposed to turn right at that last intersection. I start retracing my route and going back up the hill.

I'm at an outdoor amphitheater in Disney California Adventure. I'm way in the back of the amphitheater area, on some bleachers, watching a stage show. There is a bizarre structure on the horizon as you're looking at the stage; it looks like a pyramid with the points sticking out in a bunch of different directions, like what you would see if you put a normal pyramid in the center of a spherical structure with mirrors on all the inside surfaces. The show starts out with red fireworks that shoot out from the vicinity of this structure. The first round explodes in the sky above and to the right of the audience, the second arcs down to and explodes on the round, concrete slab of a second amphitheater behind and to the right of the audience, and the third explodes just above the audience's heads. I'm afraid that I'm going to catch on fire, but I don't.

On stage, there's some sort of announcement from a villainous character in the show that we need to prepare to be tortured. He also says that all the women should stay in the main viewing area, while all the men should move to the building at the back of the theater with the indoor concession and souvenir stands. They all do so. Then, large snakes appear throughout the viewing area. One is close enough to me to touch me with the end of its tail, which I know is poisonous [um, what?]. It's very long and all coiled around on top of itself. I visually pick out its head and tail from among the mass, and try to avoid them as I pick it up and attempt to toss it away from me. This doesn't work. It wraps itself around my waist and legs, binding me in place. I'm scared, but I resign myself to it when I realize that I can't get it off and that it's just a part of the show anyway.

After the show, which felt like it had lasted about 50 minutes, I make my way down to the stage. One of my college girlfriends is getting married here at Disney California Adventure. Several of the other girls from our group are bridesmaids, and they're all wearing long, grayish-white dresses with Disney vacation scenes on them. Two of them are pregnant, including EB. I'm here to attend the wedding, too, but I don't talk to any of them. When the wedding party starts taking pictures, I walk back to the concession and souvenir building at the back of the amphitheater.

My walk there takes me along a gently-curving grass path marked with steppingstones with the shapes of different Disney character heads on them. This path marks the edge of the amphitheater seating area. When I get into the concession and souvenir building, I talk to one of the men who was watching the show. He says the boys had their own torture: during the entire time the show was going on, they were all held in one area and none of them were allowed to pee. I tell him that the free T-shirts can be picked up at the Great American Icee stand, over there.

The dream I've been having fades to black [it may have been the one above, or a different one, I'm not quite sure]. When it does, I realize exactly what's going on, close my eyes, and think, When I open my eyes, I will be back in another dream. I open them, and I'm back at the same amphitheater, but the scenario is different.

[I'm not 100% sure I was lucid for this next part, though.] This time, there are a whole bunch of patriotic greeting cards in boxes at the back. Everyone there has been making them to send to the families of military members and people who died in the 9/11 attacks. Some people are still making them. I see that one lady in the back row has a plate full of lasagna, and take a bite with a fork. She tells me not to eat the lasagna, that it's for the people being honored.

Another show starts in the amphitheater. As it starts, people in front of me stand up, which forces me to stand up, too. I talk with the family to my left. They ask me about a “magic wand” that can be used to uncover secrets and extra content in the park. I point out one that a Cast Member down on a walkway that we can see from our seats is using. It looks a lot like a big, black metal detector, with a bunch of black tubes on top that form a Mickey head shape in the center. It detects sensors embedded in the ground and plays a sound when it finds them. The family climbs up onto the roof of the pagoda structure covering the back of the stands to get a better view of the stage, which is easy to do. I say, “Hey! That's rude!” but follow them up there anyway.

[Later, I had another dream in which I was definitely lucid, but I don't remember how it started or very many of the details. Here's what I do remember:]

I'm in an indoor environment, just walking around and admiring the scenery. I know none of this is real and acknowledge that fact in my mind, but I deeply appreciate how the scenery and the daylight illuminating it look completely real.

When I get to the top floor of the building I'm in, I attempt to fly through the ceiling, but it doesn't work. I just bump into the ceiling, which is completely solid to me. It's a stucco ceiling.

I'm flying around above a city, observing it from the air. Another female dream character [no one I know in real life] is flying with me. I take it slow, finding that I have full control over my speed and direction, but not wanting to do any more than relax and take it all in. I increase my altitude, and the other girl follows. We talk while flying. [I don't remember about what.]

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

[Last night, I had probably the longest and certainly the most highly lucid dream I've ever had. I'm writing this at the end of the day. I tried to recall this dream as best I could upon waking, and I made some handwritten notes, but by now, although I remember the highlights of the dream, I've forgotten what order they went in and how I moved from one to the other. This is my best attempt to reconstruct the whole, long sequence, but some of these are most likely not in the correct order. I do remember that I consciously chose to move from one activity to another in the dream, though.]

I’m in a large room with a really cool indoor playground in it. I observe that they’ve added more decorations and more play elements to the playroom since the last time I was there: there is now a long chain with brightly-colored wooden blocks in various shapes (cylinders, hexagons, and others) threaded onto it hanging across the ceiling, and there are more things to climb and play on. I climb up one of the climbing walls, along with another girl. We press against each other as we climb it.

Later, elsewhere in the same room, I’m looking at my reflection in a mirror. I notice that my neck looks strange, and tilt my head back to see. I see that my neck appears to have been replaced with a shiny, silver metal bar that appears to be a piston. This causes me to realize that I’m dreaming. I pinch my nose to confirm and find that I can still breathe. The familiar sensation pleases me, and I'm very happy to be in a lucid dream. I have a slightly higher degree of lucidity than I've ever had before.

I go outside the building. There is a grassy lawn outside it. I have a discussion of systems for play and discovery with MA [a real-life friend and colleague] and another dream character.

I then decide to explore a bit. I walk away from the large building and head toward another complex of buildings that appears to be an elementary-school campus. As I start walking, I say to myself, “Again, why am I walking when I can fly?” So I start flying over there. I find a party in progress on the far side of the elementary-school campus, where there are some picnic tables. People are hanging out and drinking beer. I obtain a pint glass for myself, but leave it sitting around on or near one of the walls as I wander away.

I see the entrance to a mall, and enter it.

I fly up into the air to get an overview of the area. From up here, I can see that the town I'm in is on the ocean and has a beach. I think, That makes sense. Oceans and beaches are part of my schema for what a broad overview of an area of land should look like, because of where I grew up.

I'm walking along a rolling dirt path. While walking, I eat yogurt out of a plastic cup with a metal spoon. It's raspberry-flavored and smooth and creamy, and it tastes exactly like real yogurt. Then, I find a handful of coins that someone has dropped on the side of the path, along with a bronze medallion. The medallion has some text inscribed on it that says the name of the country I'm in and what the medallion was awarded for. [I don't remember what it said now, although I could definitely read it in the dream, and the country name wasn't the name of any real country.] The coins are all common U.S. coins, but there's also a fifth coin, a brass-colored one that's shaped like a little house [a square shape with a pointy roof]. I pick all these items up.

I wake up in a car with MA, JL, and one other friend. One of them is driving, and I'm in the back seat. I remember that I had just been dreaming, and pinch my nose. Yep. Still dreaming.

While exploring the grassy, park-like area outside the building I started in, I spot a silver, metal, quarter-spherical shape rising up out of the ground. I say, “Ooh!” because I see an opportunity here. The structure is roughly the same shape as the baseball backstop I once fantasized about flying to the top of [see my DJ entry dated April 28, 2011], even though it's solid silver rather than chain-link, and it's maybe two-thirds to half the size of the real one. I take off and fly to the top of it, stopping myself by grabbing hold of the top edge of the hollow quarter-sphere with my hands and then swinging myself up onto it, so that I'm sitting at the top with my lower legs dangling over the edge. I'm facing a crowd of DCs standing on the ground, one of whom is a burly man who flashes me a thumbs-up sign. I proudly declare, “I'm the coolest kid in school!” The DCs seem to approve, but then they start flooding into the hollow space inside the quarter-sphere, filling the space and causing the structure to tip over backward. I climb off as it slowly tilts over, unhurt.

Having accomplished both the old goal of flying to the top of the backstop [well, sorta] and my other goal of trying dream food, I say aloud, “Okay, chores over. Time to have fun.” I fly up and let the wind carry me away.

The dream fades, and I find myself lying down. I try to move my arm, but judging by the feel of it, I realize, No, that's my real arm! I don't want to do that! [Whether or not this was actually true, I couldn't say for sure, but it sure felt like it was at the time.] After a brief moment of feeling stuck in that position and trying to figure out how to get back to exploring the dream world, I roll over and fall out of my bed. I think, Wow, that actually works! I quickly determine that I'm back to the lucid-dreaming state, and remind myself that all that's around me only exists inside my mind, as I read in EWOLD.

I'm looking at a different, grassy lawn. There is a little red demon thingy growing out of the grass. He has red roots that run all over the surface of the lawn. I have a magic sword, so I hold it out, wondering if it'll help and what I can do with it. The demon takes the sword and kills himself by using the sword to sever all his roots. When he and his roots have all disappeared, a small chair rises up out of the plus-sign-shaped hole in the ground where he had just been. It is a reward for my defeat of the demon. I take the chair and carry it with me as I fly back over to the party, which is still in progress.

When I get there, I use the chair to help me grab onto some structure to arrest my motion and land. Flying is easy, but stopping is hard, I think. I can't find the glass of beer I left there earlier, but I decide it's no big loss. I take my chair and sit down at the corner of one of the portable tables that are set up in the party area. I'm facing the outside wall of the elementary-school complex. Up against the wall I'm facing is another table with a clear pitcher of beer on it.

There is another handful of coins on the table near me – again, standard U.S. coins, all of them shiny and brand-new, plus the odd house-shaped coins I saw before. I decide to swallow some of them, because I know I can't do any harm to my real body by doing so. I see another girl at my table doing the same. It feels good. I can feel them going down my throat, but the sensation seems to be weaker than would be realistic, which isn't surprising, since I haven't actually done this in reality [and certainly never will]. After swallowing a few coins, I decide I want more beer to go with them, so I get up and get myself another cup. The beer is cold and rich and flavorful; it tastes exactly how I like my beer to taste.

I've run out of coins, but I still want more. I cup my hand, place it on the table palm side down, look away, and think about what I want to have happen. I feel little pops under my hand, like bursts of compressed air, as more coins pop into existence. Then I feel the coins themselves against my hand as the pile grows. I remove my hand and continue swallowing coins. I'm very pleased that I've suddenly become so good at summoning objects.

My dad is sitting right next to me, at the end of the table, so his chair is perpendicular to mine. He sees me swallowing coins and absolutely freaks out. He recoils from me in disgust, asking me, “What are you doing?” I simply respond, in an “it's not a big deal” tone, “It won't hurt my dream body.”

Then I woke up for real and waited while the last of the SP faded away, concentrating on remembering all that I'd dreamed about. I was very pleased to have accomplished so much and to have been lucid for so long. [In fact, I got to check two goals off the big list in my profile today: trying dream food and summoning an object. ]

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the night of July 23-24, 2011.]

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

I'm in [what I believe to be] the real-life hotel lobby where the hotel scenes from Inception were filmed. I'm appreciating how special it is to be here, in one of the filming locations for my favorite movie. [But totally failing to make the associative leap to the fact that I'm actually in a dream, myself. ] I even see Leonardo DiCaprio walk past. [*LOL* I fail at recognizing dreams...] I know that this building is located on the campus of a local private university. I look through a window and see a sign above the entrance to another building. The sign reads “(Some last name) Library.”

I proceed through the interior of the building I'm in to the entrance of somebody’s dorm. The dorm is themed to resemble ancient Barcelona, Spain. In the dining area, I meet up with a group of my friends from real life, including SS and SH [who I know from completely different social groups and who don't even know each other in real life, by the way]. They're all sitting at a table, eating, and I sit down and join them. It's a Mimi's Cafe table. Several of my friends order my favorite chicken and pasta dish, the one I always order when I'm at Mimi's. Sean has to leave the meal early because he has other plans, so I get to eat his chicken. (I've just sat down, so I haven't had a chance to order my own meal.) Our conversation over dinner is being filmed for TV, and we all know it. We all get separate checks at the end of the meal.

I wake up in my current room to light coming from under my sleep mask. I'm still sleepy, and I don't want to get up, but I get up in order to check the time. I check my watch, my cell phone, and my desk phone [from work], which is on my dresser. They all show the same time: it's 10:39 AM, which means I'm late for my pre-church-service choir practice. I think, It can't be that late already!, but I reason that if all three timepieces agree, then it must actually be that late. When I checked my cell phone, I saw the numbers in the hour field counting up from 2 to 10 at a rate of about 1 number per half-second, but now I rationalize this observation: It must only update the display to the current time when you pick it up and look at it.

I go out of my house, still wearing the clothes I was wearing on Friday. [I had this dream on a Saturday night/early Sunday morning, and I was wearing the outfit I actually had been wearing on the Friday immediately before in real life.] I'm going outside to take out the trash. “Outside” turns out to be a narrow parking lot that surrounds a shopping center. A mother calls to her daughter, Johana. I think, That's a pretty name.

I find a trash can at the outer edge , and empty my trash can into it. I catch a cold container of french fries as they fall from my trash can, and eat them, because I'm still running late for choir practice and don't have time for breakfast. I walk back home through one of the stores in the shopping center, past racks of CD and DVD cases.

...And then I woke up for real, and was pretty embarrassed. I realized that, indeed, it couldn't be that late in the morning already. If it had actually been time to get up, I would have heard the alarm on my cell phone go off, and I hadn't heard it yet.

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Side notes:

This was my first false awakening in my new room, at my new house. It was totally convincing, especially given the fact that I really am usually a few minutes late for a lot of things. The way I totally failed to catch it, even though my phone from my desk at work was in my room at home and the numbers on my cell phone were changing, just goes to show how strong our tendency to rationalize things is. However, on a more positive note, I had this highly convincing false awakening in my new room only two weeks after I had moved into it. I think this bodes well for my mental and emotional state. It may well mean that my unconscious mind has accepted the new room as the place where I'm supposed to be when I wake up, which is great.

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of June 10-11, 2011.]

I'm in the car with my mom. We're driving along dirt roads, checking our location against photos we have of landmarks along the way. We're on our way to JJ's party. [This dream was in anticipation of what I was going to do that evening – exactly the same thing, only without the photos or my mom.]

I'm in the parking lot outside the old Pomona First Federal branch in Ontario. It's a sunny day. I'm picking up many coins (quarters, dimes, and pennies) from the parking lot. I think, It's a bank, so it makes sense that there would be coins in the parking lot. Some real-life friends of mine [I think they may have been T and G, but I'm not sure] walk past me. There are many other people there.

I enter the building. The entryway is a high-ceilinged, airy room with tall windows and a grand, sweeping staircase. There is a freestanding sign at the bottom of the stairs saying that the Joy Laow [I think] room, the meeting room at the top of the stairs, is available for rent for meetings.

I go further into the building. The main part of the building is a large, long, rectangular, carpeted room with a high ceiling. It is a Marie Callender's restaurant. There is another part of the restaurant floor with a lower ceiling. This area has a small stage, where a loud rock band is playing. My family is sitting around a table near the stage, next to the sound-mixing board, which is sitting on another table. I join them at their table. P. orders another Pepsi from our server, and I order a glass of water. Shortly after I arrive at the table, the band takes a break. I'm relieved that I won't have their music blasting my ears out throughout dinner.

I wander off from the table and through the large, carpeted room. There's a lot of empty space in it for a restaurant seating area; there are only a few rectangular tables, arranged in a line. I enter a train-station-like lobby area off to one side of the room, where I see an ad [?] for the Scott Pilgrim video game, in mirror image. I know RD wants to play it. I see a group of people there discussing video games, and I join in.

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

I'm in an old, dusty, dark shop with gray-brown, wooden walls, a high ceiling, and lots of rows of wooden shelves. Mr. H. [my first music teacher] is there. When I see him, I tell him that I'm glad to see that he's still around and still active.

There is a sign hanging from the ceiling above a passageway that leads to another room. The sign points the way to different departments of the store. I walk through the passageway into another, larger area of the shop. This area is the grocery store. A large family with a bunch of kids is grocery shopping there. I hear one of the members of the family mention that they only ever buy produce from Ralphs [a grocery store chain in my area], so they won't be buying any here.

[The dream shifts, and] I'm playing Petpet Park. I'm controlling my usual player character from a third-person perspective, just like in real life, yet my computer isn't part of the dream; the world of the game is the world of the dream, and I'm controlling my character using only my will. [That was pretty awesome, especially for a non-lucid.] I'm walking around a spooky, Halloweeny-themed area [that looks nothing like any of the ones that exist on the real site]. I'm inside an old building. While there, I set off a quest by causing a penguin non-player character to start walking forward from his spot next to the wall. He's off on his way to make a potion. This event is the first in a quest series that is accessible to non-paying members as well as paying members. I spend some Nickcash to get into a small room off to the side.

I decide not to go through a narrow doorway into an area where I could start some other quests. Then, the spooky atmosphere of the area starts to scare me, and I decide I want to get out of there. After getting outdoors, I decide to try to fly to Celestial City. [Celestial City is another in-game area with a more beautiful, peaceful mood. In the real game, player characters cannot fly. I think the fact that it occurred to me to try to reach another in-game area by flying indicates that I was gradually beginning to realize that I was dreaming, and not playing the actual game.] I fly away from the ground [or rather, my player character does; the dream is still in third-person point of view], deliberately playing the Celestial City background music in my mind. I close my eyes [somewhere around here, the dream shifted into first-person point of view] and open them again, trying to make it daytime, instead of nighttime. It works for a few seconds, but the sky quickly darkens to night again.

[The dream shifts again, and] I'm watching a scene from a movie involving a flyover view of an airport. I can easily identify the shooting location as Ontario International Airport because of the view of the mountains rising behind the airport buildings. In terms of design, the buildings resemble the old buildings that were all there was to the airport back when I was a little kid. They're bigger than the old ones, though, and in the same position as the new buildings, although they're not as long as the new buildings.

[Dreamskip.] I find myself flying over L.A. and the ocean. I am now definitely lucid. I can feel my pulse pounding in my head. I strongly suspect that the sensation is coming from my real body, but I choose to ignore that thought and focus my attention firmly on the dream. I use the moving-my-fists-together-or-apart technique I've described in previous entries to control my flight.

I'm driving along Pacific Coast Highway. I decide I want to drive to Newport Beach. I know I've succeeded when I pass a motel that has a sign on it that says “Newport Beach.” I also pass another, two-story motel that has water slides built right into the front of it.

When I get to the street that leads down to the beach, I turn left, then peel off to the right to follow the road that leads down from the mesa and over to the beach. [This road exists in real life. The motels do not, as far as I know.] Since I've met my goal of driving to the beach, I think, I am awesome!

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

I'm at the park in the neighborhood where Houses #1 and #2 are. I'm in a building in the park that houses a snack bar. There are various types of junk food available for sale, and there's a young man staffing the snack bar. I talk to him, saying something like, “It's nice to see this snack bar open! I've lived here since I was one and a half, and this is the first time I've ever seen this place staffed.”

I go into a back room of the same building. There are a whole bunch of little kids there, and I'm supposed to give them a speech, explaining about some kind of event that's going on. I climb up on top of the bed, stand on it, and speak very haltingly. I'm sleepy, so I go to sleep in one of the beds that's in that back room.

I'm in an underground garage, where racing cars are getting ready for a race. Each one starts out from a different parking space in the garage and drives up one of several ramps to get out onto the outdoor, ground-level race track. I stand close to one of the pillars, afraid that one of the cars will run me over if I get in the way. There are some other people standing around in the garage, and I try to ask them how to get out. I try to shout to make myself heard over the noise of the car engines, but they drown out my voice.

After all the cars are gone, the people answer my question. They give me directions up and out of the underground garage and into a garden. They tell me to climb on top of this boxy wooden frame thing and balance there, while holding a potted plant with bright red flowers on top of a long stem. I do so. The people and I start singing a little song, the last line of which is, “I'll spontaneously combust!” I know that this is what will happen when I reach the end of the song, but I'm not afraid, because I know that that's how I'm going to get out of this place and back to the real world.

Indeed, right before I reach the last syllable of the last word, I suddenly can't see anything, and I feel a sensation come over my entire body. It doesn't feel like being burned with fire, though; it's the pins-and-needles feeling of random feedback from nerve endings. I find that I've woken up.

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

I wake up in my current room, go out to the kitchen, and start attempting to make coffee. The coffeemaker is big and complicated, with lots of buttons, and I can't figure out how to use it properly. While it's percolating, I decide to take the carafe out [I don't remember why], and press the Stop button, but it doesn't stop completely. Six thin jets of coffee continue to come out of it, streaming down onto the heating element and boiling and sizzling away. I look in the cupboard for breakfast, and find lots of mini-donuts and other packaged foods there. All the time I'm getting breakfast, my mind is on the fact that I have to get out of the house in time for my 8:00 A.M. meeting. [I actually had such a meeting coming up in the morning in real life, and it was on my mind as I went to bed, so, not surprisingly, I dreamed about it.]

I have another false awakening in which I check the time on my cell phone and see that it's only 6:17 A.M. Good; there's still plenty of time to get to the meeting.

I woke up, for real this time, at the end of a sleep cycle, and said sarcastically, “Well, that was wonderful.” I didn't bother to get up to check the time on my phone.

I'm on my college campus, walking around outside the dorm buildings, which are big and L-shaped and multistory. I'm trying to get to my room, which is room number 16999-A (that is, bedroom A in suite number 16999). I stop and talk to a resident assistant (RA), who asks me where I'm going. I tell him [her? not sure], and he [she?] consults a list and says that someone else is already in that bedroom. I know I'm supposed to be in that room, and I say so, showing the RA the key I have to that suite. He [she?] permits me to continue on and go to the room.

I continue walking, outside, among the dorm buildings. I pass another RA at the entrance to a new part of the complex of buildings, and speak to her as well. She tells me that there's a game of Sardines going on in that part of the complex, and offers me a raffle ticket, which shows that I'm participating in the game. I accept it and continue walking. I find the entrance to suite 16999, which is at the corner of the long, narrow building, on one of the longer sides. I stick my head in the door, but don't go in. [So I never did find out whether or not anyone else was in my bedroom.] All throughout this part of my dream, my mind is still focused on the fact that I have to make it to an 8:00 A.M. meeting.

I continue exploring around the sunny side of the building. There are basketball and handball courts there; it looks a lot like the playground of an elementary school. The sunlight is very bright and cheerful. On the other side of the courts from the building, there is a chain-link fence on the border of the playground. On the other side of the fence is a river.

Not far from the playground is a covered pavilion housing the queue for a tram that offers tours of the campus. It's the same kind of tram used at the parking lot at Disneyland. The tram passes through, setting out on its tour. A group of five students with ski masks on, their heads wrapped in white cloth, and dark sunglasses are walking alongside the tram. They're tour guides, and this is their on-campus job. They're holding a series of signs that say something like, “Be sure to pay your tram driver.” I wave at them as they pass, and they wave back. As the tram pulls out of the pavilion and drives away, a group of five or six people runs out of the queuing area, trying to catch up with the tram. They wanted to get on it for the tour, but they got there too late.

[Dreamskip.] I'm walking across a parking lot. I recognize that I'm dreaming, and that I've had this dream before. [Now that I'm awake, though, I don't remember having had it before.] I begin to concentrate on my feet, watching them move as I walk. I'm wearing dark red-brown, slip-on, closed-toed shoes with big bows on the toes that are made of the same shiny, leather-like material as the rest of the shoes. As I approach my car, I attempt to ensure that my computer backpack will be in the trunk when I get there by expecting it to be there this time. It doesn't work. Other stuff is in there, but no computer backpack.

Some guy starts talking to me as I look into my trunk. My boss is there, too. The other guy gives me a long, ornate, old-fashioned, brass key with a long, thin black string tied to the loop on one end. When he gives it to me, he says something like, “These instructions are very important. You must never let this item leave your possession.”

“Because it represents my soul?” I ask.

“It represents a lot of things,” he answers. I infer that my soul is one of those things.

[I don't remember the rest of the instructions, but they probably included the following information, because I do remember knowing it:] I understand that this key is a skeleton key. It's not just an ordinary skeleton key, either; it is magical and can unlock any door in the dream world.

That guy, my boss, and I go exploring somewhere else together. I use my key to unlock a door at one point. At another point, I ask that guy, “Do you have a name?”

“Karim, or...” he begins.

“Karim,” I say. “Okay.” To me, the way he said “or...” after his name implies that he has many names, and I'm welcome to use any of them, but I just go with the first one he says.

Karim, my boss, and I are climbing a ladder up through a narrow shaft. I look up and am intimidated by how long the shaft is, but I can see the top of the ladder, far away. [That's the last thing I remember from this dream.]

When my alarm finally went off, I was relieved that I was back in reality, and that there was still plenty of time to get to the meeting.

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Side notes:

I don't remember having the high level of conscious self-awareness in this dream that I've had in past lucid dreams, but if I started trying to use dream powers, I must have known that I was dreaming. Also, when I was receiving the instructions about the key, I was definitely aware that the context to which those instructions applied was my dreams, which I was in.

Have I met my dream guide? I can't say for sure. I feel uneasy about it. What I can say is that I hope Karim and the key show up in future dreams.

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

It's after closing time at a big, fancy modern office building, but I have to go back inside to retrieve something. On my way in, I see a couple of my friends from a club I'm in, and say hello to them. Someone closes the door that leads deeper into the interior of the building before I can get to it. There is a sign on the wall next to it that reads “Shift Workers.” Since I don't have a key to this door, I decide that whatever I was going to get can wait until the next day, and abandon my errand. I walk back out of the building and through the glass front doors.

Outside the doors is a wide, concrete entry plaza with concrete stairs leading down to the street on the side opposite the doors. The plaza and the stairs are crowded with people. As I cross the plaza, I meet Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. We walk down the stairs together, talking. At the bottom of the stairs, a guy in a movie-quality Darth Maul costume is greeting kids in character.

Ellen, Joe, and I have to get to a meeting or event somewhere else, so we start walking there. Ellen is wearing her teal evening gown [the one she's wearing in the picture I linked to above]. As we walk along a road in a semi-rural area, she carries me by holding her right forearm straight out to the side and parallel to the ground, and letting me sit on it. I can feel my pelvic bones digging into her arm. I wonder if she's doing all right carrying me all this way, since I'm bigger and heavier than she is, but I don't say anything, and she doesn't complain. She starts singing a song in Japanese, one I recognize and know well, so I join in and sing along. I think, I didn't know she was an anime fan. When we get to the end of the song, I identify it: “Digimon, season 1, ending 1.” [That ending song sounds like this in real life, but the song we were singing didn't sound like that at all. It sounded a little more like this one, but not really.] I think, The only other people I've had friendships this close with have been my AmeriCorps friends.

We come upon a park. There are several people there with some dogs that they, and Ellen, identify as Rottweilers, but they have reddish fur and look kind of fox-like. I somehow manage to drop my purse and the series of plastic bags containing the components of our picnic lunch all over the grass, and have to get them back without the dogs attacking me. I start picking them up, saying to Ellen, “I don't give a s*** about the food, I just want my purse back!” I'm scared of the dogs. One of them does end up biting my hand, but more playfully than viciously; I can feel its teeth on my hand. I try to get my hand out of its mouth without tearing the skin on a tooth. [I think] I finally succeed, after I've removed the mask that has slipped down over my eyes so that I can see it again. [I was, as usual, wearing a sleep mask in real life. I also remember having to remove covers from my ears in order to hear people at some point during this dream, but I don't remember when. I didn't have anything in or covering my ears in real life.]

We leave the park, and continue on our way down the road. I am now riding bareback on a big, black cow. Ellen is walking next to it. [Joe had disappeared from the dream entirely by this point.] I can feel the cow's fur, warmth, and movement. We're almost to our destination, which is a boxy, white, one-story set of office buildings on the next block. I think about how many different forms of transportation I've taken on my way to this place: walking, being carried by Ellen, riding in a golf cart, and now riding on a cow. [I don't remember the part of the dream where I rode in a golf cart anymore.] The office building is set back from the road a little bit. Before we get to it, and right up next to the road, there is a stable with a whole herd of black cows in it. The cow I'm riding stops in front of the stable, facing it, and moos. All the other cows moo back. This exchange repeats twice. I dismount from the cow so that she can go into the stable. She gets scared of something and climbs one of the support beams holding the roof of the stable up. She clings to the top of it, now about the size of a human child.

I turn back to face the way we just came. A woman is approaching me on the road. She has a geometric pattern of straight lines with corners all over her tan skin, and is busy putting on a silver loincloth-skirt thing as she walks toward me. I call her “Charissa” as I approach her. That's the last I remember before waking up.

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Side notes:

Two of the last things I did before going to bed last night were watching a Star Wars fan video and working on my current Arthur/Ariadne fanfic. I'm slightly surprised both that those elements showed up in my dreams immediately (unusual for me) and that it wasn't the characters themselves who showed up, but the actors who played them.

This was a really cool, fairly vivid dream with a lot of tactile sensation. I was also amazed to realize upon waking up that I'd slept right through my parents' morning routine, the sounds of which usually prevent me from getting back to sleep for that last cycle. This difference can probably be explained by the fact that I didn't get to sleep until after midnight last night, which is later than I usually do these days.

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

[This post contains dreams from last night and from Sunday night.]

Night of February 13-14

I'm out and about somewhere in town [Pat and Oscar's? It kind of looked like it]. Along the way, I sing a song: “I Run For Life” by Melissa Etheridge. [In the dream, I sang the lyrics correctly but in the wrong order, moving the first two lines of the last verse to the beginning of the first verse, and yet, I didn't take note of this as being strange.]

I'm at my kitchen table, eating breakfast. My mom is standing in the kitchen. We're carrying on a perfectly normal conversation about whether or not we're going out for coffee this morning. At first it seems like we are, but then my mom suggests that we could have premade bottled coffee here at home instead, so we do. It's cinnamon-flavored, and she prepares it by putting creamer into it.

When I woke up for real, I was slightly surprised to discover that the above paragraph had just been a dream, and that I hadn't actually gotten up yet.

Night of February 15-16

[Dream #1] I'm in a somewhat dark, upstairs room somewhere, with either my mom or my sister. [I can't remember now; the dream quality was low, but I did know that I was dreaming.] We've found a baby doll with long, red hair that sings Christmas carols. I sing along with whatever song it's playing as I walk across the room.

[Dream #2] I'm driving in my car on a freeway where everyone is driving much faster than I usually like to drive. Feeling like I have no choice, I match their pace. I want to get off the freeway soon, and as soon as I see an opening, I take advantage of it and move over into the lanes to my right, so that I can get to the offramp.

[Dreamskip.] I've now gotten off the freeway and parked in a parking structure. Somewhere around here, I realize that I'm dreaming. I walk over to the elevator to take it down to the ground floor. Two other girls are also approaching it, and they get into the elevator with me. One of them starts talking with me, and I introduce myself by name and shake hands with her.

When we're in the elevator, I get a good look at her. She has long, black hair, worn in two braids, and is pretty. I recognize her as my friend Tashi from my freshman year of college. “Tashi?” I say.

“No,” she says, shaking her head.

“Don't you remember me from college?”

“No. I know you, though.”

“So you do remember me, but not from the same place that I remember you from.”

She indicates that this is correct. I notice that the two girls are duplicates of each other. Then I woke up.

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

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of December 22-23, 2010.]

I'm riding in the back of my parents' car as we drive to the home of a friend of mine in Wrightwood. As we drive along the winding mountain road [which has appeared in at least one dream before this one, but I don't think I bothered to write it down], I notice that a Walgreens has opened in this remote little mountain town, and I am bothered by its presence there. I feel that it spoils the natural, rustic ambiance of the place. As the drive goes on, I start to feel sleepy.

We arrive at my friend's house. I meet their dog, and I'm nowhere near as afraid of being met by a new dog as I used to be [in real life]. Inside the house, there is a party going on, with lots of people. I eat dinner with some of them in the living room. The topic of conversation is how people who move out here to the mountains do so because they want to be 100% original and avoid letting big corporations influence their lifestyle too much, which is why the presence of a Walgreens is so offensive to the people who live here.

I wander into another room of the house, where I find a dog and a cat. Oh, great, I think. Now I'm going to have an allergy attack. [This is exactly how I would react to this situation in reality, by the way.] There are a whole bunch of different games set up on two different tables in this room. One of them is a stack of bowls, each with a vocabulary question and answer printed on it and a logo that reads “OKWords.” Another is a fallen phrases puzzle whose solution is an invocation to some mythological (possibly Norse?) god of death. There are quite a few people in this room, too. One of them is wearing a purple dinosaur suite, and another has some Pokemon dolls. As I'm walking around in the room, someone sends me back into the other room to find out what everyone there wants to drink. I walk back into the first room to find out. There is a large tray of cookies and other goodies on the table in that room; I eat a blueberry off of it.

The dream shifts to a new dream. Now, I'm in a movie/book titled Tron. [It has absolutely nothing to do with the real-life Tron.] The story I'm in involves an alternate dimension, which is accessed through a big, hidden doorway. Said alternate dimension is a typical epic fantasy world, and the story that takes place there has a lot of the universal mythic feel of the original Star Wars trilogy. I can understand why people are so insulted by the lightshow that is the new Tron; it has none of this mythic feel at all. [In real life, I've seen the original Tron, but not the new one. The content of this dream was based entirely on Internet hearsay about the new one.] There is a very clear scene in which the bad guys get through the aforementioned hidden doorway, and watch the good guys' actions on giant magical screens that are really interdimensional gateways.

The scene shifts again. Now, rather than being in the scene from the old Tron, I'm watching it with a group of people I know in real life, including Guy and some of my fellow students from his classes. As I watch, I realize that the scene we're watching was shot at Disneyland, due to the disguised but clearly visible Matterhorn in one broad shot of the landscape. I say aloud, “Wow, awesome! I won't say it, I'm just thinking it very loudly.”

The scene shifts again. Now that same group of people and I are on the train that goes around [this particular dream version of] Disneyland. We pass several other park landmarks that have been disguised to look like other things, like the Matterhorn was. The train passes behind a large, white, curved, several-story office building. I am shooting ahead of the train, flying on hover boots. As the train and I approach the Tron station (where we started our train trip around the park), I tell the boots to slow down, because my legs are starting to hurt from being kept bent at a 90-degree angle at the knee so that I can stay upright while using the hover boots. I say aloud, “Slow down, boots. Please?” They don't slow down. My alarm woke me up out of this scene, which disappointed me, because it was a really cool dream. I was also dismayed to realize that meeting the dog and not being afraid of it had been a dream.

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

[Another really long entry, but it's a really good one this time. Sorry for taking up so much page space again.]

I'm on the playground of my elementary school. It's dusk, and there are lots and lots of kids and teenagers on the playground, some playing games, others just milling around. I see one group of kids playing something that they call tackle football; it involves one person on the team holding a bowl of green beans and others holding and occasionally eating spoonfuls of the green beans, while the entire team moves around the field. Curious about the game they're playing, I approach the group.

“Are those green beans?” I ask.

“Yes,” someone in the group says.

The group spreads out a little, and I see that two of the people in it are P. and Thomas[, who first appeared in my dream dated December 7]. The instant I see him, I know for sure that I'm dreaming. “Thomas?” I say, looking at him. He acknowledges me. I'm pleasantly surprised to see him again, and amazed at how completely real all the people around me look. Throughout the rest of this dream, I make a special effort to pay attention to the environment around me, including paying attention to the physical sensations of touching things whenever I can. I'm aware that if I don't, they'll stop existing and fade away.

I start wandering through the playground, heading back toward the school buildings. P. and Thomas are following me. It's now fully dark, but the playground is still crowded. I end up on the sidewalk of the street that runs along the south side of the school and passes the kindergarten before the dreamscape shifts on me.

I don't notice the shift itself, but I find myself walking through the streets of a charming, slightly old-fashioned downtown with square, orderly blocks. There's no one else around. I stop and turn around, attempting to summon P. and/or Thomas by expecting them to be there. It doesn't work; I'm all alone. I shrug and continue exploring. As I had in the previous scene, I continue to notice and marvel at how vivid, detailed, and realistic the environment around me is. Everything looks and feels exactly like reality, yet I know perfectly well that I'm dreaming. I can even feel the asphalt and pavement under my feet. [It didn't occur to me until I had woken up and was lying there, recalling my dream, that I must have looked pretty funny wandering around in public places with no shoes on. ] I remember one of my lucid goals and attempt to walk through a wall into one of the shops. I try it twice, but it doesn't work either time; I'm not surprised at all to discover that the wall is just as solid and “real” as everything else in this dream world. As I continue walking, I think, Wow, this dream is really stable and seems to be going on for a long time. What should I do here? Oh, yeah – the Task of the Month is to hit a DC with a snowball. I'll have to go find a snowball. But there is no snow in this setting, and the weather is clear and bright.

I pass a small shop front on a street corner, with a red brick facade and a walk-up window where you can buy things. I recognize the woman inside as Lisa D., a real-life friend. I stop and talk to her. I say, “Lisa, do you happen to know where I might find a snowball?” She invites me to come into the shop through the door on the side. I stand just outside the door. [I don't know why; recall is a little vague here.] The small shop is actually a short truck, which is backed up to the brick facade with the window in it with its back cargo door open, forming the interior space. Lisa starts up the truck and starts driving it away from the facade and along the street. I walk quickly along with it for a little way, holding on to the frame of the open, narrow door on the side and keeping pace with it. Then I step up into the truck through the doorway and ride in it. I say aloud, “I could float along with the truck, but when the truck is moving, why make the effort?” I vaguely remember another person being in the doorway with me, but if so, I don't know who it was.

I ride inside the truck as it drives up into the mountains. While sitting in the truck, I hold onto the handle of a plastic bucket, feeling the sensation to ensure the dream remains stable. The truck takes me to a town on a mountaintop. I'm on or near a different, fenced-in school playground [I think; again, my recall isn't very good here.] I can see buildings on the tops of nearby hills, and I think I catch a glimpse of a patch of snow on a distant hilltop, but I'm not sure.

[I think] The scene shifts again, and I'm walking around on the campus of a community college. [Day residue; I walked back and forth across my real community college campus several times yesterday.] There's no one else around. This community college campus has slightly more traditional-looking architecture than my real one does, has a different layout, and there are more plants around and they're more mature, making the campus greener than my real one. This is a pretty campus, I think. I'm still admiring how vivid and "real" my surroundings are as I explore them, and I'm still looking for snow, but not finding any.

[Dreamskip? Another scene shift? I'm not sure, but the next thing I remember is that] I'm walking through the interior of a large, recreational building. I'm in a spacious, high-ceilinged indoor space with two swimming pools in it, a large, deep one and a smaller, shallower one, at right angles to each other. There are people in this room, many of them kids, walking around, swimming, and getting into and out of the pools. In one corner of the room is the entrance to a child-care room, which is full of brightly pastel-colored play equipment with little kids playing on it. It's separated from the room with the pools by glass walls. One of the glass walls has sticky gel letters on the inside of it, so that they look backward from outside the room. I can still read them backward, though. When I first look at them, I read them as “Children Sno” and think, Yay, snow! Then I approach the room for a closer look and realize that I've misread them; they say “Children Glo.” I leave the room, walking on the path between the narrow end of the larger pool and the longer side of the smaller pool. As I walk, I complain aloud: “There's no snow here! I mean, I know I've lived in Southern California all my life, but come on! Can't I have some imagination?” [I was complaining about the fact that, even though I wanted to complete the Task of the Month, my mind wasn't creating any snow in my dream world. The explanation I came up with for this observation was that I've never spent a winter in an area where it snows, so my mind can't re-create snow very easily, because I've only experienced it in real life a couple of times, so I don't know what it's like very well.]

Outside the recreational building, there's a courtyard or patio where a large group of people are having a celebration or reception. I walk among them without speaking to anyone. No one takes any notice of me. There are folding tables with paper tablecloths and lots of food set out on them, including oatmeal cookies. [I wish I'd thought to try one! This was the first time I've had the chance to try dream food while lucid, and I missed it! Dang!] Still in search of a snowball to throw, I decide to try summoning one by reaching under a small table of food next to a wall, without looking, and expecting a snowball to be there. It doesn't work. When I look, the only thing under the table is a small, open-topped cardboard box with some kind of party supplies in it, like paper napkins. [I note that in my attempts to summon people or things in this dream, I did not have the same quiet assurance and confidence that it would work as I had at those times in the past when I successfully summoned an object. I wasn't truly focusing on it or believing in it this time, which, I think, is why it didn't work.]

I get up from looking under the table and look around at the people celebrating. I sense that the dream is about to end. I close my eyes, hoping to use that method of teleporting to get to another environment. I just end up looking at the inside of my real eyelids.

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Side notes:

This dream came at the end of a very bad, emotionally draining day and a late night. I was too tired to really try to induce a lucid dream. All I did was get up for a minute or two and go back to bed right before I had this dream, do a minimal amount of affirmations (maybe one or two), and wear my cardboard-square wristband on the inside of my right wrist, which I hadn't worn at all in a while. It may have been one of these things that caused such a long, vivid lucid dream, or maybe it was just the fact that I'd had a bad day and wanted to escape from it all (even though I consciously told myself before bed that that was stupid). I sure did feel a lot happier and better after waking up from my dream, though.

After waking up, I realized two things about this dream:
A) Expecting to be able to summon a snowball was stupid because, unlike the seed pod that I successfully summoned before (see entry dated October 26, 2010), a snowball doesn't naturally exist as a discrete object. You have to make a snowball yourself.
B) I was surrounded by DCs several times. I could have talked to my subconscious and asked for the answers to the questions from my exam that I missed because I had studied those subjects months ago, forgotten about them, and failed to review before the exam. (I'm not saying for sure that it would have worked, but it would have been fun to try. I'm curious to know if it can work.) I actually thought about doing that before I went to bed, but I didn't even think of it while I was dreaming. The only thing it occurred to me to do was to hit a DC with a snowball. Silly me! I will have to add “ask a DC about stuff I should know, but have forgotten” to my list of goals.

One final note: Wow. I now have a recurring, original, named dream character who is neither a pre-existing fictional character nor anyone I know in real life, and seeing him made me go lucid because I remembered meeting him in a previous dream, and here he was again, so I had to be dreaming. That's pretty neat. I can't say for sure that that officially makes him my dream guide, though, at least not just yet. It didn't occur to me to ask him if he was one. If I see him again, I'll try to remember to do that.