The Lab Notebook

Non-lucid dream, [Commentary made while awake]

[Fragment:] I'm sorting through laundry, separating out the things that need to be washed. [Heh. Apparently, anything you've been avoiding dealing with in real life can show up in a dream, even if it's something completely mundane. ]

[The following is a different dream. I'm writing this at the end of the day after I woke up from it, rather than in the morning, right after waking up for it, so I've probably forgotten a lot by now. What I'm about to write here is all I remember now. Sorry.]

I'm a member of a group of Chosen Children [from the Digimon anime series; these people are otherwise known as Digidestined in the English dub]. Everyone in the group is around my own age. [Yes, I was the same age in my dream as I am in real life. Yes, I'm way too old to be a Chosen Child by the standards of any of the anime series. Evidently, my subconscious doesn't care about that.] There are at least 20 people in the group. We all go into a fairly small cabin, the kind that would be at a summer camp, in which we all have to find a space to lie down in, because we're all going to enter a dream together [Inception-style. No, I never once realized I was dreaming throughout this entire dream. Yes, I feel silly now.]. I climb into the upper bunk of one of the many bunk beds in the room. Addressing the group at large, I say something like, “Try to make space on the floor for everyone.”

With my right hand, I push up the left sleeve of my shirt to expose the inside of my left elbow. I wait for someone to come around with an IV needle for me. I'm not looking forward to having the needle put in, and want to just get it over with already. [Exactly how I feel about them in real life.]

I'm now in the first dream level, with the same group of people. Once again, we're all lying down, waiting to get IV needles put in. I think, We need to go into the deeper dream levels so that we can get into our stronger Digimon forms. I have the following knowledge about our current situation: We're in the midst of a mission to defeat some enemy, and in order to transform into the strongest Digimon forms we have available to us, we have to be several dream levels deep.

This time, I actually feel the needle being stuck in, but not into my elbow - it gets stuck into the tip of my left thumb. It's still not a pleasant experience, of course. I can feel it in there, and can feel my pulse throbbing in the tip of my thumb.

[Awesome. I love the premise of this dream. I'm slightly tempted to write crossover fanfic based on it, but I don't have time to write fanfic.]

[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. These dreams are from the night of June 27-28, 2011.]

I'm creeping around a parking lot, in the nude. [This has been a recurring circumstance in my dreams lately. Why is that, I wonder?] I'm trying to get to my car without being seen by anyone.

I'm in a room with a small stage, with a full set for a play on it, where people are rehearsing for a play. Nobody is playing the part of Morgan, so I jump in to play that role. In the play, Morgan is a little girl who watches her mom get murdered right in front of her, in their home. The mom is lying in her bed, and the murderer is some guy who shoots her with a rifle while she's lying there. As I'm acting out Morgan's part, I scream and shriek horrifically in reaction to this, and I start crying real tears. When the scene has ended, I tell the director of the play and the other actors that I'll probably really cry every time we rehearse this scene, but then I take it back, saying: “Even I know better than to do that. If I do that, then I won't have anything left for the performance.”

I'm riding in a car with my parents. We're discussing the washing instructions for a baseball cap that my mom has. They say to 'show' the cap to dry it, and I explain to my mom that the intended meaning there was to 'display' it, e.g., to leave it sitting out to dry. We also discuss how my mom recently had to have the password for some online account set, and in order to do that, they had to ship a packet of papers containing the printed password from Florida to somewhere else on the East Coast.

I'm in a big, cathedral-like building where a lot of people have gathered for a religious service, or a performance, or something like that. We've given everyone a password so that those who want to [and who have laptops] can log in to a Web site to see what's really going on behind the scenes of what's happening in front of them on stage. Apparently, the service/performance/whatever-it-is has something to do with Inception, because I have a printed book that is a dictionary of its characters, items, and concepts.

[Fragment] I'm taking all the bedclothes off my bed, and I realize that what makes my bed so soft and comfortable isn't the mattress itself, but the mattress pad. [This has been a concern of mine in real life lately, pursuant to my upcoming move to a new place with a new mattress.]

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of June 18-19, and it's one of the most fascinating lucids I've had yet.]

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

I'm shopping at the old Toys 'R Us that we used to go to when I was a kid. [In real life, it's been closed for several years.] I've driven up there all the way from my current town, by myself, and I told my parents where I was going before I left. I've come there just to get the purple hippo stuffed animal that I saw advertised. I find it, go to a checkout stand, swipe my credit card through the card reader sitting on the floor near one of the checkouts, and then walk to the other side of the line of checkouts and get in line to check out. There's quite a long line, but it's moving fairly quickly because there are a lot of checkouts open, and all the checkers are calling people over from that one line. The line is in a rectangular, dark, warehouse-like space in the front of the store, separated from the store proper by high, dark gray metal shelf racks that reach all the way to the high ceiling. When it comes my turn to check out, the checker waves me through when I show her my toy and the receipt that was printed out of the credit card reader.

I exit the store and get into my car [our current, brown Honda]. I examine my purple hippo. It's smaller and narrower than the teddy bear I already have [in real life], and therefore not as good a shape for use as an arm pillow, but still, it's kinda cute. I can feel that it has a plastic cup built into its nose, so that its nose holds its conical shape. I set it down on the floor of the passenger seat, start the car up, and drive out of the parking lot via the ramp behind and to the right of the store.

This ramp forces me to turn right, putting me onto a one-way street. “This is why my parents never went out this way,” I say to myself. I end up driving through a neat, clean, inviting-looking urban downtown area, with lots of modern, glass buildings, concrete parking structures, and trees on the sidewalks.

[The dream shifts.] I'm walking the darkened halls of a big, old apartment building whose halls form a continuous square. Stuff involving Muppets, a bird named Gloria, and an alarm clock happens. [This was another elaborate and plotty dream, but I don't really remember the details anymore. I don't particularly care, though, because the next part is the really awesome part.]

[The dream shifts again.] I'm out on the town, in the same cool, modern downtown I was driving around earlier, only now I'm on foot. While walking across a plaza, I see several of my friends from [$SocialClub] [an organization I belong to in real life]. I recognize that I've been in this downtown before, and am very happy to be here. Somewhere around this point, I become lucid. [As usual, I don't remember precisely at what moment I did so. It may have been that recognition that I'd been there before that triggered lucidity, but I'm not sure.] I also pass by my friends from [$Class], who are on their way to class. I think of going with them, but choose to go off by myself and explore instead.

I end up on a particular street corner where there is a restaurant with a live band playing inside. I enter the restaurant to listen to the band. The restaurant is named “Café Debussy.” [ :gape: Whoa. That is so awesome. That's the name of the cafe where Cobb gives Ariadne her first lesson in shared dreaming in Inception. That is just so cool that I have my own version of it. I may have realized the significance of this name at that moment, or it may not have been until after I woke up, I'm not sure.]

While I'm in the restaurant, I meet and get into a conversation with a female dream character, who asks me who I am. I say the same kinds of things I would say when meeting someone for the first time in real life: that I live and work nearby, what I do, that I'm a member of [$SocialClub]. When I finish, she looks at me with an expression that shows that she's disappointed in me, and that she can see right through the baloney I'm giving her. “Who are you, really?” she asks.

I sigh and start telling her the truth.

“I'm from another world, that's not like yours,” I say. “I only come to visit here when I'm dreaming.” I stop myself short of saying that I'm dreaming all this that's around us.

As I speak, we start rising up off the ground. I'm either flying us up or causing a tower to grow up from the ground under us. [I'm not exactly sure, but I think it was more likely the latter, because] I'm making the buildings all around us grow taller or shorter, or change shape, just by thinking about it. I'm doing this because I want to show my companion the city from up high.

“Because I'm dreaming, I can control the situation, like this,” I say. “It's fun.” [I say a bit more that I don't remember now, and then] I end by sighing again, then saying, “So, here I am, your dreamer.” I extend my hand to shake hands with her.

She takes it. [Surprisingly,] The female DC reacts to what I've just told her with happiness and excitement. She leads me purposefully off in a direction across the city, apparently intending to tell others about what she has learned and introduce them to me. As we go, I realize that in all the time we've been talking, I haven't told her my name, so I say to her, “My name is [$RealFirstName].” I deliberately use the nickname by which I'm known to family and friends in real life, rather than my official, legal name, because I don't want the Fae to know my true name, because that will give them power over me. [Seriously, that's what I thought during the dream. I would never set any store by such an idea in real life.] She doesn't reply, though.

[She didn't introduce me to anyone, though. The next thing I remember,] The female DC and I have walked out to a metal, industrial-looking bridge, from which we're watching the sunset over the cityscape. I ask her, “What's your name?”

“Darla,” she says.

I shake my head and correct her: “No, that's the name of my friend who looks like you. What's your name?” Although she looks like one of my real-life friends, I'm interested in her identity as a separate individual.

From the way she hesitates for at least 15 seconds, going “Hmmmm...” several times while looking all around her at our surroundings, it's clear that she's never thought of herself as having an individual name separate from that of her real-life counterpart before. Finally, she looks over at the setting sun and says, “Umbra.” [She pronounces it “OOM-brah;” it means “shadow” in Latin. Hmmm. Very interesting.]

[Fragment.] Something involving roller coasters that look like snakes.

[False awakening.] I'm comparing notes with my mom about whether or not we just had the same dream about snakes.

[Different dream.] I'm on a ride that has foam seats with over-the-shoulder restraints. The seats are suspended high up in the air from an overhead track in a large building. I've somehow managed to board the ride so that I'm perched in between two seats, rather than fully seated in one of them. While the train of seats I'm on is moving to its destination, I manage to maneuver myself into one of the seats and get the restraints into place.

My train of seats arrives at its destination: directly above a gigantic aquarium tank. That's when I realize what the purpose of this ride is: to allow visitors a chance to be submerged in the tank for several minutes on end. I realize that I was supposed to bring a snorkel or scuba gear with me on this ride, but I didn't, and there's no way to get out of the restraints before I get dunked in the tank. I'm only mildly concerned about this, though.

I hold my breath and the seats descend, submerging me and everyone else several feet underwater. As soon as the seats have stopped descending, I start swimming upward, taking my seat and my restraints with me [I think; I'm not sure]. The moment I break the surface of the water, I found myself awake. I immediately kicked myself for not realizing that I was dreaming and subsequently recalling that I can breathe underwater in dreams.

Night of May 23-24, 2011

I'm at Disneyland. I'm visiting with some guy who [apparently] designs and develops roller coasters. I watch a video of a roller coaster in action. The video freeze-frames at various moments.

At Disneyland, there is a new building under construction, and it is visible from the hub. [I think] It's in that space that they can never quite decide what to do with, the space that used to be home to the House of the Future and is currently a character meet-and-greet. The new building fits in well in its location; it's built in the same architectural style as the rest of Main Street. [It made sense in the dream.]

It is dusk, and the sky is clear and incredibly beautiful. I walk slowly down a completely deserted Main Street, carrying in both hands a lit candle in a clear glass cup. I take the time to deeply appreciate the deep beauty, calm, and peace of the scene around me. As I walk, the following thought crosses my mind: No matter who you are or where you go, you'll always find your way back home.

The goal toward which I'm walking toward is a single lightbulb, mounted in a light fixture in the teal-colored, wooden wall that forms the main entrance to the park. This light fixture is right next to one of the doors by which people enter and exit the park. I set my candle down on the steps leading up to the door, then go out through it.

On the other side of the door, there is a wide, concrete-paved entrance plaza. Out here, it's still earlier evening; the sky is on fire with the golden light of a sun that hasn't set yet, but will soon. There's still nothing but a vast expanse of parking lot beyond the perimeter of the entrance plaza. I see F.J. [a real-life friend] crossing the plaza, approaching me. He's been looking for me, because he's there to pick me up and take me home.

[The dream shifts.] I'm in a fancy restaurant, [possibly] in Downtown Disney or at the Disneyland Hotel. I'm with someone who I know is actually Eames, even though he looks exactly like Leonardo DiCaprio. [:-) Plot bunny?] He picks up a drinking glass from a nearby table and shows it to me, showing me that this restaurant is where one can find the kind of glass that my candle was in. He then tosses that glass onto the floor, breaking it. I'm horribly embarrassed by him.

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Side notes:
This was a particularly clear, vivid, and beautiful non-lucid. Not only was the scenery beautiful, but so was the sense of happiness, peace, and well-being I experienced while in the dream. I still felt wonderful when I woke up from it.

Night of May 24-25, 2011 [I think; or it might have been any day between the 25th and the 28th. That's what I get for not bothering to write them down immediately.]

I'm in my current bedroom with J. [a real-life student of mine]. I'm hugging her and pouring out love and affection, as if she were my own child, even though I know she's my student. She returns the love and affection, hugging me back.

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

I'm at my new church. The sanctuary is big and sort of round [more so than it is in reality]. I'm sitting on a pew near the front of the room, from which I can see both the altar and the center of the room. In the center of the room is an elevated circle with six thick, round columns spaced evenly around its outer edge. Beyond the outer edge of the circle, centered in the back of the room just in front of the main doors, is a lectern. I recognize it as our regular lectern, even though it and all the columns are festooned with decorative constructs made out of LEGO toys. A sort of mesh made of bright orange axles and connectors from a LEGO set hangs down a little way over the sides of the top of the lectern. The columns are all similarly decorated. The woman standing at the back of the room places a LEGO construct that she refers to as her “crown of thorns” on top of one of the columns. This causes all the columns to start moving vertically, changing their relative heights. I think about how cool all this is, especially the hydraulic-powered columns.

The sanctuary is filled with people. We're there for the Children's Stations of the Cross [an event that actually is coming up in just a few weeks]. There are lots of kids there, going through the stations in small groups. A group of kids walks by in front of my pew, and I hear one of the girls in it complain that there aren't enough girls in her group. I decide to join the group so that there will be more girls in it. [I was my adult self in this dream, but no one took any particular notice of me.]

I follow the group to the back of the room, out the main doors, and into the narthex. We stop at the location of the plaque designating the first station, which is hanging on the wall between the narthex and the sanctuary, just to the right of the main doors to the sanctuary. Another adult woman is operating this first station. She's ready for us with a toy that someone at the church put together to make Stations of the Cross more interactive and engaging: a pretend PASIV device. Inside the case, I see a piece of equipment from Verizon's network, a white metal rectangular box with the Verizon logo on top. I know that the box contains telephone cables on coils that allow them to be pulled out and then retracted. You can pull out the cables through holes in the side of the box, and that's what the woman does. The plastic jacks on the ends of the cables plug into matching ports on the bracelets that the kids and I are all wearing. The jacks and ports are the same size and shape as the ones used for the LEGO NXT robots and their sensors, I note. [The cables, however, are satiny silver-gray in color, not black like in real life.]

When all of us are plugged in by our bracelets and the device is turned on, the bracelets start pulsating, contracting and expanding in a way meant to simulate the sensation of an increasing heart rate. The experience is intended to help us identify and empathize with someone who is in mortal terror. While doing this, we all lie down on the tile floor and pretend to be asleep, because we know that this is what we're supposed to do when playing with a pretend dream-sharing device. [When I woke up and recalled all this, I thought it was hilarious both that my brain had created this scenario directly inspired by Inception, and that I had never realized that I was dreaming.]

After this, I walk through the parish hall [both the narthex and the parish hall are exactly like the ones at St. Mark's in Upland] and pick up some snacks. There seems to be some kind of meeting going on in one part of the room.

[Next cycle.] I'm walking on a wet, slippery stone-and-concrete courtyard in the middle of some old buildings with lots of dark-brown wood. The ground is wet because it has been raining; it's a gray, overcast day. I recognize this as an unfamiliar place and realize that I'm dreaming. This no longer shocks or startles me. I immediately start touching all the walls and handrails I pass, even crouching down at one point to lick up some of the water in one of the rain puddles. All of these actions evoke the corresponding sensations accurately.

I see a flight of wooden stairs leading up from the ground, attached to the outside of one of the buildings. I think, I wonder if I can turn these into an infinite loop. So I start climbing them, keeping track of how many segments of stairs separated by 90-degree turns I've climbed, counting them aloud. “One... two... three... now, when I get to the end of the next one, I should be back where I started from, right?” I say. When I get to the end of the fourth segment, though, I'm not back where I started from. The stairway just ends in a level, wooden, elevated walkway leading off to the right. “Damn you, astrophysics!” I exclaim aloud, expressing my disappointment that the normal laws of reality have prevailed despite this being a dream. [Why “astrophysics,” I have no idea.] I quickly shrug it off and continue exploring, walking along the walkway.

The walkway leads to the top of some steep, grassy hills. I crouch down near the top of one of them. I'm a little cold, so I try to summon a blanket to wrap around myself by thinking about one. Then I remember, No, just consciously, deliberately concentrating on it like that doesn't work. You have to know and expect that it will be there. I don't proceed to do this, though.

On top of one of the hills [the same one? A different one? I'm not sure], there is a concert stage with an amplifier sitting in the grass in front of it, to stage right. There's supposed to be a concert going on, but it's just beginning the process of being canceled. A rock band is on stage, but they aren't playing; they seem to be telling the audience at the bottom of the hill that there's no show to see, and some of the audience is beginning to wander away. They're canceling the show because the amplifier isn't working. I open up the top of the amplifier and find an AAA battery sitting half out of its battery cradle, which is itself only partially wired up to the rest of the amp. I reconnect all the wires and push the battery back into the cradle, and then the amp works. The band un-cancels the show and starts playing, and the audience stays and watches. I walk down the hill to join the audience. I notice that I'm now wearing the same two layers of coats that I often wear in real life. The dream starts to fade. Then I woke up.