The Lab Notebook

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

Night of February 28 - March 1

Some restaurant is having some kind of promotion where you can enter a code into an ATM and get money out. I walk out of the restaurant and across a parking lot to get to the ATM. I'm dressed in my pajamas, robe, and slippers, and am glad I'm wearing my rubber-soled slippers, because the parking lot is wet because it has just rained. I get to the ATM, enter my code, and receive a $5 bill, then a $1 bill, then a bonus $5 bill. There's also some loose change in a change dispenser on the [extremely strange-looking] ATM, and I start taking some of it for myself, but it occurs to me that I shouldn't take all of it, because that would be greedy.

Night of March 1 - 2

I'm playing PackRat and find several sets of 10 tickets by flipping over cards.

My mom is driving on a main road through an unfamiliar town, and I'm in the back seat. She's trying to find her way to someplace, but she's obviously lost. We turn left onto a residential street. Finally, I ask her for the TomTom, and she hands it to me. It's getting dark out, and I can't see the device's screen very well, so I reach up to the ceiling of the car to turn on the overhead lights. They turn on for a second, then fade away. Pressing them again does nothing. [I laughed out loud when I recalled this upon waking up and realized what I'd done. Once again, dream sign fail!] I complain to my mom that I keep pressing the wrong buttons when trying to enter the address of the place we're going to, because it's getting dark, the TomTom doesn't emit enough of its own light, and now our dome lights don't work. After a few minutes, though, when it's gotten fully dark outside, the buttons light up in bright red and white, so that I can see each letter and number clearly. [The TomTom doesn't do that in real life; my cell phone does.]

I walk into the bedroom I stayed in when I was living in Kentucky. [It didn't look much like that bedroom actually looked, but the bed was the same, I think.] I remark to whoever else is in the room with me, “I haven't been here in a while. It's the same. This is a good thing.” When I say that, I'm remembering dreaming about this place before [although I don't remember doing so now]. I get into the bed, and the two cats who live in the house jump up onto it and start walking all over me. I just lie there, quietly appreciating my mind's ability to generate the totally realistic but imaginary sensations of cats walking on me and the tips of their tails tickling my face. [No, I don't own any cats in real life, but there really were two cats in the house in Kentucky.] Even though I know that this is just a dream, I never make the logical leap from that fact to “I can go off and do whatever I want!” and never become fully lucid. [I'm still counting this as a lucid dream, though.]

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

The first thing I remember is thinking, I should really do an RC. [I have no idea why I thought that, but I did.] I do, and discover that I can breathe through my nose while holding it shut. Strangely, though, I find I can't do anything more than that, besides lie there. I can't even see anything around me. I try to get up, but I can't. I think, "I have no mouth, and I must scream," but I don't really mean it; I'm not afraid or even really concerned, just slightly puzzled, and I'm just observing that my situation is comparable to the one for which the short story is named.

[Later, I had a really, really cool non-lucid.] My mom, P., and I get into the open, upholstered back seat of a tiny little wooden propeller plane, big enough for the three of us and a pilot, who sits in a seat in front of ours. The plane takes off from the airport in the city of Louisville, which I know [in the dream] is the greenest city in America. [It looks nothing like the real Louisville.] We fly over the city in our plane, admiring the view. There is a big building with cascades of water gushing through big, rectangular openings on one side. I think, I hope that's a power plant. It obviously is, powering the entire city. The city is very beautiful from the air. It is on a very flat, sandy plain, next to the ocean. [Wait, what?! Real!Louisville is landlocked! It's by a river, but it's not the same thing.]

The little plane flies low over the ocean, so that we can dip our rubber-thong-sandal-clad feet in the water as we fly along. Then, suddenly, I find myself in the ocean water, holding on to a dark purple foam mat that floats in the water. I'm wearing my favorite swimsuit [that I have in real life]. I see the plane, floating with most of the plane below the surface of the water, the pilot still in his seat. I hang on tightly to the foam mat to keep myself afloat, knowing that I can't swim. [Strange; I could swim back on February 2.] There are other swimmers in the water besides me and my family. A young man grabs hold of my mat and flips it up and pushes it over onto me, trying to use it to playfully push me under the water. I pretend to go along with it, but manage to keep my head above water. [Now that I think of it, I was much more buoyant in the water in this dream than I am in reality, and could keep an arbitrary amount of my body above water, just like in my dream on February 2; I just wasn't aware that I could do that this time.]

My family and I get back onto the plane, which is getting ready to take off from the water. I have a conversation with the pilot about how there have to be at least two feet of distance between the surface of the water and the wings of the plane in order for it to take off. It takes off with the help of a wave that gives it a push from behind, then climbs back into the sky. The pilot says something about how he's heading back to the airport, since it's so close by that there will be practically no weather at all there. The plane returns to the airport and lands there.

[Later in the night, after a very brief WBTB.] I'm talking about being a lucid dreamer [whether to myself or to someone else, I'm not sure]. I ramble on about the mental discipline I have to have for a bit, not really paying attention to what I'm saying. Suddenly, I realize that for the last several sentences, I haven't been talking about lucid dreaming at all; I've been talking about being kind and behaving well toward other people. At some point, without realizing it, I shifted from talking about being a lucid dreamer to talking about being a Christian. I say to myself, “That's a good sign. It means my subconscious has its priorities in order.”

I'm in House #1, and am now definitely lucid. Everything around me is vague and blurry. I try to focus my attention on some of the scenery to make it clearer, and it works a little bit, but the house looks as if I'm looking at it through dark, spot-and-fingerprint-covered sunglasses. I'm walking back and forth in the master bedroom, which is much more spacious than it was in the real House #1. I remember that my dreaming goal for tonight was to practice delivering my 30-second commercial, so I start practicing.

"Hello, my name is (Emiko)," I say. "I'm a computer technician... networking technician... I'm a computer technician who specializes in networking."

I go on to say the same thing I've been saying almost every time I've practiced this, about saving money for my previous employer. I can't think of anything new and creative to add to my 30-second commercial. I'm rather surprised. I had expected the words and thoughts to flow more easily here, but it's actually a little bit harder to deliver a good 30-second commercial in a lucid dream than it is in reality. [So much for using all of your brain's potential while you're dreaming. Not for that purpose, anyway. I suppose my brain was also busy generating the scenery around me. Or maybe I just need to gain more dreaming experience. I don't know.]

There's another reason why I'm having difficulty practicing my 30-second commercial: I'm distracted by my stuffy nose, which is now running. I wipe it with a black paper napkin with white polka dots on it, remarking, “I didn't think dream bodies could get sick like this!” As I continue pacing the master bedroom, I think, I could try walking through that wall there if I wanted to, but I decide not to, because I have something more important to work on while I'm here.

I step forward far enough to see around the corner into the bathroom, to the left. I see the DC version of my mom there. She's wearing a light yellow T-shirt and is crouched down, apparently looking for something under the sink. I say, “Oh. Hi, Mom. I have this cold right now. I don't know why I'm telling you this. Just to let you know.”

She says something along the lines of, “Well, don't get it on me.” I turn away, looking back into the master bedroom, and discover that I can now see everything with perfect clarity. “Oh, now I can see!” I exclaim, slightly annoyed. I walk toward the other end of the room, aiming to explore beyond another doorway into another part of the house. [Stupidly,] I close my eyes, and then open my real eyes. I'm disappointed in myself when I realize that I've lost the dream by doing something that I know better than to do.

Night of December 3-4

I'm in a house or apartment somewhere. A friend [no one I recognize from real life] is holding up a gallon-size plastic bag full of pieces of cantaloupe and honeydew melon. I say that honeydew melon always gives me stomachaches [true in real life]. She says that we should take all that fruit and put it in our lunches, which are at the bottom of the hill, on the school playground [the playground of my elementary school]. I answer that if I'm going to haul myself all the way down there to get our lunches, I'm going to take my computer down to the school while I'm at it. My computer's hard drive needs to be reformatted, so I do that before I leave for the school. The computer's hard drive is stored within a big, black AC adapter box [like the one on our electronic keyboard, not like the one for my laptop]. When I finish reformatting it, I unplug it from the hard drive and say, “Congratulations: it's a hard drive.”

I'm sitting at the kitchen table in House #1, working on my old laptop (my first one). P. has been using it. She's opened up a whole bunch of windows with video clips in them (VLC, or Quicktime, or some program like that that shows video), and a video editing program called Star Producer. She shows me how to get to the folder Star Producer created for her videos. There's someone else there in the house with us [I don't know who, exactly, but I got the impressions 'young' and 'female'], looking for her sweater. I point her sweater out to her; it's lying in a heap over the arm of one of the two pale green armchairs in the living room. [We actually did have those at that house.]

I'm walking around outside, on a street lined with trees, houses, and small, old apartment buildings. It looks like it might be in Louisville, because most of the buildings seem to be kind of old, and a lot of them are made of brick. A woman with long hair (or possibly a veil or shawl over her head? I'm not sure) and long, flowing clothes is on the street, going along it by floating about a foot or so off the ground. I think, Oh, she must be dreaming. [Evidently, I now take for granted that flying/floating is normal when one is dreaming... and yet, it still completely failed to occur to me that I was dreaming.] I start floating, too, but then come back down to the ground [for a reason I don't quite remember now] and continue walking. I see Arthur, Ariadne, and Eames [from Inception] there, also walking along the street. [Day residue; I was reading part of the shooting script the day before.] Eames also starts to float as they go, but comes down after a minute. I walk behind them. I hear Eames say, “I'm a little bit married,” meaning, to Arthur. I repeat this, giggling at it a little. They don't notice me at all.

Night of December 4-5

I'm at Disneyland again, in the old Carousel of Progress building. It has been filled with some really neat ride/exhibit/something-or-other. [I remember that it was much, much cooler than the one that's actually there now, but I don't remember what exactly it was because I was too lazy to write it down.] Later, after leaving that building, I meet my parents at a restaurant elsewhere in Disneyland.