The Lab Notebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

Awake, Non-lucid, Halfway-dream thingy, [Commentary made while awake]

I'm in Phoenix for another regular get-together with a group of friends. Jack M. has an extra ticket to this themed dinner themed around the Goosebumps books by R.L. Stine, so he invites me to go with him, and I do. The dinner is served at a really long banquet table in a long, elaborately-designed banquet hall. Every year, they make a quilt to commemorate this themed dinner; the walls of the banquet hall are decorated with quilts from past years.

I'm with my mom in a kitchen, and she declares her intentions to make the oddest variation on “Mexican” food ever. It involves mashed sweet potatoes. We make this strange dinner and serve it to some dinner guests.

WBTB at 2:43 A.M. Took notes on the above two dreams.

I'm in a science classroom in the A building at my old high school, and science class is in session. I'm a student, and all the other student seats are filled with other students, except for the two which are occupied by my parents. I explain to one of the other students who they are, including explaining that my mom was an English teacher at that school until she retired. [True in reality.]

I'm eating a piece of pizza from BJ's, and discover that the restaurant has slipped an advertising flier into the pizza between the crust and the cheese. There's a little piece of paper towel resting directly on the crust, and on top of that is the flier, which is folded up and printed on glossy paper. It is printed in English and Japanese, and the largest, most noticeable text reads “Oe!” (Japanese for “Hey!”) in hiragana. [Awesome, I can read hiragana in dreams just as easily as I can in real life. That's pretty cool.] There's also a little cloth bag, similarly hidden in the pizza. I don't know where it comes from, but I also find a little gummy candy shaped like a Charmander; it looks a lot like the little plastic Charmander figurine that I have in real life, except more elongated.

WBTB at 4:32 A.M. Took notes on the above two dreams. I also have two notes from this one that say “afternoon nap with P.” and “breakfast with Dad – oatmeal later on,” but I really don't remember those dreams at all now.

I'm back in the A building from the aforementioned high school, in an open meeting area off of a main hallway. There are some tables set up in a rectangle, and a bunch of people my own age are sitting around them. One of them is my friend Kevina from Florida. We're doing some kind of activity that requires us to get up and move around the area. While we're doing this, I accidentally bump into another girl who's a little taller than I am, and her chin sort of gets caught on my shoulder for several moments. A third girl gets out some drawings that we all did at a previous meeting of this group. Impressed, I remark about how organized she is. I take my drawing from the stack. I tell everyone that I have to leave the meeting now, because it's 10:00 and I'm late. [For what, I'm not sure.]

I'm in an airport that I've been to several times before. [...in dreams. I still don't clue in that I'm dreaming when I find myself in these recurring dream environments.] There are separate security lines for men and women. I point this out to my dad and tell him that he can stay in the line I'm in, but he'll get some weird looks. There are freestanding, light-up advertising signs in the airport, kind of like there are in real airports and malls, except that this one has an LCD screen. The text on it is saying something about how clear and sharp the text that particular brand of screen can produce is, but I don't find it all that impressive. [LOL, I think this might have been my mind trying to tell me that I was dreaming...]

[This next part doesn't really count as a dream, lucid or otherwise, because I wasn't fully asleep. I knew the entire time that I wasn't fully asleep, I was fully aware of my real body, and I'm pretty sure I was deliberately imagining at least some of this rather than dreaming it, hence the different color and the past tense.] I was on a street somewhere, and I wanted to go into a particular shop. It was closed, so I decided to get in by climbing through the closed window. It actually worked. [For some stupid reason, dream!me is absolutely bound and determined to master the skill of walking through solid objects, even though waking!me would prefer to work on having longer-lasting lucid dreams and accomplishing the Task of the Month.] The interior of the shop was kind of dark; all the walls and furniture were made of dark wood. I went to one table and started experimenting with turning over a pair of miniature hourglasses, one with sand in it, the other with gold dust in it. I noticed that the gold-dust one was running out faster, even though they were the same size. Then I realized that I could feel something grainy blowing onto my hand. Then I looked more closely at the gold-dust hourglass and found the little hole near the top of the upper chamber, where some of the gold dust was coming out and getting all over the table and my hand. When I saw this, I went, “Oh, crap.”