The Lab Notebook

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.

[This is both a catch-up post and a repost. Apparently, there was a server crash recently that ate this entry after I posted it the first time.]

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

Some events unfold that I'm not a part of. [I don't remember what they were now, but there was definitely a plotline involved, and I was definitely just an outside observer.] When these events are over, I find myself sitting in a movie theater, watching the end credits of a movie. I realize that all of the preceding events were a movie.

I walk out into the theater lobby, which is long, narrow, and wedge-shaped, growing slightly wider as I approach the entrance. I walk out through the theater's glass front doors onto the sidewalk. There, I meet up with my parents again.

My parents and I are in a strange, [possibly?] open-air, car-like vehicle with a hired driver. I'm showing them around the quaint, seaside downtown of Lake Worth [which, as usual for me in my dreams, looks absolutely nothing like it does in real life; it looks more urban]. We marvel at the awesomely cheesy anti-drug mural painted on the wall of one building.

[Different dream.] I'm flying above M. Road, traveling north, but facing south. I'm being pulled backward by that unknown, unseen force that so often does that in my flying dreams. I realize that I'm dreaming and take control of the situation by concentrating on the details of the scenery around me, as if I were going to stop to admire them. It works as intended: my backward motion slows, then stops. Then, I start flying forward under my own willpower, heading toward home (i.e., south). As I fly, I admire the rich detail of the scene around me and how much like reality it is.

[Dreamskip.] I'm now in a quiet, peaceful, suburban residential neighborhood, on a concrete walking path separated from the backyards on either side of it by fences. I hop along the sidewalk like an astronaut on the moon, making slow jumps that carry me several feet into the air, then slowly floating back down in an arc. I'm enjoying the fun of being in a low-gravity environment, which my dream environments often are.

I get up onto one of the fences and perform several floating glide-leaps from one parallel fence to another, combining jumping with flying. Then, I decide to try to change the dream environment to a different one by closing my eyes and spinning. I think, If I'm going to do that, I'd better start from a standing start. I jump off the fence I'm on and float gently down to the sidewalk. Once I'm standing on it, I think, Neopia, and close my eyes, but forget to spin around.

When I open my eyes, I'm in a much different suburban neighborhood. I'm standing in the middle of a straight street, looking down its length. It's lined on both sides with brightly colored, two-story houses with lush, green trees in their front yards. It doesn't look much like any of the official artwork of Neopia, but nonetheless, I become aware that this is Neopia, and that I've succeeded in my goal of changing the scene and getting there. I'm so excited about this that the scene winks out of existence after about two seconds, and I wake up. [Sigh.]

[Later, different dream.] I'm attending some special event at a theme park on behalf of [the company I've been teaching with]. I'm with SH and TS [two of my fellow teachers]. We're all wearing our white lab coats, and we're walking across a plaza that has a circular concrete beam running overhead, around the perimeter. I see some friends of mine wearing full rubberhead Sesame Street character costumes, also walking across the plaza in the opposite direction. I say to the young man in the Elmo costume who is carrying the head and looking sweaty and tired, “Hi, Mark. Go get some water.”

There are many other people there, changing into or out of costumes. Many of them are hanging their hangers on the concrete ring. TS suggests that we hang our lab coats from it, but I prefer to go back to the trailer, which [only in the dream, not in real life] has sides with panels that open to reveal closets [like my band trailer did in high school]. I want to put my lab coat there because I can make sure that trailer is locked.

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Side notes:

That first scene, where I realized that everything that had preceded it had just been a movie I was watching, was a particularly cool example of day residue. I had just been to the movies the evening before I had this dream. The recent article about how dreaming and watching movies produce very similar patterns of brain activity has informed the way I watch movies now; I always mentally compare the two experiences. In the movie I watched on this evening (Limitless), the ending felt exactly like being suddenly, rudely awakened by an alarm clock when you're still right in the middle of a dream. It's not surprising that that experience gave rise to an actual dream in which a movie ended and I suddenly realized, “oh, yeah, that didn't actually happen, I'm just watching a movie.” Both within the dream and in retrospect, that realization felt very similar to the realization, “oh, yeah, that was just a dream” that I've often had just after both false and real awakenings. Therefore, that moment of realization within that dream felt very much like a false awakening.

It belatedly occurs to me that Neopia is an entire planet. If I chose only one specific locale on that planet and made that the focus of my intentions, I'd probably have better success getting there.

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!