The Lab Notebook

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

[Sorry this post is so fragmented. Lately, I seem to be able to recall individual dream scenes, but not the transitions between them. I don't remember specifically when or how I became lucid last night, either.]

I'm in a shop filled with soft slippers, which are all hung on a giant, high white wall display as well as family formal wear in the section furthest back. I see a pair of soft, purple thong slippers that I really want, but I have to ask the store clerk to get them down from the wall for me.

I'm at the Matterhorn in Disneyland. I look up and see people emerging from a hole in it, and standing on the terraced stage built into the south side. There are stairs leading down from the and into the mountain. There are a whole bunch of people up there; they're all part of a wedding party and are posing for a picture. [I think I may have become lucid at this point, or maybe it was at the beginning of this scene, I don't remember.] I come closer and see that there is an open space in the bottom of the mountain, which is set up as a wedding chapel. I look up from it into the hollow, rocky interior of the mountain, thinking that the roller coaster track must spiral around the outside. There's someone kneeling down at the front of the chapel space to pray; I feel like I ought to do the same, but I decide to keep on walking out of the chapel and keep exploring.

I enter another building of some kind, where there is a woman sitting behind a desk. She talks to me at length about something [I don't recall what]. Fully lucid by this point, I say in a rather rude and snippy tone, "I'm leaving to find something more interesting to do." I turn and walk out the door. [I work in tech support; I have to be nice to people I talk to on the phone. I'm not surprised that I was inclined to be snippy toward one of my DCs; it's a good way to release stress and frustration without hurting a real person's feelings.]

I wander around outside in a city. I look at a handheld GPS device, and it shows me that I am at the edge of one of many irregularly-shaped city blocks, separated by streets that go in all different directions with no pattern. I observe aloud, "GPS works in a dream because I expect it to." Two adjacent blocks are labeled "Omaha" and "Paris," yet when I turn around and look up, I see what is clearly the tallest tower from the LA skyline. I smile at this juxtaposition and say, "I love the dream world."

At this point, the dream begins to fade, and I begin to be aware of my real body again. I think, "I don't want to wake up yet!" I try to visualize the dream environment I was just in. The mental image becomes clearer, and I successfully get back into the dream without having woken up fully. [Amazing! I've never had a dream re-entry that smooth or elegant before. I didn't know I could do that!]

I'm exploring the entrance to a long, narrow storage room in another house. The room extends off to the left of the narrow door. While trying to get something out, I accidentally cause the two layers of freestanding shelves that run the length of the room to collapse sideways and to the left. I step back and try to restore the shelves by snapping my fingers, like a Q from Star Trek. It doesn't work the first two times. I try to concentrate and focus my intentions more clearly and specifically on what I am trying to do, and then snap my fingers again. It still doesn't work.

My real-life friend JB and I are in a house that belongs to some intelligent dragons. He talks to the dragons for a bit, and then he leaves to continue the quest he's on. As he leaves the house, icons appear in the air around him, representing his current quest statistics (money, inventory, life points, goals achieved, and so on), like in a computer RPG.

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

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the nights of December 24-27, 2011. Adult content warning for the one from December 25-26.]

Night of December 24-25

I'm at church, with my choir, accompanying our performance of “What Child is This?” on my clarinet. My clarinet keeps misfiring; some of the notes here and there refuse to play. I'm embarrassed. [This was definitely an anxiety dream. Exactly that actually happened during our choir rehearsal on Thursday, December 22, and I was afraid it was going to happen during the performance, which was the morning after I had this dream, on Christmas Day. Thankfully, it didn't happen; my clarinet worked fine.]

Night of December 25-26

I'm at this place that's kind of like a spa. It's a place for people to rest, relax, and renew. I'm in an outdoor area of this place, and it's a beautiful, warm, sunny day. I'm lying around on the ground, wearing only panties, along with several other women who are doing exactly the same. Other people are walking around the grounds, and the thought crosses my mind: Maybe I should go and put on some slightly more modest panties.

All of a sudden, I'm being molested by a group of two or three men. I manage to fight them off and struggle out of their grasp. All the while, I'm shouting at them, forcefully telling them to stop, and that I don't like or appreciate what they're doing. I end my tirade by telling another man, who's just sitting on the ground watching the proceedings, that he's a despicable jerk, too [or something to that effect; I don't remember my exact words here]. I tell him this because I know that he's being paid to be there as a witness to the scene that just unfolded. I also know that the molesters were also hired to do what they did. The men who hired them are also in the scene, standing around, watching it all happen. I know exactly what they're doing: They're lawyers, and they have a racket going on where they hire people to rape beautiful girls in establishments like the one I'm at, and then get the girls to sue those establishments for a lot of money, of which they get a percentage because they act as the girls' representation.

Night of December 26-27

I'm at work, but I'm participating in a dramatization of the work we do at my workplace for TV. The part of my boss [who I've mentioned in this DJ before] is being played by Tim Allen. I reflect that this was a strange casting choice, since he doesn't look at all like my boss, nor does he act much like him.

I'm watching a movie about a big, tall castle, a white one that looks like it came straight out of a fairy tale. I'm immersed in the movie, and I'm flying in circles around the top of the castle's high, central tower. There is a song playing on the movie soundtrack that I find kind of annoying, so I want to change the channel on the movie. Awww, man, the remote's all the way down there, I think to myself when I look down at the ground and see the TV remote control lying there. Then I think, Maybe I can get it by telekinesis. Wait a second. If I'm thinking about getting the remote by telekinesis, and flying around, I must be dreaming.

I stretch out my hand toward the remote control and concentrate on it, trying to use the force of my will to pull it into my hand. It doesn't work. Then, my mind calls up the primary example in my schema for what pulling an object into your hand with your mind looks like: the wampa cave scene from The Empire Strikes Back [starting at 2:20]. I think, It's kind of like the object is attached to a bungee cord that snaps it back into your hand. I try again, keeping that analogy in mind and focusing on it. This time, it works. The remote control flies up into my hand, just as if it were attached to a bungee cord.

At this point, I abruptly realize that during the time I've been concentrating on drawing the remote control into my hand, I haven't been concentrating on flying, so I've been gradually descending without noticing it. I'm now only a yard or two above the ground. I quickly correct for this and start climbing again. As I do so, I think, “And hurry! We're losing altitude fast!” And yes, “altitude” is the correct term in this instance, because this is a planet I'm flying over, not a moon. Even if it is just a dream planet. [This is a reference to the original version of the “Star Tours” ride from the Disney theme parks.] The remote control has transformed into a deodorant stick, which I use on myself. [? I don't even know.]

I woke up very pleased with myself, knowing that I could finally cross “Move an object with my mind” off my master list of lucid goals!

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

[I had several different dreams last night, two of which were lucid.]

[Dream #1] I'm playing Neopets. [In this particular dream,] Neopia is a fully-realized, three-dimensional world, but it's still a computer game that I'm playing using a mouse. The art looks just like it does on the real site. The game is played from a first-person perspective, and there are lots of rooms and areas to explore [just like the plot adventures on the real Neopets Web site]. One such area is filled with Neopets who are dressed in vaguely Arabian-looking clothes; they all have their noses covered with veils, which strikes me as somewhat ridiculous, since they all have such different shapes and sizes of noses. This scene makes me think, So Neopia does have something resembling an Islamic culture. I click my way into a hidden area and receive a special reward for finding it.

[Dream #2] I walk into my family's house, which is big and spacious and has two stories [and looks nothing at all like any of our real ones. House #2, our only two-story house, was nowhere near that big and was laid out very differently]. Suddenly, there are several men in the house with me. They're there to challenge me to a martial-arts tournament. I had known in advance that this challenge was coming. In the course of my conversation with them [which I don't really remember now], one of them eventually says that there is no challenge. Having become semi-lucid at some point during the conversation, I say boldly and firmly, “I have better things to do.” I begin making my way out of the house.

Then, I hear my mom yelling from behind me that the house is on fire and I should get out. I do so, thinking, I know I should just get out without stopping to try and rescue other people. I go out the front door and walk down a front walk that leads to a fairly high, steep flight of concrete stairs, which leads down a steep embankment, at the bottom of which are the public sidewalk and the street. I jump off the top step to get down to the front sidewalk more quickly. I fall in a long, slow arc, taking several seconds to get down, and land softly and gently on my feet. I had kind of known I was going to fall that way; I always do in dreams.

By this point, I'm definitely lucid. From the street, I take off and fly up over the neighborhood. Once again, it takes me two tries to take off. After the first time, I realize, I messed up – I wasn't concentrating right. I try again, kicking off with my right ankle and thinking about becoming airborne, as I always do, and this time it works. Flight feels like it always does, too.

I fly up and observe the neighborhood from above. I can see a little bit of the fire coming from the house I just left. After a minute or two, I land back on the street and see a little model of a single-story house standing on a table. I examine the model, concentrating on it, and succeed in making tiles blow off the roof with my mind. This action is directly inspired by the scene in Inception where they're at the cafe and the dream starts collapsing when Ariadne first realizes that they're dreaming. While I'm making the model blow itself to pieces, I think about how, when the characters from the movie are dreaming, they might use Michael Caine's name [*see Side Notes at end] in exclamations of surprise/anger/frustration, etc., as if he were their deity, because he was the inventor of the dream-sharing technology. I immediately dismiss this as a silly idea, though. I keep up what I'm doing, and eventually blow away all the broken-up pieces of the roof, exposing the interior of the model. It has separate rooms inside. There's a small, light brown, flea-like insect inside, with a sort of sail on its back. I know that the insect is my dad. [I don't even know.] I let it crawl onto my finger, rescuing it from the destruction of the model and setting it down gently outside the model.

This scene is immediately followed by an animated sequence of two foxes romping around in a grassy field and falling in love. I know that this means that both of my parents are still alive and got out of the burning house all right.

[Dream #3] I'm outside, in the daytime, on a series of tiled walkways, terraces, and stairways, elevated and built into the side of a hill. Some boy is following me around, singing a creepy version of some children's song at me, changing the words all around to suggest that he would like to do something sexual with me. At the end of the second or third repetition of the short song, I stop, sing the end of the verse for him, then smack him in the face. Then, a passing man helps me throw the offending boy over a wall and down a long flight of stairs. I see him get up after he reaches the bottom, and am glad to see that he can still get up and that nothing's broken.

The scene shifts slightly, and now I'm on the surface-level streets, walking around a city that I remember visiting in a dream before. [Except now I don't – false memory, apparently.] The city is bright and clean and filled with big trees. There is a train station across the street from where I'm walking. On my side of the street, there is an enlarged replica of one of the stores on Main St. at Disneyland. Upon seeing the prominent train station, I remark that my dream city doesn't necessarily have to be in the States; it could just as easily be in the UK. [This, despite the fact that said train station had a sign on the outside that very clearly read “Amtrak.”]

I walk in the main entrance to the store that replicates the one from Disneyland, and find myself in a shop that is part of a mall. I walk through that first shop and into a second one that resembles a Hot Topic (all the walls are painted black), only it's girlier (there are a lot more dresses). This store also has living mannequins that look exactly like the ones they have at Old Navy. One of these mannequins tells me that she wants to try on the dress I'm wearing, which I had gotten from that store earlier. It's a strapless, knee-length black sundress with little pink polka dots, pink lace decorating the top of the bodice, and a pink tulle underskirt part that makes the skirt puff out. There are lots of similar dresses on the racks in the store. [For some strange reason,] I'm wearing mine over the T-shirt and shorts I was already wearing. I'm really enjoying just walking around, exploring this dream. I exclaim aloud, “My mind is so awesome!”

I walk out of that store and around a corner, through one of the hallways that form the connecting core of the mall. I find myself wishing I could change out of the shorts I'm wearing under my dress, and just wear the dress. I go into another store, this one a Sephora. While I was in there, the dream ended.

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Side notes:

*Michael Caine's character's name is Stephen Miles (per the shooting script); that's what the other characters would say if they were to do that. I forgot that while dreaming, though.

Last night, when doing mental affirmations while falling asleep, I focused more on recalling the memory of what it feels like to be in a lucid dream, recalling past lucid dreams, and visualizing and imagining what it would have been like if I had become lucid in one of my memorable non-lucids. It worked really well.

As I was taught when I first tried to ski, people who are right-handed are generally right-footed as well, and are instinctively inclined to lead with their right foot and do most of their controlling of their movement with their right foot when skiing or snowboarding. I'm very pleased and not at all surprised to discover that this principle applies to my flying in dreams as well. I'm right-handed (and right-footed) in real life, and from the beginning, I've always instinctively used my right foot and ankle to kick off from the ground and launch myself into a takeoff.