The Lab Notebook

Awake, Non-lucid dream, [Commentary on dreams made after the fact, while writing this journal entry]

I hear the text message chime on my phone go off, so I get up and check it, saying to myself, “I'd better check that. There are only a couple of people who would text me in the middle of the night (P. and Ashley R.), and they're both important to me.” But when I check it, there's no indication of a new text message, and the screen looks completely normal. [I think. Was only the Vibrate icon showing, or was the Alarm icon showing, too? I'm not sure.] It says that it's 4:38 A.M., which seems right, so I conclude that I've just unwittingly dreamed myself up an unplanned WBTB alarm, but have reacted to it in reality. “Great, that should help,” I think. I move the phone over from the sewing cabinet to the dresser and go back to bed. [I'm an idiot! If I had just thought to look back at the time display on the phone one more time, I might have realized that I hadn't actually woken up at all, but I didn't. As it stands now, I'm pretty sure I just dreamed this entire sequence of events, but not positive, which is frankly rather disturbing.] [And I just remembered while writing this that as I was first trying to go to sleep last night, one of the things I was thinking about was the fact that the current Task of the Month is to have an in-dream text or IM conversation. That must have triggered the in-dream text message chime. LOL!]

Later, my phone alarm wakes me up again. It's set up so that the alarm sound is a recording I made of myself narrating a dream journal entry that talks about some embarrassing topics. Still lying on my bottom bunk, I grab the phone off the floor and muffle it between my body and the mattress so my parents won't hear it. Too late; they've already heard the beginning of it. They come into the room and ask me if I'm all right, and I explain that yes, I am, and I have my phone alarm set up to play back a recorded dream journal entry that I made on my trip to Europe back in September. (It was another of those tours with Pam S., by the way.) So I get up and go into the kitchen to have breakfast. [All this happened in the house I grew up in, by the way. It was exactly the way I remember it. I completely failed to clue in. As far as I could tell while I was in the dream, this was reality, and I was supposed to be there. I conclude that it's true, at least for me, that when dreaming about real places from memory, it is easy to be unaware that you're dreaming. I fail. To be fair, though, it's very easy for me to accept that setting as normal reality because, for a little over half my life, it was normal reality.]

So then I'm outside somewhere, going up a hill in some kind of vehicle on a road. There are LCD screens above the road that have scrolling text on them, talking about how barbarafett comes off as a ranty, opinionated blowhard in her dream journal entries and forum posts at DreamViews. [Of which I had made none, so far, in reality when I had this dream. A warning?] It expresses some of this meaning through TVTropes potholes. When I get to the top of the hill, there are these little go-karts that are only a little bigger than a roller skate, but are strong enough to support the weight of a person and have enough horsepower to move around fairly quickly when a person is standing on them. That's what we're supposed to do here, so I do. I stand on one of the go-karts with my right foot and navigate it along a path painted onto the glossy concrete. The path has a lot of switchbacks in it. The go-karts go fast enough that staying up on them is challenging and fun.

I finally did wake up for real, felt around on the dresser for my phone, didn't find it, and then saw that it was still on the sewing cabinet where I always leave it. I cried out in anger and frustration. “How many FAs can one person have in one night?!” I asked myself, irritated. I did the nose-plug RC and it passed, so I said, "Idiot! You should have checked that the first time!" (Meaning, when I first heard the text-message chime.)