The Lab Notebook

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

[This post contains dreams from last night and from Sunday night.]

Night of February 13-14

I'm out and about somewhere in town [Pat and Oscar's? It kind of looked like it]. Along the way, I sing a song: “I Run For Life” by Melissa Etheridge. [In the dream, I sang the lyrics correctly but in the wrong order, moving the first two lines of the last verse to the beginning of the first verse, and yet, I didn't take note of this as being strange.]

I'm at my kitchen table, eating breakfast. My mom is standing in the kitchen. We're carrying on a perfectly normal conversation about whether or not we're going out for coffee this morning. At first it seems like we are, but then my mom suggests that we could have premade bottled coffee here at home instead, so we do. It's cinnamon-flavored, and she prepares it by putting creamer into it.

When I woke up for real, I was slightly surprised to discover that the above paragraph had just been a dream, and that I hadn't actually gotten up yet.

Night of February 15-16

[Dream #1] I'm in a somewhat dark, upstairs room somewhere, with either my mom or my sister. [I can't remember now; the dream quality was low, but I did know that I was dreaming.] We've found a baby doll with long, red hair that sings Christmas carols. I sing along with whatever song it's playing as I walk across the room.

[Dream #2] I'm driving in my car on a freeway where everyone is driving much faster than I usually like to drive. Feeling like I have no choice, I match their pace. I want to get off the freeway soon, and as soon as I see an opening, I take advantage of it and move over into the lanes to my right, so that I can get to the offramp.

[Dreamskip.] I've now gotten off the freeway and parked in a parking structure. Somewhere around here, I realize that I'm dreaming. I walk over to the elevator to take it down to the ground floor. Two other girls are also approaching it, and they get into the elevator with me. One of them starts talking with me, and I introduce myself by name and shake hands with her.

When we're in the elevator, I get a good look at her. She has long, black hair, worn in two braids, and is pretty. I recognize her as my friend Tashi from my freshman year of college. “Tashi?” I say.

“No,” she says, shaking her head.

“Don't you remember me from college?”

“No. I know you, though.”

“So you do remember me, but not from the same place that I remember you from.”

She indicates that this is correct. I notice that the two girls are duplicates of each other. Then I woke up.

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.

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

I'm at a set of buildings that look kind of like an old-fashioned elementary school. I'm there to sign up for offline 'HITs' [Human Intelligence Tasks, small jobs for which I will get paid]. There are various organizations offering HITs to people, such as the Registrar of Voters. To work on each organization's HITs, you have to go to that organization's counter to sign up for them. When I get to one of the counters, I discover that signing up requires you to show an ID card, and I don't have mine with me. I have to go back to my car to get my purse and driver's license. Before I leave the counter, though, I notice a sheet of paper lying on it with P.'s name written on top. That means she's signing up for one of that organization's HITs, too.

When my next dream begins, a boy from my high school class appears. As soon as I see this happen, I lock on to him as the focus of my attention, knowing that the appearance of an image out of darkness like that must mean that a dream is beginning. Then other classmates of ours begin to appear around him, followed by the environment we're all in. We're in what appears to be a restaurant seating area, sitting around long, high tables on chairs designed to match their height. This area is covered and enclosed on three sides, and it's on our high school campus. Every single student sitting in the area is someone I recognize from high school. A female teacher I had and another, male staff member are also in the crowd there, walking around between the tables.

I get up from my seat and walk out of the seating area, heading out into the main part of the campus. Beautiful morning sunlight illuminates the campus. I take two steps, then take off from the ground and start flying around, staying at about the height of the roof lines of the single-story buildings. Typically for me, flying is the first thing I think of to do when I find myself lucid dreaming. Flying is fun, as always, and feels good. I have good flying control this time, but not perfect control. I don't feel like I'm being pulled or pushed in any direction, but at one point, I start losing altitude, and reach out to touch the top edge of a concrete-block wall with my fingers as I pass by it. It feels exactly like it would in reality, but I get the strange sense that it takes a split second for my brain to generate the simulated sensation, creating a tiny delay between touching the wall and receiving the sensory input. I recover and continue flying along.

As I pass the edge of one building's roof, I notice a crawlspace that you can't see from the ground. It's formed by the flat, real roof and the pointy, upper edges of the building's decorative facades, which extend above the real roof and slant toward each other, creating an empty space shaped like a long, triangular prism. I try to make a 90-degree left turn and enter this space, but I find I can't; I just start sinking down again. I shrug off this failure, recover, and continue flying across the campus. I reach an area where the long walls of two buildings run parallel to each other, and have crenellated ramparts [those square things on the top of the walls of a castle] at the top. As I'm flying along in between these two walls, the dream ends and I wake up.

I make a post at the beginning of a thread on a message board that turns out to be ridiculously, insanely popular, so that my computer is flooded with e-mail notifications from people posting to the thread at a rate of about one or two per second. [This dream may or may not have been at the beginning of the previous sleep cycle, I don't remember.]

I'm in a building that consists of a bunch of interconnected rooms that are filled with a colorful, random assortment of furniture and stuff. It kind of looks like a cross between someone's house and an antique store. [I just visited a bunch of antique stores on Friday, February 4.] I know I'm dreaming without any particular clue. I walk through the series of rooms, admiring the details of the dream environment, observing it with close attention. [That has been my lucid-dreaming goal for the last couple of days.] I think, I have to stay here as long as I can.

I reach a point when the sequence of rooms ends in a short T-intersection of passageways. I come up to the place where the long passageway I had been walking through ends. There is a piece of light-blue yarn hanging down in front of a low wall that stands in front of the back wall of the room. I touch the piece of yarn, running my fingers down it; it feels real. Then, I realize that the low wall it's hanging in front of is a mirror. It's a very speckly, dim mirror, and I can't see my reflection in it very clearly, but I can tell it's a mirror. I think, Hey, in a dream, you can walk through these and get to somewhere else. I straighten up and step forward with the intention of walking through the mirror.

First my arms, and then my head and part of my upper body go through the surface of the mirror. It is the coolest feeling. Like when I walked through the wall, I feel a slight resistance at first and then it yields to me, but this time, instead of feeling like something thin and hard breaking, it feels like going through a thick, liquid membrane. The membrane stays where it is as I go through it; I can feel it on my skin. There's nothing beyond the surface of the mirror but blackness, though. I realize that I didn't really think about what I expected to be on the other side before I started going through the mirror. Not wanting to go into the unknown, I pull back, out of the mirror.

I notice another, smaller mirror to my right. Just to continue experimenting with this newly-discovered ability, I start putting my fingers through the surface. Once again, they go right in. I don't really want to try to get anywhere else anymore, though, so I pull them back out. They come away with a silver coating of liquid mercury on them. I shake my hand to get the stuff off my fingers, but I'm aware that liquid mercury can't really hurt me in a dream.

In the small room off to the right, there is a slightly fat, female DC. I know her from somewhere, and know that her name is Melody. [Which is strange, because I've known several people named Melody and this DC didn't look like any of them.] We talk briefly [I don't remember about what], and then I turn away to explore the other side of the T-intersection, the small room off to the left of the big mirror. As I'm going into that room, I go, “Oh, yeah.” I remember the basic Task of the Month. I turn back around and say, “Melody. Melody!” She starts approaching me, and I approach her. When I get close enough, I put my arms behind her head and shoulders and lean in to kiss her. She realizes what I'm trying to do and pulls away with a look of revulsion. I say, “Just on the cheek. Please?” She stops pulling away and just stands there and lets me kiss her. I give her a kiss on the closest, most convenient spot I can reach, which is on the forehead, just above her right eye. Then I let her go, and she leaves. I look back at the big mirror and consider trying to get to Neopia by going through it, but I decide not to because I don't trust my dream control abilities that far. I've never done that before, and I'm afraid of it going wrong.

False awakening in my current, real room. I hear a sound that I recognize as the sound of fish splashing in a fishtank. I also hear P. moving around in her bed, which is on the other side of the room, parallel to mine. I don't open my eyes to look, but I do say aloud, “No! P. can't be here, and neither can her fish!”

“Yes, I can!” says P.

“When did you get home?” I ask her.

“Yesterday.”

“Oh.”

When I woke up for real, I found this FA rather amusing. Also, I was surprised that I'd had a dream that consisted entirely of sounds, with no visuals at all.

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of January 4-5, 2011.]

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

I'm flying around a large, elaborate, indoor shopping mall that has an upstairs and a downstairs level. [I don't remember how I became lucid, but I did.] Like real malls I've been to with upstairs and downstairs levels, there are lots of open spaces connecting the two. I fly down through one of them to get into the lower level and explore it. Some of the people who are in the mall see me flying, and I talk to some of them.

The lower level is completely enclosed with no windows. It's all painted off-white and appears to be mostly offices, rather than shops. When I get into this enclosed area, I start walking. I encounter a female DC and we start talking. At one point, I actually tell her, “You're a dream character!” She either ignores this or doesn't hear me, I don't know which.

While exploring the corridors and passageways of this enclosed lower level, I find a door that is an entrance to the Arlington Theater. [Although I identified it as such, it didn't quite look like that in the dream. It looked like a big theater for live performances, but without the decorative, themed walls, and even bigger and wider than the real one.] When I enter the theater, I exclaim, “I was looking for this place!” Then it occurs to me, Couldn't you have used an ability to get here faster, rather than just searching for it? I go to take an empty seat next to some of my high school friends. The performance we're watching is a live-action version of Jaws. At the end, I walk up to the very front of the theater and take a picture of the audience.

Then, I feel a need to start floating upward, just like a helium balloon, so I allow myself to. The ceiling of the theater is made up of several layers of pieces of canvas stretched out with ropes. I make my way between the pieces of canvas, sometimes detaching a corner and folding it back, until I float out of the building and into the sky.

The next thing I remember is being on a street corner. My dad and sister bicycle past me and tell me to stop at the corner before crossing the street, to be safe. I say yes, I will. I walk along the road I'm on. I think vaguely of trying to do something else cool, like run really fast, but I don't do it. I look at a photo [presumably the one I took of the audience in the theater; I'm working off brief handwritten notes here] in what I at first think is reality before I figure out that it must still be in my head, because I know that I was dreaming when I took that picture.

While still outside on the street [I think; not sure of the specifics of the transition here], I suddenly find that I'm lying down, and my entire body is vibrating. When I look up and to my left, I see a sleep paralysis monitor. It's measuring how much I'm vibrating. It looks like an oscilloscope, kind of like this one, only in the dream, the screen is all black and there's only one bright-green line across it, that grows thicker and takes up more of the screen as the SP intensifies. Below that line is a numeric readout, also bright-green, that jumps from 40% to 88% as I watch. Below the numbers, I see the words “You did it!” appear on the screen.

So this is what sleep paralysis feels like, I think. I know what it is, but I'm still just a little freaked out by the all-over, shaking, vibrating sensation. I realized that I had to be waking up and thought, No! I don't want to wake up yet! Go back! I tried to DEILD, but I couldn't think of a scene to visualize, nor could I calm myself down enough to visualize one. Eventually, the feeling went away, and I was awake and back to normal. [First time I've ever woken up into SP. Very interesting.]

When I went back to sleep after that, I had another non-lucid dream. This time, I'm in my church. The room seems to be the same size and shape as it is in reality, but lots of things about it are different. The piano is front and center [rather than off to the side], and I'm sitting a few feet behind the piano bench, with my chair up against the windows that form the front wall of the room. I'm watching Wendi play the piano. We talk to each other about something. We're attending Betty's memorial service [which was held the Saturday after I had this dream, and I knew that both Wendi and I were planning to attend].

Later, when we're at the burial service, I look down into the box that forms the underground enclosure for the coffin, and I can see furniture inside it.

After the service, I leave the church building. Outside it is a big, complex interchange of road overpasses and underpasses that spans across a straight main road. Airplanes are using this main road as a makeshift runway. I walk across one of the overpasses with my family to get to the overpass on the other side.

----------------
Side notes:
This was the second night that I wrote down a goal before going to bed. This time, I wrote: “Goal: become lucid, look around at scene, make sure it's stable, then see what other verbal commands I can use.” This time, I accomplished the first two, but forgot about the second two. So far, based on two nights of experience, my working hypothesis is that writing down my goals is definitely helping me to achieve them, but that in the future, my goals should only consist of one or two actions at most, not three or four, because I don't seem to be remembering more than two.

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

I'm on a strange version of the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland. Instead of one continuous waterway that meanders across solid ground like a real river, it consists of a series of interconnected, rectangular pools that are separated from each other by waterfalls. They're all still surrounded by jungle foliage, though, and they all have some kind of animatronic animal in or around them. One of them has an animatronic person swimming in the middle. It's nighttime.

I'm navigating these waterways all alone, in a single-person canoe. As I paddle my canoe along, I think, I hate going through this ride by myself. There's no one to do the spiel for me. I try to do it myself, but I'm not as good at it as the regular skippers are. I go over at least one waterfall in my canoe. There's no impact when my canoe hits the water; it just calmly transitions from one pool to the next.

I reach a particularly tall waterfall, with a bunch of gray rocks between the pool I'm in and the one below it. I'm tired of putting in the effort it takes to paddle, so I give up trying to canoe my way through the ride and just climb down the rocks. When I reach the lower pool, I decide to go swimming in it.

When I get into the pool, I start treading water. I move very quickly across the large, rectangular pool by this means, keeping my head completely out of the water the entire time, and feeling very proud of the fact that I've mastered the skill of treading water. [Which I haven't done in real life, by the way; I can sort of do it, but I'm not any good at it at all.] Being in the water feels really, really nice.

[Recall is a little hazy here. I think I remember the following two things:] Two or more people pour more water into the pool I'm in, making it colder. I get into and out of the water at least once. [I definitely remember everything from here on out:] I'm now in a smaller, but still rectangular pool, right next to the bigger one I initially got into. The shorter ends of the two rectangles are right next to each other. I look around in this smaller pool for a way to climb out. At first, I'm disappointed because I don't see one, but then I see it. There are some metal steps leading out of the pool, attached to the interior wall near the far corner. There are two girls I don't know in the water near the steps. I also see the B. brothers crouched down near the other short end of the pool, looking at me. [They're acquaintances from real life; I've mentioned them in my dream journal before in this entry. They're the two brothers who sang with the Parrish girls.] I'm naked, so when I see them, I imagine a bikini, and it appears on my body. [Despite this, at no point did I ever become lucid.] Then I climb out of the pool.

[Different dream.] I'm at home [or possibly in a hotel room; it didn't look like any of our houses], lounging around on a bed, doing something on my laptop. My parents want to go out somewhere, but I'm not ready. My dad jokes, "This battery-powered computer is called a 'wait-for-me device!'" I laugh a little, then stop what I'm doing, get up, and go to finish getting dressed so that we can go. Then my alarm went off and I got up.

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of December 30-31, 2010.]

I'm in a classroom in Britain. We're playing a game that involves the chalkboard, and walking in between two desks.

I'm in a room (possibly a hotel room; there's a bed in it, anyway) with Q [from Star Trek: The Next Generation]. I attempt to walk through one of the walls of the room, but get stuck halfway through it, and yell at him for messing with me. He manifests a bouncy ball made out of water, and we both bounce it back and forth.

[Dreamskip.] I'm still in that same room, but now I'm lying down on the floor under the bed. I'm stuck there somehow and can't get up. Q and some random (apparently) human woman are having sex on the bed. It's way too hot and stuffy in the room, and I'm starting to feel like there's no air in there. I get up and open the door. There's a screen door behind it. Later, I explain to Q why I did that. I say, “Did you forget that I needed oxygen to breathe?” He doesn't seem to mind that I opened the door.

I'm at a party with my mom and a bunch of her teacher friends. We're all on an outdoor patio of a restaurant at first, and then we all get into a rectangular ride vehicle that [somehow] works as a Gravitron. We all strap ourselves into our seats, and the vehicle starts moving forward. While it's moving, I look at a door on the side of the vehicle, labeled Door #6. I don't think it's closed all the way, so I reach over and try to close it, but I end up opening it. This makes the ride shut down, since I've just depressurized the cabin, and makes everyone else on the ride angry at me. A voice over the loudspeaker says, “Next time, the useless will have no reason to be here.” I defend myself by saying, “I didn't know how to close it!” An alarm is going off. I woke up at this point.

------------------
Side notes:
I realized after I woke up from this dream that, for the second time since I've been keeping a regular dream journal, sense data from my real body came through into my dream. In this case, it was so cold on this night that I slept with all the blankets pulled up over my head. I really was trying to breathe hot, stuffy air in reality, so that became true in my dream, too. I think that's a pretty cool phenomenon.

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

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from December 24-27, 2010.]

Night of December 23-24

I'm playing Neopets, and I somehow obtain an item that makes a particular level of a particular Flash game easier.

I'm with P. in a hotel/bookstore. It's 12:30 A.M., according to an analog clock. [That's what my handwritten notes say, anyway.]

I'm at my high school, once again visiting the second row of portables located a little distance to the west of the main campus. [These portables don't exist in real life, but did appear in a previous dream, namely, the last dream in this DJ entry.] I'm walking around with no shoes on. As I climb up the steps into one of those distant portables, I wonder whether I'm going to get in trouble for that.

Night of December 24-25

[I only have a very vague memory of this dream, especially now that I'm reconstructing it from handwritten notes this long after the fact (1/15/11). I've reconstructed it from my handwritten notes as best I can.]

I'm at dream!Disneyland, watching a video in a theater. I also have a lucid dream within a normal one. When I first realize that I'm dreaming, I try to fly, but I can't. There are three DCs there, one of whom introduces himself to me and to the other two, and says something about how he isn't sure if we've met in reality or not. [Hmmmm... very interesting.] I actually tell the three of them that I'm dreaming. I get a second shot at completing a mission, and this time, I succeed. The mission involves saving the son of some teacher from someone. To complete it, I have to go into a room full of computer workstations and press a red, rectangular button that I find on someone's workstation. I couldn't find it the first time. At the end, when everything around me is blowing up [I think], I'm lying face down, going, “Please be a dream... please be a dream...” because I'm convinced that it's reality.

I wake up out of my lucid, back into the regular, non-lucid dream I'd been having before.

Night of December 26-27

I'm riding along on my bicycle. A mechanical arm attached to an overhead conveyor belt grabs my bike and pulls it into this big, elaborate, two-story construct that's a combination of a maze, a play structure, and an amusement-park ride, with me still on the bike. I think, I thought things like this only existed in dreams! I didn't think anyone had actually built one as a ride! [LOL, more dream sign fail...] I'm excited to be going into it, though, because I know it's an amusement-park ride/activity and it'll be fun. The conveyor belt goes up at an angle, taking me up to the second floor. When I get there, I get off my bike and go inside a room. Other people are there, including some real-life friends [I think; I don't really remember who now]. We're all role-playing that we're scientists in a laboratory [I think], because that's part of the ride.

The next thing I remember is realizing that being put in [artificial] danger is also part of the ride. I run toward the double doors through which I came into the room and open them by punching them. They swing outward, and I see that I've opened them just in the nick of time – just after the doors open, I see a locking bolt on one of the doors shoot out automatically. If I hadn't opened the doors when I did, we would have been locked inside.

[I don't remember the transition to the next scene.] I'm in a large bike repair shop. My red bike [the one I have in real life right now] has been taken here, and I want it back. The female DC who runs the bike repair shop gives it back to me, along with a brand-new pair of long black-and-gray bicycle shorts, which are lying in a particular spot on the floor, waiting for me.

[Fragment] Something about a [different] female DC who is infected with some kind of microbes that, when active, cause her body to become excessively warm.

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

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of December 22-23, 2010.]

I'm riding in the back of my parents' car as we drive to the home of a friend of mine in Wrightwood. As we drive along the winding mountain road [which has appeared in at least one dream before this one, but I don't think I bothered to write it down], I notice that a Walgreens has opened in this remote little mountain town, and I am bothered by its presence there. I feel that it spoils the natural, rustic ambiance of the place. As the drive goes on, I start to feel sleepy.

We arrive at my friend's house. I meet their dog, and I'm nowhere near as afraid of being met by a new dog as I used to be [in real life]. Inside the house, there is a party going on, with lots of people. I eat dinner with some of them in the living room. The topic of conversation is how people who move out here to the mountains do so because they want to be 100% original and avoid letting big corporations influence their lifestyle too much, which is why the presence of a Walgreens is so offensive to the people who live here.

I wander into another room of the house, where I find a dog and a cat. Oh, great, I think. Now I'm going to have an allergy attack. [This is exactly how I would react to this situation in reality, by the way.] There are a whole bunch of different games set up on two different tables in this room. One of them is a stack of bowls, each with a vocabulary question and answer printed on it and a logo that reads “OKWords.” Another is a fallen phrases puzzle whose solution is an invocation to some mythological (possibly Norse?) god of death. There are quite a few people in this room, too. One of them is wearing a purple dinosaur suite, and another has some Pokemon dolls. As I'm walking around in the room, someone sends me back into the other room to find out what everyone there wants to drink. I walk back into the first room to find out. There is a large tray of cookies and other goodies on the table in that room; I eat a blueberry off of it.

The dream shifts to a new dream. Now, I'm in a movie/book titled Tron. [It has absolutely nothing to do with the real-life Tron.] The story I'm in involves an alternate dimension, which is accessed through a big, hidden doorway. Said alternate dimension is a typical epic fantasy world, and the story that takes place there has a lot of the universal mythic feel of the original Star Wars trilogy. I can understand why people are so insulted by the lightshow that is the new Tron; it has none of this mythic feel at all. [In real life, I've seen the original Tron, but not the new one. The content of this dream was based entirely on Internet hearsay about the new one.] There is a very clear scene in which the bad guys get through the aforementioned hidden doorway, and watch the good guys' actions on giant magical screens that are really interdimensional gateways.

The scene shifts again. Now, rather than being in the scene from the old Tron, I'm watching it with a group of people I know in real life, including Guy and some of my fellow students from his classes. As I watch, I realize that the scene we're watching was shot at Disneyland, due to the disguised but clearly visible Matterhorn in one broad shot of the landscape. I say aloud, “Wow, awesome! I won't say it, I'm just thinking it very loudly.”

The scene shifts again. Now that same group of people and I are on the train that goes around [this particular dream version of] Disneyland. We pass several other park landmarks that have been disguised to look like other things, like the Matterhorn was. The train passes behind a large, white, curved, several-story office building. I am shooting ahead of the train, flying on hover boots. As the train and I approach the Tron station (where we started our train trip around the park), I tell the boots to slow down, because my legs are starting to hurt from being kept bent at a 90-degree angle at the knee so that I can stay upright while using the hover boots. I say aloud, “Slow down, boots. Please?” They don't slow down. My alarm woke me up out of this scene, which disappointed me, because it was a really cool dream. I was also dismayed to realize that meeting the dog and not being afraid of it had been a dream.

Non-lucid, 'Video-game-controller mode' [see side notes], Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

My dad and I are on a bicycle ride together. I've just checked out a thick paperback book from the library, and it's in the rack on the back of my bicycle.

I'm outside a movie theater in Florida, with my mom. Directly across from the entrance to the theater is a small kiosk where you can get drinks in plastic cups. She and I get some drinks from it for the whole family.

False awakening in my current real room. I hear the sounds of people shouting something about a surfer dude, and decide to follow the shouting out to the creek, but decide not to wake my parents. As I'm walking out of the house, I see that there's a bunch of writing in thick, black letters on the back wall of the dining room, as well as several papers with more writing on them taped to that wall.

I'm entering an upstairs apartment. My uncle is there.

I'm walking past a junior high school. I see a large group of kids in PE uniforms setting off on a run around the perimeter of the school.

I continue walking, and my route takes me along the street in my old neighborhood that goes around the edge of the park. I'm going in the direction of House #2. I turn around and see a tiny, cartoon kid with a BB gun standing behind me on the sidewalk. I'm a little worried that he's going to shoot me with the BB gun, but in the end, I ignore him and continue walking.

I reach House #2. In the garage, floating vertically in midair, is a menu of choices, like on a DVD. They say something like 'imaginary ideal' and 'reality' [I think; I don't really remember.] I select the former first, and find myself standing in my bedroom at House #2. The room is arranged the way it was in reality, but everything in it is completely white. [I really wouldn't call that design choice 'ideal.' However, when I lived there in reality, almost everything in that room really was white, and I was pretty happy living there.] I return to the menu, and this time, I select 'reality.' After making this selection, I find myself back in the same bedroom. It's still arranged the way it was in reality, only now the bed has a green bedspread with flowers, kind of like the one I have right now in reality [which I bought when we moved to House #3], except that the pattern is bigger and bolder.

I look out the window of my room and see a wide view of rolling grassland, with a lot of people walking around all over the place. There's only sunlight shining on one small, roughly circular section of the scene, though; the rest is in shadow. I speak aloud to the scene, saying something to the effect of, “It should be sunny all over the whole scene!” The sunlight spreads to cover the whole scene.

The scene shifts without my noticing it. The window of my room is now a doorway that opens onto a scene of an arctic landscape, with a wide, shallow pool of water in it. [An aside: After all those times I complained last month about the lack of snow in my dreamworld, I finally had a dream with snow in it, and not only did I completely fail to remember that I was supposed to make a snowball and hit somebody with it, but that Task of the Month is over now, anyway! Argh.] I walk out into the scene. From the far side of the pool, I step into the water, trying to walk on it, but I quickly give up the attempt because I get scared away by an orca and a walrus approaching me through the water. I walk back out. I then get the impression that they weren't really threatening me, after all. I go back toward the house. My mom is standing outside the doorway, and I tell her she can watch me do this if she wants to. I start walking back toward the pool of water again, concentrating on continuing to walk forward, straight into the pool, while believing that the surface of it will be just as solid to me as the ground is. It doesn't work; I end up standing ankle-deep in the shallow water again. [That's all I remember.]

-------------------
Side notes:
I'm really not sure for how much of the above sequence of events I was actually asleep and dreaming, and for how much of it I was awake and actively using my regular old imagination. I felt like I was doing the latter for at least part of it, hence the green text, which I always use to indicate a sort of half-awake, half-dream state where I know that I'm using my imagination like a video-game controller to control what happens. The division between green and purple text (indicating a lucid dream) is mostly an arbitrary guess. Then again, I was definitely aware that I was dreaming by the end, so it's entirely possible that I really was dreaming the entire time, and that's what dream control feels like. If so, that's really cool! I really advanced a lot in the area of dream control last night. I will have to experiment with this further.

I'm mildly annoyed, but not at all surprised, to discover that verbal commands work really well to control my dreams. As much as I love Inception and would love to be able to alter the dreamscape just by thinking about what I want to happen, that idea is relatively new to me. I've been a Star Trek fan for years, so it's not surprising that the older and better-entrenched idea that one can change one's surrounding environment by giving verbal commands, like they do when using the holodeck on Star Trek: TNG and later series, would take precedence over the newer idea that one can change one's surrounding environment just by thinking about it. Now that I know what works for me, though, I guess I'll go along with it.

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

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of December 21-22, 2010.]

I'm at a ticket booth in a train station, trying to buy a round-trip train ticket from home to L.A., where I plan to spend the day. The train ticket costs $35 and change; when I receive my ticket, it's a plastic card with my picture on it.

I'm at a desk at a music studio, explaining that I'm there because I want to record a demo. The lady at the desk doesn't want to accept a demo from me, until I mention that it's for a contest. She takes out the CD she has of demos for the contest, puts it in her computer to see how much space is left, and sees that there's enough space on it for one more song: six minutes. She tells me I'm lucky, because I'll be the last person to enter a song in the contest.

I'm standing outside some building [the music studio? I'm not sure; I get the impression this may have been a different scene], near the side door, waiting to get in to do something. I realize I'm dreaming and turn away from the door, looking at the other buildings on the street around it. Again, the scene looks just as sharp and vivid as reality. I hesitate for a moment, deciding whether to go along with the dream plot or go off and do my own thing. I choose the latter and take off, flying away. All it takes is an act of thought and willpower and a very slight push off the ground with my legs and feet. I have no problem taking off, but I immediately find myself being pushed backward again, unable to fly forward. Then I realize that it's only the wind pushing me in a particular direction, and if I let it carry me instead of trying to fight it, I'll have an easier time of flying. So I let the wind push me along, and it is, indeed, much easier.

I'm flying over a town. I remark aloud, “And, of course, it's another beautiful, perfect, sunny day here in the dreamverse!” I'm complaining again about the lack of snow.

While flying, I happen to pass over the backyard of a gray building that might be an older apartment building, and I spot two duplicates of myself there. I land in the backyard to get a closer look, but I don't want them to see me, so I try to will myself to be invisible to them. I can't tell whether or not it works.

I wake up in my bed. I'm a little disappointed to be waking up so soon from a lucid dream. I can clearly see a single eyelash moving back and forth in front of one of my eyes as I open and close them. I'm lying on my right side. Looking across the room from this position, I can see my closet. I think, I can't see the closet when I'm lying on my right side in bed in the room I have now. This is my room in House #1. I'm still dreaming! This is just a false awakening!

So I walk out into the living room of House #1. I look around to see if there's anyone else around, but there isn't; I'm all alone in the house. Since there's no one around to see me do it, I decide to try to walk through a wall. The wall I choose this time is the one directly to the right of the front door (as I'm facing the front door from inside the house). This wall separates the living room from the kitchen. [This is exactly how that house is laid out in reality, too.] I say to myself, “I'm going to walk through this wall,” and start walking through it. It's not completely solid to me, but I do feel a slight resistance at first. I continue pressing forward, and feel something hard, but thin (like a very thin sheet of balsa wood) break under the pressure my body is exerting. I continue walking, and end up on the other side of the wall, standing in the kitchen. Looking back, I see that on this side, the section of wall I've just walked through is blank except for a couple of metal panels with doors in them, like the kind that cover circuit-breaker boxes. [In the real-life House #1, there are kitchen counters and cabinets attached to that section of wall. Go figure.] Said metal panels are on a flap of drywall that is now sticking out from the wall at an angle, like a door. My passage through the wall has left a big, rough-edged rectangular hole in the drywall, the same height as I am. I can see the inside of the wall, and how thick it is, because the hole goes all the way through. This wasn't what I had been expecting to happen, but nonetheless, I say aloud, “Hell yeah! I did it! I just walked through a wall!” I'm pretty proud of myself. [Actually, that does make sense. I've had enough experience helping to build houses and doing home improvement projects in real life that I have a very detailed and complete schema for what the inside of a wall is like. I'm not surprised that when I said, “I want to walk through a wall!”, my mind answered, “okay, but you know that means breaking a hole in the drywall.” Interestingly, though, there were no studs to be seen in the dream.]

After that, I go out onto the street that House #1 is on. I climb up on top of a car that is parked on the street in front of my house, just because I can do so with almost no effort (unlike in reality,) but I don't start flying again. I just climb down the other side and walk along the streets of my neighborhood, which are also laid out just like they are in reality. The dream starts to fade, but I focus my vision and attention on the environment around me, and successfully bring it back into focus. Then, off in the distance, I see several tall, scary-looking metal structures rising up above the houses. They're as tall and narrow as construction cranes, but they aren't construction cranes. I'm frightened, so I run off and hide in a nearby public restroom.

[At this point, the dream transitioned from a lucid dream to a long, elaborate non-lucid dream that I don't remember much of now, so I'll summarize:] I'm watching a sci-fi story unfold from third-person perspective, like watching a movie. In it, people are punished for using long words. My dad is one of the people being punished.

When I woke up, I discovered that I actually had managed to fall asleep while lying on my right side in reality, corresponding to my position in my false awakening. I also realized: It's my dream. I don't have to be scared of anything I see in a dream - I can make it go away, by ignoring it, if nothing else. I can also transition to new scenes at will, and could find some snow that way. I just need to learn that these things are true.

----------
Side notes:

I had this dream the night after I had had a small, private celebration of lucid dreaming, as I'd announced in this thread. I was so proud of myself that I'd not only had a lucid dream that night, but had accomplished one of my lucid goals in it!

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

[This is a catch-up post. These are dreams that I had between December 16 and December 20, 2010.]

Night of December 16-17

I discover that every time the “Looney Tunes” theme music is heard on TV, it's always being played live by real live musicians, even nowadays. I tell one of the live musicians how awesome I think it is that Warner Bros. [yeah, yeah, I know, “AOL Time Warner”] still does that.

There is a research project going on. The goal is to research people with innuendo-y names, but without using the Internet. I am asked to make the necessary phone calls because of my “dulcimer” voice. [Um, I think the word you're looking for there is dulcet, brain.] Several of my friends, including Brianna G., are also involved in the project. We're all on vacation together, so, to help us out with the project, my mom reads silly names out of the newspaper every morning.

Night of December 18-19

[Fragment] My mom is entered in some kind of radio station contest.

[Fragment] To get a particular piece of e-book reading software to work right in Firefox, I have to install some Firefox extensions. The e-reading software works after I've installed them, but I discover that they've taken up all the remaining free space on my hard disk.

I'm going out to dinner with my parents. I don't want Mexican food for dinner because I've just had it recently. We're having dinner near the Starbucks that has taken over the cafe and adjacent motel that had originally occupied that particular building in Cayucos.

[Fragment] I'm pulling my car out of the garage when my cell phone rings. I answer it and talk to some salespeople.

I'm reporting in to work for a marketing agency. Usually, my job is to give out free samples of food in stores [this was my first real-life job, by the way], but today, my assignment is to go to Knott's Berry Farm and evaluate my experience there, like a mystery shopper. I'm running late, and I know I'm going to fall behind on the schedule the agency gave me, which includes seeing a show in a theater near the entrance to the park, but I'm still happy to be going there.

Night of December 19-20

[Fragment] I'm in line for Star Tours with P.

[Fragment] I'm in an underground complex of preschool classrooms.

I watch a full-length opening sequence for an animated show that is a fusion of “Bewitched” and “2 Stupid Dogs.” The animation looks like it was done by Hanna-Barbera. The opening sequence is followed by a behind-the-scenes clip of the Animated Actors who played some of the dogs. This clip was interrupted by my real alarm.

Non-lucid, Lucid, Dream within a dream, [Commentary made while awake]

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the night of December 13-14, 2010.]

[Note: I'm writing this entry well after the fact, working from handwritten notes, and even when I made the handwritten notes, I wasn't sure in what order the dream scenes had occurred. When writing this entry, I just arbitrarily put them in an order that made some kind of sense to me.]

I wake up in my bed in my room at House #1. A big, strong man is invading my bed and trying to attack me. I'm scared, and I try to get P.'s attention by yelling for her, but no one comes. I manage to evade him and escape. I know that once I'm standing up, I'm safe. I feel upset after this experience, so, to cheer myself up, I decide to go off and have a lucid flying dream.

The flying dream begins, and now I'm definitely lucid. [Yeah, that's right. In the aftermath of a regular nightmare, my non-lucid dream self decided she wanted to have a particular kind of lucid dream to cheer herself up, and my mind obliged. Weirdest DILD technique ever, but it's a pretty cool story.] At first, the dream is in third person, and I see myself flying over a beautiful town that fills a beautiful valley [now that I think of it, it looked a lot like the one in Kiki's Delivery Service]. I see another girl also flying over the town, unaided, the same way I'm flying. I consciously, deliberately shift to first-person perspective [That's a pretty neat trick. I wish I understood how I did it.] and approach closer to the other girl. I recognize her as Chihiro from Spirited Away. I come right up beside her and ask her, “This is a good way to fly, isn't it?”

“Mm-hmm!” she answers cheerfully.

I decide to ask the same question again, in Japanese this time, just for fun and because I can. “Fly no shikata wa sui ne?” [trans: “(This) way of flying is good, isn't it?” Again, dream!Japanese is weird – the word for “good” is ii in reality, not sui.]

"Un!" [trans: “Yeah!”] Chihiro answers. She continues talking in a language that I take to be Japanese at first, because the sounds of it are characteristic of Japanese, but after listening for a few seconds, I realize that the words are actually Spanish.

[Dreamskip.] I'm on foot, exploring some old, pretty brick buildings.

I wake up in my bedroom in House #1 again. P. is sitting at a table in the room, writing an essay.

I'm telling my family about the DreamViews website, but lying about its nature and telling them that it's strictly fandom-related. I tell them that my username there is “Stupid Top.” When P. finds out that I've been writing about the dreams that I've had about her, she gets sad and angry, and cries.

I wake up again in a variant of my bedroom in House #1. P. and I are in the bottom bunk together. Elsewhere in the house, there is a larger room that resembles the patio of our grandparents' house. A bunch of people from church come into the bedroom, and I explain that this is our old bedroom, and we used to share the full bed (we had just pushed our full mattress off the top bunk and onto the floor), not this twin bed. A woman in the group corrects me, calling the full bed a [something I can't remember] twin. I go along with it. The youngest S. girl is put into the full bed by her parents, but she doesn't want to take a nap.

I'm in a parking garage, and I randomly find some panties.

I'm reading a book that introduces the reader to a code of spiritual laws and rules that I realize are of Mormon origin when I see a citation that says something like “Uses 21:7” [e.g., a citation from a book whose name I don't recognize]. One of the rules in the book specifically forbids entering holes populated by worms for long dreaming. It surprises me to find that the people who wrote this book both knew about lucid dreaming and made a rule about it. [Yes, I did read the thread about why it's hard to get to the moon, and I think that's what inspired this dream.]

I'm exploring a building somewhere, and my friend Mary T. is there. [Day residue; I'd seen her the day before I had this dream.]

I'm driving over the bridge on W. Road that crosses over I-15, heading toward a buffet-style cafe, where I routinely go for breakfast [only in this dream, not in real life].

Non-lucid dream, [Commentary made while awake]

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the night of December 11-12, 2010.]

[Fragment] I see a panoramic overview of the city of Austin, Texas. It's very bright, with lots of city lights and several brightly-lit casinos.

[Fragment] Two mascot characters, a monster and a yeti, are having an argument over where to find America on a globe.

[Longer dream begins here] I'm in the brown car with my mom. The car is in the parking lot of an Applebee's restaurant, which is in a shopping center. [The shopping center we were in looked nothing like any of the ones I know in real life.] I tell my mom that yes, I do actually want to wait there for Dad and go to dinner with him. We park the car in the space underneath a long van [or something like that] that is being held up off the ground by two other cars. I'm surprised that our car fits under there.

Dad arrives. We get out of the car and start walking toward the restaurant. [In this particular dream,] I have a second body and can switch from using one to using the other at will. As we're walking along the sidewalk in front of the other shops in the shopping center, I say to my parents, “Nobody's home, so I'm going to go pretend to be asleep.” When I stopped using the first body and switched to the second one, the first one had remained standing there near where we'd parked the car, staring blankly at nothing because there was no consciousness animating it. My plan is to switch back to the first body, lie down somewhere and make it look like I'm asleep so that no one else will figure out that I have two bodies, then switch back to the second one and carry on with what I was doing (going to dinner). As I walk back toward where I left the first one, I mentally debate whether it would be less illegal to (pretend to) sleep on the sidewalk, or in the front seat of the brown car. I know you're not allowed to sleep in parked cars on the street. [I thought the having-two-bodies thing was pretty darn cool. ]

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

[I dreamed for a subjectively really long time last night, but my recall is a bit fragmented. I don't really remember the transitions between most of the scenes, which is reflected in the absence of flowing transitions between paragraphs in this entry.]

I'm lying in a bed that I'm sharing with a man I know. It's not sexual; he's asleep. He rolls over onto me, apparently completely unaware of my presence. I struggle to get out from underneath him, and succeed, standing up.

I'm now in a long, wide, rectangular space with white walls that serves as the entryway to our church's offices, which are within a really big building. A long, straight hallway leading to other offices on the floor forms one of the long sides of the rectangle, and the doors into our offices are on the other side. The center of the rectangle is filled with a row of wide, square, dark-colored, upholstered seats. I'm lying on one of them, with my knees bent over the front edge of it and my feet on the floor. Several people from my church walk by, coming in and out of the doors. They see me, and I say, “Hi.”

I'm in another room in the same really big building. It's being remodeled. There's a couch that's completely wrapped in newsprint, because someone is going to paint this room. I'm standing near the doorway, and I see L.M. [a teacher from my real high school, whose class I was never in] walking by out in the hall. I introduce one of the other people who's in the room with me to her: “This is L.M. She teaches biology.” L.M. is wearing a name tag that says “Sakura Lily [Something-or-other beginning with M],” in Roman characters. I think, I didn't know that was her real name.

I'm looking out the wall of the really big building that's make up of one really big window, at a sky filled with pink and orange clouds. I realize that it's already 3:00 in the afternoon, and I've already wasted most of the day. I'd better hurry up if I want to do the studying I still need to do for my final. [In the dream, I actually remembered having experienced most of an entire day in that really big building, including lunchtime.]

I'm in another living-room-like room, similar to the one that was being remodeled, except that this one isn't. At this point, it hits me: This isn't a real place. I'm dreaming. That explains why I wasn't really hungry for lunch earlier: my real body is asleep, and I had a big dinner before I went to bed. Oh! Since I'm dreaming, it's not really 3:00. The day hasn't even started yet! I still have time to study! Strangely, thinking about the fact that I'm dreaming causes me to feel woozy, dizzy, and sick, and the whole world to tilt. [Probably because I was rereading parts of the Inception shooting script again, in which telling someone that they're dreaming causes the dream to destabilize. Dang it! I know it doesn't have to be like that.] I think, No. I have to keep the dream stable. I kneel down to feel the carpet, which, this time, is a little like the carpet in my real room, except lighter (more yellow than brown) and slightly shaggier. The dizzy, tilting feeling goes away. Standing up, I put my hands under running water. At first, I can't feel it at all, but then I feel the warm water running over my hands. Then, I reach into a fish tank on a nearby table to touch the goldfish in it with my fingers. I've done this before, I think. What did it feel like? This. It does feel pretty much like I remember it feeling when I had my own goldfish tank in reality.

I return to the room that was being remodeled, to find that they're done remodeling it. The couch has been unwrapped and all the other furniture has been returned to the room. This room will be serving as the first-aid station for some kind of event; there's a handwritten paper sign on the door saying so. I feel the need to leave this room clean and neat before this dream ends (I sense that it will soon), so I pick up all the trash and used tissues that are lying all over the middle of the floor.

I'm outside, at night, looking at a couple of brightly-lit city blocks. I think, Oh, cool! Those are the blocks just to the south of home! [What home, I don't have the slightest idea.] I start flying, this time taking off with more of an effort of will and belief than by jumping (it also helps that I'm feeling happy and excited), and go straight up, so as to admire the view better. When I get up high, I start being pulled backward again [see this DJ entry and this one], but this time, it doesn't frighten me. I think, Oh, I must be going back to my real body now.

It turns out that I'm wrong. I find myself in another unfamiliar place [I don't remember where it was]. I pinch my nose and can still breathe through it, which is a pretty neat feeling. I'm still dreaming. [I remember doing this on two different occasions, but I'm not sure when the other one was.]

I'm entering my family's house [but it's none of our real houses]. P. is waiting for me inside, and expresses frustration that I've been gone so long. I'm still aware that this is a dream, but I decide to play along with the dream plot. I enter the kitchen, and my parents are there. I look at the whiteboard/calendar attached to the side of the fridge and see that something I wrote there before has been erased, and the magnets on it have been moved around. I follow my family up the stairs in the house, and we end up in a room filled with barrels of wine.

----------------------
Side notes:

This dream seemed to go on for a really long time, especially considering that I remembered being in the dream building for most of a day. I only wrote down the most memorable moments. I think this is because time dilation was the topic I was reading the most about here on DV before I went to bed last night. I am pleased with this development, and now I'm even more motivated to learn better control, so that I can really take advantage of the time and stability I now seem to have in lucid dreams.

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

[Another really long entry, but it's a really good one this time. Sorry for taking up so much page space again.]

I'm on the playground of my elementary school. It's dusk, and there are lots and lots of kids and teenagers on the playground, some playing games, others just milling around. I see one group of kids playing something that they call tackle football; it involves one person on the team holding a bowl of green beans and others holding and occasionally eating spoonfuls of the green beans, while the entire team moves around the field. Curious about the game they're playing, I approach the group.

“Are those green beans?” I ask.

“Yes,” someone in the group says.

The group spreads out a little, and I see that two of the people in it are P. and Thomas[, who first appeared in my dream dated December 7]. The instant I see him, I know for sure that I'm dreaming. “Thomas?” I say, looking at him. He acknowledges me. I'm pleasantly surprised to see him again, and amazed at how completely real all the people around me look. Throughout the rest of this dream, I make a special effort to pay attention to the environment around me, including paying attention to the physical sensations of touching things whenever I can. I'm aware that if I don't, they'll stop existing and fade away.

I start wandering through the playground, heading back toward the school buildings. P. and Thomas are following me. It's now fully dark, but the playground is still crowded. I end up on the sidewalk of the street that runs along the south side of the school and passes the kindergarten before the dreamscape shifts on me.

I don't notice the shift itself, but I find myself walking through the streets of a charming, slightly old-fashioned downtown with square, orderly blocks. There's no one else around. I stop and turn around, attempting to summon P. and/or Thomas by expecting them to be there. It doesn't work; I'm all alone. I shrug and continue exploring. As I had in the previous scene, I continue to notice and marvel at how vivid, detailed, and realistic the environment around me is. Everything looks and feels exactly like reality, yet I know perfectly well that I'm dreaming. I can even feel the asphalt and pavement under my feet. [It didn't occur to me until I had woken up and was lying there, recalling my dream, that I must have looked pretty funny wandering around in public places with no shoes on. ] I remember one of my lucid goals and attempt to walk through a wall into one of the shops. I try it twice, but it doesn't work either time; I'm not surprised at all to discover that the wall is just as solid and “real” as everything else in this dream world. As I continue walking, I think, Wow, this dream is really stable and seems to be going on for a long time. What should I do here? Oh, yeah – the Task of the Month is to hit a DC with a snowball. I'll have to go find a snowball. But there is no snow in this setting, and the weather is clear and bright.

I pass a small shop front on a street corner, with a red brick facade and a walk-up window where you can buy things. I recognize the woman inside as Lisa D., a real-life friend. I stop and talk to her. I say, “Lisa, do you happen to know where I might find a snowball?” She invites me to come into the shop through the door on the side. I stand just outside the door. [I don't know why; recall is a little vague here.] The small shop is actually a short truck, which is backed up to the brick facade with the window in it with its back cargo door open, forming the interior space. Lisa starts up the truck and starts driving it away from the facade and along the street. I walk quickly along with it for a little way, holding on to the frame of the open, narrow door on the side and keeping pace with it. Then I step up into the truck through the doorway and ride in it. I say aloud, “I could float along with the truck, but when the truck is moving, why make the effort?” I vaguely remember another person being in the doorway with me, but if so, I don't know who it was.

I ride inside the truck as it drives up into the mountains. While sitting in the truck, I hold onto the handle of a plastic bucket, feeling the sensation to ensure the dream remains stable. The truck takes me to a town on a mountaintop. I'm on or near a different, fenced-in school playground [I think; again, my recall isn't very good here.] I can see buildings on the tops of nearby hills, and I think I catch a glimpse of a patch of snow on a distant hilltop, but I'm not sure.

[I think] The scene shifts again, and I'm walking around on the campus of a community college. [Day residue; I walked back and forth across my real community college campus several times yesterday.] There's no one else around. This community college campus has slightly more traditional-looking architecture than my real one does, has a different layout, and there are more plants around and they're more mature, making the campus greener than my real one. This is a pretty campus, I think. I'm still admiring how vivid and "real" my surroundings are as I explore them, and I'm still looking for snow, but not finding any.

[Dreamskip? Another scene shift? I'm not sure, but the next thing I remember is that] I'm walking through the interior of a large, recreational building. I'm in a spacious, high-ceilinged indoor space with two swimming pools in it, a large, deep one and a smaller, shallower one, at right angles to each other. There are people in this room, many of them kids, walking around, swimming, and getting into and out of the pools. In one corner of the room is the entrance to a child-care room, which is full of brightly pastel-colored play equipment with little kids playing on it. It's separated from the room with the pools by glass walls. One of the glass walls has sticky gel letters on the inside of it, so that they look backward from outside the room. I can still read them backward, though. When I first look at them, I read them as “Children Sno” and think, Yay, snow! Then I approach the room for a closer look and realize that I've misread them; they say “Children Glo.” I leave the room, walking on the path between the narrow end of the larger pool and the longer side of the smaller pool. As I walk, I complain aloud: “There's no snow here! I mean, I know I've lived in Southern California all my life, but come on! Can't I have some imagination?” [I was complaining about the fact that, even though I wanted to complete the Task of the Month, my mind wasn't creating any snow in my dream world. The explanation I came up with for this observation was that I've never spent a winter in an area where it snows, so my mind can't re-create snow very easily, because I've only experienced it in real life a couple of times, so I don't know what it's like very well.]

Outside the recreational building, there's a courtyard or patio where a large group of people are having a celebration or reception. I walk among them without speaking to anyone. No one takes any notice of me. There are folding tables with paper tablecloths and lots of food set out on them, including oatmeal cookies. [I wish I'd thought to try one! This was the first time I've had the chance to try dream food while lucid, and I missed it! Dang!] Still in search of a snowball to throw, I decide to try summoning one by reaching under a small table of food next to a wall, without looking, and expecting a snowball to be there. It doesn't work. When I look, the only thing under the table is a small, open-topped cardboard box with some kind of party supplies in it, like paper napkins. [I note that in my attempts to summon people or things in this dream, I did not have the same quiet assurance and confidence that it would work as I had at those times in the past when I successfully summoned an object. I wasn't truly focusing on it or believing in it this time, which, I think, is why it didn't work.]

I get up from looking under the table and look around at the people celebrating. I sense that the dream is about to end. I close my eyes, hoping to use that method of teleporting to get to another environment. I just end up looking at the inside of my real eyelids.

-------------------------------
Side notes:

This dream came at the end of a very bad, emotionally draining day and a late night. I was too tired to really try to induce a lucid dream. All I did was get up for a minute or two and go back to bed right before I had this dream, do a minimal amount of affirmations (maybe one or two), and wear my cardboard-square wristband on the inside of my right wrist, which I hadn't worn at all in a while. It may have been one of these things that caused such a long, vivid lucid dream, or maybe it was just the fact that I'd had a bad day and wanted to escape from it all (even though I consciously told myself before bed that that was stupid). I sure did feel a lot happier and better after waking up from my dream, though.

After waking up, I realized two things about this dream:
A) Expecting to be able to summon a snowball was stupid because, unlike the seed pod that I successfully summoned before (see entry dated October 26, 2010), a snowball doesn't naturally exist as a discrete object. You have to make a snowball yourself.
B) I was surrounded by DCs several times. I could have talked to my subconscious and asked for the answers to the questions from my exam that I missed because I had studied those subjects months ago, forgotten about them, and failed to review before the exam. (I'm not saying for sure that it would have worked, but it would have been fun to try. I'm curious to know if it can work.) I actually thought about doing that before I went to bed, but I didn't even think of it while I was dreaming. The only thing it occurred to me to do was to hit a DC with a snowball. Silly me! I will have to add “ask a DC about stuff I should know, but have forgotten” to my list of goals.

One final note: Wow. I now have a recurring, original, named dream character who is neither a pre-existing fictional character nor anyone I know in real life, and seeing him made me go lucid because I remembered meeting him in a previous dream, and here he was again, so I had to be dreaming. That's pretty neat. I can't say for sure that that officially makes him my dream guide, though, at least not just yet. It didn't occur to me to ask him if he was one. If I see him again, I'll try to remember to do that.