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    The Lab Notebook

    Like many others, I was attracted to lucid dreaming by Inception. Unlike some others, I was very quick to let go of the misconceptions it offers, and to learn and embrace the lingo, the practices, and the understanding of dreaming that are accepted by the community of real people I found here.

    I titled my dream journal "The Lab Notebook" because of the way I'm naturally inclined to write the portions of my dream journal entries that are commentary and side notes on my dreams. I always write with the vocabulary, style, and mindset of a scientist recording the observations she's made during her experiments. That's the framework in which I can best make sense of what I'm learning about dreaming.

    I always write about dreams in the present tense, because I remember reading somewhere that doing so helps the events of the dream seem more immediate and real to you, and helps you recall them.

    The color-coding system I use in my dream journal is:

    Dark red: Things I did while awake
    Teal: Non-lucid portions of the dream
    Deep sky blue: Semi-lucid portions of the dream
    Dark orchid: Lucid portions of the dream (because it's my favorite color)
    [Black within square brackets:] Commentary added by me while I was writing the dream journal entry

    1. FAs and a Social Gathering (Night of September 8-9)

      by , 09-11-2011 at 05:22 PM (The Lab Notebook)
      [This is another catchup post.]

      Non-lucid dream, [Commentary made while awake]

      Night of September 8-9

      I wake up in my current bedroom. I go down the stairs and look at a digital clock. As I look at it, it changes from 1:07 [or something like that] to 5:07. I know I have to get up for the day at 5:15 [this was actually true in real life, since it was a Friday morning], but I'm still feeling sleepy, so I decide to just go back to bed for those last 8 minutes. I go back up the stairs and go back to sleep.

      I wake up in a different bedroom, in a two-story house
      [that might or might not have been House #2, I'm not sure]. I go downstairs, and there's a social gathering just getting started. A bunch of my [present-day] friends from church are just arriving at the house. I get into a conversation with my mom and PB on the subject of how important it is to always eat everything on one's plate. My mom says that her father always used to tell her to clean her plate. I say that I learned that it was good manners to do so from reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's books when I was a little girl.

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

      When I woke up for real, I was pretty mad at myself for having missed two false awakenings, one of them involving the classic dream sign of a digital clock changing the time it displays.

      Right after I woke up from this dream, my memory of the exact words of the conversation I had had in the dream was much clearer than my memory of conversations in dreams usually is. I'm writing this on the evening of the following day, though, so I don't remember it as well. The story about me reading Laura Ingalls Wilder as a child and learning lessons about manners and etiquette from her books is true, and comes directly from my real life. My mom has never actually told me that specific story about her and her father – my mind just made it up, but it is consistent with his personality.

      Updated 10-04-2011 at 02:23 AM by 37356

      Categories
      non-lucid , false awakening , side notes