The Lab Notebook

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

I'm at the camp I went to as a kid [Not the one mentioned in the catchup post below, another one] with my dad. The lodge is a Marie Callender's [Cool!], and we're going out to dinner there. We get a table and order coffee and cookies. Mom is already there and tells us to come over and join her at her table. She's mad at us for not seeing her when we came in, or looking for her in the crowd. Dad and I get up and move to her table, bringing our coffee and cookies with us.

While we're in the restaurant [I think], I start looking back at old pictures of myself on various camping trips. One of them is of my and several of my Literacy AmeriCorps friends, including Laya, Jen, and Chelisa. The oldest picture is from junior high school. It's a big, panoramic picture with lots and lots of kids and their camp counselors in it. I'm near the far right, next to Erica. [She didn't even go to my junior high.] Those of us who are on that side of the picture are standing near the grassy edge of a cliff; one of the boys on in the picture is pretending to be about to step off.

I wake up in my current bed. I try several times to turn on the lamp next to it, but the bulb just flickers and sputters every time I try. I turn the knob until the flickering stops, tighten the bulb in its socket, then try again. Still nothing. I go out into the hall to look at the digital clock on one of our cable boxes, to see what time it is. It says 7:39, which disappoints me. Aw, man! It's time to get up, I think. Then I look again and see that I made a mistake: it's only 2:39. So, I get my notepad and start taking notes on the dream I just had.

...And then I woke up for real. This time, I remembered to do the nose-pinch RC. I was very annoyed with myself for not doing any RCs before and not catching the FA, especially when I realized that I had missed not one, but two of the classic dream signs, one right after another. My mind is great at giving me clues that I'm dreaming; I'm just oblivious.

After that, it seems to take me a really long time to get back to sleep. While I'm trying to do so, I think, Oh, crap, I can't talk to Cj on the phone tomorrow at 9, because that's when I'm meeting with Frank. I get up, take my laptop into the study, and sleepily start writing her an e-mail explaining that we'll have to postpone our date to talk on the phone because I have a conflicting appointment. I'm working in Yahoo! Mail [which is what I use for my main e-mail account in reality], and press Send. Suddenly, annoying, circus-y music starts to play out of the computer's speakers, and the screen is filled with a weird, old, basic HTML page with a colored background. The page appears to scroll down automatically. One of the first things to appear on it is a single sentence of text that contains my name. This is what makes me realize what's going on: I've stupidly allowed my Yahoo password to get phished by entering it into a fake website, and now my laptop has a virus. I let out a long string of curse words (actually, the same curse word repeated many times). Windows starts scanning my computer, trying to fight the virus.

Mom and P. are coming home. According to the digital clocks on the cable boxes, it's 12:02 A.M. Leaving my laptop on the floor of the study, I go outside to the street to meet them. They're coming home in a red VW New Beetle (where did they get that? I wonder silently), which they're parking on the curb across the street from our house, because our two regular cars [the ones we own in reality] are taking up both spaces in the garage. I come over to greet them as they're getting out of the car. As we walk back toward the house, I look at the side yard and see that there's a bamboo tree that sort of looks like a fountain there. Ooh, that's pretty! I think. P. goes back to put some more CDs in the New Beetle. [Neither it nor the bamboo tree exist in reality, of course, but I didn't realize that anything was strange until after I woke up. :/ ]

I woke up for real at 5:00 and took down more notes. I realized in hindsight that it hadn't actually taken me as long to fall asleep as I had thought; at least part of the process, and everything after that, had been a dream. I didn't actually have any such appointment with Cj, anyway. I was amazed at how completely and totally this dream had convinced me that I was in reality.

I'm indoors somewhere, and I'm wearing a cowboy hat. I look behind me and see my friend D.W. there, riding in a wheelchair. I think, Oh, good, she got a wheelchair. I feel the cowboy hat on my head and think, Oh, yeah, this is a dream. I can feel the by-now-familiar sensation of lucid-dream consciousness. I open my dream self's eyes and look very briefly at my hands, which appear normal, then up at my indoor surroundings. To engage more fully with my dream self and its sense of touch, I reach up to touch the brim of the cowboy hat with both hands, then take it off. I'm sitting in something [possibly another wheelchair, but I don't see it, so I'm not sure]. I stand up and try to turn around and talk to D.W., but just then, I heard my mom talking out in the entryway, which took my attention away from the dream, which instantaneously kicked me back into reality.

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Side notes:
I should choose my MILD affirmations with more care. The ones I focused on the most this past night were “I am self-aware and in control in my dreams” and “I bring clarity, lucidity, and stability into my dreams.” These backfired rather spectacularly in my second dream of the night. It was perfectly clear and stable, and, as far as I could tell, I was just as self-aware and in control of my own actions as I am in reality. And yet, I never realized that I was dreaming. I focused on that aspect more as I was trying to get back to sleep after 5:00, and it worked, if only briefly.

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

[These are all my dreams from the past week or so that I hadn't gotten around to typing up and/or posting to this DJ, until now. Most of them are pretty fragmentary because I wrote about them from notes long after the fact. None of them were lucid. My most recent dream, from last night, will be in a separate post, because it's longer.]

Night of November 10-11

I take a lengthy tour of a camp I've been to several times, answering questions asked by people who have never been there before. We're all there for our organization's annual fall conference. There are two cabins up high on a ridge, and a big meeting/dining hall on the low ground, right near the entrance. [I knew it was that camp while I was in the dream, even though it has a completely different layout in reality. This was a pretty long dream, but I can't remember any more details now.]

I'm with Ariel from the Disney version of The Little Mermaid. We're finding our way through a Little Mermaid-themed maze. It's one of several mazes at Walt Disney World.

Night of November 11-12

Mom, P., and I are out to dinner at a restaurant with an outdoor patio. P. asks me if I got any gumbo the last time we were there. I answer that no, Dad ate it all.

I see a two-year-old girl on the street. I walk with her back to my grandparents' house. The front door of the house has two separate sections that can open and close independently of each other. We get into the house by opening the top section of the door first. When we get inside, we discover that my grandparents have a new, upright, Scrabble-like electronic board game in their house. It involves a countdown timer.

Night of November 12-13

I'm in my current house, and I listen to a voice mail from a publishing company. I return their call and talk to them. We try to organize a live interview in 30 minutes' time. They're even willing to give me directions to their office over the phone. We don't schedule the interview for 30 minutes from now, though, because that's not enough time for me to shower and get dressed. They put me on hold for a bit. When they come back, we agree on next week instead. They expect me to bring a completed, polished novel manuscript with me to the interview so we can talk about it, and I don't have one, so I think, Okay. I only have one week to finish one of my novels. My hair is long and in a French braid, and I decide to leave it that way and not wash it before the interview.

I'm with my friend Jane R. She's trying on a cute dress made out of a towel-like, terry-cloth material, and I'm helping her adjust it.

I'm watching an episode of “Rugrats” in which one of the babies helps teach another how to use the potty, and they are found by one of their moms.

When I woke up, I went, Oh. I guess I don't have to have one of my novels finished by next week. Although that would be nice. I think I had that dream about the interview because I was worrying about how I was going to balance writing, studying, and job-hunting just as I was going to sleep.

Night of November 14-15

A Christian band sings a song about their dying dog.

I'm watching the pilot episode of a superhero TV show. The show will have a superhero team consisting of 5 boys and 3 girls. I will be one of the girls on the team. I know this from watching the show's opening.

Night of November 15-16

I'm at a church camp, standing outside the little trailer where the leader of the camp is staying. His wife is sitting on a chair outside the trailer. She tells me that I can't talk to him right now because he's sleeping.

I'm getting ready to leave the camp. I'm in the process of moving my stuff out of the space in and around a twin bed in a cabin, but I'm not done yet. I come back into the cabin to continue packing, and there's another girl already lying in my bed. I tell her that I was using the space, but I'm vacating it and she can have it now, but she has my permission to play with my teddy bears. Three of my teddy bears are lying on the end of the bed [I own all of them in real life]. She answers that no, she'll take the responsibility for cleaning the place up.

A third girl who is also in the room asks me, “Can I at least do your makeup?” I look at my face in the mirror next to the bed and see that it has red blotches on it, and several large zits, including two on the left side of my jawline. I agree to let the girl do my makeup, and we go over to another wall of the room, where there is a dresser with various cosmetics on it. I see that one of the bottles of makeup is labeled inception, and I think, Oh, cool. I didn't know that was the brand name of the makeup I used. [*facepalm* Oh, dear. That really should have clued me in that I was dreaming.] I reach for this bottle, but the girl who offered to do my makeup chastises me, snapping at me to spray myself first with an alcohol-based antibacterial cleanser that comes in a pale teal bottle. I do so, wiping it over my face with a cotton ball.

A bunch of non-lucid dreams last night.

I'm at our original church, and the entire center courtyard area is full of colorful and unique play structures for the kids, including a scaled-down replica of some other important building elsewhere in the area that has statues on the facade. I go into a room in the main building, and a younger (maybe 9 or 10 years old) version of P. is there, being taken care of by the usual child-care people.

I'm sitting at a table in a building somewhere, looking out the window across a narrow body of water. Across the water is an island, where Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea are located. [They're not actually on an island in real life, by the way.] I can see both of them very clearly, as well as the people on the island. Near the shore of the island is a fleet of small, brightly-colored boats and canoes, used to take guests back and forth between the island and the mainland. Most of them are filled with guests waiting to depart for the mainland; more guests are still boarding the remaining boats.

I'm at a coffee shop (might be the same building I was in above, but I'm not positive), working on my computer, which is booted into Ubuntu. I look up and enter the password for something. I register for a camping trip that is happening outside and across the street, near the beach. When I go out to the campsite, there are a bunch of tents (or some kind of structures for us to sleep in), and some portable toilets. The people in charge are distributing rolls of toilet paper from big packages, and are also distributing food. There are also some coolers, which I look into and see that they're full of ice and bags of chicken breasts. This causes me to go, “Aw, man!” I don't want chicken sandwiches for dinner, because that's what we had that one time during the camping trip in sixth grade, and I didn't like them then. [Everything after the “because” is true in reality.]