The Lab Notebook

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

[Note: This was my first time taking melatonin. I took a 3mg pill before I went to bed. I'm on a trip, and my hosts offered it to me to help me get over jet lag. I also tried to concentrate on lucid dreaming more than I had been lately, as I was falling asleep. One or both of those things worked.]

I'm walking along the right-hand side of a broad, wide street, passing several marching bands as they march past in the opposite direction, one after another.

I'm in a classroom at a school that looks a lot like my old elementary school. There are a lot of other people my age there. A bunch of us start sitting down in a semicircle with our musical instruments; we're about to play an impromptu band concert. TM [a real-life friend and roommate who I only met within the last six months] is one of the people participating in the concert, but it's obvious that she doesn't know how to line up for one correctly. I yell at her: “[TM]! You have to sit so that you're spaced evenly! That's the done thing in music!”

The band starts playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The memory of how to play it comes flooding back into my mind from high school. [This is a real memory. It was one of the songs I had to memorize how to play for football games.] I'm surprised and pleased to find that I can still play it. As we're playing, though, the other members of the band lose interest, stop playing, and wander out of the room, leaving me playing my clarinet all alone.

When I get to a stopping place, I stop playing and leave the room in the company of a female teacher. We walk around the western edge of campus and come to the entrance of another classroom, where we stop and talk to a male teacher. Somewhere around this point, I realize that I'm dreaming. [I don't remember the specific moment it happened, but I know I've had at least one other dream featuring this version of my old elementary-school campus before.]

In the conversation with the male teacher, I ask him how old I am right now: “Am I eleven, the age I was when I started playing the clarinet; fourteen, the age I was when I graduated from junior high school; eighteen, the age I was when I graduated from high school; or twenty-six, the age I am right now in the real world?” I mention the real world specifically to see whether he'll pick up on the implication that the world we're in right now isn't real, and how he'll react.

“There is no real world involved in this discussion!” the male teacher exclaims.

I decide not to pursue that topic any further, because it's obvious that I'm not going to be able to convince him that this is a dream.

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

I'm visiting Las Vegas. Downtown Las Vegas is made up of multiple levels of shops, restaurants, and casinos, most of them themed to a particular pop-culture franchise, all stacked on top of each other and connected by multiple layers of walkways and stairs, creating a gigantic, multilevel man-made environment. I'm walking through this environment with my mom. I walk away from her briefly to do something on my own [I don't remember what], and I'm worried for a moment that I won't be able to find my way back to where she's sitting. But I come back down the stairs and there she is, sitting on a bench next to a curved railing at the edge of an elevated walkway, waiting for me to come back. When I approach, she gets up, and we continue walking.

Then, my mom and I are joined by my sister and a couple of our girlfriends. [They weren't anyone I know in real life, but in the dream, they were our friends.] While we're walking around, my mom says something to the effect of, “I thought all you girls were supposed to go see a shrink!” We just kind of laugh and say, “Yeah, we were.” [I think] We're still planning on going to see one later.

My family and I are getting ready to leave somewhere on an airplane. I observe how airplanes operate, by catching drafts of air, and think about how fragile and uncertain this process is. Then I think that it's best not to think about this process too much, since I'm going to have to travel on one very shortly. Then, we're flying on the airplane. It flies past some elevated highways that appear familiar to me.

[Different dream, probably in a different cycle.] I'm sitting in a typical high school football stadium, watching the pre-game activities. There is a marching band on the field. One member of the marching band has a large trombone whose bell is filled with clarinets. When he blows into the trombone, the clarinets spray out all over the place.

I find myself hunting through the bleachers for my clarinet reeds, which have been thrown all over the place. I pick them up, looking at the numbers printed on the back of each one, looking for the 2 ½ reed. One of them says “5 ½,” another “3 ½.” Eventually, I find the 2 ½ one.

The football players are on the field, warming up for the game. One of them throws a practice pass to another, but with a basketball, not a football. I look away from the field, and look down at the program on my lap. It's made of sheets of paper folded in half crosswise, and has lots of text on it. I read it for a few moments, and then something [I don't remember what] makes me stop and think, Either [something that I can't remember now], or this is a dream program. I reach up and pinch my nose shut, and feel that wonderful, paradoxical sensation of being able to breathe through it while doing so. Yes, I'm dreaming. I pinch my nose and breathe through it for a few moments more, to verify and to enjoy the sensation. While doing this, I gaze at the program, not reading it, just looking at it and appreciating the experience of knowing that this thing I'm looking at, as real as it looks, is just a dream image being generated by my mind.

When I look up at the field again, I'm surprised to find that the scene has grown mostly dark, as if somebody turned off most of the lights. I know that's because I haven't been paying any attention to the football field for the last couple of minutes, and therefore, it's started to fade away. I'm disappointed, and wish and hope that it will get brighter again, but it doesn't. Then the dream ended.

After I had woken up, I remembered that I could have verbally commanded the dream to become clear and bright again, and mentally kicked myself for forgetting about that trick.

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

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

Night of December 24-25

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

Night of December 25-26

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

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

Night of December 26-27

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

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

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

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

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