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.

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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.

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

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

I'm in the upstairs bathroom (mine and P.'s) at House #2, with P. She has really long, pale blonde hair worn in a ponytail, and she also has an actual tail, like a horse's, the same color. She asks me to help her disentangle the two. I do so, once I figure out what she means: the hair from the two tails has gotten tangled up together, and she needs help separating them.

False awakening. I wake up in a dormitory room at my university. It's 6:15 A.M. according to my clock radio, which either didn't go off at 5:45 like it was supposed to, or it did go off and I missed it. Either way, I'm annoyed, because now I'm going to run late for my 8:00 A.M. meeting. I turn on the clock radio, which is tuned to KFI [a local talk radio station] [that I would never choose to listen to on a weekday morning in real life, by the way], figure out how to turn the alarm function off, do so, then turn the radio off again.

Looking out the window of my dorm room, which is on the ground floor of San Nicolas Hall [I lived on the second floor in real life], I see two of my friends, a guy and a girl, walking across the quad to the other dorm building to use the shower in the bathroom there. They're carrying their baskets of shampoo and other shower supplies. I'm annoyed, because I was going to use that shower. Another friend, a girl with short, curly black hair, is coming back toward my building. She tells me to use one of the bathrooms in our hallway. I decide to do so.

Before I go and do that, though, I look through my paper dream journal, which is an old, wrinkled composition book. [This composition book exists in real life, but it belongs to my mom; I've never used it for anything myself.] I reread an old entry, which contains a sentence that says something about having a monkey as a dream sign. I think, This wouldn't make any sense to anyone who was reading it unless they already knew what a 'dream sign' was. And then my real alarm went off, at 5:45. I really did have a meeting to go to at 8:00 that morning, and I really did need to get up early to shower and style my hair. All of this carried over into the dream (probably because it's not part of my usual routine, so it was on my mind), but the dream put it in a different setting. If I could have slept longer, might I have realized I was dreaming based on what I was reading about in the dream journal in my dream? Maybe, but probably not; I'm not very good at picking up on those cues.