The Lab Notebook

[This is a catch-up post. This dream took place on the night of December 5-6, 2012.]

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

I'm at my university, and I have to fill out and turn in a form to get rid of a dorm room that I don't want or need, because I'm living in an apartment. I go into a computer lab to work on it, and the computers have floppy disk drives. When I remember a previous episode in this ongoing plot, I realize that I'm dreaming. [I don't remember that previous episode now, though. I think the lucid part of this dream continued on from this point, but I didn't write down what happened.]

I wake up, walk into the room where I work, and go to my work computer. As I'm walking across the room, I think, Hmm, am I still dreaming? This sure looks and feels real, and gravity feels normal, but I have a sneaking suspicion... When I get to my work computer, I see an instant-message conversation on the screen, and it's between two fictional characters. Yep. Still dreaming, I think. I start trying to type up a dream journal entry on my work computer, but I find it's very difficult to type in a dream. It's really slow going; it feels like my fingers don't know what to do. [Makes sense - that part of my brain that knows learned skills like typing must not be active when I'm asleep.] After just a few sentences, I lose interest in finishing my dream journal entry.

I start floating away from my desk. A friend gives me a push to help me along. I go into another area, where there are a bunch of people having some sort of gathering, possibly a picnic [I don't really remember now]. I decide I want to try making myself bigger. I crouch down on all fours, close my eyes, and concentrate on expanding the size of my body. At first, I don't think it's working because I don't feel any sensation, but when I open my eyes, I discover that it worked: I'm now huge compared to the DCs.

I wake up at somebody's house, having spent the night there after a party. I drive myself home, but get lost along the way. While I'm driving, my alarm clock wakes me up for real.

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

I'm on my laptop, playing one of the mini-games within Petpet Park, when the game interrupts me with a pop-up notification saying that I've set a score record and asking me to fill in the name I want to display next to the record. I type in my player character's name. As soon as I finish typing it, it changes to a completely different, longer name. I think, Computers don't usually change what you've typed after you've typed it. I must be dreaming! I reach up and pinch my nose and, just as I had expected, feel that otherworldly sensation of being able to breathe through it. I feel a strong surge of excitement and happiness.

Suddenly, I find myself lying in my bed in my current bedroom. Still knowing perfectly well that I'm dreaming, I climb out of bed and walk out of the room and down the stairs. I hop down the last few steps, enjoying the way it takes me a couple of seconds to float down and land as gently as a feather on the floor, unlike in reality. In the living room, where the stairs end and where the ceiling is high, I float into the open space like a balloon for a few moments. I'm having a great time.

Then I decide to go out the front door. I start trying to go through it intangibly, thinking, I know I can do this. I've done it before. I can see the door and its interior, which are dark brown, and then the front yard as I begin to go through the door. I don't get all the way through it, though. I end up walking out onto the front path, then realizing that I've made a hole in the door with my face, and my face is still stuck through it; I've brought it with me. “This is stupid,” I say. I peel it off and toss it aside; it feels like it's made of thin plastic.

Now that I'm outside, I start floating again. I see two dogs in somebody’s yard and start flying higher, making sure I'm out of their reach in case they try to jump up and attack me. [Darn irrational fears. I have that one in real life, too. I know I could have confronted it and perhaps reduced its hold through this dream, but it didn't occur to me to do so at the time.] However, the dogs do no such thing. I continue flying, and think, It's good that I'm in my own neighborhood, and it looks just like it does in reality. [Except that it didn't, not quite. The street turned to the right in the dream at a place where it dead-ends in reality.] Down on the street, I see two cartoony-looking kids named Sam and Sarah talking to each other. At some point during their conversation, I woke up.

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the night of July 22-23, 2011.]

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

I'm at a big, old house that is now a tourist site. It's a bit like Hearst Castle, only older, in a different architectural style, and not on a hill. Tourists can enter either the house itself to go on a tour, or they can enter a large theater to watch a movie about the house. The space in between the house and the theater is an enclosed, carpeted lobby. While I'm in that space, I give another tourist directions to the main entrance to the house: “Go down there, turn left, go up the ramp, then turn right and go through the doors.” The ramp is long and slopes gently upward.

In addition to the large, main theater, the complex also has a ride of some kind with seats that are suspended on long bars from an overhead track. Riders board the ride by strapping themselves into the seats when they are within small, circular, mobile theater pods. These theater pods show a movie about the era in between the heyday of the large house and the present day, that is, the house's early days as a tourist attraction, before it had a visitors' center. The pods also can move around on legs and have motion-simulator functionality. I get into one of the pods 'backwards,' by riding on one of the seats as it comes into the pod from the unloading station. Other riders also board the pod, and then the movie begins.

[I'm not absolutely sure, but I think] It was at this point that I woke up for a very brief WBTB (just a few minutes, which is about how long I usually wake up for in the middle of the night). I remembered very well what I had just been dreaming about, and focused on it while I was awake. As I was going back to sleep, I thought, I wonder if I can get back into the same dream I was just in. [Amazingly,] I succeeded in doing so.

The mobile theater pod moves out into the street that runs past the big, old house, which is part of the ride. While it's out in the street, the pod is boarded by small, roundish creatures, Expies of The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything [from “VeggieTales”]. After they've boarded the pod, instead of proceeding to attack and plunder it, they decide to go inside the visitors' center to get some Starbucks. This gives me time to escape from the pod and run for help. I escape from the pod and start walking along the sidewalk. Somewhere around here, I realize that I'm dreaming, but I don't want to interrupt the dream plot already in progress; it's interesting and exciting, so I go along with it. I start searching for the main, public entrance to the tourist site. I pass by what appears to be the main entrance and go to a gift shop. The gift shop is filled with a lot of red decorations and red objects, mainly Christmas decorations. I sit down in a chair and get into a conversation with the store attendant. While I'm talking to her, my thoughts stray and the impact of the thought, “Whoa, I'm dreaming” hits me fairly hard. I am suddenly overcome by a strong feeling of sleepiness, and close my eyes. Then I remember that I'll lose the dream if I do that, and open them again. I'm still right where I was.

I tell the tour guide about the mobile theater pod being attacked by pirates, and ask, “Do you have a security guard?” She shows me where there is one waiting behind a service counter, and sends him back out onto the street with me. When we're on the street, I notice that there are “floating” vehicles on it and feel dismayed that the sci-fi future is actually here. Then I notice that at least the larger vehicles do have tractor treads, in addition to the pink, glowing force fields I see under all the vehicles. The security guard goes to the mobile theater pod and apprehends the pirates [at least, I suppose he did; I don't really remember that part of the dream].

[Different dream.] A man has been captured and locked in handcuffs. A dog brings him a key in its mouth, so he can get out of them. He does so. Then, his captor approaches and, seeing that he's out of the handcuffs, says to him, “I expected you'd be out of those by now.” The man replies, “I already am.”

[Different dream.] I'm showing some guy how to properly arrange the cord for and use the mouse on my computer.

[I may or may not have been lucid for this one, I'm not sure.] P. and I are both making cakes with a little bit of dough, under Mom's guidance. My piece of dough is bigger than P.'s. We mix ingredients into the dough with our hands. We're in the kitchen/dining room of House #1, and the cake pans are sitting on the floor under the dining table. We pick them up from there to put the dough in them. Before I put my dough in my cake pan, I run a little bit of tap water onto it, and it shrinks to the size of P.'s piece of dough. That's good, and a relief; I'd been concerned that I'd initially taken more than my fair share when we divided the dough, and when we added the other ingredients.

I'm at work, viewing the contents of my work e-mail account. I discover, to my surprise and dismay, that earlier, when I logged in to Petpet Park from work using my existing password and my new work e-mail address, the site created a whole new account for me and began sending e-mail alerts related to that account to my work e-mail address. Each of these e-mail alerts is marked with one of Petpet Park's pawprint icons. I'm very worried that my boss will see these e-mails and find out that I've been goofing off and playing games at work.

[Different dream.] I'm having a somewhat heated discussion with my parents about my living arrangements.

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Side notes:

I was already consciously aware that I was anxious about the topic of the second dream, but not the first one. That first dream brought my guilt and fear that my less-than-stellar work habits will be discovered to my conscious attention for the first time. I love it when dreams give me useful insights like that.

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

I'm descending slowly through the levels of a house. When I realize what's happening to me and that this is a dream, I decide to stop in the third level down and explore it. I will myself to stop moving downward and to be standing on the floor, and achieve both of those desires. I begin walking through the rooms, concentrating both on the action of walking and on the scenery around me, knowing that my concentrated attention will keep the dream stable. There are some steps down into a large living room. I think, This reminds me of some of my friends' houses. Well, of course it does. That's where my mind must have picked up the images that this dream is made up of.

I turn around to take in more of the room. While I'm doing so, I think, I need a mirror. When I look back at a particular section of wall a second time, a large, tall, rectangular, frameless, wall-mounted mirror has appeared there. [Cool! I guess I'm getting better at controlling the features of the dream environment.] I come up to the mirror and stick my hand into it. My hand goes right into the mirror and is obscured by silver mist, but I feel nothing at all. I still don't particularly want to try to go anywhere else that way, though, so I don't. However, on the floor to my left, I see a large, freestanding flatscreen TV [the same size and model we have in my real house], and decide to try to go through that. As I crouch down in front of it, I think briefly of a couple of specific places from my past that I would like to find on the other side of the screen. I then start going through it. I feel the screen snap when I start pushing through it, and feel the edges of its two halves dragging against my body as I climb into the TV. There's nothing inside but darkness. I ended up just waking up. [I failed to choose a single destination and truly believe that it would be there on the other side of the screen.]

I went back to sleep and had another dream. I'm in a room with a bunch of computers, and someone is directing me to complete a series of questionnaires on one computer, which is on the aisle that goes down the center of the room, between the rows of tables. One of the questionnaires involves looking at frames from an animated TV show and identifying what show they're from. I recognize them as being from the Garfield and Friends TV show.

From there, the dream shifts, putting me in that episode of that TV show. I'm standing right behind the protagonist, watching him/her [not sure] have a conversation with another character just outside the gate to a town. The setting appears to be a medieval fantasy story. I recognize that I'm dreaming. The conversation is finished, and the second character admits the protagonist and me through the gate. As I pass the gatekeeper character, I say to him, “It's good to see you again.” I start walking along through the open space in the center of the town, again concentrating on walking and on the scenery around me. As I walk, I cover my mouth with both hands and whisper into them, “I was actually talking to the town.” I can actually feel the warmth and moisture of my breath on my hands, which impress me with their realism.

I pass by a shop building with off-white walls and a window, and go, “Oh, yeah.” I remember that I still want to try to walk through a wall. I turn to my right, walk right up to that wall and keep on walking. I can only get a little way into it. It feels like walking into a flexible, but thick, strong, and semi-solid piece of rubber. [That's the last I remember.]

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.

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.

Night of December 3-4

I'm in a house or apartment somewhere. A friend [no one I recognize from real life] is holding up a gallon-size plastic bag full of pieces of cantaloupe and honeydew melon. I say that honeydew melon always gives me stomachaches [true in real life]. She says that we should take all that fruit and put it in our lunches, which are at the bottom of the hill, on the school playground [the playground of my elementary school]. I answer that if I'm going to haul myself all the way down there to get our lunches, I'm going to take my computer down to the school while I'm at it. My computer's hard drive needs to be reformatted, so I do that before I leave for the school. The computer's hard drive is stored within a big, black AC adapter box [like the one on our electronic keyboard, not like the one for my laptop]. When I finish reformatting it, I unplug it from the hard drive and say, “Congratulations: it's a hard drive.”

I'm sitting at the kitchen table in House #1, working on my old laptop (my first one). P. has been using it. She's opened up a whole bunch of windows with video clips in them (VLC, or Quicktime, or some program like that that shows video), and a video editing program called Star Producer. She shows me how to get to the folder Star Producer created for her videos. There's someone else there in the house with us [I don't know who, exactly, but I got the impressions 'young' and 'female'], looking for her sweater. I point her sweater out to her; it's lying in a heap over the arm of one of the two pale green armchairs in the living room. [We actually did have those at that house.]

I'm walking around outside, on a street lined with trees, houses, and small, old apartment buildings. It looks like it might be in Louisville, because most of the buildings seem to be kind of old, and a lot of them are made of brick. A woman with long hair (or possibly a veil or shawl over her head? I'm not sure) and long, flowing clothes is on the street, going along it by floating about a foot or so off the ground. I think, Oh, she must be dreaming. [Evidently, I now take for granted that flying/floating is normal when one is dreaming... and yet, it still completely failed to occur to me that I was dreaming.] I start floating, too, but then come back down to the ground [for a reason I don't quite remember now] and continue walking. I see Arthur, Ariadne, and Eames [from Inception] there, also walking along the street. [Day residue; I was reading part of the shooting script the day before.] Eames also starts to float as they go, but comes down after a minute. I walk behind them. I hear Eames say, “I'm a little bit married,” meaning, to Arthur. I repeat this, giggling at it a little. They don't notice me at all.

Night of December 4-5

I'm at Disneyland again, in the old Carousel of Progress building. It has been filled with some really neat ride/exhibit/something-or-other. [I remember that it was much, much cooler than the one that's actually there now, but I don't remember what exactly it was because I was too lazy to write it down.] Later, after leaving that building, I meet my parents at a restaurant elsewhere in Disneyland.

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

I'm taking some sort of computer certification test using Prometric's testing software. I get to the end of the test, and the software gives me a message saying that the computer hasn't been recording any of my answers after the first four or five, and there are only 4 minutes left on the test's countdown clock, so there's no time to go back and answer them again. The timer runs out, and the software gives me a big fat zero as a test score. Very distressed, I run down to the end of the row of computers where I'm sitting, which is in the center of a large, open room. There's a desk with another computer on it in a cubicle at the end of the row, with one teacher/supervisor sitting at the desk and another standing outside the cubicle. I tell the one standing outside the cubicle what happened, but I see that the one sitting at the desk has my green-and-white CompTIA ID card right there, with my picture on it and everything. That tells me that I must have passed the test; otherwise, they wouldn't have made an ID card for me.

Guy is there. I follow him into another room, where there is a big, black laser printer. He explains to me how sometimes, the test results get sent directly to the printer without being saved on the computer, and that's what happened to me. I say, “So I didn't just lose an hour and a half of work?” He says, “No.” [In the dream, I actually had the false memory of working on that test for the last hour and a half.]

Woke up at 11:55 P.M. (after having gone to bed at 10:20 P.M.) and was really surprised at how short a time I'd been asleep. I exclaimed, “That was only one cycle?! Wow!” That was a really long and detailed dream for a first cycle. I felt that this was a promising sign, and decided right then and there to try for a lucid dream later. (I'm supposed to be cycle-adjusting right now, but I was feeling impatient. Sorry.) I took some notes, then went back to sleep.

[Fragment] I'm interacting with all the characters from Inception this time. [I don't remember anything we did, except that] At one point, a bunch of us are sitting around a dark wood dining table, apparently in a restaurant.

[Fragment] I'm in House #2, upstairs, and I shoo a cat out of my bedroom. I know that it's already too late; it's been in the room long enough that I'm going to start having allergic reactions when I go into my room.

Woke up at 4:25 A.M., took down some more notes, then listened to the second half of my binaural beats file and did some MILDing. It worked.

I'm following my friend Sam K. and his girlfriend [who I can't identify as a specific person in this dream] through the entrance to a department store in a mall. There are other people in the store. I pass two different old men who are really tall and each have two sets of eyes right on top of each other, and are wearing two pairs of glasses on them. I think to myself, Those men must have an unusual deformity. Or I might be dreaming. I don't attain full lucidity or self-determination yet., though. [I didn't think to RC, either. D'oh.] I continue following Sam and his girlfriend. They start climbing a wide, white flight of stairs up to the second floor of the mall. I speak aloud to them, saying something along the lines of, “Guys! We could just take the elevator!” They either ignore me or just don't hear me.

Very short dreamskip. I'm on the second floor of the mall, looking up at a raised, square, brown section of the ceiling. I recognize it as the ceiling of the mall we used to go to all the time when I was a kid. [Which doesn't look at all like that in real life. Weird.] At that moment, I definitely know I'm dreaming, because I'm somewhere I wouldn't normally be in reality. I think to myself, F*** yeah. I'm here. [“Here,” in this case, meaning “in a dream,” not “at that particular mall.”]

I stop to take a good look around and touch things, to make sure the dream is stable so that I can explore it. [I'm learning to do this as a habit – yay!] I touch the carpet and look closely at the pattern on it. It's dark gray with little rectangular flecks of various colors on it in rows. I start walking around in the mall. Sam and his girlfriend are gone. This part of the second floor is the food court. I cross over the walkway that bridges one side of the mall and the other. There are white tables and chairs everywhere. One of the fast-food restaurants in the food court is an Orange Julius. I pass it, then turn around to listen and watch while somebody makes some kind of public announcement about something. [I don't remember what they said now.]

It occurs to me that since this is a dream, I can climb over the chairs and tables with impunity. I climb up onto a table, walk across it, step down onto a chair, then hop back down onto the floor. The impact feels lighter than it would have in real life. I say something like, “Sure enough, no one cares!” [Wow. That's quite a shift from the respectful attitude I had toward the DCs in my journal entry dated 05-Nov-2010. This worries me.]

I continue walking along through the food court, then think, Why am I just walking? I can fly. I can explore faster if I fly, too. So I start flying, going only a little faster than I'd been walking, and staying at about the same height above the floor of the mall as my eyes are when I'm standing up. [I'd never flown indoors or in front of DCs before, so it makes sense that I would be cautious about it.] There are two vaguely gangster-ish guys in front of me, one of whom says to me, “You're lookin' at me the wrong way.” I ignore them and fly right on past them. I head toward a row of glass-and-black-metal doors hung with dark red curtains. This is the entrance to another department store. Strangely, I find it difficult to fly toward them with any speed at all. It feels like trying to push one pole of a smaller magnet (me) toward the same pole of a much bigger magnet. I realize that it would be much easier going if I started flying backward, so I decide to release my deliberate control over my flying and let myself be pulled backward, just to see where I end up. The unknown force pulls me backward through the air very quickly. Much to my dismay, I wake up. I might have guessed that that was what would happen.

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Side notes:

I didn't wear my cardboard-square bracelet at all tonight, which suggests that it isn't the deciding factor in whether or not I succeed in inducing a lucid dream. It has to be either the MILD affirmations or the binaural beats file. (Or both; how do I know that the combination isn't more than the sum of its parts?)

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

I woke up just before 5:00 A.M. last night and was disappointed that I'd slept through most of the night, couldn't remember any dreams, and wasn't going to have time for another full sleep cycle before the rest of the house started getting up at 5:30. I decided to try to go back to sleep anyway, focusing once again on MILD affirmations and visualizations. It worked.

At some point between 5:00 and 6:40 [when I woke up for real], I have a false awakening where I'm in my current room and my bed is parallel to the closet doors [not perpendicular to them, as it is in reality]. I'm lying on the floor between the bed and the closet, all tangled up in my blankets. [I'm not sure when this happened relative to my other dreams, so I'm just sticking it here at the beginning.]

I'm looking at the results of a Google Image Search for something involving the terms “japan” and [I think] “front.” Almost all the photos that are coming up are of cherry blossoms, but one of them is of autumn leaves. I say something along the lines of, “There are about ten hundred billion pictures of cherry blossoms, but almost no pictures of the leaves.”

The next thing I know, I'm lying on my back in a wide expanse of grass. Several big, flat leaves in bright red, yellow, and green gently float down onto me from the nearest tree. The sky is blue and the weather is sunny, clear, and calm. There are trees spread out all over this grassy area, all with leaves that are turning autumn colors. Somewhere in here, I recognize that I'm dreaming, but there's no specific moment that triggers this realization. Saito is there with me, and I want to show him a seed pod from a magnolia tree. So, one comes rolling down the hill toward me, and I catch it. It's bigger than it would be in real life, and I say so when I show it to him. He says to me, “It's your mind.” Indeed; by now I'm not only aware that I'm dreaming, but I've caught on to the fact that this is my mind's rendering of what autumn is. I look around for an acorn, but find none. I say, “Of course there aren't any acorns – all my trees are are liquid-ambers.” [That's because that's what most of the trees in the neighborhood where I grew up were.]

This big, tall, flying guy in a blue costume with matching blue makeup, who looks like he came straight from a Cirque du Soleil production, comes and lifts me up in his arms and flies away with me. As I'm being lifted off the ground, the thought of hot-air balloons crosses my mind, and [for some inexplicable reason], I ask myself, “Which city in Canada is the balloon city?” The blue flying guy flies us through a series of very large, rectangular rooms with movie projection screens on all the walls and the ceiling. At first, the screens are showing immersive views of natural vistas in Canada, accompanied by some appropriately dramatic and inspiring music that I don't recognize. I'm not afraid, because I recognize that the movie screens and the guy flying me through them are all part of the Disney theme park attraction I'm now on. The attraction is kind of like Soarin' meets the CircleVision movie at Canada's pavilion in Epcot. The film footage is filmed in a style very much like that of Soarin'; it's obviously intended to make it look like you're flying, except that the shots are designed for the big rectangular screens. The film in the last room of the attraction shows the transition over the border into the U.S., and flies us over Mt. Rushmore and then under a waterfall projected on the back wall. We go under the waterfall by going through an opening in the wall.

Once I'm through the opening, I'm standing on the ground, and the blue flying guy is gone. I recognize the place where I'm standing as the interior of the Snow White's Scary Adventures attraction from Disneyland. There are no ride vehicles anywhere to be seen, though. The Evil Queen is just a little way in front of me. I approach her, and she turns around and says something scary [just like on the real ride]. I scream really loudly and high-pitched. For a few moments, terror completely overtakes all my awareness. While screaming, I think, Wake me up! Wake me up! hoping that the dream will end. [Remarkably,] It doesn't this time. I finish screaming, and observe that the dream hasn't ended, I'm still standing there, and the Evil Queen is also still standing there, turned to face the path where the ride vehicles should be, but is now motionless and silent, as she has finished saying her prerecorded phrase. So I start punching her in the face. I do this repeatedly, but I don't feel anything. While I'm beating her up, I shout at her: “You're an AAT*! I carry more complicated devices than you around on my back every day!” Which is true; she may be computer-controlled, but my laptop is much higher-tech. No longer afraid of her, I walk along the path and into the next scene of the attraction, where there is another AAT figure of the Evil Queen [this is the case in reality, too, but the track layout there is completely different]. This one turns around and starts to shriek something at me to try and scare me, but her words stop and peter out halfway through, because she can see that I'm not afraid of her. I continue walking through the scene. [*My personal shortening of “Audio-Animatronic™,” the robotic technology used to create characters in many attractions at Disney theme parks. I think I shouted more things than this, but this is all I remember shouting now.]

The next thing I know, I'm outside again, but surrounded by buildings this time. I decide to rub my hands together, only to discover that they're really hot. I realize that that's because my real hands are really hot under my blankets. That's the last thing I remember from that dream, but it seemed to take me a little longer to wake up fully. When I did, my face broke into a smile and then a laugh when I remembered the encounter with the Evil Queen. In reality, I had been pretty scared of those moments on that ride when I was a kid, and I still dislike them now. I'm really, really proud of this dream. I think facing something/someone you've been afraid of for a long time and standing up to it is quite an achievement, and a good, worthwhile use of the ability to lucid dream.

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.]