The Lab Notebook

I adopt a large, black dog from a shelter, and take him home to my apartment. I find that the responsibility of taking care of him is more than I can stand, and I don't enjoy it at all. I feel like a horrible, awful person, but I decide take him back to the place I got him from to ask them to find a different home for him. He's too big for me to pick up and put in my truck by myself, though, so two of my neighbors help me.

I get back to the shopping center where the shelter is located and walk through it, but by the time I get to the shelter, the dog has wandered off on his own, and I don't know where he is. I was such a lousy owner that I didn't even get a leash for him.

[This dream stemmed from an ad I heard on the radio yesterday for a kennel that really does find new homes for dogs. By the way, I don't even have a truck in real life, just a car.]

[Different dream, later in the night.] I'm playing Hidden Chronicles and I notice, for the first time, that the river on the main map continues further up than I had thought, and there are all kinds of buildings on the other side - a whole town for me to explore. There's a sailboat dock across the river from my estate - obviously, you're supposed to get to that part of town by sailing across the river - and a second bridge for me to repair.

Suddenly, I'm standing among the buildings of the town on the far side of the river. When I turn and look back down the river, I gasp - from this ground-level point of view, looking in this direction, I can see that there's a whole city over there to explore, complete with its own skyline of skyscrapers. I'm really excited to explore it, but I think, Looks like I'm going to keep playing this game for the next couple of years.

[Different dream.] I'm with my parents, and my mom needs me to translate some text from Japanese into English [or vice versa, I don't remember] for her. She needs it right away, and all I have is my phone, but I plug away at it anyway. We're visiting the home of some friends, and we're sitting down to have dinner with their large family around the light-brown, round table that my parents have in their house.

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

I'm driving through the parking lot of a shopping center, at night. There is a violent physical altercation going on in the parking lot, and it turns into a gunfight.

I'm now riding my bicycle through a nearby residential neighborhood, where there is more violence going on. It's still nighttime. As I ride, I pray that I won't get hit by a stray bullet. I also reflect that I could be driving to my destination, which is my old church, but I like bicycling better than driving. [This is true.] I miss the turn to get to St. Mark's.

I'm no longer riding my bicycle; I'm now standing in a black nothing. [I suspect that I might have DEILDed here, but I'm not positive.] I think of the destination I was just trying to get to, the parish hall at my old church, and cause a knife from the parish hall's silverware drawer to appear in my hand. A second later, the parish hall appears around me.

I walk through the room, appreciating the dream environment, as usual. A lot of people are there, including my parents. My dad comes up to me and offers to give me a hug, and I accept it and hug back. All the people are there for a big reception, with a lot of food laid out on tables.

After the reception, when everyone has left except me, my parents, and two or three other people, there is still a huge platter of thinly-sliced roast beef left over. I try to give it away to those two or three other people.

I wake up in my current bedroom, very pleased to have just had a lucid dream. I remember to grab my phone, which is running Ev's Lucid Dreaming App for Android, and draw a star on the screen with my finger to indicate that I just had a lucid dream. I draw the star, but very sloppily, with one point much bigger and longer than the other points. I'm concerned that the program won't recognize the gesture, but it does. It displays the gesture I just drew with the caption “lucidity!” underneath it, in the same font it always uses for those captions.

When I woke up for real, I thought to myself, You know, I bet I didn't actually record that lucid dream. The app wouldn't recognize the star if I drew it that poorly, and the caption always just says "lucid dream." I checked my actual phone and, sure enough, no "lucid dream" mark on my graph. That had, indeed, been a false awakening. I felt slightly frustrated, as well as highly amused that the app had shown up in one of my FAs.

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Side notes:

Wow. I'm pretty pleased with this DEILD, if that is indeed what it was, and with my sudden mastery of changing the dream scene. To be fair, though, I did change it to the destination I had been trying to reach in my non-lucid nightmare.

I didn't realize until after I woke up that the part where my dad hugged me was day residue. On the evening before I had this dream, I hadn't bothered to get up and hug my dad when he left the house, and I had regretted it. I thought it was awfully nice of my subconscious to give me a second chance to do that.

[This is a catchup post.]

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

Night of August 31-September 1

[Fragment] I still have the box I shipped out via FedEx yesterday, for some reason.

I'm outside and lucid. I try to start flying, but am unable to. I move to another spot where I have an unobstructed view of the sky, and try taking off again. This time, I succeed. I think, I have to be looking up at the sky at about a 40-degree angle in order to fly - no, I don't! If I think that's true, then it will be! I can't set limits on it like that!

There is a large playground where I am. I fly toward it and, to my own slight surprise, am able to fly right through all the playground equipment intangibly, with no trouble at all. I get to see the dark-gray interior cross-sections of the upright pieces of the structure. I think, Oh, heck yeah. When I get all the way through the playground, I fly up to get an overview of the landscape.

September 4, 2011

I'm at my current house. My mom has come over to visit. She's sitting on the couch in the living room. [The living-room furniture is set up in a mirror image of how it is in real life. The couch is facing the outside wall of the house, rather than being up against that wall.] I'm upstairs, looking down into the living room. I jump down the stairs and float gently down onto the ground floor, in full view of my mom and all the other guests downstairs, not caring this time about being seen using my dream abilities by my DCs. None of them take any notice of what I've just done or comment on it as being strange. [I don't remember how this dream began, or how or when I realized I was dreaming, but I definitely knew I was.]

I sit down in an armchair to visit with my mom. We're talking about what it's like for me to be on my own, whether I'm lonely, whether I miss her. She asks me, “Do you ever dream about me?” I say, “Yes.” I decide I don't want to tell her that I'm dreaming about her right now and she's just a DC, though. She continues talking to me about dreams. While she's talking, I notice that she has one or two extra digits on each hand, but I decide not to point this out to her, either. I just find it interesting. I didn't know that that could happen to DCs, too.

[Different dream, later on.] I'm in a house somewhere, with my family. We're getting ready to go out to a movie, for which someone else is buying the tickets. I take my phone out of my purse to check it. It's my smartphone that I have in real life. I've set it to display my name as “Danny Boletino,” the name of a character in a heist movie, just for the fun of it.

I'm in another room of that same house, having a quiet conversation with my boss about fishing. He's surprised to learn that the last time I went fishing with him and his family was the first time I'd ever been fishing. I also tell him that I want to go fishing with them again, because I want to get better at it.

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Side notes:

Lots of day residue here. I saw my mom yesterday, and we had company over at our house. However, my mom did not really come over to my house; I saw her elsewhere. Also, one of the last threads I was this one, about looking at your hands to RC or stabilize the dream, so I'm not surprised that that showed up in my dream.

Neat. That's the first time my new smartphone has shown up in one of my dreams. It's been exactly two weeks since I got it, which is also exactly how long it took me to have my first false awakening in my new house after I moved into it (see this DJ entry). Evidently, two weeks is how long it takes for my my unconscious mind to accept something as normal and start incorporating it into my dreams.

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the nights of July 19-21, 2011.]

Night of July 19-20

I'm in the back seat of a car that is being driven by an unidentified female DC. [I think] We're driving on the road that leads past my local casino. [If I remember correctly and we were, then this is more day residue; I had just been there on Saturday the 16th.] I'm talking to her about my idea to put all the information about the casino's parking lot layout and its pricing structure for parking fees up on its website. She says that we've discussed that before, and asks me why I haven't created a test version of the web content yet. I answer that I just haven't gotten to it yet. [On this day, when I recalled this dream upon waking, I thought I also recalled the previous dream in which this DC and I had discussed that subject before. This may or may not be a false memory.]

Night of July 20-21

I'm in House #1. I enter my bedroom. [It's much bigger and has much higher ceilings than in reality.] I see that P. has booby-trapped the room: There's a pulley attached to the ceiling with a rope running through it. P. is sitting on the top bunk with one end of the rope in her hand. The other end is tied around a pair of oversized stuffed animals that are sitting on the top shelf of the closet. When she pulls the rope, the stuffed animals will fall onto the head of the person standing in the center of the room. I see and understand how the booby trap works before she triggers it, so that I catch the stuffed animals as they fall onto me. One of them is a giant Winnie the Pooh. When I catch them, I say to P., “These things are heavy. They could seriously break someone's neck or something.” She agrees with me.

I look into the closet. [It's roughly the same wedge shape as in reality, but, again, much bigger.] It has high ceilings and windows on the two back walls. The windows are covered with either blinds or curtains [not sure], but are still letting light into the room. The closet has been mostly emptied of its contents, but a few of my clothes are left hanging there, mixed in with some of P.'s. [P. and I shared this bedroom in House #1, by the way.] My smaller Winnie the Pooh stuffed toy and other toys that I consider to be family heirlooms are sitting on the shelf directly above the clothes. There are also higher shelves. I look at the closet and think, This closet is big enough to be a second bedroom! Why didn't we ever use it as one? [I still have some clothes in the closet of my room at House #3 that I haven't moved over to my new place yet. I suspect that's where some of the content of this dream came from.]

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the night of July 18-19, 2011.]

I'm at my old elementary school. I'm following a little ridey-car through a bunch of playgrounds, which are big, colorful, and elaborate.

I'm at the dining table in House #1, eating a meal with my parents and having a heated discussion of NaNoWriMo T-shirts with my dad. I insist, “If I need a large, you need at least a 2XL!” He's insulted and ends the conversation right there. [Day residue: I had just ordered a new NaNoWriMo T-shirt on the 17th, and I do, in fact, need a large, because their shirt sizes tend to be small.]

My family is staying in a rented vacation house that is up on a slight hill. My mom and I drive up to it in her red Honda Fit [she really does drive one in real life] and pull into its dirt driveway. There are already many other cars parked in front of the house, causing my mom to complain about having to back out through such a narrow space later. We're planning on leaving the rented house later and going and staying at a camp.

[Fragment] I tell my parents about my plan to purchase a Smart Car. [More day residue; I really had been thinking about doing that.]

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the night of June 27-28, 2011.]

I'm creeping around a parking lot, in the nude. [This has been a recurring circumstance in my dreams lately. Why is that, I wonder?] I'm trying to get to my car without being seen by anyone.

I'm in a room with a small stage, with a full set for a play on it, where people are rehearsing for a play. Nobody is playing the part of Morgan, so I jump in to play that role. In the play, Morgan is a little girl who watches her mom get murdered right in front of her, in their home. The mom is lying in her bed, and the murderer is some guy who shoots her with a rifle while she's lying there. As I'm acting out Morgan's part, I scream and shriek horrifically in reaction to this, and I start crying real tears. When the scene has ended, I tell the director of the play and the other actors that I'll probably really cry every time we rehearse this scene, but then I take it back, saying: “Even I know better than to do that. If I do that, then I won't have anything left for the performance.”

I'm riding in a car with my parents. We're discussing the washing instructions for a baseball cap that my mom has. They say to 'show' the cap to dry it, and I explain to my mom that the intended meaning there was to 'display' it, e.g., to leave it sitting out to dry. We also discuss how my mom recently had to have the password for some online account set, and in order to do that, they had to ship a packet of papers containing the printed password from Florida to somewhere else on the East Coast.

I'm in a big, cathedral-like building where a lot of people have gathered for a religious service, or a performance, or something like that. We've given everyone a password so that those who want to [and who have laptops] can log in to a Web site to see what's really going on behind the scenes of what's happening in front of them on stage. Apparently, the service/performance/whatever-it-is has something to do with Inception, because I have a printed book that is a dictionary of its characters, items, and concepts.

[Fragment] I'm taking all the bedclothes off my bed, and I realize that what makes my bed so soft and comfortable isn't the mattress itself, but the mattress pad. [This has been a concern of mine in real life lately, pursuant to my upcoming move to a new place with a new mattress.]

[This is both a catch-up post and a repost. Apparently, there was a server crash recently that ate this entry after I posted it the first time.]

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

Some events unfold that I'm not a part of. [I don't remember what they were now, but there was definitely a plotline involved, and I was definitely just an outside observer.] When these events are over, I find myself sitting in a movie theater, watching the end credits of a movie. I realize that all of the preceding events were a movie.

I walk out into the theater lobby, which is long, narrow, and wedge-shaped, growing slightly wider as I approach the entrance. I walk out through the theater's glass front doors onto the sidewalk. There, I meet up with my parents again.

My parents and I are in a strange, [possibly?] open-air, car-like vehicle with a hired driver. I'm showing them around the quaint, seaside downtown of Lake Worth [which, as usual for me in my dreams, looks absolutely nothing like it does in real life; it looks more urban]. We marvel at the awesomely cheesy anti-drug mural painted on the wall of one building.

[Different dream.] I'm flying above M. Road, traveling north, but facing south. I'm being pulled backward by that unknown, unseen force that so often does that in my flying dreams. I realize that I'm dreaming and take control of the situation by concentrating on the details of the scenery around me, as if I were going to stop to admire them. It works as intended: my backward motion slows, then stops. Then, I start flying forward under my own willpower, heading toward home (i.e., south). As I fly, I admire the rich detail of the scene around me and how much like reality it is.

[Dreamskip.] I'm now in a quiet, peaceful, suburban residential neighborhood, on a concrete walking path separated from the backyards on either side of it by fences. I hop along the sidewalk like an astronaut on the moon, making slow jumps that carry me several feet into the air, then slowly floating back down in an arc. I'm enjoying the fun of being in a low-gravity environment, which my dream environments often are.

I get up onto one of the fences and perform several floating glide-leaps from one parallel fence to another, combining jumping with flying. Then, I decide to try to change the dream environment to a different one by closing my eyes and spinning. I think, If I'm going to do that, I'd better start from a standing start. I jump off the fence I'm on and float gently down to the sidewalk. Once I'm standing on it, I think, Neopia, and close my eyes, but forget to spin around.

When I open my eyes, I'm in a much different suburban neighborhood. I'm standing in the middle of a straight street, looking down its length. It's lined on both sides with brightly colored, two-story houses with lush, green trees in their front yards. It doesn't look much like any of the official artwork of Neopia, but nonetheless, I become aware that this is Neopia, and that I've succeeded in my goal of changing the scene and getting there. I'm so excited about this that the scene winks out of existence after about two seconds, and I wake up. [Sigh.]

[Later, different dream.] I'm attending some special event at a theme park on behalf of [the company I've been teaching with]. I'm with SH and TS [two of my fellow teachers]. We're all wearing our white lab coats, and we're walking across a plaza that has a circular concrete beam running overhead, around the perimeter. I see some friends of mine wearing full rubberhead Sesame Street character costumes, also walking across the plaza in the opposite direction. I say to the young man in the Elmo costume who is carrying the head and looking sweaty and tired, “Hi, Mark. Go get some water.”

There are many other people there, changing into or out of costumes. Many of them are hanging their hangers on the concrete ring. TS suggests that we hang our lab coats from it, but I prefer to go back to the trailer, which [only in the dream, not in real life] has sides with panels that open to reveal closets [like my band trailer did in high school]. I want to put my lab coat there because I can make sure that trailer is locked.

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Side notes:

That first scene, where I realized that everything that had preceded it had just been a movie I was watching, was a particularly cool example of day residue. I had just been to the movies the evening before I had this dream. The recent article about how dreaming and watching movies produce very similar patterns of brain activity has informed the way I watch movies now; I always mentally compare the two experiences. In the movie I watched on this evening (Limitless), the ending felt exactly like being suddenly, rudely awakened by an alarm clock when you're still right in the middle of a dream. It's not surprising that that experience gave rise to an actual dream in which a movie ended and I suddenly realized, “oh, yeah, that didn't actually happen, I'm just watching a movie.” Both within the dream and in retrospect, that realization felt very similar to the realization, “oh, yeah, that was just a dream” that I've often had just after both false and real awakenings. Therefore, that moment of realization within that dream felt very much like a false awakening.

It belatedly occurs to me that Neopia is an entire planet. If I chose only one specific locale on that planet and made that the focus of my intentions, I'd probably have better success getting there.

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

Night of May 20-21

I'm in the upstairs bedroom of a house. Built into one wall is the entrance to a long slide, which I go down. The first part of the slide is plastic, tubular, and constantly curves back and forth in random directions. After a bit, the plastic tube slide connects smoothly to another section of slide, this one made of polished, light-colored wood. The wooden portion of the slide turns through 90-degree corners in between straight runs, and it goes through a series of spacious rooms that are made of the same light wood.

Later, I'm back in the upstairs bedroom again, with some other people who want to go down the slide. I describe to them what the slide is like.

Night of May 21-22

I'm in the main hallway that runs through the middle of my church. There are tables lined up in the hallway, and I'm sitting behind one of them. Other people from my church are sitting behind the other tables. We're all talking to each other about the church activities we do. [This was all day residue. This dream was essentially a replay of what I had just done that day in real life at our church's spring talent festival. I count this dream as further evidence in favor of the hypothesis that dreams are produced when your brain is recording the day's experiences in long-term memory.]

[I had a lucid dream in the next cycle, but I've forgotten a lot of the details. The following paragraphs contain what I do remember of that dream.]

I realize I'm dreaming and think, Oh, cool. I'm dreaming. That means I can do anything I want to. I find myself in a rectangular room in which all the walls are full-length mirrors. I look at my reflection and notice that I have my long hair and bangs again [which was the hairstyle I had for most of my life until last October], and that my bangs are chopped off all unevenly, with little sections that end in different lengths. I either exercise, or just think about, two or more of the dream abilities I've already learned [I'm not really sure, because I don't remember this part very well], and then I decide to try an ability I've never tried before: changing my appearance.

I close my eyes and visualize what I want my reflection in the mirror to look like when I open them: I want to see myself as an old woman, with my hair gray, but still long. I open my eyes, only to find that it didn't work. My reflection still looks the same as it did before. The thought of trying to shapeshift into some kind of animal crosses my mind, but I decide not to because no animal that I particularly want to turn into comes to mind.

[Different dream, later in the night.] I'm visiting my boss's house, which is huge and very nice. My boss gives me a very kind, generous compliment about my after-school teaching. He says something along the lines of, “You're a great teacher. You treat them like people.” [“Them” meaning the students.] I'm very flattered.

I go outside my boss's house. There is a small, private jet parked outside. A group of people I know and I are about to leave on a trip somewhere in the jet. Before we leave, I decide to go and use the portable restrooms that are located on the opposite side of the grassy field I'm in. One of them is a standard portable restroom, and the other is bigger and wider; it was removed from a commercial airplane, I know. [It made sense in the dream.] I can't get into either of them, though, because my mom is blocking the entrance to them. She tells me that I can't come in because P. is in the restroom right now.

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Side notes:

In real life, I have two jobs, each with a different boss. The boss who appeared in my dream was not the one from my after-school teaching job; he was the one from my office job. It makes sense, though, in a sideways kind of way, that Office Boss would compliment me on my teaching in a dream. Two things that I know I really, deeply want are for my teaching efforts to be appreciated and for Office Boss to like me. I think my mind just combined the two desires and had Office Boss express appreciation of my teaching. (Office Boss has seen me teach in real life, but only once.) This dream, and the one I had on March 26 about being hired for that one job (which I did not get hired for in real life, by the way), lead me to this observation: Sometimes, when you really, really want something to happen in real life, your mind will grant you your desire in a dream.

Cool, my first attempt at forging. It was unsuccessful, but I'm not really surprised. I'm looking forward to continuing to work on that skill.

I begin to understand why we have a thread devoted to pictures “for daily lucid inspiration.” Lucid dreaming is beginning to feel routine and unremarkable, even when I'm in a lucid dream. It felt that way in this one. My initial excitement about the phenomenon has worn off. Now I see why one would want a source of daily lucid inspiration.

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

[Another really long entry, but it's a really good one this time. Sorry for taking up so much page space again.]

I'm on the playground of my elementary school. It's dusk, and there are lots and lots of kids and teenagers on the playground, some playing games, others just milling around. I see one group of kids playing something that they call tackle football; it involves one person on the team holding a bowl of green beans and others holding and occasionally eating spoonfuls of the green beans, while the entire team moves around the field. Curious about the game they're playing, I approach the group.

“Are those green beans?” I ask.

“Yes,” someone in the group says.

The group spreads out a little, and I see that two of the people in it are P. and Thomas[, who first appeared in my dream dated December 7]. The instant I see him, I know for sure that I'm dreaming. “Thomas?” I say, looking at him. He acknowledges me. I'm pleasantly surprised to see him again, and amazed at how completely real all the people around me look. Throughout the rest of this dream, I make a special effort to pay attention to the environment around me, including paying attention to the physical sensations of touching things whenever I can. I'm aware that if I don't, they'll stop existing and fade away.

I start wandering through the playground, heading back toward the school buildings. P. and Thomas are following me. It's now fully dark, but the playground is still crowded. I end up on the sidewalk of the street that runs along the south side of the school and passes the kindergarten before the dreamscape shifts on me.

I don't notice the shift itself, but I find myself walking through the streets of a charming, slightly old-fashioned downtown with square, orderly blocks. There's no one else around. I stop and turn around, attempting to summon P. and/or Thomas by expecting them to be there. It doesn't work; I'm all alone. I shrug and continue exploring. As I had in the previous scene, I continue to notice and marvel at how vivid, detailed, and realistic the environment around me is. Everything looks and feels exactly like reality, yet I know perfectly well that I'm dreaming. I can even feel the asphalt and pavement under my feet. [It didn't occur to me until I had woken up and was lying there, recalling my dream, that I must have looked pretty funny wandering around in public places with no shoes on. ] I remember one of my lucid goals and attempt to walk through a wall into one of the shops. I try it twice, but it doesn't work either time; I'm not surprised at all to discover that the wall is just as solid and “real” as everything else in this dream world. As I continue walking, I think, Wow, this dream is really stable and seems to be going on for a long time. What should I do here? Oh, yeah – the Task of the Month is to hit a DC with a snowball. I'll have to go find a snowball. But there is no snow in this setting, and the weather is clear and bright.

I pass a small shop front on a street corner, with a red brick facade and a walk-up window where you can buy things. I recognize the woman inside as Lisa D., a real-life friend. I stop and talk to her. I say, “Lisa, do you happen to know where I might find a snowball?” She invites me to come into the shop through the door on the side. I stand just outside the door. [I don't know why; recall is a little vague here.] The small shop is actually a short truck, which is backed up to the brick facade with the window in it with its back cargo door open, forming the interior space. Lisa starts up the truck and starts driving it away from the facade and along the street. I walk quickly along with it for a little way, holding on to the frame of the open, narrow door on the side and keeping pace with it. Then I step up into the truck through the doorway and ride in it. I say aloud, “I could float along with the truck, but when the truck is moving, why make the effort?” I vaguely remember another person being in the doorway with me, but if so, I don't know who it was.

I ride inside the truck as it drives up into the mountains. While sitting in the truck, I hold onto the handle of a plastic bucket, feeling the sensation to ensure the dream remains stable. The truck takes me to a town on a mountaintop. I'm on or near a different, fenced-in school playground [I think; again, my recall isn't very good here.] I can see buildings on the tops of nearby hills, and I think I catch a glimpse of a patch of snow on a distant hilltop, but I'm not sure.

[I think] The scene shifts again, and I'm walking around on the campus of a community college. [Day residue; I walked back and forth across my real community college campus several times yesterday.] There's no one else around. This community college campus has slightly more traditional-looking architecture than my real one does, has a different layout, and there are more plants around and they're more mature, making the campus greener than my real one. This is a pretty campus, I think. I'm still admiring how vivid and "real" my surroundings are as I explore them, and I'm still looking for snow, but not finding any.

[Dreamskip? Another scene shift? I'm not sure, but the next thing I remember is that] I'm walking through the interior of a large, recreational building. I'm in a spacious, high-ceilinged indoor space with two swimming pools in it, a large, deep one and a smaller, shallower one, at right angles to each other. There are people in this room, many of them kids, walking around, swimming, and getting into and out of the pools. In one corner of the room is the entrance to a child-care room, which is full of brightly pastel-colored play equipment with little kids playing on it. It's separated from the room with the pools by glass walls. One of the glass walls has sticky gel letters on the inside of it, so that they look backward from outside the room. I can still read them backward, though. When I first look at them, I read them as “Children Sno” and think, Yay, snow! Then I approach the room for a closer look and realize that I've misread them; they say “Children Glo.” I leave the room, walking on the path between the narrow end of the larger pool and the longer side of the smaller pool. As I walk, I complain aloud: “There's no snow here! I mean, I know I've lived in Southern California all my life, but come on! Can't I have some imagination?” [I was complaining about the fact that, even though I wanted to complete the Task of the Month, my mind wasn't creating any snow in my dream world. The explanation I came up with for this observation was that I've never spent a winter in an area where it snows, so my mind can't re-create snow very easily, because I've only experienced it in real life a couple of times, so I don't know what it's like very well.]

Outside the recreational building, there's a courtyard or patio where a large group of people are having a celebration or reception. I walk among them without speaking to anyone. No one takes any notice of me. There are folding tables with paper tablecloths and lots of food set out on them, including oatmeal cookies. [I wish I'd thought to try one! This was the first time I've had the chance to try dream food while lucid, and I missed it! Dang!] Still in search of a snowball to throw, I decide to try summoning one by reaching under a small table of food next to a wall, without looking, and expecting a snowball to be there. It doesn't work. When I look, the only thing under the table is a small, open-topped cardboard box with some kind of party supplies in it, like paper napkins. [I note that in my attempts to summon people or things in this dream, I did not have the same quiet assurance and confidence that it would work as I had at those times in the past when I successfully summoned an object. I wasn't truly focusing on it or believing in it this time, which, I think, is why it didn't work.]

I get up from looking under the table and look around at the people celebrating. I sense that the dream is about to end. I close my eyes, hoping to use that method of teleporting to get to another environment. I just end up looking at the inside of my real eyelids.

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Side notes:

This dream came at the end of a very bad, emotionally draining day and a late night. I was too tired to really try to induce a lucid dream. All I did was get up for a minute or two and go back to bed right before I had this dream, do a minimal amount of affirmations (maybe one or two), and wear my cardboard-square wristband on the inside of my right wrist, which I hadn't worn at all in a while. It may have been one of these things that caused such a long, vivid lucid dream, or maybe it was just the fact that I'd had a bad day and wanted to escape from it all (even though I consciously told myself before bed that that was stupid). I sure did feel a lot happier and better after waking up from my dream, though.

After waking up, I realized two things about this dream:
A) Expecting to be able to summon a snowball was stupid because, unlike the seed pod that I successfully summoned before (see entry dated October 26, 2010), a snowball doesn't naturally exist as a discrete object. You have to make a snowball yourself.
B) I was surrounded by DCs several times. I could have talked to my subconscious and asked for the answers to the questions from my exam that I missed because I had studied those subjects months ago, forgotten about them, and failed to review before the exam. (I'm not saying for sure that it would have worked, but it would have been fun to try. I'm curious to know if it can work.) I actually thought about doing that before I went to bed, but I didn't even think of it while I was dreaming. The only thing it occurred to me to do was to hit a DC with a snowball. Silly me! I will have to add “ask a DC about stuff I should know, but have forgotten” to my list of goals.

One final note: Wow. I now have a recurring, original, named dream character who is neither a pre-existing fictional character nor anyone I know in real life, and seeing him made me go lucid because I remembered meeting him in a previous dream, and here he was again, so I had to be dreaming. That's pretty neat. I can't say for sure that that officially makes him my dream guide, though, at least not just yet. It didn't occur to me to ask him if he was one. If I see him again, I'll try to remember to do that.

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.

[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.