The Lab Notebook

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

I'm in the office building complex north of Disneyland. I'm there to be cast in a show or parade there. [I don't specifically remember becoming lucid, but I do remember being lucid.] I'm floating around up by the ceiling, which is a high ceiling, when the casting director walks into the room below me. When I see her enter, I float down so I can talk to her. "Hi," I say while descending. She says I've been cast in [whatever show or parade it was], and to go and change into my costume for the show. I head out of the building to do so.

Outside the building, I stand on a stretch of grass that ends at the top of a concrete block wall, about twelve feet high, at the bottom of which is a sidewalk. I need to get down onto the sidewalk to get back to my car. I know I can do a controlled fall, so I do. I jump off the top of the wall, control my descent speed, and land easily on the sidewalk.

When I get back to my car, I realize I don't have any underclothes with me, and I can't be in the performance without any. I realize I'll have to go to a Walmart or Target and buy new ones, but I don't even know where there is one around here. I decide to set off and go looking for one.

I'm at a freeway onramp, on my bicycle, still on my way to find the nearest Target or Walmart. [Why am I on my bicycle and not in my car? I dunno.] The onramp runs next to a high, tan-colored wall. On this wall, about a quarter to a third of the way down the ramp, there is a traffic sign that reads "NO BICYCLES ON FREEWAY." I start bicycling down the ramp, but when I get to the sign, I read it, sigh, and say, "All right, fine. This is me, not riding my bicycle on the freeway." I get off my bike, turn around, walk it back up the onramp, and start looking for another route that doesn't involve taking the freeway.

Non-lucid dream, [Commentary made while awake]

I'm at Disneyland, being trained as a Cast Member. I'm with a large group of other trainees, all of whom are wearing costumes and name tags. [The name tags are blue, not white, for some inexplicable reason.] A trainer is taking us through how to operate King Arthur's Carrousel. For training purposes, all the pieces of the carrousel have been taken apart and removed, so there's just a big, wide, brilliant blue, rotating disc built into the ground. It has smaller discs built into it, just like the setup for the Mad Tea Party. We walk across the disc, led by our trainer, who is explaining how everything works. We gather on the north edge of it in a crowd and listen to him talk.

The whole carrousel is back in place, and I think, This is a fifty-year-old attraction, so it deserves respect. It's amazing how well it's working after all this time. There must be just one guy left who is the only one who knows how it all works well enough to repair it.

As part of my training, I go through the queue for the carrousel, which is enclosed, elaborate, and tells a story that appears to be part of, or at least inspired by, Disney's Sleeping Beauty. As I go through, performing my job duties, I find myself on stage as part of a mini-stage show. I'm sitting down, looking out through a window, and when a particular piece of music starts playing, I suddenly realize: You're Belle! Don't forget to sparkle! The song is “Belle,” the opening song from Beauty and the Beast, and I join in the singing. I get all the way through the first verse, and when I get to the end of it, Mulan, who is standing in the audience right next to where I'm sitting at the edge of the stage, says the next line: “Good morning, Belle!” I answer, “Good morning, madame!” ...and then I realize I can't remember what comes next, so I just sort of stop.

[Dreamskip.] I'm walking away from the carrousel, saying to myself: “I didn't sign up to be a princess! I signed up to be in Operations! I don't want to be a princess! I'm no good at it, and I look more like post-haircut Rapunzel than anyone else!” [I do have short hair in real life, but it's lighter than her hair is when it's cut short.]

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Side Notes:
I've always had a lot of bizarre dreams about Disneyland, but more so when I was a kid than now. This is the first time I've ever had a dream in which I was a Cast Member.
I know why I had a dream about a carrousel. I had read this article shortly before going to bed. It uses a carrousel as an analogy for the orbit of the sun around the center of the galaxy. Also, the whole “being a princess” theme comes from a fanfic that I have in the works, and the whole “Don't forget to sparkle!” thing is a reference to a thread I've been following on a different discussion forum.

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

I'm in the parking lot of the office complex where I work. I suddenly think: I distinctly remember going to Toastmasters yesterday morning, then to work, but I haven't had any time off work since then. [I go to Toastmasters on Friday mornings, and I have the weekends off.] How did I get here? I'm here out of sequence, and I don't remember coming here. Oh, s*** – I must be dreaming. I pinch my nose and can breathe. Yep, I'm dreaming.

I decide to climb the outdoor stairs to the back door of my office. It only takes me four strides to get to the top of a staircase that I know has 14 or 15 steps. [Again, this was an example of that dream phenomenon where you focus on arriving at your intended destination and quickly arrive there, having “fast-forwarded” through the act of getting there.] I figure that the door is probably locked because it's not business hours, so there shouldn't be anyone inside. I attempt to use my dream ability to become intangible and walk through things to get into the office, but it doesn't work. The door remains solid to me. However, I quickly discover that the door is, in fact, unlocked, and just open it. [Apparently, my brain likes to do things in the simplest way possible.]

The office looks exactly like it does in reality, except that there is a large, round, pink toy Jigglypuff sitting on the reception desk. This makes me laugh. [In real life, that desk is decorated only with pictures of the occupant's kids, who are now young adults, and some artificial plants. The occupant would never even own such a thing, much less display it on her desk.] I think, That's a random thing for my brain to put there!

I wander into my boss's office. There is a small, clear plastic bag of broken crayon pieces on his desk, mostly blue, orange, and green. It makes sense for them to be there, because he has young children. I pick up a crayon piece and contemplate eating it, but I think that that wouldn't be very nice, because these crayons belong to the boss's kids. Then I think, The real $Boss is never going to know, and pick up a small piece and swallow it. As in my previous lucid, I can feel it, but the sensation is weaker than it would be in real life.

I go back out to the main room, where the reception desk is, and stand just to one side of it. I hear my boss's voice as he comes up the indoor stairway. Then my boss comes into the office through the front door, followed by his entire family. I'm naked [as I have been throughout this dream, but I haven't felt the embarrassment that I usually feel in my dreams that involve nudity]. At first I stay where I am, thinking, I don't mind if he sees me. It's just a dream, after all. But the force of the social taboo overwhelms me, despite my conscious effort to resist it, and I try to hide behind the reception desk. He doesn't appear to take any notice of me at all.

I run back out the back door, down the stairs, and into the parking lot. I see that it's nighttime. I say aloud, “Well, I can bloody well make it daytime!” I attempt to change the dream scene from night to day by closing my eyes, turning in a circle while thinking about what I want to have happen, and then opening them again. It doesn't work. It's still nighttime.

Then the dream shifts. It looks like the new scene is rising up from behind the foreground of the first scene, then replacing it. [That's the best I can describe it; I don't remember the transition really well.] I say, “Cool!”

I'm now indoors, in a portable classroom filled with school desks. I'm wearing regular clothes again, too. There are students and teachers here. One of the teachers starts singing “Amazing Grace,” and I sing along. We sing the entire first verse. I think, Cool. I've been wanting to sing an entire song in a dream. I know there' s more than just that one verse, but I feel like I've accomplished that goal.

The classroom starts to fly. It flies over a cityscape that I know is in China. We're heading out toward the ocean.

[There was another dream scene after this one, but I don't remember much about it. I know it was indoors, and I think it involved me and my mom searching for and trying to identify the perpetrator of a crime.]

[This is a catchup post. These dreams are from the night of July 15-16, 2011.]

I'm at a high school football game between my high school and another school called Bell High School, which has white and purple as its school colors. [I'm sure there is a real Bell High School, but I do not know what its school colors are in real life.] At halftime, both school's marching bands combine to perform a semi-rehearsed field show together. It's based on my high school's field show from last year [which I didn't even see in real life; within the dream, however, I recognized the show I was watching as being based on the show they had done the previous year]. Although I could go out and join in performing the show if I wanted to, I just watch it. I would have known how to perform most of the show I'm watching if I had been in marching band last year, but I wasn't, so I don't. Besides, I don't have my clarinet with me. The show involves pushing low, wheeled wooden boxes around on the field and crouching down to hide behind them.

[Different dream.] I'm walking around in a public space naked, hoping not to be seen by anyone. [Yes, again. This time,] I'm in an enclosed, single-story retail mall with a tae kwon do studio in it. [At one point during the dream,] I have some sort of blanket or piece of cloth that I clutch around my body as I sit down against a wall in a hallway. There are people I one of the shops I pass through [it looked like a cafe], but, thankfully, they don't seem to take any notice of me. [There must be some unresolved issue somewhere in my mind. This dream has been recurring a lot as of late.]

[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 a catch-up post. These dreams are from the night of June 9-10, 2011.]

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

I'm walking around the downtown area of a city. Every block is covered with tall buildings. Most of one block is covered with a three-or-four-story building with signs that identify it as “Jews' World.” It's their community center and place of worship; it is built around a narrow, rectangular courtyard/entryway with doors to various rooms leading off of it. I look at it and think, Wow, that's pretty cool, having a community center like that.

Directly across the street from this center is a similar, five-or-six-story community center and place of worship for the LDS church. A woman walks out of that complex and walks down the street. We pass each other in the street between the two centers, walking in opposite directions. The woman recognizes me and calls me “Pie [$RealFirstName].” I know that “Pie” is a nickname for [$OfficeBoss] [yes, he is LDS in real life], and that the use of that nickname as a title before my name indicates that I am a member of the in-group associated with [$OfficeBoss]. I'm rather disturbed that the woman both knew who I was and associated me with [$OfficeBoss] in such an intimate and familiar way.

Having realized I was dreaming at some point during this sequence of events [again, I'm not sure when], I decide to start flying. I take off and get pulled in a random direction, backward and sort of sideways. I try to control my flying and start flying forward by concentrating on details of the scenery I can see in front of me and trying to examine them more closely, as I did in my previous lucid [on the night of June 5], but it doesn't work. I attempt this method of control several times. When it stubbornly refuses to work, I just give up. I think, Fine. I'm just going to let myself get pulled along to wherever.

Then that dream faded to black, yet I remained consciously self-aware. I'm not sure if I was actually awake [more likely] or still asleep and self-aware during the gap between two dreams. At any rate, I remember that I knew that I was still asleep [however that works; I really don't even know what was going on here] and that if I just waited patiently, another dream would begin. I did, and it did.

I'm in the central courtyard of a big, old church made of yellow-tan stone. On one side of the courtyard, there is a large, windowlike opening in the wall with no glass, and on the other side of it are rolling vineyards. I briefly think of going flying over the vineyards, but I decide not to. Instead, I explore the building I'm in, and find a large kitchen knife. I pick it up and look at it, reflecting upon it: What's this doing here? We don't do sacrifices of living creatures in my church. We don't have to.

I go into the building, find the kitchen, and put the knife away. To get to the kitchen, I have to go through the parish hall. There are other people in there. I continue to explore more of the building, concentrating on just what a wonderful gift it is to be here in a dream and be lucid. [That's the last I remember.]

[Later, I had another nonlucid.] A whole bunch of the important businesspeople I know in real life, including [$OfficeBoss], have come over to House #2 for an early-morning presentation that I'm supposed to be giving, and they've all crowded into my bedroom. I wake up late for the presentation. In order to get into my closet, I have to ask [$OfficeBoss] and another man to move aside. I'm embarrassed to be seen by all these people while wearing only my black nightgown. [It was the same one I was wearing in real life that night.] I take too long to get ready, and all my guests wander off.

I go out into the rest of the house and see that my mom has put up all the Christmas decorations, even though it's June. I run the vacuum cleaner in the study; P. is there. I get a second shot at doing the presentation, and this time, it works out. I'm grateful that the first attempt, where I got up late for it and everyone left, was just a dream. [LOL!]

[Fragment] I'm in a house or hotel somewhere with MLT [a real-life friend]. I demonstrate to her the fold-out bed that's built into the wall, and she declares it to be too opulent. The building is cylindrical.

I'm in House #1. [So much for recognizing dream signs... :/] I look through a window that looks out onto the patio from the side opposite the dining room [um... in real life, that would be the bathroom window, from which such a view would be impossible...] and see that there's a wasps' nest hanging from the eaves outside the dining-room window.

I'm in the garage, and I say goodbye to P. There are two cool, old, red, elongated, flat-topped cars there (one might have been a convertible). My parents are taking me out somewhere, but I haven't been able to find anything I want to wear, so I'm only wearing my royal blue bathrobe. [I used to have this robe in real life, but I don't anymore.]

[Dreamskip.] I'm driving the brown car into the parking lot where our hair salon and the OSH hardware store are [back in our old town]. I'm naked, so I try to crouch down so that the other drivers around don't see me. When I try to park, the driver of the car that's parked crookedly in the space next to mine decides to back out and straighten his parking job, coming close to hitting my car, but narrowly missing it. I cower in my seat, frightened. When the driver gets out of his car and comes over to talk to me, I look down to check the arrangement of my blue bathrobe, which I'm suddenly wearing again, and make sure it's covering me decently. The other driver tells me that he didn't hit me.

Then, four young boys (10 or so) come to my car and start pestering me relentlessly, climbing in it and all over it and talking to me loudly and annoyingly. I yell as loudly as I can at them to GO AWAY. I'm surprised that I'm capable of yelling with that volume. After I yell at them like that about three times, they finally go away. I'm trying to keep my blue robe on and maintain my modesty, with only partial success. I continue to do so once I've moved from my car to a patio table on the sidewalk outside the hardware store. [I don't recall getting from one location to the other.] People pass me by on the sidewalk as I try to keep the robe up. Next to me on the sidewalk, B.W. and his chorale friends are getting dressed for a performance.

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Side notes:

This was an interesting twist on a classic anxiety dream. It featured the common dream scenario of being naked in a public place and ashamed of it, but it combined that scenario with two stressful occurrences from my waking life: a minor car accident in a parking lot, and the very spirited all-boys class I've been teaching once a week. In the dream, I yelled more loudly than I ever have in real life. Do I unconsciously wish I could yell that loud in reality? It's a plausible hypothesis.

Night of May 23-24, 2011

I'm at Disneyland. I'm visiting with some guy who [apparently] designs and develops roller coasters. I watch a video of a roller coaster in action. The video freeze-frames at various moments.

At Disneyland, there is a new building under construction, and it is visible from the hub. [I think] It's in that space that they can never quite decide what to do with, the space that used to be home to the House of the Future and is currently a character meet-and-greet. The new building fits in well in its location; it's built in the same architectural style as the rest of Main Street. [It made sense in the dream.]

It is dusk, and the sky is clear and incredibly beautiful. I walk slowly down a completely deserted Main Street, carrying in both hands a lit candle in a clear glass cup. I take the time to deeply appreciate the deep beauty, calm, and peace of the scene around me. As I walk, the following thought crosses my mind: No matter who you are or where you go, you'll always find your way back home.

The goal toward which I'm walking toward is a single lightbulb, mounted in a light fixture in the teal-colored, wooden wall that forms the main entrance to the park. This light fixture is right next to one of the doors by which people enter and exit the park. I set my candle down on the steps leading up to the door, then go out through it.

On the other side of the door, there is a wide, concrete-paved entrance plaza. Out here, it's still earlier evening; the sky is on fire with the golden light of a sun that hasn't set yet, but will soon. There's still nothing but a vast expanse of parking lot beyond the perimeter of the entrance plaza. I see F.J. [a real-life friend] crossing the plaza, approaching me. He's been looking for me, because he's there to pick me up and take me home.

[The dream shifts.] I'm in a fancy restaurant, [possibly] in Downtown Disney or at the Disneyland Hotel. I'm with someone who I know is actually Eames, even though he looks exactly like Leonardo DiCaprio. [:-) Plot bunny?] He picks up a drinking glass from a nearby table and shows it to me, showing me that this restaurant is where one can find the kind of glass that my candle was in. He then tosses that glass onto the floor, breaking it. I'm horribly embarrassed by him.

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Side notes:
This was a particularly clear, vivid, and beautiful non-lucid. Not only was the scenery beautiful, but so was the sense of happiness, peace, and well-being I experienced while in the dream. I still felt wonderful when I woke up from it.

Night of May 24-25, 2011 [I think; or it might have been any day between the 25th and the 28th. That's what I get for not bothering to write them down immediately.]

I'm in my current bedroom with J. [a real-life student of mine]. I'm hugging her and pouring out love and affection, as if she were my own child, even though I know she's my student. She returns the love and affection, hugging me back.

[First three paragraphs were one continuous dream, last paragraph was a separate one.]

I'm in the car with my parents, and we pull into the parking lot of the shopping center in our old town where our original family dentist's office is. As we're getting out of the car, a woman with brilliant copper hair gets out of the car. She says “Ma'am” several times to get my mom's attention. When she finally does, my mom recognizes her as Tamara A., a colleague of hers from the high school. [Tamara A. is a real person, but she doesn't have hair like that in real life.] For some reason, I leave my normal clothes in the back of the car and start walking toward the shops wearing only panties and a green blanket wrapped around myself.

We go into the large building to the right (south) of the dentist's office. It's still beautifully decorated and set up as a furniture showroom, even though the furniture store has closed. The back part of it has been converted into a restaurant of some kind, but it's also closed. There's another lady there (not Tamara) who comments on all this.

When I actually go into the dentist's office, someone there compliments me on my cute panties. I get all embarrassed and try to re-wrap the blanket so it's closed in the back. I go further into the building to go to the restroom. In a back area just behind the waiting room, there's a small, dark library filled with lots of shelves of children's books, a couch, and even a bed. The restroom is in a semi-enclosed space separated from the library by swinging doors, really just a closet with a big plastic jug thing that you're supposed to pee in. I decide to just wait until I can find a real one.

I'm looking up at a bright blue sky filled with little puffy clouds. One of them is shaped like California. I seem to have some degree of control over the shape of the clouds. [But I don't remember ever going, “hey, I'm dreaming!” :-( ]