The Lab Notebook

I enter a fancy, beautiful restaurant in one of the nice towers on Coruscant. I round a corner and sit down at a table with Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi, whom I had arranged to meet there for breakfast.

I am approaching the main entrance to Hogwarts, but in order to get to the main door, you have to get through a series of challenges and tasks. They include climbing across a sliding metal puzzle-thing (which someone who was there before me has already aligned so that it can be climbed across easily), and washing some dishes and putting them away neatly (again, this has already been done for me). When you get to the main door, you have to sing the Hogwarts school song to the low doorknob to get it to open. Fortunately, I still remember most of it, and I sing the end part of it. The door opens.

I'm with one of my coworkers, and we are meeting to play a Star Trek RPG. We have to wait for my sister to show up, and I go on a rant about how she can get away with sleeping in late, while I never could when I was a kid.

Non-lucid dream, [Commentary made while awake]

I'm looking out my upstairs bedroom window in our family's house [our first one that I lived in as a kid - the one that didn't have upstairs bedroom windows, it was only one story in real life], watching my parents and sister drive away in their new Honda SUV. They drive up onto a freeway offramp, where they get out of the new SUV and get into a different vehicle [bus, I think?]. The now-empty SUV is a self-driving car, so I watch it come back down the freeway offramp and drive itself along one of the main roads through our neighborhoods. I realize that if we're going to get it back, I'm going to have to go chase after it. I know that it's brand-new, my parents just bought it, and since I'm home alone, I'm now responsible for it.

I run out of the house and chase after the SUV, on foot. You'd think it would either keep going in a straight line and crash into something, or else it would be programmed to either pull over and stop or come back to our driveway and park itself, I think, but no. It's programmed to follow the streets and turn at randomly-selected corners, of which there are many in our tract-home neighborhood. Fortunately, it does so very slowly, slowly enough that I almost catch up to it a couple of times, even running after it on foot. I follow it into the neighborhood on the opposite side of that main road I mentioned, just north of the one where our house is. I lose sight of it and yell, "NANOOK!" before I remember, It's a car, not a dog. It can't hear you. [No surprise it's a Honda; my parents have been loyal to them for many years. The odd part is that they never name their cars in real life.]

I finally see Nanook the Honda SUV parked nose-in to the chain-link fence at the front of somebody's front yard, which stops it for long enough that I can get close, but it gets away from me again before I can get in. [I think - my memory gets fuzzy here. It was a fun and amusing dream, though.]

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

[Note: This DJ entry contains discussion of my personal religious beliefs, which are Christian. If, for any reason, you do not want to read about them, please skip over this entry.]

I'm trying to get from one place to another by bicycle. It's right at or just after sunset on a cloudy, overcast day, so it's somewhat dark outside. I'm bicycling along sidewalks that run between buildings that are each about four or five stories tall and have lots of windows. [It actually bears a strong resemblance to some of the private college campuses I used to walk around when I was a kid.] When I try to turn a corner, a guy on a larger bike passes by really fast right in front of me, and I shout out in surprise and fear. After he has passed by, I turn the corner and go on my way. I'm carrying a large plastic bag hanging from my left handlebar. It is filled with other, crumpled-up plastic bags, as well as a heavy, black, U-shaped metal bike lock.

I'm in the sacristy [back room where robes and other special equipment are stored] at my old church. I've arrived there to meet up with a bunch of my friends from my old college Christian fellowship, who are all crowded into the room. [I think this might have been the place I was trying to get to on my bike, but I'm not absolutely sure; I don't remember the transition from one dream scene to another. Or they may have been two entirely separate dreams.] We're all there for a special church service in which all of us young adults will be honored. All my friends already have their choir robes on, and I hurry to take mine out of the closet and put it on over my clothes.

As I'm doing this, everyone starts to file out of the room, because it's time for the service to start. I'm still hunting through the shelves in the back of the closet for my shoes, saying aloud to myself, “I'm not sure if I have black shoes in here....” I came into the room wearing white shoes, which wouldn't go with my dark-purple choir robe. [They were the same kind of choir robe I used to wear at the church I attended immediately before my current one.] I find a pair of black, slip-on sandals [a pair I own in real life] on a shelf and start putting on, but I'm already being hurried out the exterior door of the sacristy, along with the rest of the procession of young adults. When we get outside, I cross the sunlit courtyard by shuffling and sliding my feet forward, still working on getting them all the way into the sandals.

Although this church building is in a different place and has a very different layout than it does in reality, I recognize it as the one I went to as a child. The sacristy door opens onto a courtyard paved with red ceramic tile and enclosed with white walls, and it's a beautiful, sunny day. We walk in a procession along the outside wall of the sanctuary, then turn left and then left again to enter the church through its large, wooden double doors. I'm still finishing up fastening the front of my choir robe as we enter.

As we enter, there is modern, rock-instrumentation-based worship music playing, the kind we used to have in fellowship meetings. Most of the pews are facing forward, except for the section nearest the front, where they are facing inward toward the center aisle. Beyond those seats is the altar area. The sanctuary is full of people, including my mom, who is sitting in an aisle seat that I pass on my right as I walk up the aisle with the procession. I'm aware that the families of my friends from the fellowship are there, too. We all process up the center aisle and take seats in the center-facing pews.

The music continues until we are all sitting down. When it ends, one of the leaders of the fellowship starts welcoming everyone to the service and talking about how its purpose is to honor the young adults of the congregation. During this speech, I realize that I accidentally dropped my knitted bag of choir books [again, something I had in real life at my previous church] in the aisle, right where my mom is sitting. I stand up and go to retrieve it, but a tall, old black lady beats me to it. She picks it up and brings it back to me.

The leader who's speaking says that we're going to start things off by playing a team-building game. [This was typically how we started off conferences in that fellowship in real life.] I smile; this is going to be fun. I look at the service bulletin and see that just about everything the leader will say is printed on it, like a script. There are even photos of the young adults who are being honored, and a list of the supplies we'll need for the team-building game. As I continue to look through the bulletin, I see that after we play this game, we'll proceed to have a regular church service, the more traditional kind we've always had at this church. I'm also aware that although some of the people in the congregation are from my Episcopal tradition, and others are from my friends' evangelical tradition, absolutely everyone present is not only okay with the idea of having a service that blends elements of both traditions, but is actually happy about it and looking forward to the rest of the service. I am, too. The whole gathering is suffused with a sense of love, peace, joy, and unity.

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Side notes:
This dream was significant for me because it made me feel better about the past. It made me feel less conflicted and less torn, and gave me hope that reconciliation between those two areas of my experience is possible.

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.

(This is a catch-up post. This dream took place on the night of September 8-9, 2012.)

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

I'm in my old hometown, on a major east-west street. I have to transport some large, cooked meat dish from one place to another in the trunk of my car, without letting the juices from it spill all over the trunk, so I have to drive very carefully.

[Later, different dream.] I'm in my apartment in Omaha. My parents are there with me. They've come to visit along with SS [a good friend of my mom's], and we're trying to figure out a more comfortable sleeping situation than cramming both of my parents and SS into my office, which is what we have been doing. We wander into the far side of the apartment, where I don't go very often. We walk through a hallway that goes past an outdoor courtyard, with a brick floor and a stone fireplace, and into the large master suite.

“I don't come in here very often,” I say. The master suite has a large, unused bedroom and its own bathroom, which solves the problem of sharing bathrooms. We can also move someone into that bedroom.

A little later, I walk toward the door of my apartment, from the inside, and find that my parents are decorating it for Christmas by putting lights up all around it and putting a green garland over the top of the door, so it hangs down on the inside and the outside. “Mom!” I say indignantly. “I don't put up fall decorations until the autumnal equinox, and I don't put up Christmas decorations until December 1st!” I start taking the decorations down.

My parents and I are discussing the amount of money we spent on my relocation, and how much I still owe them. They are under the impression that I owe them for the car we rented, but I counter with the argument that no, I don't, because that expense went on my mom's credit card, not mine.

My friend Jim is in my apartment. He looks very young [younger than he is in real life] and is holding a baby girl. I introduce him to my parents: “Mom, this is my friend Jim. Jim, this is my mom,” and the same with my dad. While I'm doing so, Jim disappears, leaving only the baby floating in midair. [I have no idea how I didn't realize I was dreaming. I did take note of how strange it was that Jim looked younger than he normally did, though.]

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Side notes:
This is the first time I've dreamed about my new apartment since I moved here, which was 1 month and 9 days ago now. This dream comes as a relief. I was beginning to worry about my mental state. On two previous occasions when I've made a change in my life (when I moved into the rented room and when I got my first smartphone - see my DJ entries from July 24, 2011 and September 4, 2011), only two weeks passed between the date of the change and the date that change was reflected in my dreams. This led me to develop the hypothesis: “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 time, it took just over five weeks. Time to adjust my previous hypothesis. Here's the adjusted version: “When my unconscious mind has begun to accept something as normal, it starts incorporating that something into my dreams. The amount of time it takes for that to happen may vary.” On a conscious level, I would agree that it has been much more difficult to adjust to and accept this change than it was to adjust to the other two changes in this data sample. I believe that this accounts for the time discrepancy.

I recognize several of the other themes in this dream as themes that have been on my mind lately while I'm awake. I frequently think about how my apartment seems very large for just me, so in my dream, my apartment actually was as big as it feels, or even bigger. I really am excited about decorating my own apartment for Christmas, so it makes sense that I would dream about that. Yesterday, when I was shopping, I really did purchase a few Christmas decorations, but I didn't put them up. My policy on putting up decorations is exactly as I said in my dream.

My best guess as to why Jim was there is that I subconsciously feel guilty that it's been five weeks and I still haven't found or joined a new Toastmasters club yet, because I keep putting it off.

(This is a catch-up post. This dream took place on the night of August 22-23, 2012.)

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

My mom and I are watching a play together. The play features a girl and a creepy, life-sized puppet that is designed to be a body double of her. I see that $OfficeBoss is there, watching the play with his family. Then, my mom and I go out to the parking lot and drive away in the same car together, even though we both have cars there. We can only start one of our cars, not the other one, because neither of us has the right key for that one.

I'm in the Phoenix, Arizona metro area on vacation, visiting my good friend, JM. I have my own car [which I never do when I go to visit him, because I always fly there and get rides around town with him and his friends - this should have been my first clue that I was dreaming, but it wasn't], and I'm driving east along the freeway, heading in the direction of JM's house. The scenery around me is incredibly beautiful and lush, with lots of desert plants.

JM and I are hanging out in a bar together, totally chilling out on a sofa. I'm drinking a beer that someone else abandoned on a table. We walk out of the bar, which is located in a shopping mall. As we're on our way out of the mall, we find another friend of ours, ET [a human - yes, those are his initials], in another of the mall's shops. I realize it's him when I hear his voice. A bunch of our friends are with us now. ET hugs everyone in the group (myself, JM, CF, and a couple of others), except for RD. RD doesn't want to be hugged, and uses her fingers to climb up the side of a door to get away from ET. ET tickles her on the small of her back instead.

I'm walking through a beautiful Arizona landscape of desert farms, and at this point, I finally realize that I'm dreaming. I focus on the fact that the guard dogs that many of the farms have cannot really hurt me when I'm in a dream. I run away from one of them by flying straight up, and then start flying over the lovely scenery, admiring it. Looking southwest, I can see downtown Phoenix, which has skyscrapers and a giant stone head with a big, wide-open mouth. Just after I've started flying, my alarm goes off and wakes me up.

[This is a catch-up entry. This dream is from the night of February 11-12, 2012.]

[I'm writing this down so long after the fact that I'm not 100% sure that I have the date right. It's within 1 day of the actual date, though. This is the only dream I remember having while on my first-ever cruise. I thought it was pretty cool, funny, and interesting.]

I'm at my old high school, with my mom. [I went to the high school where my mom was a teacher, by the way.] The fire alarm goes off, emitting a continuous stream of high-pitched tones. We try to turn it off ourselves, but we can't. We go to the school administrative office and ask the principal to turn it off, because it's driving us crazy. He tells us that he can't turn it off, either.

I wake up, and can still hear the high-pitched tones. I realize the following, in this order: That's not a fire alarm. That's the ventilation system whistling. Hey, that was a real sound that was occurring in the real world, and it came through into my dream! Awesome! Also, the speed and durations of the tones was exactly the same when I heard it in the dream as it is now, further demonstrating that time passes at the same rate in dreams as it does in reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I'm in my family's house [it doesn't look anything like any of our real houses]. P. has a terrible secret that she can't stand to tell our parents, so she's making me tell them for her. She actually cries when she tries to talk about it, because she feels so bad about it. Information about the secret is hidden on the computer in a file called “Sisters.nxt,” which is the type of file that contains programming instructions for the toy robots we use at my teaching job.

Our parents come in, and I gather my courage and tell Mom the terrible secret. Everyone is upset, including me.

When I woke up, I was quite stunned that it had just been a dream. It had been incredibly vivid and realistic. I actually made mental notes to call my sister and ask her if she was okay, and to to check my real computer later for a file named “Sisters.nxt.” [There was none, of course.]

I'm in my car [my new-to-me one], on my driveway. It rolls backward down the driveway, even though the parking brake is set. [Anxiety. I am afraid of this happening.] As I turn around to look behind me, I see JM backing a big truck up to our driveway. I smile and wave at him.

I'm back in the same house from earlier, with my parents. My mom's hair has suddenly turned gray, and is short and fluffy. It has two parts that come to a point on the top of her head, which she is feeling with her fingertips to find out how they go. My dad's hair is also turning gray. I realize that I'm back in the unfamiliar house that appeared in my previous dream, and therefore, that I'm dreaming.

I turn away from my parents and walk around the house, observing. The rooms are spacious and empty in the middle. Thoughts about how all this is a dream and not real just won't leave me alone, even though I try to ignore them, for fear that thinking about it too much will cause the dream to fade and me to wake up. I remember that I should try to stabilize and ground myself in the dream by engaging more of my senses, so I go looking for something to eat.

One of the rooms of the house is a kitchen. I open the refrigerator and get out one of those little plastic, single-serving cups of applesauce. I open it up and eat it directly out of the cup, by sticking my tongue into it. It tastes just like applesauce, but the flavor isn't as strong as it would be in reality. I also find that my lips are all tingly and semi-numb, as if I'd had a Novacaine shot that was wearing off. I think, That's happening because these sensations of eating aren't real.

[Dreamskip.] I'm outside, and I remember that I wanted to fly in this dream. I try to take off twice, and both times, I succeed only in jumping about six or eight feet and then falling back down to the ground. The first time, I end up on my butt. After the second time, I think, Wait, don't I usually do this just by thinking about flying? So I do, and it works. I fly around the beautiful scenery of a bunch of ocean harbors and inlets with towns on them. At one point, I fly through some power lines [?] intangibly. [I don't feel any sensation associated with it, though.] As I fly, I go, “Wheeee!”

I'm outside a big church building at night, still flying around.

I'm inside a shop full of shoes and other fashion items. It is owned by Yusuf, who is minding it. I fly through the shop and out the front entrance, into a street.

I'm now outside that same big church building during daylight. I say to myself, “It's daytime now because my real body says so.” I say this because I know it must be light outside by now, and I'm sure my body clock knows that. I decide to just walk across the grass to get to the entrance of the church, but then I use a small burst of my flight powers to get up all six steps in one leap.

There is some big event going on on an outdoor lawn, with tents or shade covers set up. [I don't really remember this part very well.]

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Side notes:

Last night was the one-year anniversary of the night I had my first substantial lucid dream. That fact made me really motivated to have another cool lucid dream, and I succeeded in having one. I was really pleased and proud of myself that I had. I wasn't quite as euphoric about it as I was that first night, but I was pretty happy. I'm really happy with what I've experienced in my dream life this year, but, of course, there's much more I want to do and learn. Here's to many more years of lucid dreams!

[This is another catchup post.]

Non-lucid dream, [Commentary made while awake]

Night of September 8-9

I wake up in my current bedroom. I go down the stairs and look at a digital clock. As I look at it, it changes from 1:07 [or something like that] to 5:07. I know I have to get up for the day at 5:15 [this was actually true in real life, since it was a Friday morning], but I'm still feeling sleepy, so I decide to just go back to bed for those last 8 minutes. I go back up the stairs and go back to sleep.

I wake up in a different bedroom, in a two-story house [that might or might not have been House #2, I'm not sure]. I go downstairs, and there's a social gathering just getting started. A bunch of my [present-day] friends from church are just arriving at the house. I get into a conversation with my mom and PB on the subject of how important it is to always eat everything on one's plate. My mom says that her father always used to tell her to clean her plate. I say that I learned that it was good manners to do so from reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's books when I was a little girl.

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Side notes:

When I woke up for real, I was pretty mad at myself for having missed two false awakenings, one of them involving the classic dream sign of a digital clock changing the time it displays.

Right after I woke up from this dream, my memory of the exact words of the conversation I had had in the dream was much clearer than my memory of conversations in dreams usually is. I'm writing this on the evening of the following day, though, so I don't remember it as well. The story about me reading Laura Ingalls Wilder as a child and learning lessons about manners and etiquette from her books is true, and comes directly from my real life. My mom has never actually told me that specific story about her and her father – my mind just made it up, but it is consistent with his personality.

[This is a 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.

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

[Last night, I had probably the longest and certainly the most highly lucid dream I've ever had. I'm writing this at the end of the day. I tried to recall this dream as best I could upon waking, and I made some handwritten notes, but by now, although I remember the highlights of the dream, I've forgotten what order they went in and how I moved from one to the other. This is my best attempt to reconstruct the whole, long sequence, but some of these are most likely not in the correct order. I do remember that I consciously chose to move from one activity to another in the dream, though.]

I’m in a large room with a really cool indoor playground in it. I observe that they’ve added more decorations and more play elements to the playroom since the last time I was there: there is now a long chain with brightly-colored wooden blocks in various shapes (cylinders, hexagons, and others) threaded onto it hanging across the ceiling, and there are more things to climb and play on. I climb up one of the climbing walls, along with another girl. We press against each other as we climb it.

Later, elsewhere in the same room, I’m looking at my reflection in a mirror. I notice that my neck looks strange, and tilt my head back to see. I see that my neck appears to have been replaced with a shiny, silver metal bar that appears to be a piston. This causes me to realize that I’m dreaming. I pinch my nose to confirm and find that I can still breathe. The familiar sensation pleases me, and I'm very happy to be in a lucid dream. I have a slightly higher degree of lucidity than I've ever had before.

I go outside the building. There is a grassy lawn outside it. I have a discussion of systems for play and discovery with MA [a real-life friend and colleague] and another dream character.

I then decide to explore a bit. I walk away from the large building and head toward another complex of buildings that appears to be an elementary-school campus. As I start walking, I say to myself, “Again, why am I walking when I can fly?” So I start flying over there. I find a party in progress on the far side of the elementary-school campus, where there are some picnic tables. People are hanging out and drinking beer. I obtain a pint glass for myself, but leave it sitting around on or near one of the walls as I wander away.

I see the entrance to a mall, and enter it.

I fly up into the air to get an overview of the area. From up here, I can see that the town I'm in is on the ocean and has a beach. I think, That makes sense. Oceans and beaches are part of my schema for what a broad overview of an area of land should look like, because of where I grew up.

I'm walking along a rolling dirt path. While walking, I eat yogurt out of a plastic cup with a metal spoon. It's raspberry-flavored and smooth and creamy, and it tastes exactly like real yogurt. Then, I find a handful of coins that someone has dropped on the side of the path, along with a bronze medallion. The medallion has some text inscribed on it that says the name of the country I'm in and what the medallion was awarded for. [I don't remember what it said now, although I could definitely read it in the dream, and the country name wasn't the name of any real country.] The coins are all common U.S. coins, but there's also a fifth coin, a brass-colored one that's shaped like a little house [a square shape with a pointy roof]. I pick all these items up.

I wake up in a car with MA, JL, and one other friend. One of them is driving, and I'm in the back seat. I remember that I had just been dreaming, and pinch my nose. Yep. Still dreaming.

While exploring the grassy, park-like area outside the building I started in, I spot a silver, metal, quarter-spherical shape rising up out of the ground. I say, “Ooh!” because I see an opportunity here. The structure is roughly the same shape as the baseball backstop I once fantasized about flying to the top of [see my DJ entry dated April 28, 2011], even though it's solid silver rather than chain-link, and it's maybe two-thirds to half the size of the real one. I take off and fly to the top of it, stopping myself by grabbing hold of the top edge of the hollow quarter-sphere with my hands and then swinging myself up onto it, so that I'm sitting at the top with my lower legs dangling over the edge. I'm facing a crowd of DCs standing on the ground, one of whom is a burly man who flashes me a thumbs-up sign. I proudly declare, “I'm the coolest kid in school!” The DCs seem to approve, but then they start flooding into the hollow space inside the quarter-sphere, filling the space and causing the structure to tip over backward. I climb off as it slowly tilts over, unhurt.

Having accomplished both the old goal of flying to the top of the backstop [well, sorta] and my other goal of trying dream food, I say aloud, “Okay, chores over. Time to have fun.” I fly up and let the wind carry me away.

The dream fades, and I find myself lying down. I try to move my arm, but judging by the feel of it, I realize, No, that's my real arm! I don't want to do that! [Whether or not this was actually true, I couldn't say for sure, but it sure felt like it was at the time.] After a brief moment of feeling stuck in that position and trying to figure out how to get back to exploring the dream world, I roll over and fall out of my bed. I think, Wow, that actually works! I quickly determine that I'm back to the lucid-dreaming state, and remind myself that all that's around me only exists inside my mind, as I read in EWOLD.

I'm looking at a different, grassy lawn. There is a little red demon thingy growing out of the grass. He has red roots that run all over the surface of the lawn. I have a magic sword, so I hold it out, wondering if it'll help and what I can do with it. The demon takes the sword and kills himself by using the sword to sever all his roots. When he and his roots have all disappeared, a small chair rises up out of the plus-sign-shaped hole in the ground where he had just been. It is a reward for my defeat of the demon. I take the chair and carry it with me as I fly back over to the party, which is still in progress.

When I get there, I use the chair to help me grab onto some structure to arrest my motion and land. Flying is easy, but stopping is hard, I think. I can't find the glass of beer I left there earlier, but I decide it's no big loss. I take my chair and sit down at the corner of one of the portable tables that are set up in the party area. I'm facing the outside wall of the elementary-school complex. Up against the wall I'm facing is another table with a clear pitcher of beer on it.

There is another handful of coins on the table near me – again, standard U.S. coins, all of them shiny and brand-new, plus the odd house-shaped coins I saw before. I decide to swallow some of them, because I know I can't do any harm to my real body by doing so. I see another girl at my table doing the same. It feels good. I can feel them going down my throat, but the sensation seems to be weaker than would be realistic, which isn't surprising, since I haven't actually done this in reality [and certainly never will]. After swallowing a few coins, I decide I want more beer to go with them, so I get up and get myself another cup. The beer is cold and rich and flavorful; it tastes exactly how I like my beer to taste.

I've run out of coins, but I still want more. I cup my hand, place it on the table palm side down, look away, and think about what I want to have happen. I feel little pops under my hand, like bursts of compressed air, as more coins pop into existence. Then I feel the coins themselves against my hand as the pile grows. I remove my hand and continue swallowing coins. I'm very pleased that I've suddenly become so good at summoning objects.

My dad is sitting right next to me, at the end of the table, so his chair is perpendicular to mine. He sees me swallowing coins and absolutely freaks out. He recoils from me in disgust, asking me, “What are you doing?” I simply respond, in an “it's not a big deal” tone, “It won't hurt my dream body.”

Then I woke up for real and waited while the last of the SP faded away, concentrating on remembering all that I'd dreamed about. I was very pleased to have accomplished so much and to have been lucid for so long. [In fact, I got to check two goals off the big list in my profile today: trying dream food and summoning an object. ]

[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.

[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.]