The Lab Notebook

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, Half-awake, half-dream state, [Commentary made while awake]

While out of the house somewhere, I put on a navy-blue, stretchy headband [that I have in real life], and make some kind of wish. This causes me to suddenly have long hair again [I cut my real hair short at the beginning of this month]. My hair is down to my shoulder blades, which is still a little shorter than it was when I cut it, and seems thinner and wavier than it used to be when it was long. I don't want my mom to see me with my hair long again, because if she did, I would have to explain to her about the magical headband. So, when I return home, I do my best to avoid letting her see me.

I consider re-cutting my hair myself, but decide I don't want to, because it wouldn't come out very neat. I decide instead to go back and find the stretchy headband and make another wish to reverse the effects of the first one. I ask my mom if I can use the car to run an errand. She asks what it is, and I answer that I'm going to a vacant lot to look for something I lost. This is true, but it's not the whole truth.

I get into the brown car, and someone is in the front passenger seat. [My dad, I think.] I say to him, “Watch the street signs. I don't even know my own neighborhood in these dreams.” And they'll probably change, I think. I back the car out of the garage, turn it to my left, and continue backing in that direction all the way down to the corner, where the street turns 90 degrees. [In this dream, this corner is now a 90-degree turn like it is in reality, not a four-way intersection like it was in the first dream described in my dream journal entry dated 10/08/10.] Sure enough, as we drive down the street backwards and then back up the street going forward, each street sign says something different the second time we pass it than it did the first time we passed it. The street signs are all blue with white letters [not green with white letters, as they are in reality]. Eventually, I find the street I'm looking for and turn left onto it.

The next scene seems to take place in a fast-food restaurant. I find the headband I was looking for and restore my short haircut. [For this part of the dream, I was in “video-game-controller” mode again, as I described in my dream journal entry dated 10/21/10. I was kind of removed from the action and aware that it was all going on in my mind/imagination, and at the same time, I was fully aware of my real body.]

Woke up at 1:36 A.M., took some notes on my dream, went back to bed.

My parents and I are attending a wedding at the estate of some really rich people. The estate has a little re-creation of a neighborhood from old-timey New York, and the little church in that neighborhood is being used for the ceremony. In one room, an old man, the father or grandfather of the groom, I think, is lying on a hospital bed, all dressed up for the ceremony and being included in the festivities. After the ceremony, they make everyone attending the wedding pose for a group picture. My dad wants to put some sand in containers to use it to stabilize some photography equipment, so he gets out a bunch of sand toys, and I help him shovel sand into buckets. The people who own the estate are originally from Thailand, and they've recreated the beaches of Thailand on their estate. The sand we're shoveling is filled with beautiful blue-and-white seashells, colorful stones and jewels, and gold dust.

Woke up at 3:36 A.M., took some notes, went back to bed.

I'm at my old high school, walking across campus, looking for the classroom of one of my old teachers. I get to the western edge of campus, where the furthest-out portable classrooms used to be, and discover that there's a sort of ravine there, with concrete stairs leading down the near side and up the far side. On the far side of the ravine stand the furthest-out portables. I'm not really surprised that so much has changed in the years since I've been away.

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An aside:

When I cut my hair short in reality, it was after many years of having long hair. I've been wondering for a while whether or not my dream self (if I may steal some jargon from the Matrix universe, my residual self-image) would still have long hair. Not surprisingly, thinking about this over a period of time caused me to dream about it. I find it interesting, and reassuring, that after only three weeks of having short hair in reality, even my dream self apparently feels that that's the norm, and that having long hair feels wrong.

Also, I'm pleased with the increasing frequency of my lucid dreams, but disappointed with my lack of control. I keep realizing that I'm dreaming and either not trying to do or change anything at all, or trying and failing. I will continue trying to improve.

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

I'm in Phoenix for another regular get-together with a group of friends. Jack M. has an extra ticket to this themed dinner themed around the Goosebumps books by R.L. Stine, so he invites me to go with him, and I do. The dinner is served at a really long banquet table in a long, elaborately-designed banquet hall. Every year, they make a quilt to commemorate this themed dinner; the walls of the banquet hall are decorated with quilts from past years.

I'm with my mom in a kitchen, and she declares her intentions to make the oddest variation on “Mexican” food ever. It involves mashed sweet potatoes. We make this strange dinner and serve it to some dinner guests.

WBTB at 2:43 A.M. Took notes on the above two dreams.

I'm in a science classroom in the A building at my old high school, and science class is in session. I'm a student, and all the other student seats are filled with other students, except for the two which are occupied by my parents. I explain to one of the other students who they are, including explaining that my mom was an English teacher at that school until she retired. [True in reality.]

I'm eating a piece of pizza from BJ's, and discover that the restaurant has slipped an advertising flier into the pizza between the crust and the cheese. There's a little piece of paper towel resting directly on the crust, and on top of that is the flier, which is folded up and printed on glossy paper. It is printed in English and Japanese, and the largest, most noticeable text reads “Oe!” (Japanese for “Hey!”) in hiragana. [Awesome, I can read hiragana in dreams just as easily as I can in real life. That's pretty cool.] There's also a little cloth bag, similarly hidden in the pizza. I don't know where it comes from, but I also find a little gummy candy shaped like a Charmander; it looks a lot like the little plastic Charmander figurine that I have in real life, except more elongated.

WBTB at 4:32 A.M. Took notes on the above two dreams. I also have two notes from this one that say “afternoon nap with P.” and “breakfast with Dad – oatmeal later on,” but I really don't remember those dreams at all now.

I'm back in the A building from the aforementioned high school, in an open meeting area off of a main hallway. There are some tables set up in a rectangle, and a bunch of people my own age are sitting around them. One of them is my friend Kevina from Florida. We're doing some kind of activity that requires us to get up and move around the area. While we're doing this, I accidentally bump into another girl who's a little taller than I am, and her chin sort of gets caught on my shoulder for several moments. A third girl gets out some drawings that we all did at a previous meeting of this group. Impressed, I remark about how organized she is. I take my drawing from the stack. I tell everyone that I have to leave the meeting now, because it's 10:00 and I'm late. [For what, I'm not sure.]

I'm in an airport that I've been to several times before. [...in dreams. I still don't clue in that I'm dreaming when I find myself in these recurring dream environments.] There are separate security lines for men and women. I point this out to my dad and tell him that he can stay in the line I'm in, but he'll get some weird looks. There are freestanding, light-up advertising signs in the airport, kind of like there are in real airports and malls, except that this one has an LCD screen. The text on it is saying something about how clear and sharp the text that particular brand of screen can produce is, but I don't find it all that impressive. [LOL, I think this might have been my mind trying to tell me that I was dreaming...]

[This next part doesn't really count as a dream, lucid or otherwise, because I wasn't fully asleep. I knew the entire time that I wasn't fully asleep, I was fully aware of my real body, and I'm pretty sure I was deliberately imagining at least some of this rather than dreaming it, hence the different color and the past tense.] I was on a street somewhere, and I wanted to go into a particular shop. It was closed, so I decided to get in by climbing through the closed window. It actually worked. [For some stupid reason, dream!me is absolutely bound and determined to master the skill of walking through solid objects, even though waking!me would prefer to work on having longer-lasting lucid dreams and accomplishing the Task of the Month.] The interior of the shop was kind of dark; all the walls and furniture were made of dark wood. I went to one table and started experimenting with turning over a pair of miniature hourglasses, one with sand in it, the other with gold dust in it. I noticed that the gold-dust one was running out faster, even though they were the same size. Then I realized that I could feel something grainy blowing onto my hand. Then I looked more closely at the gold-dust hourglass and found the little hole near the top of the upper chamber, where some of the gold dust was coming out and getting all over the table and my hand. When I saw this, I went, “Oh, crap.”