The Lab Notebook

Non-lucid dream, [Commentary made while awake]

Night of April 22-23

I have returned to Japan to live there again. I live in an apartment that is in the same city and the same neighborhood as the one I lived in the first time, but it's several times as big, and has a separate kitchen as well as a larger bathroom.

I'm outside of the building, on the north side of it, standing on a large, open, elevated concrete plaza. [It kind of resembled the one that's part of the queue for Space Mountain at Disneyland, now that I think of it, only bigger. It definitely doesn't exist in real life, at least, not there.] I admire the view of the nearby hills and the old houses that are on top of them. [Um, what?] There is a tourist there with me, pointing a camera to the south at the big apartment building behind me. I tell him that he's at one of the three or four most popular places in the city to take pictures. [What. There are an awful lot more than three or four such places in my city, and that certainly isn't one of them.]

I have a conversation with someone in Japanese, and I seem to handle it fairly well. The words come quite easily. [And I don't remember any of them being off or weird, as they sometimes have been in previous dreams.] Nevertheless, I feel concerned about my Japanese language abilities no longer being adequate to deal with the day-to-day tasks of living here, especially not now that I'm fully responsible for dealing with all the transaction details for things like bills and rent. [This is currently of my ongoing background thoughts in real life, too, but one I haven't been able to give much conscious thought to. Obviously.] I take out my foreign resident registration card, look at it, and think, This is the one from last time, so it's expired now, but it'll be good until I can get an updated one. [Um, no. It doesn't work that way. I don't have the one from last time anymore in real life; I handed it in upon leaving Japan to return to the U.S., which is required.]

Night of April 23-24

My mom and I are driving through a wild area in the brown car. We're looking for an outdoor wedding ceremony that someone told us we should attend. We drive along, and I spot the ceremony: it's taking place on the opposite side of the river from where our car is. We drive along the river for a ways, looking for a place where we can cross it and turn around.

[Different scene.] My mom and I are shopping in the shopping center nearest our house [the one we often walk through in reality]. We're in a smallish, narrowish store that sells beauty products. We leave it and walk along the walkway that passes in front of all the shops, heading back home on foot. There is a man there who only has the upper half of one leg left, and who gets around on crutches. There is also a woman in an electric mobility vehicle there. She's wearing a T-shirt [I think; or it might have been a sign] with text on it that says that she's from a very large family, and that her mother started having children when she was only 11 [!!]. I get into a very long, involved conversation with this woman. [I don't remember most of it now, but I do remember that] One of the topics of conversation is how different our points of view and perspectives are because of the different experiences we've had. At one point, I say, “And I don't care about kids, unless they're my students.” She replies, “You see? Different perspectives.” We walk all the way to the end of the shopping center and turn up the road that leads back to my house.

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

[I had four different dreams last night.]

[Dream #1] I'm at the apartment building where I lived in Japan. There are several different landlords who own parts of the building, which is reflected in the fact that different parts of the facade have different designs. [Of course, this was not the case in real life.] Inside the building, though, instead of many small apartments, there is one big, open space crisscrossed by wooden support beams. A few other people my own age are in the building. Several of the wooden beams are arranged in a tall pyramid shape, supporting a large heating/air conditioning unit at the apex of the pyramid. This pyramid collapses and the unit crashes to the floor. At first, I think it's killed the young man who appeared to be standing directly under it, but then I see that he's okay, just scratched up a bit.

One of the other people in this large, open space is President Obama. I follow him up into an enclosed hallway and eavesdrop on a phone conversation he's having with his wife. From the conversation, I gather that he's going to pay for repairs to the damaged support structure and HVAC unit.

[Dream #2] I'm riding on Ellen's Energy Adventure in Epcot. The ride vehicles move up to get to the room with the screens for the film portion of the attraction; I can feel the vehicle moving upward. We get to that room, and the film begins. The film starts out on only one screen, then widens to fill the wraparound screens on either side of it as well, but there are no curtains that pull back to reveal the additional screens. [There were curtains when I went on this ride in reality back in 2000, but according to an article I just read recently, they're not working anymore.] The film contains lots of exciting action sequences, punctuated and made more immersive and realistic by air jets built into the backs of the seats. The seats also have lap bars; I can feel mine. At some point during the film, it dawns on me that I'm dreaming. When the film ends, I exit the ride along with everyone else. As I walk along my row of seats, I say to the guy walking in front of me, “Hey! You're a dream character!” Again, I don't get his attention at all. I continue walking through the passageways that lead out of the building. They're very dark; I make sure to pay close attention to the people and the edges of walls that I can see by the few dim lights, because I know that if I don't, the dream will fade. As I walk, I sing a song aloud, which was my lucid goal for the night. [I don't recall now which song it was, but I have the vague impression that it was a current country song, one I know well, sung by a male singer.] It doesn't even occur to me to do anything other than go along with the dream scenario; this is a ride at Epcot, so of course I'm going to go along with it and enjoy the experience.

There's a bottleneck along the exit route that slows down the flow of foot traffic. This makes me go, “Huh? What's going on?” Then I see what's causing the bottleneck: Suspended by individual cords from a track on the ceiling are multiple pairs of 3D glasses with polarized lenses, with no earpieces, so you have to hold them up to your eyes. Each cord is attached to a little wheel inside the track, so you can move the 3D glasses back and forth along the track. This passageway is filled with painted, Star-Wars-themed scenery, and when you look through the glasses, the scenery looks 3D. I take a pair of glasses and walk with them the rest of the way out of the building. I say aloud, “Oh my God! Rope-Trak!” [While in the dream, I remembered a dream I had when I was a kid that featured a very similar system, only with harnesses attached to the ends of the cords instead of the 3D glasses. In that dream, the purpose of the system was to make sure everyone at a museum followed the same path through the exhibits. I named this system “Rope-Trak” after the fact, when I was awake and used the dream as inspiration for a school project.] I'm surprised and pleased to see this concept reappear in another dream.

I reach the outside of the building. This outdoor space looks very much like I remember it, and I can see everything clearly in the natural light. However, the sky is overcast and cloudy, and it's either raining or just about to; a hurricane is coming in. The dream ended here.

[Dream #3] I'm at my high school, just outside the gymnasium, looking south. Apparently, just being there is enough to make me realize I'm dreaming. It's nighttime, and the quad is filled with students. I decide to fly; it takes me two tries to take off. My first try turns into a big, parabolic jump. The second time, I succeed in getting airborne. To help launch myself forward, I kick off the wall of the gym with my foot, as one might kick off the wall of a pool while swimming. Among the crowd, I see the B. brothers again as I pass overhead. I think, They didn't go to my high school. I fly higher and see that the school is surrounded on two sides by ocean, which makes me go, “Huh?”

[Dream #4] I'm riding in the back seat of the brown car down a street in my old city. It's nighttime. I know where I am because I recognize the trees and landscaping on either side of the car. Looking out my window, I see a white car flying along, above and to the left of our car. This clues me in that I'm still dreaming. I wonder if I can make this car fly. Almost as soon as I've decided to try to do so, I find myself sitting in the driver's seat, alone in the car. I immediately realize that I'm now alone and driving the car, rather than riding in the back seat while someone else drove, because I had wanted/expected to be the driver. My dream control is improving. Cool.

The car is still going down the street at the same speed it was before. I make the same effort of will I used in my previous dream to fly on my own, only this time, I try to focus my will on the car rather than on my own body. As before, I concentrate on the thought of the object of focus rising up, on how that should feel. It takes noticeably more effort, but it works. I get the car into the air. However, I find that it's now traveling backward, and I can't get it to go forward. Looking out the front windshield and over the landscape, I notice that the moon is low on the horizon ahead of me and to the left, looks normal, and is full. Then the dream faded and I woke up.

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

[I apologize in advance for how much of the page this entry takes up. It was my longest lucid dream to date, though, and I wanted to make the best record of it I could.]

I'm at my old high school, outside the entrance to my mom's old classroom. The open-air entrance on one side of the classroom and the semi-enclosed atrium on the other side are reversed from the sides they're on in real life. I'm listening to an old woman [Betty J.? Aunt Edie? I'm not sure] talk about life. I also remember reading some text about how in the old days, we just lived together with love and respect for one another as a matter of course, without any need for external forces like social programs to manipulate or engineer good feelings between people. [Yep. That sounds like my mind, all right.]

I'm playing PackRat. [Again. I am so sick of dreaming about PackRat, and I know perfectly well that the only way to stop dreaming about it is to stop playing it. That'll happen at the end of this year, I hope.] I discover that the reason an old collection cannot be completed is that they created all the cards, with artwork and everything, but never actually made them available to players.

I'm looking through a rack of envelopes of photo prints, organized by the subject of the photos.

I'm reading a novel on a shiny, black electronic reader. The last page of one chapter has a small illustration of a rolling, bouncing boulder on it [this illustration is from a particular PackRat card]. The electronic reader has small, rectangular “previous page” and “next page” buttons in the lower right corner. It also has readouts in the lower left corner of the screen that show remaining battery life and how many inches from your eyes the screen is. It says that a distance of at least 9 inches is recommended. I see my reflection in its surface and am surprised to discover that I'm wearing glasses. [I don't wear them in real life, but I might have to, someday.]

I go to say good night to my dad. He shows me that he's discovered a way to screw this cylindrical part onto his guitar so that it still has its protective plastic cover.

WBTB at 3:58 A.M. I stayed up for 10-15 minutes, taking notes on the dreams I recalled so far. Then I listened to the second half of my binaural beats file and continued doing affirmations, this time including remembering to stabilize my dream as one of them. I then spent about 45 minutes being kept awake by my coughing and sneezing, but eventually, I managed to get back to sleep. I think I even experienced sleep paralysis for the first time ever; I remember a moment when it felt like my body was vibrating or shaking really fast.

When I find myself in House #1, I immediately know I'm dreaming. [Since I was lucid from the very beginning and can remember a little bit of the sleep paralysis, I think I may have just performed a successful WILD, even though I didn't originally intend to.] This time, I succeed in remembering to stop and take in the scene before doing anything else, in order to stabilize the dream. Once again, I gaze around in awe of the fact that my mind can create such a detailed and realistic environment. Everything looks real, even though I know it's not. I walk around the house a bit, and when I get to the sinks in the bathroom and kitchen, I look at the faucets and quietly expect them to turn on, and they do, without my touching them. [I think that's pretty cool.]

I go out into the study, which looks pretty much just as it did in reality, except that the space inside it is entirely filled with spiderwebs. I turn back and go back into the house, with spiderwebs sticking all over me. When I come back in, I accidentally let a spider into the house, too. It has a big, nearly spherical body with stripes in two different shades of gray. I squash it while it's walking along the wall in the master bedroom. Then I discover another, even bigger, red spider/crab thing on the carpet, and squash that one, too, saying something about how sorry I am for making a stain on the carpet. [The carpet I squashed the spider into was light brown and semi-shaggy. House #1 never had carpet like that; that's the kind of carpet we have in House #3. I didn't notice this until after I woke up, at which point I found it highly amusing that the details of the carpet had been off in one of my dreams and I hadn't noticed. ]

My mom is there in the house. [I don't really remember the specifics of this part, but] I lie down on the bed in the master bedroom and get under the covers so that my parents won't see that I'm quivering and shaking in the throes of SP. [I don't even know.]

I decide I want to leave the house and go explore other parts of this dream world, but I feel obliged to take leave of my parents first and tell them where I'm going, but I want to keep it a secret from them that I'm dreaming. I say to myself, “If I told them I was going to school, would they believe me? Given the setting, they might.” As I say this, what I have in mind is that I'm going to pretend to be setting out on foot for my junior high school. [Funny; that was the only school I ever took the school bus to. I did walk from my house to the bus stop, though.]

I walk through the side yard toward the front gate. I find my parents in the corner of the yard, where the wall with said gate in it meets the wall of the neighbors' house, doing some kind of yard work. I say, “I'm going to school. Bye, Mom!”

“Bye, (Emiko)!” says my mom, and it sounds exactly the same as it always does when my real mom says it. [Obviously, an unaltered memory.] “Have a good day!”

“You, too!” I say, or something like it. I walk out through the front gate and down toward the street. The neighborhood seems more spacious and spread-out than it is in reality. Now that no one is looking, I begin flying, taking off from the middle of the street and traveling parallel to it and upward from it at an angle, like an airplane taking off.

As I fly higher into the air, the dream and my dream consciousness start to fade away. Now, having read the DEILD tutorial, I had some idea of what to do. I lay absolutely still in my bed and concentrated intently on the dream I had just been having, willing myself to start dreaming again. It worked. [First successful DEILD, too! I was really on a roll last night!]

I end up in a group of interconnected, upstairs rooms in a building somewhere. I seem to have flown there. The rooms are white, and there are chairs, upholstered stools, and bookshelves in them. From reading a plaque on a wall near a doorway, I learn that these rooms are reading rooms dedicated to a strange alternate take on Christianity, centered around an alternate set of gospels written by different people. [I didn't recognize it as any sect that exists in real life.] One of the rooms has an analog clock on the wall. It doesn't have numbers, just a circle and two hands, all made of the same rough, gray metal. Even though I already know I'm dreaming, I deliberately look at the clock, glance away, and then look at it again to see if the hands have jumped. The first time I try this, they seem to be in pretty much the same position they were in, so I try again. The second time, they've jumped to a totally different position. I am pleased with myself; again, I was expecting that to happen, so it did.

I leave these rooms and start walking down a flight of stairs. The dream starts to fade again, but again, I manage to stay in it through sheer willpower.

The stairs end in a wide hallway. There is a set of double doors to the right, leading into a room. Judging by the decorations and items outside these doors and inside the room, it looks like there's a wedding going on. Am I the bride? I wonder, but when I enter the large, rectangular room and see the retail-style displays of clothing and stuff, I think, Oh, good. Just a fair, then. I see a real-life friend [I forget who] to my right, who says to me, “Cute dress, (Emiko)!”

“Thank you!” I answer, even though I think this is an odd thing to say, because all I'm wearing is a damp, clammy black blanket wrapped around me. It feels like it's made of swimsuit material. I continue further into the room, turning to my left and walking that way. I look down and to the left, between two racks of clothing, and see another real-life friend, Eleanor B. She's wearing a royal-blue bridesmaid dress [the one she was wearing the last time I saw her in real life, which was at the wedding of some mutual friends]. I call her name twice to get her attention. She looks up, sees me, and stands up to talk to me. I come over and talk to her. When I take a closer look at the clothes hanging on the rack we're standing next to, I say something like, “And are these the new Christmas sweatshirts from Target? Cute! I want!” The sweatshirts are white and have patterns on them of snowflakes made up of narrow lines, either in shades of pink or shades of teal. They also have hems and seams in those colors. I take one pink one and one teal one off the rack and carry them with me. They feel soft.

I leave that room and find myself outside. In the distance, I can see big mountains with snow on top of them. I continue exploring and somehow [I don't remember the exact route I took] make it into an old Japanese temple (or residence, or something). It has a very old, very traditional room with tatami mats on the floor. I pry off each of my sneakers in turn, using the toe of the other foot (suddenly, I'm wearing sneakers, I think). [Yes, I actually thought that while in the dream. Now that I think of it, I think I was suddenly wearing regular clothes, too.] Leaving my sneakers (the exact same ones I have in real life, I note) out in the passageways, I enter the room with the tatami mats and walk around in it. I can feel the mats and my socks under my feet. I say aloud to myself, “Wait – we're allowed to walk around in here? Oh – of course we are; that's what I was expecting.” Yet again, something is so because I expected it to be so. [In all my real-life experience visiting historical tourist sites in Japan, we were never allowed to actually enter the rooms with the tatami; we were only allowed to look into them from the outside. I always wanted to walk around inside them, though, so now, in a dream, I got my wish. Cool.]

Outside of this room are some passageways that are all painted a dusty shade of teal, and have wooden signs hanging in them. I walk around in here for a few minutes. One of the signs says “Telephone,” and indeed, there is a pay telephone on the wall in a wooden box. It looks like an old tourist facility.

One of the doorways within these passageways leads into a spacious, modern restaurant that I recognize as the one inside the onsen [hot spring] that I visited while I was living in Japan. There are a few people sitting at tables here and there. I walk through the restaurant, looking for one of my real-life friends [I don't remember which one now]. I don't find her there, so I decide to head for the restaurant's exit and go somewhere else.

The way to the exit is through a long passageway with a wall on the right side and an upholstered bench on the left side where guests can sit and wait for tables, which separates the passageway from the rest of the restaurant. There are two people sitting on the bench. As I approach the door, I think, What shall I do next? Task of the Month – cell phone – oh, yeah! For a split second I think of getting out my cell phone to text somebody, but then I remember the new Task of the Month for November. I turn to one of the two DCs sitting on the bench, the one sitting nearest the door, who happens to be a black, pregnant woman. “Hey, can I tell you what I'm thankful for?” I say to her.

“Okay.” She straightens, sitting forward on the edge of the bench, listening to me.

“I'm thankful for my family, and [something else I can't remember now], and my computer, and for being able to come here!” I say. [Meaning, to the dream world.] Unfortunately, the dream starts to fade again just as I'm finishing my sentence.

FA in which, instead of being me, I'm Cobb. Mal is there when I wake up, the real one. [They're characters from Inception.] We talk about something, probably the dream I just had. [I don't remember now exactly what it was we talked about, but dude. That was a really weird FA.]

FA in which I count my fingers while they're spread out against the legs of my jeans. When I find I have a sixth finger on my left hand, my reaction is, “Oh, damn. Gosh-darn it!” Apparently, I really want to actually be awake. But I'm still feeling sleepy, so I lie down, sprawling over the sides of the white, wooden bench I'm sitting on.

When I woke up for real, I just lay there for several minutes because my body still felt heavy. I recalled my dream and was pretty impressed.

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Side notes:

That was the longest lucid dream I've ever had. I'm also very impressed and pleased with the number of times I succeeded in controlling what happened just by expecting something to happen. I really got the hang of that skill last night. Finally, I'm amazed that I managed to stay lucid for that long, and to force myself to keep dreaming so many times when the dream threatened to end. Wow!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A bunch of non-lucid dreams last night.

I'm at our original church, and the entire center courtyard area is full of colorful and unique play structures for the kids, including a scaled-down replica of some other important building elsewhere in the area that has statues on the facade. I go into a room in the main building, and a younger (maybe 9 or 10 years old) version of P. is there, being taken care of by the usual child-care people.

I'm sitting at a table in a building somewhere, looking out the window across a narrow body of water. Across the water is an island, where Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea are located. [They're not actually on an island in real life, by the way.] I can see both of them very clearly, as well as the people on the island. Near the shore of the island is a fleet of small, brightly-colored boats and canoes, used to take guests back and forth between the island and the mainland. Most of them are filled with guests waiting to depart for the mainland; more guests are still boarding the remaining boats.

I'm at a coffee shop (might be the same building I was in above, but I'm not positive), working on my computer, which is booted into Ubuntu. I look up and enter the password for something. I register for a camping trip that is happening outside and across the street, near the beach. When I go out to the campsite, there are a bunch of tents (or some kind of structures for us to sleep in), and some portable toilets. The people in charge are distributing rolls of toilet paper from big packages, and are also distributing food. There are also some coolers, which I look into and see that they're full of ice and bags of chicken breasts. This causes me to go, “Aw, man!” I don't want chicken sandwiches for dinner, because that's what we had that one time during the camping trip in sixth grade, and I didn't like them then. [Everything after the “because” is true in reality.]