The Lab Notebook

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

[For the second lucid in a row, I'm actually aware of the dream beginning, and it begins the same way as the last one - a visual scene emerges out of a blank nothingness, and I focus on it until it expands from a few little circles to fill my entire field of vision. This time,] I'm out in front of a big, old, two-story wooden house where some Toastmasters meetings are going to take place. I go inside to attend them, and some of my real-life Toastmasters friends are there, too. There are also visitors there, whom they are trying to recruit to Toastmasters. While I'm standing around and talking with the group, I demonstrate my ability to fly from the ground floor of the house up to the upstairs balcony. I compare it to "lifting myself by the seat of my pants" [shoutout to Dr. Seuss!] because, I notice on this particular occasion, that's roughly what it feels like when I bring my concentration to bear on the task of actuating that ability. It feels like I'm using my mental concentration to lift myself up from the small of my back and propel myself through the air. I say to the assembled DCs: "I used to be very secretive about my flying, but now I'm very open about it. I think everyone should be able to enjoy it." [And I do.]

After the meetings are over, I walk out of the house onto the street, except where one would expect there to be a street, there is instead a big, shallow swimming pool. It is surrounded by tropical plants, and its edges go in a series of curves so that the overall shape of the pool is a big, amoeba-like blob with lots of curving pockets sticking out every which way. I walk around to one side of the pool, sit down on the edge, put my feet in the water, and think: "I wonder if I can change my clothes just by thinking about it?" I close my eyes and concentrate on what I want to happen - namely, I want to be wearing a swimsuit. I can actually feel the swimsuit form around me. When I open my eyes, I'm wearing a tankini with tribal-looking geometric patterns on it in raspberry, burgundy, and many other colors. I exclaim out loud, "Holy $#!*, I did it!" [It was a super cute swimsuit, but certainly not one I would ever choose for myself in real life. Upon reflecting afterwards, I realized that my dream body doesn't have stretch marks - or if it does, they're much less noticeable than they are in real life, since I don't remember noticing them - and it's also less fat than my real one, though not dramatically so.]

I notice that the regular clothes I had just been wearing - jeans, button-down shirt and white sneakers - are now floating on the surface of the pool, around me. I get the rest of the way into the pool. There are two other people enjoying the pool, two guys and another woman. I realize that while my swimsuit top has shoulder straps, it also has a part that's supposed to tie together across my back, just at the bottom of my shoulder blades, and it's untied. I approach the woman (the pool is shallow enough to walk in easily) and say, "Trade you ties?" We tie the ties on each other's swimsuits, as I had just requested. She is some type of POC [most likely South Asian? I couldn't say for sure] and very pretty, and her name is Kim.

After swimming and lounging around for a bit, the two guys, Kim, and I all get out of the pool, down at the far end of the 'street,' away from the house I had just been in. Another dream character is standing there, a petite, definitely East Asian woman [she reminds me of a younger Agent May from the "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." TV series]. She asks me and the two guys to come with her; she is recruiting us for some kind of spy-adventure-type mission. [I have no idea why she ignored Kim completely, but she did.] We follow her, but I turn to say goodbye to Kim, who is now standing on the edge of the pool, as I go.

The two guys and I follow Young Agent May into an area that looks like an ancient temple courtyard, all dusty dirt floors and high, light-yellow-tan-colored walls of rough-hewn stone that stand open to the sky. There are lots of wall segments forming corners, but there is a space off to the left that's more than big enough for a dark-brown, equally-roughly-hewn wooden table with two people sitting behind it. This is the check-in desk for the adventure/mission. Young Agent May goes over to check us in, and I look around the courtyard while the two guys start to explore. As I'm looking around, a brochure printed on unbleached brown paper appears in my hand. The title, printed in a curved swoop across the center in big, yellow letters, reads "Dole Presents: Adventures in Dole Whip." [Or something like that. Interestingly enough, I could read the whole thing perfectly fine. I can't remember all of it, but I'll reproduce the text I do remember.] The brochure goes on to say: "This dreamer is about to earn her title! Next Task: Create a tiny, consensually-dressed, applesauce humanoid." There's even an illustration of this little humanoid figure I'm apparently supposed to create out of applesauce. [Don't ask me what "consensually-dressed" is supposed to mean. Presumably "dressed in an outfit of its own choosing," with an undertone of "modestly dressed."]

I wake up to the sensation of my left arm being asleep. I've fallen asleep on my left side, something I rarely do.

[Cool! New ability! This is the first time I've ever changed my clothing at will. I guess that counts as changing my appearance, although I really meant changing an aspect of my physical body.]

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

I see a beautiful, blue sky with lots of puffy, white clouds in it. I realize that this is a dream [I'm not quite certain, but I believe I became lucid by first realizing that I didn't recall how I had gotten outdoors where I could look up at the sky], and ground my awareness in the dream by focusing on the clouds in the sky. The sky expands to fill my field of vision, covering up and washing out the gray nothing behind it.

I realize I'm in the backyard of the house I lived in as a child, and I'm with two girls I knew in elementary school. I walk around the neighborhood with them for a bit, exploring the yards of the houses. They are fenced in, and many of them are on very steep hills [which was not the case in real life]. At one point, a man who lives in one of the houses sees us. Eventually, I stop following them and start following two DCs who are young women closer to my own age now, a blonde one and an Asian one. [I typically prefer to spend my lucid-dreaming time exploring my dream world on my own, but this time, I thought I could maintain a longer, more stable lucid dream if I focused my attention on following two dream characters around, instead. It seems to have worked.]

We end up wandering from the suburban neighborhood we're in to a well-lit, wood-paneled mall. We end up in front of a hair salon, where the salon owner stops us and presents the Asian DC with an award for her hairdressing skills. I notice that she is suddenly wearing a pretty, fancy dress appropriate for accepting an award at an awards ceremony. After she accepts it, we continue wandering around and exploring. The next time I notice the Asian DC, I see that she's wearing casual, comfortable clothes again. I exclaim in disappointment, "Aw, man! I wanted to do the finger-snap thing!" [Meaning, I wanted to consciously and actively change her from one outfit to another by snapping my fingers, Q-style. I was disappointed that she had performed the transformation on her own. ]

Our wanderings continue to take us through indoor environments, and we eventually end up in a spacious church where the service is just about to start. A greeter hands me a service bulletin, which is a single large sheet of paper that you have to fold up yourself. I wander through the sanctuary, from front to back, just as the procession is starting.

As I wander outside again, I remember that the next time I found myself lucid dreaming, I had wanted to do the 'pinch your nose shut and try to breathe through it' reality check, so I do so. It still works the same as ever - I can still feel myself breathing even while pinching my nose, which I still think is the coolest sensation. However, this time, my dream-sense of touch tells me that I'm missing part of the tip of my nose. [I thought, "Maybe I've been reading too many A Song of Ice and Fire books?"]

I see the aforementioned blonde dream character again, and for the first time, we actually stop to talk. When I ask, she tells me that her name is Julia, and it turns out that she knows that I'm the dreamer. She refers to me as the "universe goddess." [There's a gap in my memory here; I don't recall how we got from just talking to this next part, but:]

Julia is now mostly submerged in a tank of water, and I lay one hand on the crown of her head, which is sticking up above the water, and say: "I, [my full, legal IRL name], do hereby name you Julia." As she climbs out of the tank, I add, " [Nickname] is short for [my full first name]." [I often explain that to people when meeting them for the first time IRL.] After Julia is out of the tank, I ask her if I can do that again, because I didn't use both hands. I ask her what her middle and last names are, and she says "Tilly El-Haz[something, I don't remember exactly]." We stand facing each other, and I lay both hands on the top of her head and name her with her full name. [She looked like she could have been Supergirl, or otherwise related to those Els.]

[Hmm. Fascinating. I've only met one or two other dream characters who exhibited any awareness that we were in a dream, and this is the first time one has referred to me in terms like "the universe goddess." This dream put me in a great mood, as my lucid dreams always do.]