The Lab Notebook

[This is both a catch-up post and a repost. Apparently, there was a server crash recently that ate this entry after I posted it the first time.]

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

Some events unfold that I'm not a part of. [I don't remember what they were now, but there was definitely a plotline involved, and I was definitely just an outside observer.] When these events are over, I find myself sitting in a movie theater, watching the end credits of a movie. I realize that all of the preceding events were a movie.

I walk out into the theater lobby, which is long, narrow, and wedge-shaped, growing slightly wider as I approach the entrance. I walk out through the theater's glass front doors onto the sidewalk. There, I meet up with my parents again.

My parents and I are in a strange, [possibly?] open-air, car-like vehicle with a hired driver. I'm showing them around the quaint, seaside downtown of Lake Worth [which, as usual for me in my dreams, looks absolutely nothing like it does in real life; it looks more urban]. We marvel at the awesomely cheesy anti-drug mural painted on the wall of one building.

[Different dream.] I'm flying above M. Road, traveling north, but facing south. I'm being pulled backward by that unknown, unseen force that so often does that in my flying dreams. I realize that I'm dreaming and take control of the situation by concentrating on the details of the scenery around me, as if I were going to stop to admire them. It works as intended: my backward motion slows, then stops. Then, I start flying forward under my own willpower, heading toward home (i.e., south). As I fly, I admire the rich detail of the scene around me and how much like reality it is.

[Dreamskip.] I'm now in a quiet, peaceful, suburban residential neighborhood, on a concrete walking path separated from the backyards on either side of it by fences. I hop along the sidewalk like an astronaut on the moon, making slow jumps that carry me several feet into the air, then slowly floating back down in an arc. I'm enjoying the fun of being in a low-gravity environment, which my dream environments often are.

I get up onto one of the fences and perform several floating glide-leaps from one parallel fence to another, combining jumping with flying. Then, I decide to try to change the dream environment to a different one by closing my eyes and spinning. I think, If I'm going to do that, I'd better start from a standing start. I jump off the fence I'm on and float gently down to the sidewalk. Once I'm standing on it, I think, Neopia, and close my eyes, but forget to spin around.

When I open my eyes, I'm in a much different suburban neighborhood. I'm standing in the middle of a straight street, looking down its length. It's lined on both sides with brightly colored, two-story houses with lush, green trees in their front yards. It doesn't look much like any of the official artwork of Neopia, but nonetheless, I become aware that this is Neopia, and that I've succeeded in my goal of changing the scene and getting there. I'm so excited about this that the scene winks out of existence after about two seconds, and I wake up. [Sigh.]

[Later, different dream.] I'm attending some special event at a theme park on behalf of [the company I've been teaching with]. I'm with SH and TS [two of my fellow teachers]. We're all wearing our white lab coats, and we're walking across a plaza that has a circular concrete beam running overhead, around the perimeter. I see some friends of mine wearing full rubberhead Sesame Street character costumes, also walking across the plaza in the opposite direction. I say to the young man in the Elmo costume who is carrying the head and looking sweaty and tired, “Hi, Mark. Go get some water.”

There are many other people there, changing into or out of costumes. Many of them are hanging their hangers on the concrete ring. TS suggests that we hang our lab coats from it, but I prefer to go back to the trailer, which [only in the dream, not in real life] has sides with panels that open to reveal closets [like my band trailer did in high school]. I want to put my lab coat there because I can make sure that trailer is locked.

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Side notes:

That first scene, where I realized that everything that had preceded it had just been a movie I was watching, was a particularly cool example of day residue. I had just been to the movies the evening before I had this dream. The recent article about how dreaming and watching movies produce very similar patterns of brain activity has informed the way I watch movies now; I always mentally compare the two experiences. In the movie I watched on this evening (Limitless), the ending felt exactly like being suddenly, rudely awakened by an alarm clock when you're still right in the middle of a dream. It's not surprising that that experience gave rise to an actual dream in which a movie ended and I suddenly realized, “oh, yeah, that didn't actually happen, I'm just watching a movie.” Both within the dream and in retrospect, that realization felt very similar to the realization, “oh, yeah, that was just a dream” that I've often had just after both false and real awakenings. Therefore, that moment of realization within that dream felt very much like a false awakening.

It belatedly occurs to me that Neopia is an entire planet. If I chose only one specific locale on that planet and made that the focus of my intentions, I'd probably have better success getting there.

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

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from December 24-27, 2010.]

Night of December 23-24

I'm playing Neopets, and I somehow obtain an item that makes a particular level of a particular Flash game easier.

I'm with P. in a hotel/bookstore. It's 12:30 A.M., according to an analog clock. [That's what my handwritten notes say, anyway.]

I'm at my high school, once again visiting the second row of portables located a little distance to the west of the main campus. [These portables don't exist in real life, but did appear in a previous dream, namely, the last dream in this DJ entry.] I'm walking around with no shoes on. As I climb up the steps into one of those distant portables, I wonder whether I'm going to get in trouble for that.

Night of December 24-25

[I only have a very vague memory of this dream, especially now that I'm reconstructing it from handwritten notes this long after the fact (1/15/11). I've reconstructed it from my handwritten notes as best I can.]

I'm at dream!Disneyland, watching a video in a theater. I also have a lucid dream within a normal one. When I first realize that I'm dreaming, I try to fly, but I can't. There are three DCs there, one of whom introduces himself to me and to the other two, and says something about how he isn't sure if we've met in reality or not. [Hmmmm... very interesting.] I actually tell the three of them that I'm dreaming. I get a second shot at completing a mission, and this time, I succeed. The mission involves saving the son of some teacher from someone. To complete it, I have to go into a room full of computer workstations and press a red, rectangular button that I find on someone's workstation. I couldn't find it the first time. At the end, when everything around me is blowing up [I think], I'm lying face down, going, “Please be a dream... please be a dream...” because I'm convinced that it's reality.

I wake up out of my lucid, back into the regular, non-lucid dream I'd been having before.

Night of December 26-27

I'm riding along on my bicycle. A mechanical arm attached to an overhead conveyor belt grabs my bike and pulls it into this big, elaborate, two-story construct that's a combination of a maze, a play structure, and an amusement-park ride, with me still on the bike. I think, I thought things like this only existed in dreams! I didn't think anyone had actually built one as a ride! [LOL, more dream sign fail...] I'm excited to be going into it, though, because I know it's an amusement-park ride/activity and it'll be fun. The conveyor belt goes up at an angle, taking me up to the second floor. When I get there, I get off my bike and go inside a room. Other people are there, including some real-life friends [I think; I don't really remember who now]. We're all role-playing that we're scientists in a laboratory [I think], because that's part of the ride.

The next thing I remember is realizing that being put in [artificial] danger is also part of the ride. I run toward the double doors through which I came into the room and open them by punching them. They swing outward, and I see that I've opened them just in the nick of time – just after the doors open, I see a locking bolt on one of the doors shoot out automatically. If I hadn't opened the doors when I did, we would have been locked inside.

[I don't remember the transition to the next scene.] I'm in a large bike repair shop. My red bike [the one I have in real life right now] has been taken here, and I want it back. The female DC who runs the bike repair shop gives it back to me, along with a brand-new pair of long black-and-gray bicycle shorts, which are lying in a particular spot on the floor, waiting for me.

[Fragment] Something about a [different] female DC who is infected with some kind of microbes that, when active, cause her body to become excessively warm.