The Lab Notebook

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

I'm in the parking lot of the office complex where I work. I suddenly think: I distinctly remember going to Toastmasters yesterday morning, then to work, but I haven't had any time off work since then. [I go to Toastmasters on Friday mornings, and I have the weekends off.] How did I get here? I'm here out of sequence, and I don't remember coming here. Oh, s*** – I must be dreaming. I pinch my nose and can breathe. Yep, I'm dreaming.

I decide to climb the outdoor stairs to the back door of my office. It only takes me four strides to get to the top of a staircase that I know has 14 or 15 steps. [Again, this was an example of that dream phenomenon where you focus on arriving at your intended destination and quickly arrive there, having “fast-forwarded” through the act of getting there.] I figure that the door is probably locked because it's not business hours, so there shouldn't be anyone inside. I attempt to use my dream ability to become intangible and walk through things to get into the office, but it doesn't work. The door remains solid to me. However, I quickly discover that the door is, in fact, unlocked, and just open it. [Apparently, my brain likes to do things in the simplest way possible.]

The office looks exactly like it does in reality, except that there is a large, round, pink toy Jigglypuff sitting on the reception desk. This makes me laugh. [In real life, that desk is decorated only with pictures of the occupant's kids, who are now young adults, and some artificial plants. The occupant would never even own such a thing, much less display it on her desk.] I think, That's a random thing for my brain to put there!

I wander into my boss's office. There is a small, clear plastic bag of broken crayon pieces on his desk, mostly blue, orange, and green. It makes sense for them to be there, because he has young children. I pick up a crayon piece and contemplate eating it, but I think that that wouldn't be very nice, because these crayons belong to the boss's kids. Then I think, The real $Boss is never going to know, and pick up a small piece and swallow it. As in my previous lucid, I can feel it, but the sensation is weaker than it would be in real life.

I go back out to the main room, where the reception desk is, and stand just to one side of it. I hear my boss's voice as he comes up the indoor stairway. Then my boss comes into the office through the front door, followed by his entire family. I'm naked [as I have been throughout this dream, but I haven't felt the embarrassment that I usually feel in my dreams that involve nudity]. At first I stay where I am, thinking, I don't mind if he sees me. It's just a dream, after all. But the force of the social taboo overwhelms me, despite my conscious effort to resist it, and I try to hide behind the reception desk. He doesn't appear to take any notice of me at all.

I run back out the back door, down the stairs, and into the parking lot. I see that it's nighttime. I say aloud, “Well, I can bloody well make it daytime!” I attempt to change the dream scene from night to day by closing my eyes, turning in a circle while thinking about what I want to have happen, and then opening them again. It doesn't work. It's still nighttime.

Then the dream shifts. It looks like the new scene is rising up from behind the foreground of the first scene, then replacing it. [That's the best I can describe it; I don't remember the transition really well.] I say, “Cool!”

I'm now indoors, in a portable classroom filled with school desks. I'm wearing regular clothes again, too. There are students and teachers here. One of the teachers starts singing “Amazing Grace,” and I sing along. We sing the entire first verse. I think, Cool. I've been wanting to sing an entire song in a dream. I know there' s more than just that one verse, but I feel like I've accomplished that goal.

The classroom starts to fly. It flies over a cityscape that I know is in China. We're heading out toward the ocean.

[There was another dream scene after this one, but I don't remember much about it. I know it was indoors, and I think it involved me and my mom searching for and trying to identify the perpetrator of a crime.]

[This is a catchup post. These dreams are from the night of July 15-16, 2011.]

I'm at a high school football game between my high school and another school called Bell High School, which has white and purple as its school colors. [I'm sure there is a real Bell High School, but I do not know what its school colors are in real life.] At halftime, both school's marching bands combine to perform a semi-rehearsed field show together. It's based on my high school's field show from last year [which I didn't even see in real life; within the dream, however, I recognized the show I was watching as being based on the show they had done the previous year]. Although I could go out and join in performing the show if I wanted to, I just watch it. I would have known how to perform most of the show I'm watching if I had been in marching band last year, but I wasn't, so I don't. Besides, I don't have my clarinet with me. The show involves pushing low, wheeled wooden boxes around on the field and crouching down to hide behind them.

[Different dream.] I'm walking around in a public space naked, hoping not to be seen by anyone. [Yes, again. This time,] I'm in an enclosed, single-story retail mall with a tae kwon do studio in it. [At one point during the dream,] I have some sort of blanket or piece of cloth that I clutch around my body as I sit down against a wall in a hallway. There are people I one of the shops I pass through [it looked like a cafe], but, thankfully, they don't seem to take any notice of me. [There must be some unresolved issue somewhere in my mind. This dream has been recurring a lot as of late.]

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the night of June 27-28, 2011.]

I'm creeping around a parking lot, in the nude. [This has been a recurring circumstance in my dreams lately. Why is that, I wonder?] I'm trying to get to my car without being seen by anyone.

I'm in a room with a small stage, with a full set for a play on it, where people are rehearsing for a play. Nobody is playing the part of Morgan, so I jump in to play that role. In the play, Morgan is a little girl who watches her mom get murdered right in front of her, in their home. The mom is lying in her bed, and the murderer is some guy who shoots her with a rifle while she's lying there. As I'm acting out Morgan's part, I scream and shriek horrifically in reaction to this, and I start crying real tears. When the scene has ended, I tell the director of the play and the other actors that I'll probably really cry every time we rehearse this scene, but then I take it back, saying: “Even I know better than to do that. If I do that, then I won't have anything left for the performance.”

I'm riding in a car with my parents. We're discussing the washing instructions for a baseball cap that my mom has. They say to 'show' the cap to dry it, and I explain to my mom that the intended meaning there was to 'display' it, e.g., to leave it sitting out to dry. We also discuss how my mom recently had to have the password for some online account set, and in order to do that, they had to ship a packet of papers containing the printed password from Florida to somewhere else on the East Coast.

I'm in a big, cathedral-like building where a lot of people have gathered for a religious service, or a performance, or something like that. We've given everyone a password so that those who want to [and who have laptops] can log in to a Web site to see what's really going on behind the scenes of what's happening in front of them on stage. Apparently, the service/performance/whatever-it-is has something to do with Inception, because I have a printed book that is a dictionary of its characters, items, and concepts.

[Fragment] I'm taking all the bedclothes off my bed, and I realize that what makes my bed so soft and comfortable isn't the mattress itself, but the mattress pad. [This has been a concern of mine in real life lately, pursuant to my upcoming move to a new place with a new mattress.]

I'm in House #1. [So much for recognizing dream signs... :/] I look through a window that looks out onto the patio from the side opposite the dining room [um... in real life, that would be the bathroom window, from which such a view would be impossible...] and see that there's a wasps' nest hanging from the eaves outside the dining-room window.

I'm in the garage, and I say goodbye to P. There are two cool, old, red, elongated, flat-topped cars there (one might have been a convertible). My parents are taking me out somewhere, but I haven't been able to find anything I want to wear, so I'm only wearing my royal blue bathrobe. [I used to have this robe in real life, but I don't anymore.]

[Dreamskip.] I'm driving the brown car into the parking lot where our hair salon and the OSH hardware store are [back in our old town]. I'm naked, so I try to crouch down so that the other drivers around don't see me. When I try to park, the driver of the car that's parked crookedly in the space next to mine decides to back out and straighten his parking job, coming close to hitting my car, but narrowly missing it. I cower in my seat, frightened. When the driver gets out of his car and comes over to talk to me, I look down to check the arrangement of my blue bathrobe, which I'm suddenly wearing again, and make sure it's covering me decently. The other driver tells me that he didn't hit me.

Then, four young boys (10 or so) come to my car and start pestering me relentlessly, climbing in it and all over it and talking to me loudly and annoyingly. I yell as loudly as I can at them to GO AWAY. I'm surprised that I'm capable of yelling with that volume. After I yell at them like that about three times, they finally go away. I'm trying to keep my blue robe on and maintain my modesty, with only partial success. I continue to do so once I've moved from my car to a patio table on the sidewalk outside the hardware store. [I don't recall getting from one location to the other.] People pass me by on the sidewalk as I try to keep the robe up. Next to me on the sidewalk, B.W. and his chorale friends are getting dressed for a performance.

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Side notes:

This was an interesting twist on a classic anxiety dream. It featured the common dream scenario of being naked in a public place and ashamed of it, but it combined that scenario with two stressful occurrences from my waking life: a minor car accident in a parking lot, and the very spirited all-boys class I've been teaching once a week. In the dream, I yelled more loudly than I ever have in real life. Do I unconsciously wish I could yell that loud in reality? It's a plausible hypothesis.

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

I'm in dream!Las Vegas. At some point [I don't remember when or how], I realize that I'm dreaming. From the top of one of the lower, more square buildings, I admire the view of the city around me, with its many tall, themed buildings. “Beautiful day for it,” I remark. It is indeed: sunny and clear with a few puffy clouds.

Looking down and to my right, I can see a big, broad swimming pool. I say, “There's a pool, if you're into going swimming.” I'm not that much into it, myself. [True in real life, too.] Nonetheless, I find myself swimming in the pool at some point, once again naked. [I don't know why dream!me likes skinny-dipping so much. I've only ever done it in reality when I was totally alone in our backyard spa.]

Later, it occurs to me, “Just let yourself drift... drift...” I start floating upwards off the ground, very slowly, not really flying, just sort of drifting away. [Clearly, the subconscious influence of the wording of the “Hypnosis for Sleep” audio recordings was at work here.]

I eventually end up in a grassy field where hundreds of golf balls are flying at me in a thick, fast, continuous onslaught. I firmly determine in my mind, “This is a dream. I'm going to let those golf balls go through me, instead of hitting me.” It works. I feel one of them bounce off my shoulder, but it doesn't hit nearly as hard as it would have in real life. I don't feel any of the others touch me at all, so they must be going through me. [Awesome! I finally convinced myself that I can become intangible to objects in the dream world! I'm one big step closer to walking through a wall without leaving a hole in it now!]

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

I'm on a strange version of the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland. Instead of one continuous waterway that meanders across solid ground like a real river, it consists of a series of interconnected, rectangular pools that are separated from each other by waterfalls. They're all still surrounded by jungle foliage, though, and they all have some kind of animatronic animal in or around them. One of them has an animatronic person swimming in the middle. It's nighttime.

I'm navigating these waterways all alone, in a single-person canoe. As I paddle my canoe along, I think, I hate going through this ride by myself. There's no one to do the spiel for me. I try to do it myself, but I'm not as good at it as the regular skippers are. I go over at least one waterfall in my canoe. There's no impact when my canoe hits the water; it just calmly transitions from one pool to the next.

I reach a particularly tall waterfall, with a bunch of gray rocks between the pool I'm in and the one below it. I'm tired of putting in the effort it takes to paddle, so I give up trying to canoe my way through the ride and just climb down the rocks. When I reach the lower pool, I decide to go swimming in it.

When I get into the pool, I start treading water. I move very quickly across the large, rectangular pool by this means, keeping my head completely out of the water the entire time, and feeling very proud of the fact that I've mastered the skill of treading water. [Which I haven't done in real life, by the way; I can sort of do it, but I'm not any good at it at all.] Being in the water feels really, really nice.

[Recall is a little hazy here. I think I remember the following two things:] Two or more people pour more water into the pool I'm in, making it colder. I get into and out of the water at least once. [I definitely remember everything from here on out:] I'm now in a smaller, but still rectangular pool, right next to the bigger one I initially got into. The shorter ends of the two rectangles are right next to each other. I look around in this smaller pool for a way to climb out. At first, I'm disappointed because I don't see one, but then I see it. There are some metal steps leading out of the pool, attached to the interior wall near the far corner. There are two girls I don't know in the water near the steps. I also see the B. brothers crouched down near the other short end of the pool, looking at me. [They're acquaintances from real life; I've mentioned them in my dream journal before in this entry. They're the two brothers who sang with the Parrish girls.] I'm naked, so when I see them, I imagine a bikini, and it appears on my body. [Despite this, at no point did I ever become lucid.] Then I climb out of the pool.

[Different dream.] I'm at home [or possibly in a hotel room; it didn't look like any of our houses], lounging around on a bed, doing something on my laptop. My parents want to go out somewhere, but I'm not ready. My dad jokes, "This battery-powered computer is called a 'wait-for-me device!'" I laugh a little, then stop what I'm doing, get up, and go to finish getting dressed so that we can go. Then my alarm went off and I got up.