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, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

The moment I see my old college campus start to appear out of the darkness, I realize, Oh, cool, a dream is starting. There are lots of multistory buildings all around me, and it's a beautiful day with a vivid blue sky and puffy white clouds. The dream is fairly vivid [and remains so throughout its entire length]. I observe that the environment around me is consistent with the environment I've observed in previous dreams set on my old college campus. [Although, now that I think about it, I think the dreams I have that are set there feel similar more than they look similar. Being in the environment always feels the same, but I think the layout, the spatial relationships of buildings, is slightly different each time. The style of the buildings is always pretty much the same, though.]

I walk along among the buildings, and eventually [possibly after a dreamskip?] find myself inside somebody’s house. The living room has been filled with chlorinated water and turned into a big, deep indoor pool. The second floor of the house is open to the living room, and has a balcony-like walkway that surrounds the living room on three sides. The water comes almost all the way up to the level of the walkway. When I see the pool, I think, This is a dream. I should be able to breathe underwater. I get into the water and start swimming down into the pool, testing this hypothesis. It proves to be correct. By consciously focusing on the knowledge that I can breathe underwater here, I can breathe underwater. While I'm swimming, I feel the resistance that one normally feels from the water when swimming, but not the wetness; I still feel completely dry. I also notice that breathing feels exactly the same as it normally does when I'm breathing air; those parts of my body don't feel any resistance from the water, whereas my skin and limbs do feel it. [I think this experience further demonstrates the same phenomenon that lies behind the nose-pinch reality check: doing something that would obstruct your ability to breathe in reality will not obstruct it in a dream, because your real body is still breathing normally.]

I resurface, then dive again, this time going all the way to the bottom of the pool. I find a small, square sticker there, part of a board game. I retrieve it and bring it to a dream character who is sitting on the walkway at the side of the pool opposite where I came into the room. He's playing the game that the sticker came from. I hand him the sticker, saying something like, “Here. This is part of your game. I brought this back for you.”

The dream character accepts the sticker and asks me to go over to the far corner of the room (near where I came in) and retrieve another, similar sticker that he dropped. I agree to do so. Before I dive under the water again, I pretend to take a deep breath and hold it, for the sake of appearances. I don't want any of the several dream characters who are around to realize that I have superhuman abilities. I dive toward the bottom corner of the pool at the far end of the room, where two walls come together at an acute angle. I find not only another sticker like the first one, but also a die, a playing card, and other, similar small objects from games. I pick them all up.

I decide to try to get back to the second floor by flying. [Apparently because I want there not to be,] There's no water around me anymore. With a short grunt, I try unsuccessfully to take off. I decide to just climb the nearby stairs to get up to the second-floor walkway.

I walk along the walkway and stop in front of the male dream character playing the game. He asks me, “What was that grunt?”

“I was trying to jump up and fly back to the second floor,” I answer.

“Why?” he asks.

I throw my handful of small game pieces at him. “Because you're a dream character!” I exclaim. [Or it might have been, “Because I'm dreaming!” I don't quite remember. The main point is that I dropped all pretense that I was a regular person with no superhuman abilities at this moment, and admitted to being the dreamer.]

A second later, my conscience kicks in. “Wait. I don't know why I did that,” I say. “That was rude. I'm sorry.”

A woman about my age with short, dark hair joins our conversation at this point. She starts off by addressing me, saying something like, “That's right. You're dreaming.” She, the game-playing DC, and I all proceed to have a long, in-depth conversation on the subject of lucid dreaming. [Unfortunately, I don't remember much of what we said. What I do recall is an overall impression that this woman was an expert on the subject, and that her attitude toward me was that of a supportive older mentor. She seemed interested in my progress and how much I had learned so far.] The dark-haired woman asks me something like, “This is your fortieth or so lucid dream, right?”

“Forty-seventh, or fiftieth, something like that,” I answer.

At another point during the conversation, another guy my age, named Andy, is also there in the room. The dark-haired woman points him out to me as another dreamer. [I had no intention of anything like that happening to me. If it did, it was completely without my desire or consent.]

Andy, the woman, the game-playing DC, and I all walk out of the building onto the coast by my university. We're facing a sea cliff with train tracks running along it. We walk along and come to the grassy, topmost level of an amphitheater, built into the land where it slopes down toward the beach. Below the grassy part are many levels of bleachers made out of a metal mesh.

“I really like floaty things,” I observe, addressing the woman. I point out that there are a lot of colorful helium balloons around, and a lot of the other people who are around are flying small, colorful kites. I have one myself.

The other DCs who are there are passing around a strange contraption. At its center is a device that has a chamber in which marijuana leaves are burning, and a fan. The fan is keeping the semi-transparent plastic garbage bag that surrounds the device inflated. The bag is there to keep the marijuana smoke in, but there is a tear in the plastic near the knot, allowing the smoke to escape at a limited rate so that one might inhale it. One of the other, female DCs in the scene comes over to me and my group and offers us the contraption. The other DCs in my group accept it first and take hits from it, then offer it to me. My immediate reaction to getting the opportunity to try marijuana is, Yay! I can do this without getting in trouble or risking the health of my real body, and if I do it, I can brag about it on the forums! [Meaning DreamViews, of course.]

I accept the blown-up garbage bag and maneuver it so that the tear in the plastic is near my face. This isn't easy to do with the fan device constantly inflating the plastic from the inside and making it move around. When I've gotten the tear as close to my face as I can, I inhale some of the smoke through my nose. It has a plant-like smell. The drug doesn't make me feel any different, nor does it change the environment around me.

My companions and I sit down on the metal mesh bleachers to watch a concert [or something like that]. As I sit down, I try to be careful not to get the string of my kite tangled up with the strings of my companions' kites.

There is a blue reusable shopping bag from Wal-Mart lying just to my left on the metal bleachers. It comes to life and starts wrapping its handles around my left arm and constricting its handles tightly, much like Devil's Snare from the Harry Potter universe. I'm not sure if this occurrence is a weed-induced hallucination or just ordinary dream weirdness. I look up and to my right at the dark-haired woman, who is sitting next to me. She looks back at me with an expression that communicates, “Yeah, this is what I was expecting would happen; how are you going to deal with it?”

I'm a little frightened by the shopping bag attacking me, but I'm still secure in the knowledge that this is a dream, so I'll be safe and sound when I wake up. I close my eyes and think to myself, Take me home. [By which I mean, “Take me back to the real world.”]

I then woke up for real, just as I had desired to do. I was amazed to discover that a full 6 ½ hours had passed since I'd gone to sleep. When I recalled my reaction to the opportunity to smoke marijuana, I laughed derisively at myself and thought, Oh, boy. I need to sort out my priorities.

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Side notes:
It's certainly fitting that I dreamed about smoking marijuana on the morning of 4/20. I first learned about 4/20 from peers in college, but on a conscious level, I had completely forgotten about it until I found the “Happy 4/20!” thread on DreamViews this morning. My subconscious sure remembered, though. :-)

I've never tried marijuana in real life, so I can't compare the reality to the dream. That might also be why it didn't really make me feel any different: my brain doesn't really know what it's supposed to feel like to be under its influence. I have drunk alcohol in real life, but I haven't done so in a dream yet. If I ever do, I expect it will probably feel just like it does in reality.

I noticed something today: When I write dream journal entries, I write like a scientist. I write down what I've observed and compare my new observations to previous ones. Sometimes I draw conclusions from all these observations. Often, I perform experiments within the dream and report on their results.

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.

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

[Another really long entry, but it's a really good one this time. Sorry for taking up so much page space again.]

I'm on the playground of my elementary school. It's dusk, and there are lots and lots of kids and teenagers on the playground, some playing games, others just milling around. I see one group of kids playing something that they call tackle football; it involves one person on the team holding a bowl of green beans and others holding and occasionally eating spoonfuls of the green beans, while the entire team moves around the field. Curious about the game they're playing, I approach the group.

“Are those green beans?” I ask.

“Yes,” someone in the group says.

The group spreads out a little, and I see that two of the people in it are P. and Thomas[, who first appeared in my dream dated December 7]. The instant I see him, I know for sure that I'm dreaming. “Thomas?” I say, looking at him. He acknowledges me. I'm pleasantly surprised to see him again, and amazed at how completely real all the people around me look. Throughout the rest of this dream, I make a special effort to pay attention to the environment around me, including paying attention to the physical sensations of touching things whenever I can. I'm aware that if I don't, they'll stop existing and fade away.

I start wandering through the playground, heading back toward the school buildings. P. and Thomas are following me. It's now fully dark, but the playground is still crowded. I end up on the sidewalk of the street that runs along the south side of the school and passes the kindergarten before the dreamscape shifts on me.

I don't notice the shift itself, but I find myself walking through the streets of a charming, slightly old-fashioned downtown with square, orderly blocks. There's no one else around. I stop and turn around, attempting to summon P. and/or Thomas by expecting them to be there. It doesn't work; I'm all alone. I shrug and continue exploring. As I had in the previous scene, I continue to notice and marvel at how vivid, detailed, and realistic the environment around me is. Everything looks and feels exactly like reality, yet I know perfectly well that I'm dreaming. I can even feel the asphalt and pavement under my feet. [It didn't occur to me until I had woken up and was lying there, recalling my dream, that I must have looked pretty funny wandering around in public places with no shoes on. ] I remember one of my lucid goals and attempt to walk through a wall into one of the shops. I try it twice, but it doesn't work either time; I'm not surprised at all to discover that the wall is just as solid and “real” as everything else in this dream world. As I continue walking, I think, Wow, this dream is really stable and seems to be going on for a long time. What should I do here? Oh, yeah – the Task of the Month is to hit a DC with a snowball. I'll have to go find a snowball. But there is no snow in this setting, and the weather is clear and bright.

I pass a small shop front on a street corner, with a red brick facade and a walk-up window where you can buy things. I recognize the woman inside as Lisa D., a real-life friend. I stop and talk to her. I say, “Lisa, do you happen to know where I might find a snowball?” She invites me to come into the shop through the door on the side. I stand just outside the door. [I don't know why; recall is a little vague here.] The small shop is actually a short truck, which is backed up to the brick facade with the window in it with its back cargo door open, forming the interior space. Lisa starts up the truck and starts driving it away from the facade and along the street. I walk quickly along with it for a little way, holding on to the frame of the open, narrow door on the side and keeping pace with it. Then I step up into the truck through the doorway and ride in it. I say aloud, “I could float along with the truck, but when the truck is moving, why make the effort?” I vaguely remember another person being in the doorway with me, but if so, I don't know who it was.

I ride inside the truck as it drives up into the mountains. While sitting in the truck, I hold onto the handle of a plastic bucket, feeling the sensation to ensure the dream remains stable. The truck takes me to a town on a mountaintop. I'm on or near a different, fenced-in school playground [I think; again, my recall isn't very good here.] I can see buildings on the tops of nearby hills, and I think I catch a glimpse of a patch of snow on a distant hilltop, but I'm not sure.

[I think] The scene shifts again, and I'm walking around on the campus of a community college. [Day residue; I walked back and forth across my real community college campus several times yesterday.] There's no one else around. This community college campus has slightly more traditional-looking architecture than my real one does, has a different layout, and there are more plants around and they're more mature, making the campus greener than my real one. This is a pretty campus, I think. I'm still admiring how vivid and "real" my surroundings are as I explore them, and I'm still looking for snow, but not finding any.

[Dreamskip? Another scene shift? I'm not sure, but the next thing I remember is that] I'm walking through the interior of a large, recreational building. I'm in a spacious, high-ceilinged indoor space with two swimming pools in it, a large, deep one and a smaller, shallower one, at right angles to each other. There are people in this room, many of them kids, walking around, swimming, and getting into and out of the pools. In one corner of the room is the entrance to a child-care room, which is full of brightly pastel-colored play equipment with little kids playing on it. It's separated from the room with the pools by glass walls. One of the glass walls has sticky gel letters on the inside of it, so that they look backward from outside the room. I can still read them backward, though. When I first look at them, I read them as “Children Sno” and think, Yay, snow! Then I approach the room for a closer look and realize that I've misread them; they say “Children Glo.” I leave the room, walking on the path between the narrow end of the larger pool and the longer side of the smaller pool. As I walk, I complain aloud: “There's no snow here! I mean, I know I've lived in Southern California all my life, but come on! Can't I have some imagination?” [I was complaining about the fact that, even though I wanted to complete the Task of the Month, my mind wasn't creating any snow in my dream world. The explanation I came up with for this observation was that I've never spent a winter in an area where it snows, so my mind can't re-create snow very easily, because I've only experienced it in real life a couple of times, so I don't know what it's like very well.]

Outside the recreational building, there's a courtyard or patio where a large group of people are having a celebration or reception. I walk among them without speaking to anyone. No one takes any notice of me. There are folding tables with paper tablecloths and lots of food set out on them, including oatmeal cookies. [I wish I'd thought to try one! This was the first time I've had the chance to try dream food while lucid, and I missed it! Dang!] Still in search of a snowball to throw, I decide to try summoning one by reaching under a small table of food next to a wall, without looking, and expecting a snowball to be there. It doesn't work. When I look, the only thing under the table is a small, open-topped cardboard box with some kind of party supplies in it, like paper napkins. [I note that in my attempts to summon people or things in this dream, I did not have the same quiet assurance and confidence that it would work as I had at those times in the past when I successfully summoned an object. I wasn't truly focusing on it or believing in it this time, which, I think, is why it didn't work.]

I get up from looking under the table and look around at the people celebrating. I sense that the dream is about to end. I close my eyes, hoping to use that method of teleporting to get to another environment. I just end up looking at the inside of my real eyelids.

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Side notes:

This dream came at the end of a very bad, emotionally draining day and a late night. I was too tired to really try to induce a lucid dream. All I did was get up for a minute or two and go back to bed right before I had this dream, do a minimal amount of affirmations (maybe one or two), and wear my cardboard-square wristband on the inside of my right wrist, which I hadn't worn at all in a while. It may have been one of these things that caused such a long, vivid lucid dream, or maybe it was just the fact that I'd had a bad day and wanted to escape from it all (even though I consciously told myself before bed that that was stupid). I sure did feel a lot happier and better after waking up from my dream, though.

After waking up, I realized two things about this dream:
A) Expecting to be able to summon a snowball was stupid because, unlike the seed pod that I successfully summoned before (see entry dated October 26, 2010), a snowball doesn't naturally exist as a discrete object. You have to make a snowball yourself.
B) I was surrounded by DCs several times. I could have talked to my subconscious and asked for the answers to the questions from my exam that I missed because I had studied those subjects months ago, forgotten about them, and failed to review before the exam. (I'm not saying for sure that it would have worked, but it would have been fun to try. I'm curious to know if it can work.) I actually thought about doing that before I went to bed, but I didn't even think of it while I was dreaming. The only thing it occurred to me to do was to hit a DC with a snowball. Silly me! I will have to add “ask a DC about stuff I should know, but have forgotten” to my list of goals.

One final note: Wow. I now have a recurring, original, named dream character who is neither a pre-existing fictional character nor anyone I know in real life, and seeing him made me go lucid because I remembered meeting him in a previous dream, and here he was again, so I had to be dreaming. That's pretty neat. I can't say for sure that that officially makes him my dream guide, though, at least not just yet. It didn't occur to me to ask him if he was one. If I see him again, I'll try to remember to do that.

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

[This is a catch-up journal entry. This dream is from the night of October 28-29.]

I'm at a meeting of a class I'm in. We seem to be in an upstairs balcony space with cushioned benches along both sides, and no table in the middle. I get out some generic allergy medicine and tell everyone about how effective it is and how often I take it. I go down to the basement of the building we're in to get some water. My Aunt Edie enters the room.

I'm with a group of my peers, and we're all walking to a swimming pool. I'm the only one who's still wearing street clothes, because I didn't bring a swimsuit with me because I don't want to be seen in one; everyone else already has theirs on. As we're walking, I say, “Wait a minute. You guys have seen me in a swimsuit before, haven't you?” I remember when they saw me in my new blue one-piece [that I have in real life, but no one but my family has ever seen me wear it]. I wish I had my swimsuit on now.

My family and I are at Disneyland. The entrance to Star Tours is mostly filled in with blue construction walls, and the space is being used for character meet-and-greets, one of which P. wants to go and see.

Woke up at 5:30, took some notes, went back to bed. I hadn't gone to bed until almost 11, and I now know from personal experience that I have more and better dreams just before getting up. The one I had early this morning was EPIC. Too bad my recall is so spotty, since I waited over an hour to start writing about it.

I'm with a group of my peers, and we're all making our way to a class somewhere. My peers are communicating with our other classmates via cell phone about how to get to the classroom. Someone who's with me says something about explaining to me how to get there. First, we get into an elevator situated on the right side of the entranceway to a building. We have to hold the elevator for one of our other friends/classmates who is approaching. The elevator takes us down into the building complex.

The next thing I remember is being in a little car, still with that same group of friends from the elevator, driving through a parking garage. There's a place where the interior changes from a garage to a white, carpeted room with nurses doing some mundane task in it (there weren't any patients in this room; it was just a sort of prep/administrative area). I say, “We have to drive through that?” I think, This is weird. It's a lot like the stuff I dream about. But I know where we came from and where we're going, so this is real. [*facepalm* Well, to be fair, asking myself how I got to wherever I am is the RC I've been using the most often lately.] The open space in the middle of the room is wide enough for our little car, and as we get into the room further, I see that the path turns to the left and goes out of the room again. We travel through the room on that path, which leads to an outdoor garden patio. There is an old man out there whose irises are all red, reclining on a hospital bed, and I talk to him.

[Scene change.] I'm on a two-lane road that runs in a ring around a huge rock that sticks out of the ocean. It looks a lot like Morro Rock, only it's two or three times as big, both in height and in circumference. The road is elevated up out of the ocean, and is built out from the rock, so there is an open space of ocean between the road and the rock. The road comes up to about a third or a half the height of the rock. It's nighttime, but I can still see everything clearly even with no apparent light sources [just moonlight, I guess]. The ocean waves are surging up unusually high, so that they break over the sides of the elevated roadway. There are at least a couple hundred other people walking on the roadway; we're all coming back from a camping trip out on the rock [I think]. We're all walking on the sidewalk near the outside-edge railing when the waves start, and I watch at least two successive people fall over the rail into the ocean and start drowning. It occurs to me that this is a chance to watch someone die, something I'll probably never have another chance to do, but I can't bring myself to actually watch. As the waves get higher, I step back from the railing so that I'm standing in the middle of the road, where the waves won't hit me, and start calling out to the others to do the same. No one listens. I think, I am going to die, but in a very detached way, with no fear or, for that matter, any emotion at all. The incoming waves rebounding off the big rock start to create smaller, but still scary waves that break over the inside-edge railing. My parents come out of the crowd and find me, and I'm glad to see that they're okay. Eventually, most of the crowd makes it to a tour bus that's waiting near the place where the two-lane elevated road widens and connects to the roads on the mainland, so everyone can get on it and be taken away from the rock safely.