The Lab Notebook

Non-lucid dream, [Commentary made while awake]

I'm at Disneyland, being trained as a Cast Member. I'm with a large group of other trainees, all of whom are wearing costumes and name tags. [The name tags are blue, not white, for some inexplicable reason.] A trainer is taking us through how to operate King Arthur's Carrousel. For training purposes, all the pieces of the carrousel have been taken apart and removed, so there's just a big, wide, brilliant blue, rotating disc built into the ground. It has smaller discs built into it, just like the setup for the Mad Tea Party. We walk across the disc, led by our trainer, who is explaining how everything works. We gather on the north edge of it in a crowd and listen to him talk.

The whole carrousel is back in place, and I think, This is a fifty-year-old attraction, so it deserves respect. It's amazing how well it's working after all this time. There must be just one guy left who is the only one who knows how it all works well enough to repair it.

As part of my training, I go through the queue for the carrousel, which is enclosed, elaborate, and tells a story that appears to be part of, or at least inspired by, Disney's Sleeping Beauty. As I go through, performing my job duties, I find myself on stage as part of a mini-stage show. I'm sitting down, looking out through a window, and when a particular piece of music starts playing, I suddenly realize: You're Belle! Don't forget to sparkle! The song is “Belle,” the opening song from Beauty and the Beast, and I join in the singing. I get all the way through the first verse, and when I get to the end of it, Mulan, who is standing in the audience right next to where I'm sitting at the edge of the stage, says the next line: “Good morning, Belle!” I answer, “Good morning, madame!” ...and then I realize I can't remember what comes next, so I just sort of stop.

[Dreamskip.] I'm walking away from the carrousel, saying to myself: “I didn't sign up to be a princess! I signed up to be in Operations! I don't want to be a princess! I'm no good at it, and I look more like post-haircut Rapunzel than anyone else!” [I do have short hair in real life, but it's lighter than her hair is when it's cut short.]

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Side Notes:
I've always had a lot of bizarre dreams about Disneyland, but more so when I was a kid than now. This is the first time I've ever had a dream in which I was a Cast Member.
I know why I had a dream about a carrousel. I had read this article shortly before going to bed. It uses a carrousel as an analogy for the orbit of the sun around the center of the galaxy. Also, the whole “being a princess” theme comes from a fanfic that I have in the works, and the whole “Don't forget to sparkle!” thing is a reference to a thread I've been following on a different discussion forum.

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the night of July 22-23, 2011.]

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

I'm at a big, old house that is now a tourist site. It's a bit like Hearst Castle, only older, in a different architectural style, and not on a hill. Tourists can enter either the house itself to go on a tour, or they can enter a large theater to watch a movie about the house. The space in between the house and the theater is an enclosed, carpeted lobby. While I'm in that space, I give another tourist directions to the main entrance to the house: “Go down there, turn left, go up the ramp, then turn right and go through the doors.” The ramp is long and slopes gently upward.

In addition to the large, main theater, the complex also has a ride of some kind with seats that are suspended on long bars from an overhead track. Riders board the ride by strapping themselves into the seats when they are within small, circular, mobile theater pods. These theater pods show a movie about the era in between the heyday of the large house and the present day, that is, the house's early days as a tourist attraction, before it had a visitors' center. The pods also can move around on legs and have motion-simulator functionality. I get into one of the pods 'backwards,' by riding on one of the seats as it comes into the pod from the unloading station. Other riders also board the pod, and then the movie begins.

[I'm not absolutely sure, but I think] It was at this point that I woke up for a very brief WBTB (just a few minutes, which is about how long I usually wake up for in the middle of the night). I remembered very well what I had just been dreaming about, and focused on it while I was awake. As I was going back to sleep, I thought, I wonder if I can get back into the same dream I was just in. [Amazingly,] I succeeded in doing so.

The mobile theater pod moves out into the street that runs past the big, old house, which is part of the ride. While it's out in the street, the pod is boarded by small, roundish creatures, Expies of The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything [from “VeggieTales”]. After they've boarded the pod, instead of proceeding to attack and plunder it, they decide to go inside the visitors' center to get some Starbucks. This gives me time to escape from the pod and run for help. I escape from the pod and start walking along the sidewalk. Somewhere around here, I realize that I'm dreaming, but I don't want to interrupt the dream plot already in progress; it's interesting and exciting, so I go along with it. I start searching for the main, public entrance to the tourist site. I pass by what appears to be the main entrance and go to a gift shop. The gift shop is filled with a lot of red decorations and red objects, mainly Christmas decorations. I sit down in a chair and get into a conversation with the store attendant. While I'm talking to her, my thoughts stray and the impact of the thought, “Whoa, I'm dreaming” hits me fairly hard. I am suddenly overcome by a strong feeling of sleepiness, and close my eyes. Then I remember that I'll lose the dream if I do that, and open them again. I'm still right where I was.

I tell the tour guide about the mobile theater pod being attacked by pirates, and ask, “Do you have a security guard?” She shows me where there is one waiting behind a service counter, and sends him back out onto the street with me. When we're on the street, I notice that there are “floating” vehicles on it and feel dismayed that the sci-fi future is actually here. Then I notice that at least the larger vehicles do have tractor treads, in addition to the pink, glowing force fields I see under all the vehicles. The security guard goes to the mobile theater pod and apprehends the pirates [at least, I suppose he did; I don't really remember that part of the dream].

[Different dream.] A man has been captured and locked in handcuffs. A dog brings him a key in its mouth, so he can get out of them. He does so. Then, his captor approaches and, seeing that he's out of the handcuffs, says to him, “I expected you'd be out of those by now.” The man replies, “I already am.”

[Different dream.] I'm showing some guy how to properly arrange the cord for and use the mouse on my computer.

[I may or may not have been lucid for this one, I'm not sure.] P. and I are both making cakes with a little bit of dough, under Mom's guidance. My piece of dough is bigger than P.'s. We mix ingredients into the dough with our hands. We're in the kitchen/dining room of House #1, and the cake pans are sitting on the floor under the dining table. We pick them up from there to put the dough in them. Before I put my dough in my cake pan, I run a little bit of tap water onto it, and it shrinks to the size of P.'s piece of dough. That's good, and a relief; I'd been concerned that I'd initially taken more than my fair share when we divided the dough, and when we added the other ingredients.

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of June 18-19, and it's one of the most fascinating lucids I've had yet.]

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

I'm shopping at the old Toys 'R Us that we used to go to when I was a kid. [In real life, it's been closed for several years.] I've driven up there all the way from my current town, by myself, and I told my parents where I was going before I left. I've come there just to get the purple hippo stuffed animal that I saw advertised. I find it, go to a checkout stand, swipe my credit card through the card reader sitting on the floor near one of the checkouts, and then walk to the other side of the line of checkouts and get in line to check out. There's quite a long line, but it's moving fairly quickly because there are a lot of checkouts open, and all the checkers are calling people over from that one line. The line is in a rectangular, dark, warehouse-like space in the front of the store, separated from the store proper by high, dark gray metal shelf racks that reach all the way to the high ceiling. When it comes my turn to check out, the checker waves me through when I show her my toy and the receipt that was printed out of the credit card reader.

I exit the store and get into my car [our current, brown Honda]. I examine my purple hippo. It's smaller and narrower than the teddy bear I already have [in real life], and therefore not as good a shape for use as an arm pillow, but still, it's kinda cute. I can feel that it has a plastic cup built into its nose, so that its nose holds its conical shape. I set it down on the floor of the passenger seat, start the car up, and drive out of the parking lot via the ramp behind and to the right of the store.

This ramp forces me to turn right, putting me onto a one-way street. “This is why my parents never went out this way,” I say to myself. I end up driving through a neat, clean, inviting-looking urban downtown area, with lots of modern, glass buildings, concrete parking structures, and trees on the sidewalks.

[The dream shifts.] I'm walking the darkened halls of a big, old apartment building whose halls form a continuous square. Stuff involving Muppets, a bird named Gloria, and an alarm clock happens. [This was another elaborate and plotty dream, but I don't really remember the details anymore. I don't particularly care, though, because the next part is the really awesome part.]

[The dream shifts again.] I'm out on the town, in the same cool, modern downtown I was driving around earlier, only now I'm on foot. While walking across a plaza, I see several of my friends from [$SocialClub] [an organization I belong to in real life]. I recognize that I've been in this downtown before, and am very happy to be here. Somewhere around this point, I become lucid. [As usual, I don't remember precisely at what moment I did so. It may have been that recognition that I'd been there before that triggered lucidity, but I'm not sure.] I also pass by my friends from [$Class], who are on their way to class. I think of going with them, but choose to go off by myself and explore instead.

I end up on a particular street corner where there is a restaurant with a live band playing inside. I enter the restaurant to listen to the band. The restaurant is named “Café Debussy.” [ :gape: Whoa. That is so awesome. That's the name of the cafe where Cobb gives Ariadne her first lesson in shared dreaming in Inception. That is just so cool that I have my own version of it. I may have realized the significance of this name at that moment, or it may not have been until after I woke up, I'm not sure.]

While I'm in the restaurant, I meet and get into a conversation with a female dream character, who asks me who I am. I say the same kinds of things I would say when meeting someone for the first time in real life: that I live and work nearby, what I do, that I'm a member of [$SocialClub]. When I finish, she looks at me with an expression that shows that she's disappointed in me, and that she can see right through the baloney I'm giving her. “Who are you, really?” she asks.

I sigh and start telling her the truth.

“I'm from another world, that's not like yours,” I say. “I only come to visit here when I'm dreaming.” I stop myself short of saying that I'm dreaming all this that's around us.

As I speak, we start rising up off the ground. I'm either flying us up or causing a tower to grow up from the ground under us. [I'm not exactly sure, but I think it was more likely the latter, because] I'm making the buildings all around us grow taller or shorter, or change shape, just by thinking about it. I'm doing this because I want to show my companion the city from up high.

“Because I'm dreaming, I can control the situation, like this,” I say. “It's fun.” [I say a bit more that I don't remember now, and then] I end by sighing again, then saying, “So, here I am, your dreamer.” I extend my hand to shake hands with her.

She takes it. [Surprisingly,] The female DC reacts to what I've just told her with happiness and excitement. She leads me purposefully off in a direction across the city, apparently intending to tell others about what she has learned and introduce them to me. As we go, I realize that in all the time we've been talking, I haven't told her my name, so I say to her, “My name is [$RealFirstName].” I deliberately use the nickname by which I'm known to family and friends in real life, rather than my official, legal name, because I don't want the Fae to know my true name, because that will give them power over me. [Seriously, that's what I thought during the dream. I would never set any store by such an idea in real life.] She doesn't reply, though.

[She didn't introduce me to anyone, though. The next thing I remember,] The female DC and I have walked out to a metal, industrial-looking bridge, from which we're watching the sunset over the cityscape. I ask her, “What's your name?”

“Darla,” she says.

I shake my head and correct her: “No, that's the name of my friend who looks like you. What's your name?” Although she looks like one of my real-life friends, I'm interested in her identity as a separate individual.

From the way she hesitates for at least 15 seconds, going “Hmmmm...” several times while looking all around her at our surroundings, it's clear that she's never thought of herself as having an individual name separate from that of her real-life counterpart before. Finally, she looks over at the setting sun and says, “Umbra.” [She pronounces it “OOM-brah;” it means “shadow” in Latin. Hmmm. Very interesting.]

[Fragment.] Something involving roller coasters that look like snakes.

[False awakening.] I'm comparing notes with my mom about whether or not we just had the same dream about snakes.

[Different dream.] I'm on a ride that has foam seats with over-the-shoulder restraints. The seats are suspended high up in the air from an overhead track in a large building. I've somehow managed to board the ride so that I'm perched in between two seats, rather than fully seated in one of them. While the train of seats I'm on is moving to its destination, I manage to maneuver myself into one of the seats and get the restraints into place.

My train of seats arrives at its destination: directly above a gigantic aquarium tank. That's when I realize what the purpose of this ride is: to allow visitors a chance to be submerged in the tank for several minutes on end. I realize that I was supposed to bring a snorkel or scuba gear with me on this ride, but I didn't, and there's no way to get out of the restraints before I get dunked in the tank. I'm only mildly concerned about this, though.

I hold my breath and the seats descend, submerging me and everyone else several feet underwater. As soon as the seats have stopped descending, I start swimming upward, taking my seat and my restraints with me [I think; I'm not sure]. The moment I break the surface of the water, I found myself awake. I immediately kicked myself for not realizing that I was dreaming and subsequently recalling that I can breathe underwater in dreams.

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the nights of June 12-13 and 14-15, 2011.]

Night of June 12-13

There is a murder investigation taking place in a house that looks a lot like my grandparents' house. I am directly involved, and the investigation is highly elaborate and has a detailed plot, with lots of dialog. [Of course, I can't remember any of the specifics now.] Partway through, the dream morphs from live-action into a Tim Burton stop-motion movie featuring the Grim Reaper, who “kills” me. I somehow know I'm not really dead, though. I fall over backwards from the force of the scythe-blow and land in a sling, suspended from a moving, overhead track; it's part of a theme park ride. The ride takes me through “heaven” and ends with me exchanging salutes with Weird Al, who is standing in for Jesus on the ride.

Night of June 14-15

[Bizarre, Disneyland-related dreams FTW! This time,] I'm with a vivacious traveling companion, and we have time-traveled to the year 2011. [Whether backward or forward, I do not know.] We wonder how we know what year it is, until we come up with the obvious answer: “Because that's the year we set the time machine for?”

The entrance to the new version of Star Tours is in a rotating building with revolving doors. [This dream was in anticipation of the upcoming weekend; I was planning to go to Disneyland to ride the new Star Tours the following Sunday, June 19th, and I did.] Inside, there is a loading/staging area for the ride with circular staging zones.

“Abilene!” I say to a 1-year-old girl who is in the staging area with me. “You know you can't be on the end [of the row of seats]!” I take her spot in the staging area, making her and the other little kids move over along the row, toward the outside of the circle.

Non-lucid, Possibly lucid?, [Commentary made while awake]

I'm at the mall in my town, standing at the outside edge of the big parking lot on the north side of it. The parking lot is empty because it's been blocked off, and the route for the annual Race for the Cure, which runs around the edges of it, has been marked off. There are lots of people walking and running around the track. This is a practice run for the actual event. I remark to myself that I need to train for this event, because it is a race, and that I'm glad to see that they've repainted some of the lines on the parking lot while they've had it blocked off, because the lines really needed repainting.

From there, I start flying around the west side of the mall. [I think I remember realizing at some point during this sequence that if I was flying, I had to be dreaming. I'm not totally sure, though.] As I go from the north to the west side of it, the terrain changes from flat parking lot to natural land that rises and falls slightly. I'm holding onto a small, rectangular, round-cornered, solid plastic board, slightly larger than a sheet of paper. It catches the wind, and I fly by using it like a sail to pull me along, holding it perpendicular to the ground, with both hands, with my arms straight out in front of me. It's a lot of fun to fly this way. The wind carries me up and over each little rise in the land; every time I go over one, I have to pull my legs up to make sure my feet clear the top of the rise. They do, every time. This entire scene is very clear and vivid; I can feel the air moving around me, the pull of the wind on my arms, and the motions I make, and can see the land and the trees around me clearly.

Someone else passes me on my left, flying past in the opposite direction. As she does so, she holds up a bunch of white pieces of paper, fanned out, with big, black letters printed on them. They spell out “SLOWPOKE!” I don't take any offense at this, because that's fair; this method of flying is indeed slower than my normal self-powered, superhero-style flight.

[Different dream scene.] I'm at a place that seems to be a restaurant, but has a dark ride in the back, meeting a man named Harley Davidson, for whom the company was named.

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of December 30-31, 2010.]

I'm in a classroom in Britain. We're playing a game that involves the chalkboard, and walking in between two desks.

I'm in a room (possibly a hotel room; there's a bed in it, anyway) with Q [from Star Trek: The Next Generation]. I attempt to walk through one of the walls of the room, but get stuck halfway through it, and yell at him for messing with me. He manifests a bouncy ball made out of water, and we both bounce it back and forth.

[Dreamskip.] I'm still in that same room, but now I'm lying down on the floor under the bed. I'm stuck there somehow and can't get up. Q and some random (apparently) human woman are having sex on the bed. It's way too hot and stuffy in the room, and I'm starting to feel like there's no air in there. I get up and open the door. There's a screen door behind it. Later, I explain to Q why I did that. I say, “Did you forget that I needed oxygen to breathe?” He doesn't seem to mind that I opened the door.

I'm at a party with my mom and a bunch of her teacher friends. We're all on an outdoor patio of a restaurant at first, and then we all get into a rectangular ride vehicle that [somehow] works as a Gravitron. We all strap ourselves into our seats, and the vehicle starts moving forward. While it's moving, I look at a door on the side of the vehicle, labeled Door #6. I don't think it's closed all the way, so I reach over and try to close it, but I end up opening it. This makes the ride shut down, since I've just depressurized the cabin, and makes everyone else on the ride angry at me. A voice over the loudspeaker says, “Next time, the useless will have no reason to be here.” I defend myself by saying, “I didn't know how to close it!” An alarm is going off. I woke up at this point.

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Side notes:
I realized after I woke up from this dream that, for the second time since I've been keeping a regular dream journal, sense data from my real body came through into my dream. In this case, it was so cold on this night that I slept with all the blankets pulled up over my head. I really was trying to breathe hot, stuffy air in reality, so that became true in my dream, too. I think that's a pretty cool phenomenon.

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.

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from November 19-22.]

Night of November 19-20

I've just taken some sort of computer certification exam (A+? Cisco?) along with a large group of my peers. We're all looking at the exam results, which are printed on a strip of the kind of paper most store receipts are printed on. On the strip of paper, the students in the group are ranked in order of how high they scored on the test; I'm ranked third.

We go into another room to receive our rewards for completing the exam: students whose ranks were odd numbers get a red bottle of soda (red Fanta or Dr. Pepper), and students whose ranks were even numbers get a purple bottle of soda (grape Fanta). The sodas are in a room that resembles the social gathering room at my church.

I also remember walking across a wide, beautiful, gray flagstone courtyard in the sunshine.

Night of November 20-21 (or possibly 21-22, I'm not sure because I wrote it down too long after the fact)

I'm on an amusement park ride with over-the-shoulder restraints. I think the trains are suspended from an overhead track. It takes me up an upward-sloping section of track that goes through a tunnel. The ride simulates reduced gravity, which I think is pretty cool.

[Fragment] I'm in dream!Las Vegas, passing behind the back sides of several of the large casinos. There is a wide strip of empty desert between me and the buildings.

[Longer dream] I'm in a sort of club with dark-brown wood on all the walls, being followed around by a cartoony-looking blonde girl with pigtails, close to my own age. While I'm there, I get a phone call from the coordinator of our tour group (yes, I'm on a tour as part of a tour group) saying that they're offering me the opportunity to extend the tour for a couple of hours, and if I want to take them up on it, I should meet them at the nearest [some kind of store whose name I can't recall].

So I head for the exit of the club. There are steps leading down from the door of the club onto a large, open space of concrete, which is on a street corner. As I leave the club, I realize that I'm surrounded by several of my favorite actors, who are leaving it at the same time as I am. Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor are there, and I hear Patrick Stewart's voice. I don't speak to them, though, because I don't want to bother them with my fangirling while they're trying to hang out and have fun. I know that I'm in Barcelona, and that the club I'm just leaving is known for being a popular hangout for famous people.

Out on the street corner, I see the aforementioned some-kind-of-store directly across the street from the entrance to the club. It has a green awning with white letters on it. I decide not to go there, though, because I see all the other people from my tour group walking along the street and turning the corner to go up a side street. I decide to stick with the group. The cartoony-looking blonde girl is part of the group, too, but she hasn't come out of the club yet. “She'll catch up,” I say, and start walking up the street with the group. The street goes uphill. We walk several blocks, turn at least one more corner, and end up on an open-air elevated light rail car. I sit in the corner seat on the end of the car that points in the direction it's traveling. It starts moving and goes really fast along the track. It's quite thrilling when it turns a corner, and I cheer and whoop in exhilaration, as if I were on a roller coaster.

Eventually, the track for the vehicle we're in ends abruptly, high above a river that has broad beaches along its banks. Somehow, the vehicle has morphed into one of those circular whitewater rafts, like the ones they have on Grizzly River Run at Disney California Adventure. Our raft shoots off the end of the track and starts falling toward the river. I know that we're not actually falling all that distance, because we're inside a simulator ride. The raft starts tumbling and turning end over end as it falls through the air, but I don't feel the sensation of being turned upside down, and I know that that's because I'm not actually being turned upside down, it's just the video in the simulator ride making it look like I am. Just before our raft hits the water, I realize that it's going to hit with enough force to plunge pretty deeply into the water before floating back to the surface again. I hold my breath just to play along with the simulation, even though I know it is one, and, indeed, there is no real water; I don't feel wet, but I see the deep-green-tinted underwater video all around me. [LOL! Maybe this is what happens when MILDing is only partially successful? ]

Awake, Non-lucid dream, [Commentary on dreams made after the fact, while writing this journal entry]

I hear the text message chime on my phone go off, so I get up and check it, saying to myself, “I'd better check that. There are only a couple of people who would text me in the middle of the night (P. and Ashley R.), and they're both important to me.” But when I check it, there's no indication of a new text message, and the screen looks completely normal. [I think. Was only the Vibrate icon showing, or was the Alarm icon showing, too? I'm not sure.] It says that it's 4:38 A.M., which seems right, so I conclude that I've just unwittingly dreamed myself up an unplanned WBTB alarm, but have reacted to it in reality. “Great, that should help,” I think. I move the phone over from the sewing cabinet to the dresser and go back to bed. [I'm an idiot! If I had just thought to look back at the time display on the phone one more time, I might have realized that I hadn't actually woken up at all, but I didn't. As it stands now, I'm pretty sure I just dreamed this entire sequence of events, but not positive, which is frankly rather disturbing.] [And I just remembered while writing this that as I was first trying to go to sleep last night, one of the things I was thinking about was the fact that the current Task of the Month is to have an in-dream text or IM conversation. That must have triggered the in-dream text message chime. LOL!]

Later, my phone alarm wakes me up again. It's set up so that the alarm sound is a recording I made of myself narrating a dream journal entry that talks about some embarrassing topics. Still lying on my bottom bunk, I grab the phone off the floor and muffle it between my body and the mattress so my parents won't hear it. Too late; they've already heard the beginning of it. They come into the room and ask me if I'm all right, and I explain that yes, I am, and I have my phone alarm set up to play back a recorded dream journal entry that I made on my trip to Europe back in September. (It was another of those tours with Pam S., by the way.) So I get up and go into the kitchen to have breakfast. [All this happened in the house I grew up in, by the way. It was exactly the way I remember it. I completely failed to clue in. As far as I could tell while I was in the dream, this was reality, and I was supposed to be there. I conclude that it's true, at least for me, that when dreaming about real places from memory, it is easy to be unaware that you're dreaming. I fail. To be fair, though, it's very easy for me to accept that setting as normal reality because, for a little over half my life, it was normal reality.]

So then I'm outside somewhere, going up a hill in some kind of vehicle on a road. There are LCD screens above the road that have scrolling text on them, talking about how barbarafett comes off as a ranty, opinionated blowhard in her dream journal entries and forum posts at DreamViews. [Of which I had made none, so far, in reality when I had this dream. A warning?] It expresses some of this meaning through TVTropes potholes. When I get to the top of the hill, there are these little go-karts that are only a little bigger than a roller skate, but are strong enough to support the weight of a person and have enough horsepower to move around fairly quickly when a person is standing on them. That's what we're supposed to do here, so I do. I stand on one of the go-karts with my right foot and navigate it along a path painted onto the glossy concrete. The path has a lot of switchbacks in it. The go-karts go fast enough that staying up on them is challenging and fun.

I finally did wake up for real, felt around on the dresser for my phone, didn't find it, and then saw that it was still on the sewing cabinet where I always leave it. I cried out in anger and frustration. “How many FAs can one person have in one night?!” I asked myself, irritated. I did the nose-plug RC and it passed, so I said, "Idiot! You should have checked that the first time!" (Meaning, when I first heard the text-message chime.)