The Lab Notebook

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of January 4-5, 2011.]

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

I'm flying around a large, elaborate, indoor shopping mall that has an upstairs and a downstairs level. [I don't remember how I became lucid, but I did.] Like real malls I've been to with upstairs and downstairs levels, there are lots of open spaces connecting the two. I fly down through one of them to get into the lower level and explore it. Some of the people who are in the mall see me flying, and I talk to some of them.

The lower level is completely enclosed with no windows. It's all painted off-white and appears to be mostly offices, rather than shops. When I get into this enclosed area, I start walking. I encounter a female DC and we start talking. At one point, I actually tell her, “You're a dream character!” She either ignores this or doesn't hear me, I don't know which.

While exploring the corridors and passageways of this enclosed lower level, I find a door that is an entrance to the Arlington Theater. [Although I identified it as such, it didn't quite look like that in the dream. It looked like a big theater for live performances, but without the decorative, themed walls, and even bigger and wider than the real one.] When I enter the theater, I exclaim, “I was looking for this place!” Then it occurs to me, Couldn't you have used an ability to get here faster, rather than just searching for it? I go to take an empty seat next to some of my high school friends. The performance we're watching is a live-action version of Jaws. At the end, I walk up to the very front of the theater and take a picture of the audience.

Then, I feel a need to start floating upward, just like a helium balloon, so I allow myself to. The ceiling of the theater is made up of several layers of pieces of canvas stretched out with ropes. I make my way between the pieces of canvas, sometimes detaching a corner and folding it back, until I float out of the building and into the sky.

The next thing I remember is being on a street corner. My dad and sister bicycle past me and tell me to stop at the corner before crossing the street, to be safe. I say yes, I will. I walk along the road I'm on. I think vaguely of trying to do something else cool, like run really fast, but I don't do it. I look at a photo [presumably the one I took of the audience in the theater; I'm working off brief handwritten notes here] in what I at first think is reality before I figure out that it must still be in my head, because I know that I was dreaming when I took that picture.

While still outside on the street [I think; not sure of the specifics of the transition here], I suddenly find that I'm lying down, and my entire body is vibrating. When I look up and to my left, I see a sleep paralysis monitor. It's measuring how much I'm vibrating. It looks like an oscilloscope, kind of like this one, only in the dream, the screen is all black and there's only one bright-green line across it, that grows thicker and takes up more of the screen as the SP intensifies. Below that line is a numeric readout, also bright-green, that jumps from 40% to 88% as I watch. Below the numbers, I see the words “You did it!” appear on the screen.

So this is what sleep paralysis feels like, I think. I know what it is, but I'm still just a little freaked out by the all-over, shaking, vibrating sensation. I realized that I had to be waking up and thought, No! I don't want to wake up yet! Go back! I tried to DEILD, but I couldn't think of a scene to visualize, nor could I calm myself down enough to visualize one. Eventually, the feeling went away, and I was awake and back to normal. [First time I've ever woken up into SP. Very interesting.]

When I went back to sleep after that, I had another non-lucid dream. This time, I'm in my church. The room seems to be the same size and shape as it is in reality, but lots of things about it are different. The piano is front and center [rather than off to the side], and I'm sitting a few feet behind the piano bench, with my chair up against the windows that form the front wall of the room. I'm watching Wendi play the piano. We talk to each other about something. We're attending Betty's memorial service [which was held the Saturday after I had this dream, and I knew that both Wendi and I were planning to attend].

Later, when we're at the burial service, I look down into the box that forms the underground enclosure for the coffin, and I can see furniture inside it.

After the service, I leave the church building. Outside it is a big, complex interchange of road overpasses and underpasses that spans across a straight main road. Airplanes are using this main road as a makeshift runway. I walk across one of the overpasses with my family to get to the overpass on the other side.

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Side notes:
This was the second night that I wrote down a goal before going to bed. This time, I wrote: “Goal: become lucid, look around at scene, make sure it's stable, then see what other verbal commands I can use.” This time, I accomplished the first two, but forgot about the second two. So far, based on two nights of experience, my working hypothesis is that writing down my goals is definitely helping me to achieve them, but that in the future, my goals should only consist of one or two actions at most, not three or four, because I don't seem to be remembering more than two.