The Lab Notebook

Awake, Lucid dream, [Commentary made while awake]

After I've woken up in the night and am going back to sleep, I feel that sensation of floating, of being untethered from gravity and from anything else physical. I know that I can enter a dream from here if I let myself float away. I do so, and immediately find myself in a dream. [I have to admit, though, I'm not 100% certain that my consciousness remained continuous from the time I woke up to the time I entered the dream, so I'm only willing to use my WBTB and DILD tags for this entry, not my WILD one.]

I'm in a bright, sunny, pedestrian-oriented shopping area, with a wide, winding sidewalk that leads between a series of large, curving, mostly-white buildings, each of which contains many different shops and restaurants. One of them has a large Cold Stone Creamery sign on the outside. It's very pretty, and looks very real. I'm very pleased to be in a lucid dream again.

At some point while exploring this new dreamscape, I see several friends of mine from earlier periods of my life [high school and/or college - I don't remember this part all that clearly]. Then, I wander through a small exterior door in one of the buildings, which leads into a classroom. In this classroom, the desks are set up in several sets of rows that are set at right angles to each other. The aisle between the rows of desks begins near the door and goes right through where the corners of those right angles would be. All the desks are filled with young adults, like me, but I don't know any of them. I walk down the aisle toward the front of the classroom. There is a male teacher there, leading the class in a discussion about something, but he doesn't complain or try to shut me up when I interrupt him and say to the class:

“Anyone want to help me out with this possession thing?”

[Or some similar words to that effect.] By this point, I've remembered one of the current Tasks of the Month and decided that with all these DCs around, it should be easy to give it a try. [I'm not surprised that I asked if one of my DCs would willingly act as the possessee. Possessing someone by force or surprise doesn't appeal to me at all; I already knew that about myself.]

A woman in the front row, on my left (the teacher's right), raises her hand and stands up. She's maybe an inch taller than I am, but stockier, and has dark red hair and green eyes. Both of us are wearing jeans. She follows me to the back of the classroom.

“I want my gold star, dammit!” I say, just before I go to work on possessing her. [I was talking about the gold wings I was going to earn here on DreamViews (or rather, the silver wings - in the excitement of the moment, I completely forgot that we had switched the basic and advanced tasks early in the month), but my exclamation came out as the commonplace expression meaning a reward or recognition for an achievement. My subconscious betrays my true colors: I really want recognition for my lucid dreaming achievements. Wow, I'm shallow. :blush: ]

My method of possessing people is as follows: I stand directly behind the red-haired woman, and we clasp hands with our fingers interlaced. Then, I press the trunk of my body into her back, with our shoulders aligned, and push myself forward until our bodies merge. It's a somewhat slow process at first, since the substance of her body offers some resistance to mine, but it works. [I already know how to become intangible to walk through things in dreams; why didn't I think to make use of that ability and adapt it to this purpose? I don't know.] In a few moments, I'm standing in her body and controlling it from the inside. It has an awkward, heavy feeling to it, but it's really cool. When I've made it all the way forward, I notice that I've done an incomplete job; I can still feel our hands clasped together, and my feet are sticking out above hers, because she was taller than me to begin with. “We're supposed to merge them together,” I say. I straighten out my fingers and merge them with hers, and push down with my feet so they're merged properly. Then, I walk forward, one step at a time. It feels heavy and awkward, like I'm wearing several layers of really heavy clothes. I walk out through the door of the classroom into the sunlit walkway. Then, I collapse onto the ground and try to extricate myself from my DC. I only succeed in discarding the pair of jeans the DC was wearing, leaving them lying on the ground.

I get up, go back into the classroom, and try again to release my DC from possession. This time, it works. The DC steps forward and away from me, and calmly walks back to her seat. The other DCs in the class seem to approve of the successful possession. [If my DC now wasn't wearing pants, none of the characters in the dream seemed to take any notice, including the red-haired DC herself. I think she just had a long, dress-like blouse on.]

I want to practice this newfound skill again, so I look around the classroom. In an aisle seat on my right (the teacher's left), a man with black hair in a ponytail is sitting. That'll be different, I think. [Being in a man's body will be different, I mean.] I look at him, and he gets up and allows me to take possession of him in the same way. This time, it's a little bit easier and goes a little faster. Unfortunately, I woke up shortly after this point.

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.]

I'm going to work at an elementary school [neither of the ones I work at in reality]. I have to go back out to my car to get something. There are other people out in the large, flat parking lot. When I finally head into the building, it's already 3:00, a full hour later than I was supposed to start working. I'm mad at myself because the fact that I got started late means that I can't count that first hour (2:00 – 3:00) toward my total number of AmeriCorps service hours. [LOL! No, no, brain, that was my last teaching job.]

I can hear the faint, muffled sound of repetitious, vaguely pop-sounding music playing from somewhere nearby. I realize that I've woken up in my bed. [Not really.] I'm still tired and decide to stay in bed.

I wake up again in a slightly different room. [Again, not really.] This time, I take my throw pillow and pull it over my head. [Yeah. I fail at catching false awakenings. :/]

[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.