The Lab Notebook

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the night of July 24-25, 2011.]

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

I'm driving my mom's red Honda Fit out past Katella Avenue to spend a weekend away. The rest of my family is already at my destination for the weekend.

I arrive at basic training camp for the Navy National Guard, into which I have just been drafted. I enter the barracks along with several of my real-life friends from college. The bunks are stacked three high and are concealed behind cupboard doors. In between the bunks are shelves with metal label-holders intended to hold labels showing the names of the occupants of the bunks. These shelves are meant to be used to hold boxes of the occupants' stuff. I start settling in. Evidently, I've packed wisely for this experience, because the boxes I brought don't take up all the space that was allotted to me. I change into my new uniform. One of the items I brought was a small pair of scissors with blue handles [that I have in real life]. I realize that it was stupid of me to bring them, because they would get me in trouble if I were caught with them. So, I just fold up the labels with my name on them and slide them into the label-holders.

Later, we're all sitting in a restaurant-style booth, choosing nicknames from a printed list. Mine is “Spider.” The nicknames for the officers are printed in a substitution cypher. I have absolutely no clue what tasks and training activities I'll be doing here, or what position I'll be assigned to. I hope I'll be able to handle it, especially swimming. [I think this may be the first time one of my dreams has accurately reflected the fact that I don't know how to swim very well in real life. I've had tons of dreams where I could swim expertly.]

Basic training is beginning. Everyone is outside, standing at attention in a block, wearing their uniforms. I ask one of my friends to let me out of the booth so that I can run to the bathroom before going outside and joining the block. There is a girl with short, blond hair directly ahead of me in the line for the bathrooms. I think to myself that I ought to be thinking of it as 'the head' rather than 'the bathroom,' because I'm in the Navy, not the Marines. [Which is stupid, because as far as I know, the Marines say that, too.] Then I woke up, because I actually did need to go to the bathroom. [This dream was much longer, more elaborate, more vivid, and more detailed than these notes reflect. What I get for putting off typing this up for so long.]

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

I'm in a long, rectangular yard with a lawn, behind a building. I find myself flying backward over the grass. Recognizing the familiar dream occurrence, I mentally grab hold of the situation and wrench my movement into my conscious control. First, I start to fly forward, and then I just land and start walking across the grass toward the building, just because I'll have better and more reliable control that way. As I walk, I say something along the lines of, “If it gets me there faster, I'll just walk.”

Inside the building, I walk through several rooms until I find one that contains a table and a bunch of people. [I think they were people I know in real life, but I'm not sure who.] We all sit down around the round table and have a meeting. [I don't remember now what we talked about, but we were all talking about something.] During the meeting, I focus on staying in the present moment, paying attention to it, because I want the dream to go on for as long as possible. It works, for a bit, but then I start thinking, I wonder how much REM time I have left? I don't want to wake up. Of course, the dream starts to collapse and I find myself waking up shortly after thinking about that.

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Side notes:

I achieved this MILD by focusing intently on my feelings of intention and desire to have a lucid dream, mostly without thinking in words, and for a sustained period of several minutes. When I did think in words, they were, Lucid dreaming is easy. Everyone can do it, even me. I had this dream after several nights in a row without any dream recall at all, which made those feelings of intention and desire particularly intense and easy to focus on.