The Lab Notebook

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

[Note: This was my first time taking melatonin. I took a 3mg pill before I went to bed. I'm on a trip, and my hosts offered it to me to help me get over jet lag. I also tried to concentrate on lucid dreaming more than I had been lately, as I was falling asleep. One or both of those things worked.]

I'm walking along the right-hand side of a broad, wide street, passing several marching bands as they march past in the opposite direction, one after another.

I'm in a classroom at a school that looks a lot like my old elementary school. There are a lot of other people my age there. A bunch of us start sitting down in a semicircle with our musical instruments; we're about to play an impromptu band concert. TM [a real-life friend and roommate who I only met within the last six months] is one of the people participating in the concert, but it's obvious that she doesn't know how to line up for one correctly. I yell at her: “[TM]! You have to sit so that you're spaced evenly! That's the done thing in music!”

The band starts playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The memory of how to play it comes flooding back into my mind from high school. [This is a real memory. It was one of the songs I had to memorize how to play for football games.] I'm surprised and pleased to find that I can still play it. As we're playing, though, the other members of the band lose interest, stop playing, and wander out of the room, leaving me playing my clarinet all alone.

When I get to a stopping place, I stop playing and leave the room in the company of a female teacher. We walk around the western edge of campus and come to the entrance of another classroom, where we stop and talk to a male teacher. Somewhere around this point, I realize that I'm dreaming. [I don't remember the specific moment it happened, but I know I've had at least one other dream featuring this version of my old elementary-school campus before.]

In the conversation with the male teacher, I ask him how old I am right now: “Am I eleven, the age I was when I started playing the clarinet; fourteen, the age I was when I graduated from junior high school; eighteen, the age I was when I graduated from high school; or twenty-six, the age I am right now in the real world?” I mention the real world specifically to see whether he'll pick up on the implication that the world we're in right now isn't real, and how he'll react.

“There is no real world involved in this discussion!” the male teacher exclaims.

I decide not to pursue that topic any further, because it's obvious that I'm not going to be able to convince him that this is a dream.