The Lab Notebook

[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, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

Last night, my WBTB went on for nearly fifteen minutes, due to my trying (and failing) to figure out what it was that had gone thump and woken me up. I think it helped me attain lucidity. I should do WBTBs that last that long more often.

I'm bicycling along a sidewalk that winds through grass along the side of a street. Every so often, the sidewalk rises up and becomes a little bridge that allows water to go under it. It goes up-and-down and side-to-side so much that it's a little difficult to bicycle on.

I'm in a building with a group of my Literacy AmeriCorps friends. We're in an open, interior space that runs through several stories of the multi-story building, and has lots of staircases and landings in it. My LAC friends are standing around on the staircases and landings. We're talking about the party that's going on in a room upstairs. One of my friends says that, in order to get in, you have to bribe the guy watching the door in a “touchy-feely” way, e.g., by touching him in a sexual way. I absolutely refuse to do this. At some point during this conversation, I realize, “This is a dream. I can't really be talking to these people.” [I haven't seen any of them in reality since the program ended; we don't even live in the same state anymore.] Then, a bunch of unidentified guys come up a flight of stairs from deeper in the building and start trying to molest me and the other girls with their hands. As they begin to surround me like a flood, I realize this is turning into a nightmare, and try to leave the scene by closing my eyes and turning around. Once again, it does absolutely nothing. The guys start getting their hands on me, and achieve their goal of discovering where my erogenous zones are. I'm scared and shocked and I wish it would end, so it does. I wake up, and go back to sleep shortly afterward.

I'm in a room where I and three of my LAC friends, one other girl and two guys, have been staying. I find a guitar in the closet. A tall guy I don't recognize is also in the room. One of us asks, “Who in this room plays guitar?” and the other answers with “Lisa C.” and one or two other names. [I can't remember now who said what, or what the other two names were.]

I'm in a giant, room-sized aquarium. It's rectangular and about twelve feet from floor to ceiling, and all but the top three feet are filled with fresh water. One wall of the rectangular room is covered with small, enclosed plastic boxes, each containing a different kind of fish. You can open up the doors on the front of each box to let the fish out into the larger aquarium. I'm swimming in the water and can apparently breathe under it. I'm playing with the fish that are out in the larger aquarium, trying to get them to act out some scenario, but it isn't working out too well because there's this one carnivorous fish with big, pointy teeth that keeps eating most of the smaller fish. Eventually, it even starts eating another fish that's bigger than itself. I swim up to the very top row of little boxes, one of which contains a Blue Tang. I think about letting it out, but decide not to because I'm not sure if this one is a freshwater fish or not, and because I don't have very many of that kind. At this point, I discover that I suddenly can't breathe as easily under the water, and I realize that it's because the top three feet of the room are now filled with water, too. [Yes, I realize that doesn't make much sense. No, I didn't realize this during the dream, nor did I realize I was dreaming.] I go to the end of the room and start trying to get the door open so I can breathe the air outside the room. It has a wheel on it that you turn to open the door. While I'm still trying to open the door, before I can either drown or get it open, I wake up. [Dude. That was pretty cool. I wanna go back and play in the aquarium room again sometime.]