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.