The Lab Notebook

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

I see a beautiful, blue sky with lots of puffy, white clouds in it. I realize that this is a dream [I'm not quite certain, but I believe I became lucid by first realizing that I didn't recall how I had gotten outdoors where I could look up at the sky], and ground my awareness in the dream by focusing on the clouds in the sky. The sky expands to fill my field of vision, covering up and washing out the gray nothing behind it.

I realize I'm in the backyard of the house I lived in as a child, and I'm with two girls I knew in elementary school. I walk around the neighborhood with them for a bit, exploring the yards of the houses. They are fenced in, and many of them are on very steep hills [which was not the case in real life]. At one point, a man who lives in one of the houses sees us. Eventually, I stop following them and start following two DCs who are young women closer to my own age now, a blonde one and an Asian one. [I typically prefer to spend my lucid-dreaming time exploring my dream world on my own, but this time, I thought I could maintain a longer, more stable lucid dream if I focused my attention on following two dream characters around, instead. It seems to have worked.]

We end up wandering from the suburban neighborhood we're in to a well-lit, wood-paneled mall. We end up in front of a hair salon, where the salon owner stops us and presents the Asian DC with an award for her hairdressing skills. I notice that she is suddenly wearing a pretty, fancy dress appropriate for accepting an award at an awards ceremony. After she accepts it, we continue wandering around and exploring. The next time I notice the Asian DC, I see that she's wearing casual, comfortable clothes again. I exclaim in disappointment, "Aw, man! I wanted to do the finger-snap thing!" [Meaning, I wanted to consciously and actively change her from one outfit to another by snapping my fingers, Q-style. I was disappointed that she had performed the transformation on her own. ]

Our wanderings continue to take us through indoor environments, and we eventually end up in a spacious church where the service is just about to start. A greeter hands me a service bulletin, which is a single large sheet of paper that you have to fold up yourself. I wander through the sanctuary, from front to back, just as the procession is starting.

As I wander outside again, I remember that the next time I found myself lucid dreaming, I had wanted to do the 'pinch your nose shut and try to breathe through it' reality check, so I do so. It still works the same as ever - I can still feel myself breathing even while pinching my nose, which I still think is the coolest sensation. However, this time, my dream-sense of touch tells me that I'm missing part of the tip of my nose. [I thought, "Maybe I've been reading too many A Song of Ice and Fire books?"]

I see the aforementioned blonde dream character again, and for the first time, we actually stop to talk. When I ask, she tells me that her name is Julia, and it turns out that she knows that I'm the dreamer. She refers to me as the "universe goddess." [There's a gap in my memory here; I don't recall how we got from just talking to this next part, but:]

Julia is now mostly submerged in a tank of water, and I lay one hand on the crown of her head, which is sticking up above the water, and say: "I, [my full, legal IRL name], do hereby name you Julia." As she climbs out of the tank, I add, " [Nickname] is short for [my full first name]." [I often explain that to people when meeting them for the first time IRL.] After Julia is out of the tank, I ask her if I can do that again, because I didn't use both hands. I ask her what her middle and last names are, and she says "Tilly El-Haz[something, I don't remember exactly]." We stand facing each other, and I lay both hands on the top of her head and name her with her full name. [She looked like she could have been Supergirl, or otherwise related to those Els.]

[Hmm. Fascinating. I've only met one or two other dream characters who exhibited any awareness that we were in a dream, and this is the first time one has referred to me in terms like "the universe goddess." This dream put me in a great mood, as my lucid dreams always do.]