dream fragment

Last night, I remember waking up post-sleep cycle and thinking, Man, that dream was awesome. I don't wanna sit up and write it down, though. I already stayed up too late and am not going to get enough sleep tonight. I'll do it in the morning. And, of course, now I don't remember what that awesome dream was about I really need to start going to bed earlier and writing dreams down as soon as I wake up from them again. Since I couldn't remember that one, I decided to enjoy some time thinking about dreams by spending the morning getting caught up on DJ entries from the past two weeks that were still only in handwritten-note form, and now I'm all caught up.

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

Night of November 26-27

[Fragment] I'm listening to one of Guy's lectures in person and/or via cell phone.

My parents have remodeled our kitchen. The color scheme is the same as before [the same as it currently is in reality], but the stove and the sink have switched places. [Also, the layout is totally different from how it is in reality.] My mom and I are in the kitchen, making tea and coffee. I look through a canister of little packets of coffee and tea for something I like.

[Longer dream begins here] I'm driving down a street in my mom's car, with the top down. [My mom's car isn't a convertible in real life.] I'm in an old residential neighborhood that's apparently somewhere in the UK. Throughout the rest of this dream, all the environments are incredibly detailed and realistic. I turn around and drive back up the street and through an open gate in a stone wall, into the old center of town, which I explore on foot. The plaza is made of stone. There's a castle on the right and a bell/clock tower on the left.

I take the train to get up to the next town. The train car is full of old, plush couches and seats. An old man on the train starts telling a story. Looking out the window, I see fields, trees, a sign that says something like “You are now leaving (town name),” and a train on another track that looks just like the commuter trains I'm used to here in the US.

The train reaches its destination. I remember visiting this town once before. The train station there is inside an enormous hangar complex, which is also an airplane museum. Several small, old airplanes are on display. There are a fairly large number of people there playing tourist, but it's not crowded. There are also several restaurants in the complex, including a pub and a taco place. I think of getting something to eat, but I know I have no cash on me, and I worry that my credit cards won't work.

Night of November 27-28

I drive through the mountains and enter something that appears at first to be a half-underwater base, but later turns out to be a big ship, by going through an underwater airlock. There are lots of other people on the ship. There's a storm going on; big, pretty snowflakes are falling, and big chunks of ice are falling from the mountains onto the ship and into the water around it. We can't sail out in this storm, so we'll have to spend the night on board. I see Tracy F., who is in charge of the ship and all the people on it, bustling about on the deck of the ship. Either I or somebody else [I don't remember] says, “Poor Tracy's so busy she hasn't even had time to notice the storm, much less make an announcement.” There are bathrooms on board; I absentmindedly wander into the men's bathroom, which gets me some weird looks.

I'm at M.V. High School to watch an athletic meet. I've left campus, so I have to sneak back onto it by hopping over a gate in a fence. I have a shopping cart, but I abandon it somewhere. I explain to some sort of security officer what I'm doing on campus. I also meet a big, omnivorous alien that I recognize in the dream as belonging to one of the Siglerverse alien species [but who doesn't look anything like any of them], who tells me a story about something.

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from November 19-22.]

Night of November 19-20

I've just taken some sort of computer certification exam (A+? Cisco?) along with a large group of my peers. We're all looking at the exam results, which are printed on a strip of the kind of paper most store receipts are printed on. On the strip of paper, the students in the group are ranked in order of how high they scored on the test; I'm ranked third.

We go into another room to receive our rewards for completing the exam: students whose ranks were odd numbers get a red bottle of soda (red Fanta or Dr. Pepper), and students whose ranks were even numbers get a purple bottle of soda (grape Fanta). The sodas are in a room that resembles the social gathering room at my church.

I also remember walking across a wide, beautiful, gray flagstone courtyard in the sunshine.

Night of November 20-21 (or possibly 21-22, I'm not sure because I wrote it down too long after the fact)

I'm on an amusement park ride with over-the-shoulder restraints. I think the trains are suspended from an overhead track. It takes me up an upward-sloping section of track that goes through a tunnel. The ride simulates reduced gravity, which I think is pretty cool.

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

I'm standing just outside the window of a cream-colored building, looking up and into the building through the window. There is a sort of rectangular tower or column inside the building, wide enough for the name of the building to be displayed at the top in tall, narrow, bright teal letters made of molded metal. [The font is Times New Roman, or something like it.] I'm controlling what letters appear there by typing on a keyboard. First, I type “Walgreens Bookstore.” Then, my mom is standing next to me and rebukes me gently, telling me to put in the real name of the building. I backspace over what I've typed, and the teal letters disappear. I then type the real name of the building, “Public Library.”

Once again, I realize easily and naturally that I'm dreaming. Saying something like “Wait” to my mom, I turn away from the window and look to my left, intending to go and explore. The sidewalk I'm standing on outside the public library runs right along the edge of a river, which has more sidewalks and buildings all along both sides. The dream only lasts a couple of seconds before fading, though.

I'm lying on a mattress on a floor somewhere. There are blankets covering me, and my dad is bending down closely over me, as if to tuck me in. I'm breathing hard, and it feels like I'm being smothered. I start to panic, but then I think, It's okay. It's just a memory. I can't breathe because I have a stuffy nose in reality. [Which I don't, by the way, but it seemed logical at the time. Also, that must have been either a false memory or one from when I was really little.]

Dreamskip. I'm still on the mattress on the floor, but my dad is gone and the blankets aren't over my head. I'm in between two raised platforms [loft beds, maybe?] with shelves built into the sides, and there are all kinds of toys and books and stuff all over them. Someone says something about being in seminary. [I don't really remember this part.]

I find myself looking up at a white stucco ceiling high above me. Thinking I've woken up, I try to DEILD back in, and succeed. [LOL, I just performed a DEILD within a false awakening! Awesome!]

I'm back on the mattress on the floor again. This time, I reach out from the mattress to feel the carpet beneath it. It's brown and semi-shaggy, the kind we have in our current house. I'm not fully immersed or engaged in the dream, though, and it only lasts a few seconds.

When I woke up for real, I remembered and remarked aloud: “This house doesn't have stucco ceilings! All its ceilings are flat!” Only then did I realize that that had been a false awakening.

--------------------
Side notes:
I really like that brown carpet. I've noticed that in my dreams, any indoor space where I'm residing usually has that kind of carpet, even if it's not my current house. I think the reason I'm so attached to it, and therefore, the reason it shows up so much in my dreams, is because I helped pick out the carpet for this house, unlike at either of the other two houses.

Also, that public library is so going into my current NaNoWriMo novel. Most of it is set in a dream world version of Louisville, where I lived once and which is by a river.

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

[These are all my dreams from the past week or so that I hadn't gotten around to typing up and/or posting to this DJ, until now. Most of them are pretty fragmentary because I wrote about them from notes long after the fact. None of them were lucid. My most recent dream, from last night, will be in a separate post, because it's longer.]

Night of November 10-11

I take a lengthy tour of a camp I've been to several times, answering questions asked by people who have never been there before. We're all there for our organization's annual fall conference. There are two cabins up high on a ridge, and a big meeting/dining hall on the low ground, right near the entrance. [I knew it was that camp while I was in the dream, even though it has a completely different layout in reality. This was a pretty long dream, but I can't remember any more details now.]

I'm with Ariel from the Disney version of The Little Mermaid. We're finding our way through a Little Mermaid-themed maze. It's one of several mazes at Walt Disney World.

Night of November 11-12

Mom, P., and I are out to dinner at a restaurant with an outdoor patio. P. asks me if I got any gumbo the last time we were there. I answer that no, Dad ate it all.

I see a two-year-old girl on the street. I walk with her back to my grandparents' house. The front door of the house has two separate sections that can open and close independently of each other. We get into the house by opening the top section of the door first. When we get inside, we discover that my grandparents have a new, upright, Scrabble-like electronic board game in their house. It involves a countdown timer.

Night of November 12-13

I'm in my current house, and I listen to a voice mail from a publishing company. I return their call and talk to them. We try to organize a live interview in 30 minutes' time. They're even willing to give me directions to their office over the phone. We don't schedule the interview for 30 minutes from now, though, because that's not enough time for me to shower and get dressed. They put me on hold for a bit. When they come back, we agree on next week instead. They expect me to bring a completed, polished novel manuscript with me to the interview so we can talk about it, and I don't have one, so I think, Okay. I only have one week to finish one of my novels. My hair is long and in a French braid, and I decide to leave it that way and not wash it before the interview.

I'm with my friend Jane R. She's trying on a cute dress made out of a towel-like, terry-cloth material, and I'm helping her adjust it.

I'm watching an episode of “Rugrats” in which one of the babies helps teach another how to use the potty, and they are found by one of their moms.

When I woke up, I went, Oh. I guess I don't have to have one of my novels finished by next week. Although that would be nice. I think I had that dream about the interview because I was worrying about how I was going to balance writing, studying, and job-hunting just as I was going to sleep.

Night of November 14-15

A Christian band sings a song about their dying dog.

I'm watching the pilot episode of a superhero TV show. The show will have a superhero team consisting of 5 boys and 3 girls. I will be one of the girls on the team. I know this from watching the show's opening.

Night of November 15-16

I'm at a church camp, standing outside the little trailer where the leader of the camp is staying. His wife is sitting on a chair outside the trailer. She tells me that I can't talk to him right now because he's sleeping.

I'm getting ready to leave the camp. I'm in the process of moving my stuff out of the space in and around a twin bed in a cabin, but I'm not done yet. I come back into the cabin to continue packing, and there's another girl already lying in my bed. I tell her that I was using the space, but I'm vacating it and she can have it now, but she has my permission to play with my teddy bears. Three of my teddy bears are lying on the end of the bed [I own all of them in real life]. She answers that no, she'll take the responsibility for cleaning the place up.

A third girl who is also in the room asks me, “Can I at least do your makeup?” I look at my face in the mirror next to the bed and see that it has red blotches on it, and several large zits, including two on the left side of my jawline. I agree to let the girl do my makeup, and we go over to another wall of the room, where there is a dresser with various cosmetics on it. I see that one of the bottles of makeup is labeled inception, and I think, Oh, cool. I didn't know that was the brand name of the makeup I used. [*facepalm* Oh, dear. That really should have clued me in that I was dreaming.] I reach for this bottle, but the girl who offered to do my makeup chastises me, snapping at me to spray myself first with an alcohol-based antibacterial cleanser that comes in a pale teal bottle. I do so, wiping it over my face with a cotton ball.

[This is a catch-up journal entry. This dream is from the night of November 6-7.]

[Fragments] Something involving making a delivery of some kind using my car. I remember wondering where my car keys were just as I was waking up from the dream. I also remember riding my old, green GT bike in the rain.

IHOP and Denny's are having a TV commercial war. I'm watching a series of commercials for the two chains, one after the other. One of them [I'm not sure which restaurant it was for] focuses on the repetition of the phrase, “Accurate fries, accurate donuts,” accompanied by images of the two items. It means that when you order fries or mini-donuts as a side item there, they always serve you the correct amount. Later, I'm at Denny's with my mom.

I'm riding in a car, passing by the fields of a local high school. I can see their marching band rehearsing, in their uniforms. Some marching band members from my own high school are there, too, also in their uniforms and rehearsing in a block.

I'm walking through the hallways of an unidentified high school. A female student is there, loudly crowing away about something political. The TV monitors mounted in the hallway are showing political advertisements. There's one pro-Whitman, anti-Brown ad that ends with the spoken line, “Last chance to come together, California.”

I'm in a UCSB dorm room, thinking to myself: What's the date today? April 9? 2 months. Meaning, in two months, I will be graduating and leaving the university forever. I think about how hard I'm going to cry when I have to pack up the contents of this room and leave it for the last time. I remember [or maybe I just inferred this after having woken up, I'm not sure] that I went to Kentucky during fall quarter, then returned to UCSB for the winter and spring quarters to finish up the last of my studies. [As opposed to real life, where it was spring quarter that I missed to go to Kentucky.] My roommate Sarah M. is in the room. I have to be on my way and go to math class without my math homework completed, because I've been goofing off all weekend.

A group of Chinese international students and teachers come into the dorm room. One of the female teachers notices a magnet I have as a decoration. The magnet has five Chinese characters on it. She reads them aloud, in Chinese, but stumbles over the last one, giving two different possible readings for it. As she puzzles over the characters, I say to her, in Japanese, “Imi mo nai na no da.” [Translation: “They don't even mean anything.”] I know this to be the case because I know that this particular string of characters came from Hanzi Smatter. The female teacher understands what I said, and agrees with me. She and the other teachers and international students then start a conversation, all in Japanese. When they ask me a question in Japanese, my reaction is, “Oh, God, now I've started it!” I'm nervous and self-conscious because I haven't spoken any Japanese in a long time. It takes me a second, but I manage to formulate an answer to the question in perfectly good Japanese. [I don't remember what the question and answer were, but I do remember that] At some point during the conversation, I say something like, “Kono kanji wa imi ga nai to itte kumatta desu.” I know what I mean when I say it, which is, “I heard that these kanji don't mean anything.” [But I know perfectly well that those aren't the proper Japanese words for “I heard that...” There goes dream!Japanese being weird again.] [Also, what I meant is that they don't mean anything as a phrase. Most likely they mean something individually, or else the teacher wouldn't have been able to identify readings for them.]

[Not sure if this one is in the correct chronological order.] I'm with my church choir, and we're singing a pretty Advent hymn. [I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist in reality, yet. I managed to record six notes onto my phone when I woke up, and someday I plan to compose it.]

I'm driving up toward UCSB with my parents. We see Dale C. performing live on the side of the road, by the exit off Highway 217 that leads to the airport. He's singing and playing the bongos.

I'm reading a little cloth book that Dale wrote about his music career. In the book, he says that he was more excited about the full-time income he would earn from being a musician than any other aspect of the career. This makes me think less of him.

I enter an unfamiliar house to get something. P. is there, and there is an unknown woman sleeping in the back room.

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

I'm taking some sort of computer certification test using Prometric's testing software. I get to the end of the test, and the software gives me a message saying that the computer hasn't been recording any of my answers after the first four or five, and there are only 4 minutes left on the test's countdown clock, so there's no time to go back and answer them again. The timer runs out, and the software gives me a big fat zero as a test score. Very distressed, I run down to the end of the row of computers where I'm sitting, which is in the center of a large, open room. There's a desk with another computer on it in a cubicle at the end of the row, with one teacher/supervisor sitting at the desk and another standing outside the cubicle. I tell the one standing outside the cubicle what happened, but I see that the one sitting at the desk has my green-and-white CompTIA ID card right there, with my picture on it and everything. That tells me that I must have passed the test; otherwise, they wouldn't have made an ID card for me.

Guy is there. I follow him into another room, where there is a big, black laser printer. He explains to me how sometimes, the test results get sent directly to the printer without being saved on the computer, and that's what happened to me. I say, “So I didn't just lose an hour and a half of work?” He says, “No.” [In the dream, I actually had the false memory of working on that test for the last hour and a half.]

Woke up at 11:55 P.M. (after having gone to bed at 10:20 P.M.) and was really surprised at how short a time I'd been asleep. I exclaimed, “That was only one cycle?! Wow!” That was a really long and detailed dream for a first cycle. I felt that this was a promising sign, and decided right then and there to try for a lucid dream later. (I'm supposed to be cycle-adjusting right now, but I was feeling impatient. Sorry.) I took some notes, then went back to sleep.

[Fragment] I'm interacting with all the characters from Inception this time. [I don't remember anything we did, except that] At one point, a bunch of us are sitting around a dark wood dining table, apparently in a restaurant.

[Fragment] I'm in House #2, upstairs, and I shoo a cat out of my bedroom. I know that it's already too late; it's been in the room long enough that I'm going to start having allergic reactions when I go into my room.

Woke up at 4:25 A.M., took down some more notes, then listened to the second half of my binaural beats file and did some MILDing. It worked.

I'm following my friend Sam K. and his girlfriend [who I can't identify as a specific person in this dream] through the entrance to a department store in a mall. There are other people in the store. I pass two different old men who are really tall and each have two sets of eyes right on top of each other, and are wearing two pairs of glasses on them. I think to myself, Those men must have an unusual deformity. Or I might be dreaming. I don't attain full lucidity or self-determination yet., though. [I didn't think to RC, either. D'oh.] I continue following Sam and his girlfriend. They start climbing a wide, white flight of stairs up to the second floor of the mall. I speak aloud to them, saying something along the lines of, “Guys! We could just take the elevator!” They either ignore me or just don't hear me.

Very short dreamskip. I'm on the second floor of the mall, looking up at a raised, square, brown section of the ceiling. I recognize it as the ceiling of the mall we used to go to all the time when I was a kid. [Which doesn't look at all like that in real life. Weird.] At that moment, I definitely know I'm dreaming, because I'm somewhere I wouldn't normally be in reality. I think to myself, F*** yeah. I'm here. [“Here,” in this case, meaning “in a dream,” not “at that particular mall.”]

I stop to take a good look around and touch things, to make sure the dream is stable so that I can explore it. [I'm learning to do this as a habit – yay!] I touch the carpet and look closely at the pattern on it. It's dark gray with little rectangular flecks of various colors on it in rows. I start walking around in the mall. Sam and his girlfriend are gone. This part of the second floor is the food court. I cross over the walkway that bridges one side of the mall and the other. There are white tables and chairs everywhere. One of the fast-food restaurants in the food court is an Orange Julius. I pass it, then turn around to listen and watch while somebody makes some kind of public announcement about something. [I don't remember what they said now.]

It occurs to me that since this is a dream, I can climb over the chairs and tables with impunity. I climb up onto a table, walk across it, step down onto a chair, then hop back down onto the floor. The impact feels lighter than it would have in real life. I say something like, “Sure enough, no one cares!” [Wow. That's quite a shift from the respectful attitude I had toward the DCs in my journal entry dated 05-Nov-2010. This worries me.]

I continue walking along through the food court, then think, Why am I just walking? I can fly. I can explore faster if I fly, too. So I start flying, going only a little faster than I'd been walking, and staying at about the same height above the floor of the mall as my eyes are when I'm standing up. [I'd never flown indoors or in front of DCs before, so it makes sense that I would be cautious about it.] There are two vaguely gangster-ish guys in front of me, one of whom says to me, “You're lookin' at me the wrong way.” I ignore them and fly right on past them. I head toward a row of glass-and-black-metal doors hung with dark red curtains. This is the entrance to another department store. Strangely, I find it difficult to fly toward them with any speed at all. It feels like trying to push one pole of a smaller magnet (me) toward the same pole of a much bigger magnet. I realize that it would be much easier going if I started flying backward, so I decide to release my deliberate control over my flying and let myself be pulled backward, just to see where I end up. The unknown force pulls me backward through the air very quickly. Much to my dismay, I wake up. I might have guessed that that was what would happen.

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Side notes:

I didn't wear my cardboard-square bracelet at all tonight, which suggests that it isn't the deciding factor in whether or not I succeed in inducing a lucid dream. It has to be either the MILD affirmations or the binaural beats file. (Or both; how do I know that the combination isn't more than the sum of its parts?)

[I was lucid throughout both of these dream fragments, but I didn't manage to relax or stabilize them because the house had already gotten up, so I was in a hurry because I knew I was running out of time, and I was sleeping on my side again, so I wasn't as relaxed as I could have been.]

I'm in my current bedroom. I throw two thick, blue foam-rubber mats onto the floor between the end of my bed and the closet, and throw myself down onto them. They land with a gap in between them, which I can feel when I land on them, so I go, “Ow!” The closet doors open, and P. climbs out of the bottom of the closet toward me, with a look on her face as if she were trying to scare me by pretending to be a zombie or a ghost. I think, but don't say, “No. You can't be here. You're not even at home right now. You're away at college.”

I'm standing on the grass in the backyard of House #1. There is no study. [Nor is there a swingset, now that I think of it.] It's nighttime, and the sky is a beautiful indigo blue with a few stars in it. There's an enormous, white full moon, much larger than it ever could be in reality, hanging in the sky to my left (to the north of the backyard). When I stare straight at it, it fades away into the background blue like the contrasting color does in some optical illusions where things disappear, and then fades back into view. I look back down at the grass, and the wooden bench from the backyard of House #2 is there, facing toward the moon. I think, “Wait, what am I doing here? I'm still dreaming.”

[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]

[I apologize in advance for how much of the page this entry takes up. It was my longest lucid dream to date, though, and I wanted to make the best record of it I could.]

I'm at my old high school, outside the entrance to my mom's old classroom. The open-air entrance on one side of the classroom and the semi-enclosed atrium on the other side are reversed from the sides they're on in real life. I'm listening to an old woman [Betty J.? Aunt Edie? I'm not sure] talk about life. I also remember reading some text about how in the old days, we just lived together with love and respect for one another as a matter of course, without any need for external forces like social programs to manipulate or engineer good feelings between people. [Yep. That sounds like my mind, all right.]

I'm playing PackRat. [Again. I am so sick of dreaming about PackRat, and I know perfectly well that the only way to stop dreaming about it is to stop playing it. That'll happen at the end of this year, I hope.] I discover that the reason an old collection cannot be completed is that they created all the cards, with artwork and everything, but never actually made them available to players.

I'm looking through a rack of envelopes of photo prints, organized by the subject of the photos.

I'm reading a novel on a shiny, black electronic reader. The last page of one chapter has a small illustration of a rolling, bouncing boulder on it [this illustration is from a particular PackRat card]. The electronic reader has small, rectangular “previous page” and “next page” buttons in the lower right corner. It also has readouts in the lower left corner of the screen that show remaining battery life and how many inches from your eyes the screen is. It says that a distance of at least 9 inches is recommended. I see my reflection in its surface and am surprised to discover that I'm wearing glasses. [I don't wear them in real life, but I might have to, someday.]

I go to say good night to my dad. He shows me that he's discovered a way to screw this cylindrical part onto his guitar so that it still has its protective plastic cover.

WBTB at 3:58 A.M. I stayed up for 10-15 minutes, taking notes on the dreams I recalled so far. Then I listened to the second half of my binaural beats file and continued doing affirmations, this time including remembering to stabilize my dream as one of them. I then spent about 45 minutes being kept awake by my coughing and sneezing, but eventually, I managed to get back to sleep. I think I even experienced sleep paralysis for the first time ever; I remember a moment when it felt like my body was vibrating or shaking really fast.

When I find myself in House #1, I immediately know I'm dreaming. [Since I was lucid from the very beginning and can remember a little bit of the sleep paralysis, I think I may have just performed a successful WILD, even though I didn't originally intend to.] This time, I succeed in remembering to stop and take in the scene before doing anything else, in order to stabilize the dream. Once again, I gaze around in awe of the fact that my mind can create such a detailed and realistic environment. Everything looks real, even though I know it's not. I walk around the house a bit, and when I get to the sinks in the bathroom and kitchen, I look at the faucets and quietly expect them to turn on, and they do, without my touching them. [I think that's pretty cool.]

I go out into the study, which looks pretty much just as it did in reality, except that the space inside it is entirely filled with spiderwebs. I turn back and go back into the house, with spiderwebs sticking all over me. When I come back in, I accidentally let a spider into the house, too. It has a big, nearly spherical body with stripes in two different shades of gray. I squash it while it's walking along the wall in the master bedroom. Then I discover another, even bigger, red spider/crab thing on the carpet, and squash that one, too, saying something about how sorry I am for making a stain on the carpet. [The carpet I squashed the spider into was light brown and semi-shaggy. House #1 never had carpet like that; that's the kind of carpet we have in House #3. I didn't notice this until after I woke up, at which point I found it highly amusing that the details of the carpet had been off in one of my dreams and I hadn't noticed. ]

My mom is there in the house. [I don't really remember the specifics of this part, but] I lie down on the bed in the master bedroom and get under the covers so that my parents won't see that I'm quivering and shaking in the throes of SP. [I don't even know.]

I decide I want to leave the house and go explore other parts of this dream world, but I feel obliged to take leave of my parents first and tell them where I'm going, but I want to keep it a secret from them that I'm dreaming. I say to myself, “If I told them I was going to school, would they believe me? Given the setting, they might.” As I say this, what I have in mind is that I'm going to pretend to be setting out on foot for my junior high school. [Funny; that was the only school I ever took the school bus to. I did walk from my house to the bus stop, though.]

I walk through the side yard toward the front gate. I find my parents in the corner of the yard, where the wall with said gate in it meets the wall of the neighbors' house, doing some kind of yard work. I say, “I'm going to school. Bye, Mom!”

“Bye, (Emiko)!” says my mom, and it sounds exactly the same as it always does when my real mom says it. [Obviously, an unaltered memory.] “Have a good day!”

“You, too!” I say, or something like it. I walk out through the front gate and down toward the street. The neighborhood seems more spacious and spread-out than it is in reality. Now that no one is looking, I begin flying, taking off from the middle of the street and traveling parallel to it and upward from it at an angle, like an airplane taking off.

As I fly higher into the air, the dream and my dream consciousness start to fade away. Now, having read the DEILD tutorial, I had some idea of what to do. I lay absolutely still in my bed and concentrated intently on the dream I had just been having, willing myself to start dreaming again. It worked. [First successful DEILD, too! I was really on a roll last night!]

I end up in a group of interconnected, upstairs rooms in a building somewhere. I seem to have flown there. The rooms are white, and there are chairs, upholstered stools, and bookshelves in them. From reading a plaque on a wall near a doorway, I learn that these rooms are reading rooms dedicated to a strange alternate take on Christianity, centered around an alternate set of gospels written by different people. [I didn't recognize it as any sect that exists in real life.] One of the rooms has an analog clock on the wall. It doesn't have numbers, just a circle and two hands, all made of the same rough, gray metal. Even though I already know I'm dreaming, I deliberately look at the clock, glance away, and then look at it again to see if the hands have jumped. The first time I try this, they seem to be in pretty much the same position they were in, so I try again. The second time, they've jumped to a totally different position. I am pleased with myself; again, I was expecting that to happen, so it did.

I leave these rooms and start walking down a flight of stairs. The dream starts to fade again, but again, I manage to stay in it through sheer willpower.

The stairs end in a wide hallway. There is a set of double doors to the right, leading into a room. Judging by the decorations and items outside these doors and inside the room, it looks like there's a wedding going on. Am I the bride? I wonder, but when I enter the large, rectangular room and see the retail-style displays of clothing and stuff, I think, Oh, good. Just a fair, then. I see a real-life friend [I forget who] to my right, who says to me, “Cute dress, (Emiko)!”

“Thank you!” I answer, even though I think this is an odd thing to say, because all I'm wearing is a damp, clammy black blanket wrapped around me. It feels like it's made of swimsuit material. I continue further into the room, turning to my left and walking that way. I look down and to the left, between two racks of clothing, and see another real-life friend, Eleanor B. She's wearing a royal-blue bridesmaid dress [the one she was wearing the last time I saw her in real life, which was at the wedding of some mutual friends]. I call her name twice to get her attention. She looks up, sees me, and stands up to talk to me. I come over and talk to her. When I take a closer look at the clothes hanging on the rack we're standing next to, I say something like, “And are these the new Christmas sweatshirts from Target? Cute! I want!” The sweatshirts are white and have patterns on them of snowflakes made up of narrow lines, either in shades of pink or shades of teal. They also have hems and seams in those colors. I take one pink one and one teal one off the rack and carry them with me. They feel soft.

I leave that room and find myself outside. In the distance, I can see big mountains with snow on top of them. I continue exploring and somehow [I don't remember the exact route I took] make it into an old Japanese temple (or residence, or something). It has a very old, very traditional room with tatami mats on the floor. I pry off each of my sneakers in turn, using the toe of the other foot (suddenly, I'm wearing sneakers, I think). [Yes, I actually thought that while in the dream. Now that I think of it, I think I was suddenly wearing regular clothes, too.] Leaving my sneakers (the exact same ones I have in real life, I note) out in the passageways, I enter the room with the tatami mats and walk around in it. I can feel the mats and my socks under my feet. I say aloud to myself, “Wait – we're allowed to walk around in here? Oh – of course we are; that's what I was expecting.” Yet again, something is so because I expected it to be so. [In all my real-life experience visiting historical tourist sites in Japan, we were never allowed to actually enter the rooms with the tatami; we were only allowed to look into them from the outside. I always wanted to walk around inside them, though, so now, in a dream, I got my wish. Cool.]

Outside of this room are some passageways that are all painted a dusty shade of teal, and have wooden signs hanging in them. I walk around in here for a few minutes. One of the signs says “Telephone,” and indeed, there is a pay telephone on the wall in a wooden box. It looks like an old tourist facility.

One of the doorways within these passageways leads into a spacious, modern restaurant that I recognize as the one inside the onsen [hot spring] that I visited while I was living in Japan. There are a few people sitting at tables here and there. I walk through the restaurant, looking for one of my real-life friends [I don't remember which one now]. I don't find her there, so I decide to head for the restaurant's exit and go somewhere else.

The way to the exit is through a long passageway with a wall on the right side and an upholstered bench on the left side where guests can sit and wait for tables, which separates the passageway from the rest of the restaurant. There are two people sitting on the bench. As I approach the door, I think, What shall I do next? Task of the Month – cell phone – oh, yeah! For a split second I think of getting out my cell phone to text somebody, but then I remember the new Task of the Month for November. I turn to one of the two DCs sitting on the bench, the one sitting nearest the door, who happens to be a black, pregnant woman. “Hey, can I tell you what I'm thankful for?” I say to her.

“Okay.” She straightens, sitting forward on the edge of the bench, listening to me.

“I'm thankful for my family, and [something else I can't remember now], and my computer, and for being able to come here!” I say. [Meaning, to the dream world.] Unfortunately, the dream starts to fade again just as I'm finishing my sentence.

FA in which, instead of being me, I'm Cobb. Mal is there when I wake up, the real one. [They're characters from Inception.] We talk about something, probably the dream I just had. [I don't remember now exactly what it was we talked about, but dude. That was a really weird FA.]

FA in which I count my fingers while they're spread out against the legs of my jeans. When I find I have a sixth finger on my left hand, my reaction is, “Oh, damn. Gosh-darn it!” Apparently, I really want to actually be awake. But I'm still feeling sleepy, so I lie down, sprawling over the sides of the white, wooden bench I'm sitting on.

When I woke up for real, I just lay there for several minutes because my body still felt heavy. I recalled my dream and was pretty impressed.

--------------------------------

Side notes:

That was the longest lucid dream I've ever had. I'm also very impressed and pleased with the number of times I succeeded in controlling what happened just by expecting something to happen. I really got the hang of that skill last night. Finally, I'm amazed that I managed to stay lucid for that long, and to force myself to keep dreaming so many times when the dream threatened to end. Wow!

[This is a catch-up journal entry. These dreams are from the night of October 30-31.]

My parents and I are visiting Epcot. We're walking to the entrance through a city. There are signs pointing to Epcot and the Magic Kingdom.

I'm at a pizza restaurant. There's an eating contest going on to see how many slices of pizza you can eat in 15 minutes. I have most of a pizza in front of me and start eating it, going through the slices, which aren't very big, quite quickly. When I'm in the middle of my third one, I look at the remaining slices of pizza and try to decide which are the smallest ones, so I can eat them. It occurs to me that this is a form of cheating. I keep track of how much time I have left by looking at the clock up on the wall. [Figures! The one time I actually see an analog clock in a dream, it works correctly! ]

I'm in a classroom that kind of looks like it's in a high school, having a conversation about my teacher with the teacher in that classroom (I'm from another class). She says, “His name is Guy, right?” [It is, in real life, but I'm not in high school anymore.]

My mom and I are driving on a dirt road through a big park on a cloudy day. [We're actually sitting in the front of the car this time.] The park has lots of big, dark-green trees in it, and several playground areas. It is located somewhere in the Santa Barbara area. At one point, the dirt road goes right through the center of one of the playground areas, so there's blue and orange play equipment on either side of the road. We stop here, and my mom asks me, “Did you know that this was where your dad and I met?” I say no, and then she tells me the story of how they met.

FA in which I discover that my bed has shifted around until it's sticking out from the wall between the desk and the sewing cabinet. I wonder how on earth I managed to move around so much in the night that my bed moved that far.

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

[I don't remember much about my first dream, except that I went,] “Hey, isn't that Ken Watanabe?” I realize that I'm waking up from a dream and attempt, for the very first time, to DEILD. It doesn't work, probably because I have no idea what I'm doing. I wake up and take some notes, as usual, and then go back to sleep.

[Warning: Disturbing imagery ahead!]

False awakening in my current real room. [I completely fail to catch it.] My parents' alarm clock radio is playing music really loudly.

I go down a big slide made of foam padding with canvas on the outside of it. It takes me down to a beach, but this beach seems to be the bank of a river rather than the shore of an ocean. When I get to the bottom, the end of the slide goes on for a little way so that riders can come to a complete stop. When I do come to a stop at the end, the end of the slide partially deflates under my weight, and I discover that there's a cute little kitten lying on the end of it. It has some of its fur and even a lot of its skin missing, so it's mostly gray bone plates. It curls up into a ball and gets the most awful look on its face. The lady who is there watching it says that he's freezing. I decide to give the kitten my beach towel to keep him warm, as well as my fried chicken. There are lots of other people around us on the beach. I'm a little afraid of them, because I know I'm in the middle of a very large city.

I realize this is a dream just as it's ending. I woke up and was very surprised to discover that I'd actually fallen asleep while lying on my side, something I've never done before (okay, I probably have, but it was when I was too young to remember it).

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while writing journal entry]

[Fragment] I'm at junior high school, going to class and learning what my class schedule will be.

The next dream starts out like a documentary about Canada. In the dream, I remember that I visited a city in Canada once, and my strongest impression upon arriving there was, “Wow, I'm in a foreign country!” [I've never actually been to Canada. These are most likely straight-up false memories, but I also got the feeling when taking notes during my WBTB that they might possibly have been memories of a previous dream that I'd otherwise forgotten about. Weird.] According to the documentary, Canada has a “Mexico City,” a concentrated population center of Mexican immigrants.

The dream then shifts from a documentary to an episode of “The Red Panda Adventures” that involves all of Canada being hypnotized/brainwashed into hating a man with the last name of Campbell. I remember a long text document [don't ask me why a dream about an episode of an audio series generates a dream image of a text document] that goes on and on about what a despicable person Campbell is. At one point in the text document, there is a warped and twisted version of the Canadian equivalent of the Pledge of Allegiance that also mentions his name and says something bad about him. [I was curious, so I looked it up, and it turns out that there is no Canadian equivalent of the Pledge of Allegiance. My mind just made one up. Cool.]

Woke up at 4:00 A.M. at the end of a sleep cycle and needed the restroom, so I used it, then took a few notes on my dreams so far, then went back to sleep.

I'm in a really big library with white walls and lots of light wood. The word “dream” crosses my mind somehow. [I don't remember whether someone said it, or I saw it on a sign, or I was just thinking about it; I think it was probably the latter.] However it happens, it makes me realize, “Hey, I'm dreaming! I did it!”

I decide to try doing a scene transition. [I don't remember how I did it, but] I find myself sitting in front of a computer monitor, which is displaying a command prompt against a black screen. The program that's running is a text adventure based on the novel Watership Down. I can't do anything right in it – I try entering a couple of commands, but none of them make any progress. Even the inventory command yields a response that goes something like, “You can't have an inventory with only one!” It means that you have to have more than one rabbit in your party before you can check your inventory. I quickly discover that the program is tied to the computer's clock, and that if a certain number of seconds pass without the player making any progress, the program just gives you a Game Over saying something about how you just got eaten (you, the rabbit, in the game, that is). After I get this Game Over, I think: “I don't have to sit here and play this text adventure just because I ended up here. If I want to, I can get up from this computer and go explore the building.” So I do.

I'm still in the library, because that's where that computer is. It's near a second-story interior passageway that's open and more like a balcony, overlooking the ground floor of the library. I follow the passageway over to where it ends in a flight of stairs going down, then descend the stairs, holding on to the handrails the entire way to keep myself focused on and grounded in the dream, and to make sure it remains stable. It works. The whole time, I'm marveling at how the sensations of walking, descending stairs, and holding the handrails are exactly like they would be in reality. The stairs have handrails running up the middle of the steps, but they aren't parallel to the ones running up the sides of the stairs; they're at an angle, so I have to go through a narrow space between two handrails on the last few steps of the staircase. I say, “Why did I have to design these stairs this way?”

I exit the building, and am outside on a dream version of my college campus. It's sunny and beautiful, and all the buildings are big and white and slightly old-fashioned [in real life, most of them are various shades of brown, tan, or orange, and none of them date back further than the 1940s]. Also, the St. Louis Arch and another, light-brown arch with some words on it in black, marking the entrance to some area, are there. [I can't remember what the words said now, but there were two of them, they were the name of the area, and they both started with S.] I go, “Ahhh, it's so good to be here.”

I notice that the beach, with its light-colored, soft sand, is down at the bottom of the cliff. I decide to try something. I think to myself, “When I close my eyes and turn around, I'm going to be standing on that beach down there.” I close my eyes, turn around in a circle (not too fast), and then open them again. I'm now on the beach, not quite at the exact spot I had been shooting for, but pretty close. “It worked!” I say aloud.

I stand on the beach for a moment, but the waves suddenly start coming up really close to the cliff, so there's not enough dry sand left to stand on. I decide to spin around again to go somewhere else, but this time, I'm thinking, “Just take me wherever.”

[In retrospect, that wasn't a very good idea.] I end up on the porch of an old, slightly spooky-looking house made of wooden boards, that seems to be floating on the ocean. It's not abandoned, though – there is a couple living in it. Also, I now have a friend with me – no one I know in real life, just a random, unnamed female dream character.

I look out from the porch to the east at the surrounding landscape and see a world that is ending. The sky is filled with thick, solid black clouds, with streaks of bright red and orange here and there because the sun is rising behind them. The entire landscape is flooded, and a jumble of disconnected buildings stick out of the water here and there. Some of them are on fire, some are falling apart, and one is being ruled over by some sort of dictator, whose enormous figure I can see looming over the building and gesturing with his arms in a way that means “work, you miserable peons!”

The couple who live in the house we're at start talking to me and my friend. They say that we have to get back to safety by sailing back the way we came. I think, “But we didn't sail here! We teleported!” I don't say so, though. [I don't know why not. Either I didn't get a chance to say anything, or I didn't want her to know about my newfound teleportation abilities, I'm not sure.]

[From this point forward, my recall is a little less clear in that I remember all the scenes, but none of the transitions or connections between them.]

The next thing I remember is facing away from the house toward the west, where there is a sort of path leading away from the house, but it's made up of a bunch of vines (or tree roots?). I try to get to the other end of the path by spinning around and closing my eyes again, but this time it doesn't work at all. I say, “Okay, if we can't do that, we'll just get there the hard way,” and start climbing over the vines.

Somehow, I end up on the deck of a ship, and there are waves coming up onto the deck I'm on, over and through the metal railing to my left. One of them doesn't look very big (it's about the same height as the railing), but it breaks right on the deck I'm on, tilting the ship over but not capsizing it.

The next thing I know, my friend and I are being escorted through the flooded landscape in a boat. There is a tank-like, armored boat with lots of guns in front of our boat, and another one behind ours. I take it they're there for our protection, but I quickly figure out that they're mostly just there for intimidation, and they're not even doing a very good job of that. There are lots of dangerous things trying to attack us, including exploding police cars, but we and our boat are passing through all of them as if they were air. What's really protecting us is a magic spell, one which, I know in the dream, comes from the Incarnations of Immortality universe.

I'm on foot, indoors, running away from something. I run into what appears to be a bathroom. I wonder if the protection spell is still holding now that I'm off the boat.

[I'm not entirely sure whether these last two scenes were in this order, or the reverse order:]

I'm a student sitting in a classroom, on the first day of school. All the other student seats are full of preteen or teenage Japanese girls, but the teacher is white. She explains that all we'll do in her class is make these little hat/hair accessory things out of tissue paper, which must be very trendy, because many of the girls are wearing them in their hair.

I'm standing on some rocks in the ocean, near the beach. I'm still lucid, so I think, “Okay! Text-messaging! Task of the month!” I go to take my phone out of my pocket, but then think, “No, better not do that here – I don't want to get my phone wet.”

Woke up and was delighted to have had another lucid dream. While thinking back over it, I laughed out loud at that last part – I was concerned about my phone getting wet? It wasn't even my real phone! :-D Then again, I realized that that makes sense: my dream cell phone would have been just as damaged by dream water as my real one would be by real water. After all, that's what I expect will happen when cell phones get wet.

-------------

Commentary:

Last night, I listened to about half of my binaural beats file at the beginning of the night, did a five-minute WBTB, did a lot of MILD affirmation and visualization both when I first went to bed and when I was going back to sleep after the WBTB, and had a new cardboard-square bracelet, one made with a smaller square of thicker cardboard than my first one, on my wrist the entire time. Something helped me have a really good, long lucid dream. I don't know what. How very unscientific of me, I know. I'm sorry, everybody.

On a more positive note, I'm getting a little better at this! I had more lucidity than ever before this time, and I thought about and actively tried out some dream control techniques while in the dream. I've moved out of the “what is this new world?!” phase now, and into a phase that can be characterized by these thoughts: “Okay, I get the idea of what lucid dreams are, but how do I shot web?” That is, I'm just starting to learn to use those dream control abilities. It was one thing to read about the spinning scene-change/teleportation ability, but as with most skills, now that I've done it for myself, I truly understand what it's like. Note to self, though: I should never spin around to transition to a new scene without first deciding what the new scene should be, because if I let it be random, I may not like what I get.

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

[I remember three dreams from last night, the last one REALLY long and complicated. It wasn't lucid, unfortunately, but it was still pretty awesome.]

[Fragment] I'm at a mall. Even though it's late at night, there are still people approaching the entrances, mostly to get to the McDonald's and the Starbucks that are near one of the entrances.

[Somewhat longer dream] I'm at Disneyland, going on Star Tours. There's a really, really long, elaborate queue for it, but I just walk straight through, because there are hardly any people waiting for it. The first part of the ride is a standard spinner, which is up on a platform with a big painting of Buzz Lightyear and his spaceship on it. “Why would they do that?” I think when I see it. [Sigh. I really need to make serious reality-checking a stronger habit.] After we (the guests) get off the spinner, we walk back across the platform to the entrance to the next part of the queue, where we are handed a seatbelt to take with us when we go and board our actual Starspeeder, which has four rows of four seats each. I try to get into the seat furthest to the right in either the second or third row, but I can't; it's too narrow for me. There's another empty seat in one of the rows behind me, but everyone else has already sat down, so to get there, I have to climb over everyone else. I accidentally kick one person in the head and just miss another in the process.

[Really long dream begins here] I see what look like full-page panels from a comic book: each one is a cityscape at night, and there is a glow of sunlight on the horizon. The point of view moves, moving toward the horizon each time, but every time it passes over the horizon and 'turns the page,' there's still the same distant glow of light on the new horizon.

After the fourth or fifth repetition of this, the scene transforms into three-dimensional live-action all around me. I'm still me, but I know that I'm imagining myself into the universe of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which is what this place is. I'm in a room, and there are two other people there with me, a man with dark-brown hair and stubble and a blonde woman. They're both supporting characters from the show. [I knew what these characters' names were in the dream, but I cannot remember them now, so I will refer to them as “The Guy” and “The Girl.”]

Outside, it's now daytime, but there's a thick white haze covering the entire sky. This has been going on for several days, and it will allow vampires to be out and about during the day.

The Guy, The Girl, and I all go to a class at a school. I'm not playing the role of any particular character from the show; I'm just trying to blend in as a generic student. We enter a classroom, and all the students hand their homework in to the teacher before sitting down. I try to walk straight to one of the old-fashioned, dark wood desks and sit down, but the teacher grabs my arm and asks me, “Did you do your homework?” I say, “No, I don't have it.” Of course I haven't done it; I'm not actually a resident of this fictional universe. Then it occurs to me to try reaching into my backpack, which is sitting on a chair, and expecting my homework to be there in order to obtain it. I try it, but it doesn't work. [Yes, that's right. In this dream, I remembered to apply a technique I learned here on DV, even though I hadn't realized that I was dreaming. My mind is weird.]

Later, The Guy, The Girl and I are all in a car. We're talking about how I'm going to leave soon (or something is going to happen soon), but it's all right, because afterward, The Girl is going to be just the same. “In fact, she'll be whatever you want,” I say to The Guy. I'm the only one who knows that the role of The Girl is actually being played by Bebe, a fictional character I imagined up years ago [both in this dream and in my waking life, by the way], and when I stop imagining myself into the Buffyverse and leave it, Bebe will leave it, too, because she's part of my imagination.

I look out the window of the car and see, in the distance on the top of a hill, the silhouette of a big roller coaster and Ferris wheel. I think, “That must be Six Flags Magic Mountain.”

The Guy, who is driving the car, says something along the lines of, “Are those guys still following us?” We look into the rearview mirror and see four guys walking behind our car. Our car is driving pretty slowly, because we're on a narrow street with lots of other cars on it that runs through town, but still, if those guys managed to follow our car on foot all this way and through all this traffic, they must be ghosts. The Guy shoots a fireball at one of them, but he dodges it, even calling his attack (“Ghost Dodge!”). There is a fight out on the street, and The Guy, The Girl, and I all get killed by the ghosts.

Having been killed, I wake up in some unidentified location. [Not really! I was still dreaming, but as usual with FAs, I didn't realize it was false until after I woke up for real.] Waking up upon being killed is exactly what I expected to happen. I know that that particular dream/imaginary place isn't supposed to exist anymore – I was the only one dreaming/imagining it and I just got thrown out of it by being killed, so it should have just collapsed – but I think, “Screw the rules, I have imagination,” and imagine my way right back into it. [Note that although the rules being screwed here are the ones from Inception, there was no sign of one of their dream-sharing devices during this FA – everything was powered entirely by my imagination.]

I'm back in the Buffyverse, but not in the same place I just left; I'm walking around in an unpaved plaza. Passing by a particular cafe, I find my Starbucks travel mug [yes, the one I have in real life] standing on the ground outside the shop, being used to collect the water dripping off the roof. The lid is lying next to it, and both the lid and the cup are all cracked and broken from being left outside for such a long time. I say something along the lines of, “Did I leave this thing out here for the last few days?” to the cafe owner. Then I pick up the cup and the lid, take them with me, and continue walking. I find several small, brick structures with audio-animatronic characters in them, activated by motion sensors. These structures are actually trash cans; I use one of them to throw away the broken cup.

The next thing I remember is being in my old townhouse apartment in Florida. I discover that the two sheets of notebook paper I set down on the couch a few minutes ago, the ones with notes from my dreams written on them, are soaking up liquid. I pick them up and see that there's punch spilled on the couch. Annoyed, I say, “I have to read these.” My roommate, Laya, is there, and the following conversation ensues.

Laya: Someone threw a cup of punch at the couch.
Me: We don't have any paper towels in the house, do we?
Laya: No.

So I go over to the kitchen sink and get a cloth towel.

Laya: You should pull your weight around here.

I start trying to wipe the spilled punch off the couch. It's a foldout couch, and I've been sleeping on it. An unidentified male friend of ours is looking around upstairs and sees that none of the bedrooms up there are being used. I'm alerted to this fact when he calls down the stairs to us.

Unidentified Male Friend: (Emiko) never sleeps here. [he used my real first name in the dream]
Me (yelling back): Yes, I do! In fact, this is the only place I've slept at all since we've been in Florida this go-round! It's just that I sleep downstairs!

When I woke up for real, I commented, “The kitchen sink isn't up against the back wall, and since when do any of those apartments have foldout couches?” [Also, “this go-round?” Apparently, in this dream, not only had I gone back to spend another year there, but so had several of my friends from that year. Finally, my memory for spoken dialog from dreams has been really bad up until now, but this time it was really good. That's pretty cool.]

I had a late night last night and wasn't concentrating properly when I was falling asleep, so I can only remember fragments.

[1] My parents and I are having a conversation with somebody. The subject of an internship I once had comes up, and my mom describes it as “the anti-job” and goes on to explain why. [Which is, in fact, a rather apt description.]

[2] I'm in a room that looks like my bedroom, except the furniture is all in the wrong places. [doesn't count as an FA because I don't actually remember waking up]