The Lab Notebook

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

Night of December 7-8

I'm in the kitchen of House #1, looking up somebody's phone number on my cell phone. It looks like a calculator, but it has a two-line display, and the number is stored in it. Then, my dad, P. and I have a conversation via text messages about camping. I see the text messages on the screen of this calculator-phone thing. My dad says, “Want to go camping?” I say, “I love camping! Do we have to go in winter, though?” My dad says he doesn't expect us to go in winter. [There was a text message from P. in there somewhere, but I don't remember what it said.]

Then, my dad comes into the room, and he and I argue about how to retrieve the phone numbers of past incoming callers from the house phone. [My dad and I had figured this out together in real life the evening before I had this dream, but the phone in the dream had a much bigger, much more complicated two-panel display than our real house phone has.]

Night of December 8-9

There's an area where some sort of armed conflict has been taking place. There is an organization of people called “Help the Hungry” who are providing food to the survivors by parachuting in with it and by air-dropping it.

I'm in the bombed-out, roofless, empty remains of a small, single-story house that had only one or a few rooms. There is a rectangular box in the middle of the floor of the largest room. All the sides of the box are on fire, but there is a single hard-boiled egg in the center of the box, and it's not burning. I know that it was air-dropped there by Help the Hungry. Oh, a dream, I realize. I decide to go out of the house and explore. I turn around, toward another section of the house, a rectangular section where the wall at one of the narrow ends has been blown up. There's too much rubble between me and the opening for me to walk through conveniently, so I fly over it.

Once I get outside, I discover that the house is in the middle of a wide-open, flat, grassy field, lined with trees around the edges. [Now that I think of it, it resembles the one at the park closest to House #1, only the one in the dream is bigger, has more trees, and has no roads or other buildings in sight.] There is only one other person there, standing right near me as I'm flying just a few feet above the ground. He says something to me [that I don't remember now]. His tone doesn't sound hostile, but I know that he's part of the group responsible for bombing the house, so I want to get away from him quickly. I start flying straight up to escape. He makes a grab for my legs to catch me, but misses. I continue ascending, and the dream starts to fade. Gray blotches appear and spread, blotting out the sky around me.

When I found myself back in bed, I thought, No, I'm not done yet, with resolve. I didn't want this dream to be over already. I remained perfectly still and concentrated on visualizing the dream I'd just been having. I remember thinking, Please... please... please...

...and then I'm back in the sky above that same grassy field, falling toward it just as fast as I had been flying away from it. I do a faceplant into the grass, but feel no sensation at all, neither impact nor deceleration nor pain. I'm now lying on my stomach in the grass. Three or four people about my own age are crouched down in front of me, watching me as I push myself up. I try to speak, but for some reason, although my mind is sending the right commands, my mouth won't work. Instead, I smile and wave at the young woman on the right, who smiles and waves back. As I'm getting up, I keep trying to speak, and after a few seconds, I succeed in getting my mouth to work. I say something like, “Hi, I'm (Emiko). Hide me from anyone other than the Help the Hungry people, will you? I don't think they like me very much.” By “they” I mean the group responsible for bombing the house, and the reason I don't think they like me very much is that I ran (well, flew) away from them. The others seem to accept me, and we all walk away across the field as a group. [That's the last I remember.]

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Side notes:

I was getting to be kind of annoyed that I'd had dreams featuring House #1, one of my dream signs, for two nights in a row without going lucid. Last night, I started to do more serious RCs again, and changed up my before-bed affirmations, making them more along the lines of, “When I'm in an unfamiliar place, especially House #1, I realize that I'm dreaming.” It seems to have worked.

Also, this is the second time that a dream has started to fade right when I've been flying upward. I think it's because both times, I was concentrating exclusively on the act of flying, not paying any attention at all to the environment around me. Lesson learned: In the future, look around more when flying. (Yay for DEILDs, though! I'm so glad I know that trick and can pull it off successfully. )