The Lab Notebook

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

I'm in Phoenix for another regular get-together with a group of friends. Jack M. has an extra ticket to this themed dinner themed around the Goosebumps books by R.L. Stine, so he invites me to go with him, and I do. The dinner is served at a really long banquet table in a long, elaborately-designed banquet hall. Every year, they make a quilt to commemorate this themed dinner; the walls of the banquet hall are decorated with quilts from past years.

I'm with my mom in a kitchen, and she declares her intentions to make the oddest variation on “Mexican” food ever. It involves mashed sweet potatoes. We make this strange dinner and serve it to some dinner guests.

WBTB at 2:43 A.M. Took notes on the above two dreams.

I'm in a science classroom in the A building at my old high school, and science class is in session. I'm a student, and all the other student seats are filled with other students, except for the two which are occupied by my parents. I explain to one of the other students who they are, including explaining that my mom was an English teacher at that school until she retired. [True in reality.]

I'm eating a piece of pizza from BJ's, and discover that the restaurant has slipped an advertising flier into the pizza between the crust and the cheese. There's a little piece of paper towel resting directly on the crust, and on top of that is the flier, which is folded up and printed on glossy paper. It is printed in English and Japanese, and the largest, most noticeable text reads “Oe!” (Japanese for “Hey!”) in hiragana. [Awesome, I can read hiragana in dreams just as easily as I can in real life. That's pretty cool.] There's also a little cloth bag, similarly hidden in the pizza. I don't know where it comes from, but I also find a little gummy candy shaped like a Charmander; it looks a lot like the little plastic Charmander figurine that I have in real life, except more elongated.

WBTB at 4:32 A.M. Took notes on the above two dreams. I also have two notes from this one that say “afternoon nap with P.” and “breakfast with Dad – oatmeal later on,” but I really don't remember those dreams at all now.

I'm back in the A building from the aforementioned high school, in an open meeting area off of a main hallway. There are some tables set up in a rectangle, and a bunch of people my own age are sitting around them. One of them is my friend Kevina from Florida. We're doing some kind of activity that requires us to get up and move around the area. While we're doing this, I accidentally bump into another girl who's a little taller than I am, and her chin sort of gets caught on my shoulder for several moments. A third girl gets out some drawings that we all did at a previous meeting of this group. Impressed, I remark about how organized she is. I take my drawing from the stack. I tell everyone that I have to leave the meeting now, because it's 10:00 and I'm late. [For what, I'm not sure.]

I'm in an airport that I've been to several times before. [...in dreams. I still don't clue in that I'm dreaming when I find myself in these recurring dream environments.] There are separate security lines for men and women. I point this out to my dad and tell him that he can stay in the line I'm in, but he'll get some weird looks. There are freestanding, light-up advertising signs in the airport, kind of like there are in real airports and malls, except that this one has an LCD screen. The text on it is saying something about how clear and sharp the text that particular brand of screen can produce is, but I don't find it all that impressive. [LOL, I think this might have been my mind trying to tell me that I was dreaming...]

[This next part doesn't really count as a dream, lucid or otherwise, because I wasn't fully asleep. I knew the entire time that I wasn't fully asleep, I was fully aware of my real body, and I'm pretty sure I was deliberately imagining at least some of this rather than dreaming it, hence the different color and the past tense.] I was on a street somewhere, and I wanted to go into a particular shop. It was closed, so I decided to get in by climbing through the closed window. It actually worked. [For some stupid reason, dream!me is absolutely bound and determined to master the skill of walking through solid objects, even though waking!me would prefer to work on having longer-lasting lucid dreams and accomplishing the Task of the Month.] The interior of the shop was kind of dark; all the walls and furniture were made of dark wood. I went to one table and started experimenting with turning over a pair of miniature hourglasses, one with sand in it, the other with gold dust in it. I noticed that the gold-dust one was running out faster, even though they were the same size. Then I realized that I could feel something grainy blowing onto my hand. Then I looked more closely at the gold-dust hourglass and found the little hole near the top of the upper chamber, where some of the gold dust was coming out and getting all over the table and my hand. When I saw this, I went, “Oh, crap.”

A bunch of non-lucid dreams last night.

I'm at our original church, and the entire center courtyard area is full of colorful and unique play structures for the kids, including a scaled-down replica of some other important building elsewhere in the area that has statues on the facade. I go into a room in the main building, and a younger (maybe 9 or 10 years old) version of P. is there, being taken care of by the usual child-care people.

I'm sitting at a table in a building somewhere, looking out the window across a narrow body of water. Across the water is an island, where Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea are located. [They're not actually on an island in real life, by the way.] I can see both of them very clearly, as well as the people on the island. Near the shore of the island is a fleet of small, brightly-colored boats and canoes, used to take guests back and forth between the island and the mainland. Most of them are filled with guests waiting to depart for the mainland; more guests are still boarding the remaining boats.

I'm at a coffee shop (might be the same building I was in above, but I'm not positive), working on my computer, which is booted into Ubuntu. I look up and enter the password for something. I register for a camping trip that is happening outside and across the street, near the beach. When I go out to the campsite, there are a bunch of tents (or some kind of structures for us to sleep in), and some portable toilets. The people in charge are distributing rolls of toilet paper from big packages, and are also distributing food. There are also some coolers, which I look into and see that they're full of ice and bags of chicken breasts. This causes me to go, “Aw, man!” I don't want chicken sandwiches for dinner, because that's what we had that one time during the camping trip in sixth grade, and I didn't like them then. [Everything after the “because” is true in reality.]

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

When my 6:30 alarm went off this morning, I was still sleepy, despite having gone to bed just after 10, and I felt somehow sure that I'd have at least one dream that I remembered if I slept in for another hour, so I reset the alarm for 7:30. Luckily, before I fell asleep again, I remembered that REM cycles take 90 minutes, so I reset it again for 8:00. [I'm not entirely sure in what order I had the following dreams, nor am I sure whether the first one took place before or after the 6:30 alarm, but here they all are.]

I open my eyes in my bedroom and immediately notice that the light fixture in the center of the ceiling has a square cover over the lightbulb, like the light over the shower in my real bathroom, not a round cover like it does in my real bedroom. I say right out loud, “That light is wrong, so I must be dreaming! HELLS TO THE YEAH!” I get out of bed, but then stand just inside the door for a few moments, trying to figure out whether or not I can still breathe through my nose while pinching it shut. It seems I can, but only a little bit. Confused, I give up trying to figure it out and leave the room to say good morning to my mom. She's there, just like normal. I go back in my room and, still hopeful that this might still be a dream, try to walk through one of the walls. Again, it doesn't work; the wall and I are completely solid to each other.

The Dream King is talking to me. [Not the one from The Sandman; it's the gryphon from the Rankin-Bass version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”] He says something along the lines of, “When you summoned us for fun times earlier, you bounced and lay down. The next time you do it, could you lay on your back first so the palace doesn't get shaken around?”

I'm in a park somewhere with P. We have to go through it to get home. There are all these dogs running around, and she protects me from them just by knowing how to act confidently and politely toward them. At some point, we end up riding bareback on a horse through the park. I can feel the horse's hair. Eventually we get to an escalator and start riding up it (yes, still on our horse). It goes up into an enclosed chamber with animatronic figurines in it, designed to look like the riders of the escalator are coming out of the mouth of some giant creature. There is some kind of audio narration playing, thanking us for visiting this attraction. When we get to the top of the escalator and exit the chamber, we're on a street.

The 8:00 alarm went off for real, and I recalled all of the above. I went out of my room and talked to my mom.
Me: I just had a really confusing dream. Is this the first time I've come out to say hi to you this morning, or the second?
Mom: The first.
Me: I thought so. That's what I dreamed about.
After I'd confirmed it, I started feeling happy and proud about having another lucid dream.

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Meta-commentary:

The WBTB+MILD technique seems to be working well for me, at least giving me interesting dreams with good recall, if not consistently giving me lucid dreams. I've found something that works for me, though, so I'm going to keep it up. I was making the effort with my MILDing again last night, but I could be putting even more effort into it. Also, I had my cardboard-square bracelet on for most of the night, but I think I took it off when the 6:30 alarm went off because I was tired of wearing it. I'm not sure, though, so I can't say whether or not I was wearing it when I had my lucid dream. Finally, I shall have to remember not to rely on the nose-pinch RC so much; it served to confuse the issue rather than to clarify it. Next time, I'll try the finger-counting method.

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

I'm in Florida, driving my little car to a neighborhood where there's a shopping center I want to go to, only to discover that it's been torn out, leaving empty lots and abandoned buildings. Some thoughtful people have already come to the area and put up posters encouraging others not to allow the area to become a “trash park.” The posters feature the URL to the website for this campaign, which is dontgointolimbo.com. [LOL! I'm not sure whether this is more amusing or disturbing.] I park my car next to a curb and get out. There are two women standing in the street, talking about what happened. I look at my phone and see that it's 6:40 P.M. That means I still have 20 minutes, so I decide to just walk over to the store I'd been intending to go to. [ARGH. I've been practicing checking my phone twice every time I want to know the time, but it's a relatively new habit, so I guess it isn't ingrained deeply enough in my subconscious yet.]

My mom comes into my room to wake me up. She tells me that P. [my younger sister] has gotten sentimental and has invited us all to come and meet her for a day at the beach in some town with a funny name, so I should pack and get ready for one. I think, Okay, I can miss church this once. The other St. Francis anthem isn't that hard. [My third night with that little cardboard-square bracelet brought about another completely convincing false awakening – this one even more convincing than the last, because this time, my awareness within the dream of what day of the week it was and what song I would be missing out on if I missed church matched up with reality exactly.]

Woke up for real. Thought to myself, Oh. I guess I'm going to church after all. I wasn't angry about the FA at all this time; I just took it in stride. Took some notes, then went back to bed. The next dream I had followed on directly from the previous one.

I'm driving in the car with my family, through a city. I look up from something I'm using to occupy myself (book or magazine, maybe) and ask, “Where in Gonk's name are we?” My mom answers with the same funny town name she mentioned before. It's nighttime, and we drive through a residential neighborhood on a cliff overlooking the ocean. We pass a succession of three street signs that read “Ruruoni,” “B-Ruruoni,” and “C-Ruruoni.” There's one big apartment house with a bunch of letter-shaped mylar helium balloons on the roof, spelling out “SOS SHOTS” [as in, the alcoholic kind]. There is a wild party with lots of alcohol going on there. P. wants to go to the party and spend the night in that building, but our parents won't let her, so we're having a family fight.

We're on the top floor of some kind of big, public building with lots of glass walls and a long staircase going down into the rest of the building. P. says to all of us, “Meet you at the bottom,” and starts going down the stairs.

[What's the deal? It's like my subconscious went, “Here, have a big family fight – it's been a while since you've had one in reality.” That kind of sucks. :-( ]

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]

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary and notes written while awake]

Last night, while going to sleep and attempting to MILD, I stopped to pray. I had stopped to pray the previous night, too, and had had no dreams that I could remember, so I almost didn't want to do it again, but I told myself, Post hoc, ergo propter hoc much? You know that doesn't make sense. Just go ahead and do it. So I did. [I'm only writing this part down because it relates to the first dream I had last night.]

[Dream #1] On the corner of the street my house is on [a corner that doesn't exist in real life – the real corner is just a 90-degree turn in the road, but in the dream, it's a four-way intersection], in the front yard of the corner house, there is a big, tall tree with bright yellow leaves like the leaves on a maidenhair tree. There are also some gourds with faces hand-carved on them hanging from the tree. The house belongs to an old woman, who did the carving. I am reading a newspaper article about this house, in a newspaper called The Syntax. According to the article, a few days ago, a strong wind picked up and blew all the leaves off the tree. Immediately thereafter, people in the neighborhood started having various strokes of both good and bad fortune, and they all claimed that it was because of the wind blowing the leaves off the tree. This sparked a neighborhood-wide controversy: were the good things really caused by the tree, or the bad things, or none of them? Someone who was interviewed for the newspaper article argued for the “none of them” position by quoting the Bible verse about how no one can tell where the wind comes from or where it is going. [John 3:8, for the record.]

[Dream #2] I'm walking through an indoor hallway to get to some kind of high school sporting event that is being held in a high school gymnasium. One of the teams is called the Blue Meanies; they have two mascot outfits, a male and female Norse warrior. The other team has someone in a mascot outfit, too. [I don't remember now what it looked like, or what their team name was.] Each team has also brought just a handful of cheerleaders to the game.

[Dream #3] I'm playing PackRat. [Again.] There are two different limited-release collections pretty much right at the same time, and they've re-released a whole bunch of retired cards for the recipes in the retired collections. The images on one of the limited-release sets are of pipes or cables, and they extend across multiple different cards. They're making it even easier than they did with the jigsaw-puzzle set, I think. [The jigsaw-puzzle set exists in reality; this limited-release set does not.] I find that my pack has been erased and refilled with 5 cards from the other limited-release set, the one with normal art [in Doug J.'s signature style], one of which is the top card.

[Dream #4 – seemed to segue directly from the above, but how, I couldn't say] I'm outside somewhere, apparently in the yard or garden of some manor house or something, and it's nighttime. I see a fireworks show starting up a short distance away; the horizon is low and flat, so I can see it with no obstructions at all. My mom is there, and I tell her that if she turns around, she can see the fireworks show.

Woke up at 2:32 A.M. Took some notes on my dreams so far on a notepad, then went back to sleep, attempting to MILD again. It worked!

[Dream #5] I'm in the house I grew up in again. [Although this is a known dream sign for me, I don't remember specifically thinking, “hey, if I'm here, then I must be dreaming.” Nonetheless,] I'm lucid enough to decide to walk around from room to room of my own volition. When I get to the bathroom, I try to walk through the back wall of the white tile shower, which would take me out into the patio. [Yes, the real house is laid out that way.] It doesn't work; I only get part way into it, not through it. I don't feel anything. I continue walking through the house, and one of my parents sees me. [That's all I remember, unfortunately.]

[Dream #6] My family and I are on vacation in Key Largo. [Apart from having tropical beaches, it's absolutely nothing at all like the real Key Largo, which I've been to once.] It consists of a couple of islands connected by a bridge. On the first one, there is a high, tower-like hill. We climb the stairs to the top and look out at the ocean and the other island, which is where the town and the boat launch area are. I exclaim, “Guess what I forgot! Sunblock!” Then we go down the hill and over into town.

The town, or at least the downtown, consists of one big continuous building with corridors lined with shops and restaurants running through it. The entrances to the corridors are numbered and are rounded, making them look more like tunnels. We go down corridor #8 and pass a lot of shops. It's obvious how small and rivalry-filled, yet close-knit, the community here is by what's written on the signs people have in front of their shops: one of them says that their food is better than the food at another shop (even specifically naming the other one!), and another contains a proposal of marriage. Eventually, the tunnel ends in a rounded food court, like in a mall. My parents and I go over to a coffee shop/bakery toward the far side of the chamber and a little to the right. There are breads and pastries displayed all over the back wall and in long glass cases.

[Very abruptly, the scene changes and] My mom and I are driving in her car back toward the main highway that runs through the Florida Keys. (The two islands mentioned above that make up Key Largo stick out from it at a right angle.) I see the high-rise buildings of Key West [the what now?!] in the distance. The sun is either rising or setting, and the way its light is hitting them is making them glow with amazingly brilliant neon colors. [Some of which would be impossible in real life. It's surreal, but really beautiful.] I tell my mom to look at the light on the high-rises, and she does. In order to get a better view of it from further back, she turns the car so the front windshield is facing the high-rises, then starts backing it up, across the sandy beach and into the ocean. Somewhere around here, I shift to viewing the scene from a third-person perspective, up above the car. The car keeps going across the water for a pretty good distance before it sinks into the ocean and we die. Then I think to myself, “Only not really, because this is a dream.” Then the scene rewinds [on its own, not because of anything I did, thought, or willed]. The car drives forward, back over the surface of the water, with me still watching from my third-person perspective.

On our way back toward the town (I'm back to first-person perspective now), I look back and can see where the main highway is by the telephone poles and elevated bridges on the horizon. When we reach the town, I can see that there's a small railroad that goes all the way around the outside of the building, and every shop has a back door that opens onto the railroad track. This is how they load and unload things. Of course, I think; there's no room for cars or trucks on the island. [Then what are we doing driving our car there?] We re-enter the coffee shop/bakery from before, through the back door, and now we order food: cinnamon rolls out of one of those canisters you get from the refrigerated section at the grocery store. The shop attendant opens the canister behind the counter, and the vertical stack of cinnamon rolls expands, the frosting running down the sides. I say aloud, “Do want!” We proceed along the outside of the glass cases to where the coffee machines are. The signs on the coffee machines show that they contain a milder and a bolder version of Dunkin' Donuts coffee. I start getting myself some coffee, and then the dream ends.

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Some meta-commentary on the lucid dreaming journey:

One of the things I'm really liking about this experiment with dream journaling and lucid dreaming is that it's finally broken me of the bad habit of staying up past 11:00 every night that I developed when I started college. I was still doing it up until a week or two ago. I always used to want to stay in bed until well after sunrise, but the sunlight always woke me up, so I got a sleep mask and got into the habit of reaching over and putting it on as soon as the sunlight started to wake me up, then continuing to sleep, or trying to. I've been in this habit for at least a year, and I'm finding that it's so deeply ingrained that I'm still doing it, even though I'm now going to bed earlier and getting up at or before sunrise. I would be annoyed by this if I hadn't realized that it's useful – I have a natural, biological WBTB alarm set.

Last night, I read this thread and decided to adopt the mantra “I lucid dream” for MILD purposes. I decided to put that sentence in the same mental categories with such sentences as “I play the clarinet,” “I speak Spanish,” and “I write novels:” the categories of “ongoing, recurring action” and “learned skill.”

My previous lucid experience back on the night of October 1 left me euphoric for the entirety of the next day, but this one just left me disappointed. While I was recalling my dreams after waking up, I thought: What did I just say about lucid dreaming being a learned skill? That was only my third time. What was it like the third time I played the clarinet? I know the answer to that one: I only played one, two, or three different notes, because that was all I knew how to play. It took lots of practice and learning before I could play all the notes. I hope, and intend, to master lucid dreaming skills via the same process.

Awake, Non-lucid dream, [Commentary on dreams made after the fact, while writing this journal entry]

I hear the text message chime on my phone go off, so I get up and check it, saying to myself, “I'd better check that. There are only a couple of people who would text me in the middle of the night (P. and Ashley R.), and they're both important to me.” But when I check it, there's no indication of a new text message, and the screen looks completely normal. [I think. Was only the Vibrate icon showing, or was the Alarm icon showing, too? I'm not sure.] It says that it's 4:38 A.M., which seems right, so I conclude that I've just unwittingly dreamed myself up an unplanned WBTB alarm, but have reacted to it in reality. “Great, that should help,” I think. I move the phone over from the sewing cabinet to the dresser and go back to bed. [I'm an idiot! If I had just thought to look back at the time display on the phone one more time, I might have realized that I hadn't actually woken up at all, but I didn't. As it stands now, I'm pretty sure I just dreamed this entire sequence of events, but not positive, which is frankly rather disturbing.] [And I just remembered while writing this that as I was first trying to go to sleep last night, one of the things I was thinking about was the fact that the current Task of the Month is to have an in-dream text or IM conversation. That must have triggered the in-dream text message chime. LOL!]

Later, my phone alarm wakes me up again. It's set up so that the alarm sound is a recording I made of myself narrating a dream journal entry that talks about some embarrassing topics. Still lying on my bottom bunk, I grab the phone off the floor and muffle it between my body and the mattress so my parents won't hear it. Too late; they've already heard the beginning of it. They come into the room and ask me if I'm all right, and I explain that yes, I am, and I have my phone alarm set up to play back a recorded dream journal entry that I made on my trip to Europe back in September. (It was another of those tours with Pam S., by the way.) So I get up and go into the kitchen to have breakfast. [All this happened in the house I grew up in, by the way. It was exactly the way I remember it. I completely failed to clue in. As far as I could tell while I was in the dream, this was reality, and I was supposed to be there. I conclude that it's true, at least for me, that when dreaming about real places from memory, it is easy to be unaware that you're dreaming. I fail. To be fair, though, it's very easy for me to accept that setting as normal reality because, for a little over half my life, it was normal reality.]

So then I'm outside somewhere, going up a hill in some kind of vehicle on a road. There are LCD screens above the road that have scrolling text on them, talking about how barbarafett comes off as a ranty, opinionated blowhard in her dream journal entries and forum posts at DreamViews. [Of which I had made none, so far, in reality when I had this dream. A warning?] It expresses some of this meaning through TVTropes potholes. When I get to the top of the hill, there are these little go-karts that are only a little bigger than a roller skate, but are strong enough to support the weight of a person and have enough horsepower to move around fairly quickly when a person is standing on them. That's what we're supposed to do here, so I do. I stand on one of the go-karts with my right foot and navigate it along a path painted onto the glossy concrete. The path has a lot of switchbacks in it. The go-karts go fast enough that staying up on them is challenging and fun.

I finally did wake up for real, felt around on the dresser for my phone, didn't find it, and then saw that it was still on the sewing cabinet where I always leave it. I cried out in anger and frustration. “How many FAs can one person have in one night?!” I asked myself, irritated. I did the nose-plug RC and it passed, so I said, "Idiot! You should have checked that the first time!" (Meaning, when I first heard the text-message chime.)