The Lab Notebook

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

[This is a catch-up journal entry. This dream is from the night of October 31-November 1.]

I'm at one of my old houses (the second one I remember). A woman my age (whom I don't recognize) comes to the door leading into the garage. She's there to talk to me about going on a week-long retreat in a place called Morning Canyon in March or April, to study the book of Ninian. The retreat is sponsored by a missions organization [not by InterVarsity]. I recall receiving an e-mail containing a promotional video about the program. I recognized one of the people in the video as my old friend Bekah W. from college, even though she had bleached her brown hair blond. I tell all this to the woman, and she says, “Oh, do you know Bekah?” It turns out that she's a friend of Bekah's, too. We also talk about my parents' jobs. I decide I want to go on the retreat, but conclude that I'll have to fundraise for it, since it's a whole week long. I start thinking about what I want my fundraising letter to say, and come up with the following:

"I live in the worst part of California for jobs. Riverside County has an unemployment rate of over 15%. It's very unlikely that I'm going to have a job in time for this retreat, which is why I'm asking for your support."

[What? That's true now, but I don't think it was true when we lived at that house. Despite the setting, though, it's clear from my thoughts and reactions that this dream was taking place during this present period of my life.]

[The dream skips forward here, and now] It's my first day out on the road on my way to the retreat. I'm spending the night in a room that has bunk beds. I get into the top bunk and go to sleep.

I wake up in that top bunk, look at a digital clock, and think, “It's the wrong time to get up! I overslept!”

I wake up in that top bunk again. I look at the digital clock again, and see that it's now the correct time to get up. I've just had a false awakening, I realize. Now my parents are there in the room with me.

When I woke up this morning, I thought, “I need to go check my e-mail and see if that opportunity really exists.” Then I remembered that there is no book of Ninian to study.

[Yes!!! I actually had a dream within a dream!!!! That was AWESOME.]

[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! ]

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

[This is a catch-up journal entry. This dream is from the night of October 28-29.]

I'm at a meeting of a class I'm in. We seem to be in an upstairs balcony space with cushioned benches along both sides, and no table in the middle. I get out some generic allergy medicine and tell everyone about how effective it is and how often I take it. I go down to the basement of the building we're in to get some water. My Aunt Edie enters the room.

I'm with a group of my peers, and we're all walking to a swimming pool. I'm the only one who's still wearing street clothes, because I didn't bring a swimsuit with me because I don't want to be seen in one; everyone else already has theirs on. As we're walking, I say, “Wait a minute. You guys have seen me in a swimsuit before, haven't you?” I remember when they saw me in my new blue one-piece [that I have in real life, but no one but my family has ever seen me wear it]. I wish I had my swimsuit on now.

My family and I are at Disneyland. The entrance to Star Tours is mostly filled in with blue construction walls, and the space is being used for character meet-and-greets, one of which P. wants to go and see.

Woke up at 5:30, took some notes, went back to bed. I hadn't gone to bed until almost 11, and I now know from personal experience that I have more and better dreams just before getting up. The one I had early this morning was EPIC. Too bad my recall is so spotty, since I waited over an hour to start writing about it.

I'm with a group of my peers, and we're all making our way to a class somewhere. My peers are communicating with our other classmates via cell phone about how to get to the classroom. Someone who's with me says something about explaining to me how to get there. First, we get into an elevator situated on the right side of the entranceway to a building. We have to hold the elevator for one of our other friends/classmates who is approaching. The elevator takes us down into the building complex.

The next thing I remember is being in a little car, still with that same group of friends from the elevator, driving through a parking garage. There's a place where the interior changes from a garage to a white, carpeted room with nurses doing some mundane task in it (there weren't any patients in this room; it was just a sort of prep/administrative area). I say, “We have to drive through that?” I think, This is weird. It's a lot like the stuff I dream about. But I know where we came from and where we're going, so this is real. [*facepalm* Well, to be fair, asking myself how I got to wherever I am is the RC I've been using the most often lately.] The open space in the middle of the room is wide enough for our little car, and as we get into the room further, I see that the path turns to the left and goes out of the room again. We travel through the room on that path, which leads to an outdoor garden patio. There is an old man out there whose irises are all red, reclining on a hospital bed, and I talk to him.

[Scene change.] I'm on a two-lane road that runs in a ring around a huge rock that sticks out of the ocean. It looks a lot like Morro Rock, only it's two or three times as big, both in height and in circumference. The road is elevated up out of the ocean, and is built out from the rock, so there is an open space of ocean between the road and the rock. The road comes up to about a third or a half the height of the rock. It's nighttime, but I can still see everything clearly even with no apparent light sources [just moonlight, I guess]. The ocean waves are surging up unusually high, so that they break over the sides of the elevated roadway. There are at least a couple hundred other people walking on the roadway; we're all coming back from a camping trip out on the rock [I think]. We're all walking on the sidewalk near the outside-edge railing when the waves start, and I watch at least two successive people fall over the rail into the ocean and start drowning. It occurs to me that this is a chance to watch someone die, something I'll probably never have another chance to do, but I can't bring myself to actually watch. As the waves get higher, I step back from the railing so that I'm standing in the middle of the road, where the waves won't hit me, and start calling out to the others to do the same. No one listens. I think, I am going to die, but in a very detached way, with no fear or, for that matter, any emotion at all. The incoming waves rebounding off the big rock start to create smaller, but still scary waves that break over the inside-edge railing. My parents come out of the crowd and find me, and I'm glad to see that they're okay. Eventually, most of the crowd makes it to a tour bus that's waiting near the place where the two-lane elevated road widens and connects to the roads on the mainland, so everyone can get on it and be taken away from the rock safely.

There has been a contest to choose the guests who will attend a dinner party with a friendly, very easy-going, gray-haired woman who makes letters out of soft wax. I am at this dinner. There is another woman there who collects little figurines, including one that looks like a classic Hollywood actress. I mess up the top bar of the wax “E” that the first woman has made, making it all bent and chewed up so that she has to redo that part, but she doesn't mind because she loves doing her art. [It wasn't until I woke up and was writing down this dream that I recognized this woman as former Survivor contestant Gillian Larson, who was the guest speaker at a lunch seminar I went to last week.]

Third-person perspective. I'm watching a teenage girl walk around in a mall or a department store. She rides up an escalator, and I can see the bright-green lights glowing from the spaces between the steps. All the time she's walking around, I can hear a voice narrating her story. The words of the story are written in the first person with the teenage girl as the point-of-view character, but the voice reading them is Scott Sigler's. [Not surprisingly, as I just finished getting caught up on the latest episode of the Ancestor podcast an hour before I went to bed.] According to the narration, this girl “eats, sleeps, and breathes TV:” she has a name very similar to that of a specific, well-known TV character, she watches a lot of TV shows, and other aspects of her life are very similar to the situation on various TV shows. I'm aware that what Scott is reading is the first chapter of Ancestor. [The actual first chapter of Ancestor is absolutely nothing like this.]

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 woke up just before 5:00 A.M. last night and was disappointed that I'd slept through most of the night, couldn't remember any dreams, and wasn't going to have time for another full sleep cycle before the rest of the house started getting up at 5:30. I decided to try to go back to sleep anyway, focusing once again on MILD affirmations and visualizations. It worked.

At some point between 5:00 and 6:40 [when I woke up for real], I have a false awakening where I'm in my current room and my bed is parallel to the closet doors [not perpendicular to them, as it is in reality]. I'm lying on the floor between the bed and the closet, all tangled up in my blankets. [I'm not sure when this happened relative to my other dreams, so I'm just sticking it here at the beginning.]

I'm looking at the results of a Google Image Search for something involving the terms “japan” and [I think] “front.” Almost all the photos that are coming up are of cherry blossoms, but one of them is of autumn leaves. I say something along the lines of, “There are about ten hundred billion pictures of cherry blossoms, but almost no pictures of the leaves.”

The next thing I know, I'm lying on my back in a wide expanse of grass. Several big, flat leaves in bright red, yellow, and green gently float down onto me from the nearest tree. The sky is blue and the weather is sunny, clear, and calm. There are trees spread out all over this grassy area, all with leaves that are turning autumn colors. Somewhere in here, I recognize that I'm dreaming, but there's no specific moment that triggers this realization. Saito is there with me, and I want to show him a seed pod from a magnolia tree. So, one comes rolling down the hill toward me, and I catch it. It's bigger than it would be in real life, and I say so when I show it to him. He says to me, “It's your mind.” Indeed; by now I'm not only aware that I'm dreaming, but I've caught on to the fact that this is my mind's rendering of what autumn is. I look around for an acorn, but find none. I say, “Of course there aren't any acorns – all my trees are are liquid-ambers.” [That's because that's what most of the trees in the neighborhood where I grew up were.]

This big, tall, flying guy in a blue costume with matching blue makeup, who looks like he came straight from a Cirque du Soleil production, comes and lifts me up in his arms and flies away with me. As I'm being lifted off the ground, the thought of hot-air balloons crosses my mind, and [for some inexplicable reason], I ask myself, “Which city in Canada is the balloon city?” The blue flying guy flies us through a series of very large, rectangular rooms with movie projection screens on all the walls and the ceiling. At first, the screens are showing immersive views of natural vistas in Canada, accompanied by some appropriately dramatic and inspiring music that I don't recognize. I'm not afraid, because I recognize that the movie screens and the guy flying me through them are all part of the Disney theme park attraction I'm now on. The attraction is kind of like Soarin' meets the CircleVision movie at Canada's pavilion in Epcot. The film footage is filmed in a style very much like that of Soarin'; it's obviously intended to make it look like you're flying, except that the shots are designed for the big rectangular screens. The film in the last room of the attraction shows the transition over the border into the U.S., and flies us over Mt. Rushmore and then under a waterfall projected on the back wall. We go under the waterfall by going through an opening in the wall.

Once I'm through the opening, I'm standing on the ground, and the blue flying guy is gone. I recognize the place where I'm standing as the interior of the Snow White's Scary Adventures attraction from Disneyland. There are no ride vehicles anywhere to be seen, though. The Evil Queen is just a little way in front of me. I approach her, and she turns around and says something scary [just like on the real ride]. I scream really loudly and high-pitched. For a few moments, terror completely overtakes all my awareness. While screaming, I think, Wake me up! Wake me up! hoping that the dream will end. [Remarkably,] It doesn't this time. I finish screaming, and observe that the dream hasn't ended, I'm still standing there, and the Evil Queen is also still standing there, turned to face the path where the ride vehicles should be, but is now motionless and silent, as she has finished saying her prerecorded phrase. So I start punching her in the face. I do this repeatedly, but I don't feel anything. While I'm beating her up, I shout at her: “You're an AAT*! I carry more complicated devices than you around on my back every day!” Which is true; she may be computer-controlled, but my laptop is much higher-tech. No longer afraid of her, I walk along the path and into the next scene of the attraction, where there is another AAT figure of the Evil Queen [this is the case in reality, too, but the track layout there is completely different]. This one turns around and starts to shriek something at me to try and scare me, but her words stop and peter out halfway through, because she can see that I'm not afraid of her. I continue walking through the scene. [*My personal shortening of “Audio-Animatronic™,” the robotic technology used to create characters in many attractions at Disney theme parks. I think I shouted more things than this, but this is all I remember shouting now.]

The next thing I know, I'm outside again, but surrounded by buildings this time. I decide to rub my hands together, only to discover that they're really hot. I realize that that's because my real hands are really hot under my blankets. That's the last thing I remember from that dream, but it seemed to take me a little longer to wake up fully. When I did, my face broke into a smile and then a laugh when I remembered the encounter with the Evil Queen. In reality, I had been pretty scared of those moments on that ride when I was a kid, and I still dislike them now. I'm really, really proud of this dream. I think facing something/someone you've been afraid of for a long time and standing up to it is quite an achievement, and a good, worthwhile use of the ability to lucid dream.

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

The sidewalk on the southwest side of the stretch of M. Road that heads southeast toward R. V. Road, which is on a downhill slope [both in this dream and in reality], has a banister running alongside it [only in this dream, as far as I know]. I'm sliding down the banister, and two large dogs come up to me to investigate. I manage to stop on the banister so that the woman who owns them can talk to me. She says that the oddness of what I was doing and my ethnicity had made the dogs curious. I say, “Really? I didn't think this was all that strange. I just took it for granted.” I feel the sensation of a dog's teeth gripping the back of my shirt, just behind my left shoulder, and pulling back on it, but I reassure myself by thinking, “It's all in your head.” Once again, I've only realized that I'm dreaming as I'm waking up from it.

I'm driving in the brown car with my mom to go and pick up our friend Sam K. from one of our old houses. He isn't there. When we turn around to head back, we decide to “go halvsies” - that is, we both sit in the back seat and reach forward as needed to turn the steering wheel. It's very easy to reach it. I remark, “Wow, I didn't expect this to work so well! I didn't expect it to work at all. I thought we would just crash and die.” I'm remembering having previously dreamed about driving this way [see my dream journal entry dated 10/21/10 – that's the dream I'm remembering], and am surprised that driving that way is working out so well in reality. [Ha!!] Our car goes all over lawns and sidewalks with us driving it this way, and we have one close call with another car, but we manage to avoid actually running into anything. I woke up and was very annoyed to realize that that had just been a dream, too, and that I hadn't noticed that it was one.

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

While out of the house somewhere, I put on a navy-blue, stretchy headband [that I have in real life], and make some kind of wish. This causes me to suddenly have long hair again [I cut my real hair short at the beginning of this month]. My hair is down to my shoulder blades, which is still a little shorter than it was when I cut it, and seems thinner and wavier than it used to be when it was long. I don't want my mom to see me with my hair long again, because if she did, I would have to explain to her about the magical headband. So, when I return home, I do my best to avoid letting her see me.

I consider re-cutting my hair myself, but decide I don't want to, because it wouldn't come out very neat. I decide instead to go back and find the stretchy headband and make another wish to reverse the effects of the first one. I ask my mom if I can use the car to run an errand. She asks what it is, and I answer that I'm going to a vacant lot to look for something I lost. This is true, but it's not the whole truth.

I get into the brown car, and someone is in the front passenger seat. [My dad, I think.] I say to him, “Watch the street signs. I don't even know my own neighborhood in these dreams.” And they'll probably change, I think. I back the car out of the garage, turn it to my left, and continue backing in that direction all the way down to the corner, where the street turns 90 degrees. [In this dream, this corner is now a 90-degree turn like it is in reality, not a four-way intersection like it was in the first dream described in my dream journal entry dated 10/08/10.] Sure enough, as we drive down the street backwards and then back up the street going forward, each street sign says something different the second time we pass it than it did the first time we passed it. The street signs are all blue with white letters [not green with white letters, as they are in reality]. Eventually, I find the street I'm looking for and turn left onto it.

The next scene seems to take place in a fast-food restaurant. I find the headband I was looking for and restore my short haircut. [For this part of the dream, I was in “video-game-controller” mode again, as I described in my dream journal entry dated 10/21/10. I was kind of removed from the action and aware that it was all going on in my mind/imagination, and at the same time, I was fully aware of my real body.]

Woke up at 1:36 A.M., took some notes on my dream, went back to bed.

My parents and I are attending a wedding at the estate of some really rich people. The estate has a little re-creation of a neighborhood from old-timey New York, and the little church in that neighborhood is being used for the ceremony. In one room, an old man, the father or grandfather of the groom, I think, is lying on a hospital bed, all dressed up for the ceremony and being included in the festivities. After the ceremony, they make everyone attending the wedding pose for a group picture. My dad wants to put some sand in containers to use it to stabilize some photography equipment, so he gets out a bunch of sand toys, and I help him shovel sand into buckets. The people who own the estate are originally from Thailand, and they've recreated the beaches of Thailand on their estate. The sand we're shoveling is filled with beautiful blue-and-white seashells, colorful stones and jewels, and gold dust.

Woke up at 3:36 A.M., took some notes, went back to bed.

I'm at my old high school, walking across campus, looking for the classroom of one of my old teachers. I get to the western edge of campus, where the furthest-out portable classrooms used to be, and discover that there's a sort of ravine there, with concrete stairs leading down the near side and up the far side. On the far side of the ravine stand the furthest-out portables. I'm not really surprised that so much has changed in the years since I've been away.

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An aside:

When I cut my hair short in reality, it was after many years of having long hair. I've been wondering for a while whether or not my dream self (if I may steal some jargon from the Matrix universe, my residual self-image) would still have long hair. Not surprisingly, thinking about this over a period of time caused me to dream about it. I find it interesting, and reassuring, that after only three weeks of having short hair in reality, even my dream self apparently feels that that's the norm, and that having long hair feels wrong.

Also, I'm pleased with the increasing frequency of my lucid dreams, but disappointed with my lack of control. I keep realizing that I'm dreaming and either not trying to do or change anything at all, or trying and failing. I will continue trying to improve.

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

Last night, my WBTB went on for nearly fifteen minutes, due to my trying (and failing) to figure out what it was that had gone thump and woken me up. I think it helped me attain lucidity. I should do WBTBs that last that long more often.

I'm bicycling along a sidewalk that winds through grass along the side of a street. Every so often, the sidewalk rises up and becomes a little bridge that allows water to go under it. It goes up-and-down and side-to-side so much that it's a little difficult to bicycle on.

I'm in a building with a group of my Literacy AmeriCorps friends. We're in an open, interior space that runs through several stories of the multi-story building, and has lots of staircases and landings in it. My LAC friends are standing around on the staircases and landings. We're talking about the party that's going on in a room upstairs. One of my friends says that, in order to get in, you have to bribe the guy watching the door in a “touchy-feely” way, e.g., by touching him in a sexual way. I absolutely refuse to do this. At some point during this conversation, I realize, “This is a dream. I can't really be talking to these people.” [I haven't seen any of them in reality since the program ended; we don't even live in the same state anymore.] Then, a bunch of unidentified guys come up a flight of stairs from deeper in the building and start trying to molest me and the other girls with their hands. As they begin to surround me like a flood, I realize this is turning into a nightmare, and try to leave the scene by closing my eyes and turning around. Once again, it does absolutely nothing. The guys start getting their hands on me, and achieve their goal of discovering where my erogenous zones are. I'm scared and shocked and I wish it would end, so it does. I wake up, and go back to sleep shortly afterward.

I'm in a room where I and three of my LAC friends, one other girl and two guys, have been staying. I find a guitar in the closet. A tall guy I don't recognize is also in the room. One of us asks, “Who in this room plays guitar?” and the other answers with “Lisa C.” and one or two other names. [I can't remember now who said what, or what the other two names were.]

I'm in a giant, room-sized aquarium. It's rectangular and about twelve feet from floor to ceiling, and all but the top three feet are filled with fresh water. One wall of the rectangular room is covered with small, enclosed plastic boxes, each containing a different kind of fish. You can open up the doors on the front of each box to let the fish out into the larger aquarium. I'm swimming in the water and can apparently breathe under it. I'm playing with the fish that are out in the larger aquarium, trying to get them to act out some scenario, but it isn't working out too well because there's this one carnivorous fish with big, pointy teeth that keeps eating most of the smaller fish. Eventually, it even starts eating another fish that's bigger than itself. I swim up to the very top row of little boxes, one of which contains a Blue Tang. I think about letting it out, but decide not to because I'm not sure if this one is a freshwater fish or not, and because I don't have very many of that kind. At this point, I discover that I suddenly can't breathe as easily under the water, and I realize that it's because the top three feet of the room are now filled with water, too. [Yes, I realize that doesn't make much sense. No, I didn't realize this during the dream, nor did I realize I was dreaming.] I go to the end of the room and start trying to get the door open so I can breathe the air outside the room. It has a wheel on it that you turn to open the door. While I'm still trying to open the door, before I can either drown or get it open, I wake up. [Dude. That was pretty cool. I wanna go back and play in the aquarium room again sometime.]

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).

[This started out as a regular dream, but it was after my alarm had gone off and I was only partially asleep and partially awake, so I think I was actively using my imagination to keep this sequence of events going, and it felt like I was doing so from outside it, as if my imagination were a video game controller. Hence the shift from teal and present tense, representing a regular dream, to green and past tense, which is what I use for those times when I'm not sure if what I experienced was a really low-quality lucid dream, or just me imagining stuff, or what.]

I'm in the brown car with P. We're both sitting in the back seat, but I'm still controlling the car. [I honestly don't know if I'm just reaching forward and grabbing the wheel every so often, or I'm just telekinetic.] I remember that we've driven this way in dreams before. I say to P., “Thanks again for the ride.” Apparently, she brought the car to pick me up from somewhere and take me home. We're driving up a major street in the area where we grew up.

At some point, we shifted from riding in the car to riding on bicycles. She was on a little pink bicycle that one or the other of us had when we were little. We continued our journey back toward the house on bicycles. I realized that on the route we were going, we would eventually get to a street named Amaranth, where I would get hit by a car and killed. I knew this because I remembered dreaming about it before. [Now that I'm fully awake and writing this, though, I don't remember dreaming about it before. More false memories, I think.] As we got closer to Amaranth Street, I felt a cold chill of fear of my impending death for a moment, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I was also aware that none of this was real. We reached the corner where we could turn to get onto Amaranth Street, or take a different route. I said, “Do you believe in fate? I don't.” P. decided to take the different route, the one that wouldn't take us onto Amaranth Street at all, and we continued riding.

[These dreams, all of which were non-lucid, are actually from the night before last. The ones from last night are private.]

I'm at a supermarket. I attempt to get money out of an ATM, but my card doesn't work. While I'm there, I run into Jenny A. [She's a real-life friend of mine.]

I'm with a group of people my own age, and we're all studying for either the A+ or CCNA exams. We're discussing whether or not you should broadcast SSIDs. [That question has come up as I've been studying for the A+ in real life. The sample questions say you shouldn't broadcast them, but they're apparently operating under the assumption that the wireless network is only there for the benefit of company employees. If it's there for the benefit of customers, then of course you should broadcast the SSID, so your customers will know which network is yours.]

I'm outside a tall office building with P. We need to get into a conference room, where lunch is being served. The way we're going to get there is by riding up to the outside window of the conference room on a porch swing being lifted by a helicopter. P. goes up first. She tilts the swing so it's not at a right angle to the chains [by flipping it over? I guess so, but I didn't see her do it] and stands on top of it, holding on to the chain to her left. [I think] I tell her that that's dangerous, but she ignores me and rides up. She has no problem stepping off the swing and into the conference room.

I don't get to enter the conference room by riding up on the swing. I have to get there by climbing up this net of ropes that has appeared on the side of the building. My mom is there cheering me on. On my way up, I can smell the coffee in the conference room. When I get to where I can see into the room, some of the monsters from Sesame Street are there. Also, Mr. Saito is one of the people at the lunch meeting. [Why is he the only one from the Dream Team who's actually shown up in any of my dreams so far? I think it's because of my long-abiding love for Japan and everything about 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.

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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.]

[First three paragraphs were one continuous dream, last paragraph was a separate one.]

I'm in the car with my parents, and we pull into the parking lot of the shopping center in our old town where our original family dentist's office is. As we're getting out of the car, a woman with brilliant copper hair gets out of the car. She says “Ma'am” several times to get my mom's attention. When she finally does, my mom recognizes her as Tamara A., a colleague of hers from the high school. [Tamara A. is a real person, but she doesn't have hair like that in real life.] For some reason, I leave my normal clothes in the back of the car and start walking toward the shops wearing only panties and a green blanket wrapped around myself.

We go into the large building to the right (south) of the dentist's office. It's still beautifully decorated and set up as a furniture showroom, even though the furniture store has closed. The back part of it has been converted into a restaurant of some kind, but it's also closed. There's another lady there (not Tamara) who comments on all this.

When I actually go into the dentist's office, someone there compliments me on my cute panties. I get all embarrassed and try to re-wrap the blanket so it's closed in the back. I go further into the building to go to the restroom. In a back area just behind the waiting room, there's a small, dark library filled with lots of shelves of children's books, a couch, and even a bed. The restroom is in a semi-enclosed space separated from the library by swinging doors, really just a closet with a big plastic jug thing that you're supposed to pee in. I decide to just wait until I can find a real one.

I'm looking up at a bright blue sky filled with little puffy clouds. One of them is shaped like California. I seem to have some degree of control over the shape of the clouds. [But I don't remember ever going, “hey, I'm dreaming!” :-( ]