The Lab Notebook

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

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the night of December 13-14, 2010.]

[Note: I'm writing this entry well after the fact, working from handwritten notes, and even when I made the handwritten notes, I wasn't sure in what order the dream scenes had occurred. When writing this entry, I just arbitrarily put them in an order that made some kind of sense to me.]

I wake up in my bed in my room at House #1. A big, strong man is invading my bed and trying to attack me. I'm scared, and I try to get P.'s attention by yelling for her, but no one comes. I manage to evade him and escape. I know that once I'm standing up, I'm safe. I feel upset after this experience, so, to cheer myself up, I decide to go off and have a lucid flying dream.

The flying dream begins, and now I'm definitely lucid. [Yeah, that's right. In the aftermath of a regular nightmare, my non-lucid dream self decided she wanted to have a particular kind of lucid dream to cheer herself up, and my mind obliged. Weirdest DILD technique ever, but it's a pretty cool story.] At first, the dream is in third person, and I see myself flying over a beautiful town that fills a beautiful valley [now that I think of it, it looked a lot like the one in Kiki's Delivery Service]. I see another girl also flying over the town, unaided, the same way I'm flying. I consciously, deliberately shift to first-person perspective [That's a pretty neat trick. I wish I understood how I did it.] and approach closer to the other girl. I recognize her as Chihiro from Spirited Away. I come right up beside her and ask her, “This is a good way to fly, isn't it?”

“Mm-hmm!” she answers cheerfully.

I decide to ask the same question again, in Japanese this time, just for fun and because I can. “Fly no shikata wa sui ne?” [trans: “(This) way of flying is good, isn't it?” Again, dream!Japanese is weird – the word for “good” is ii in reality, not sui.]

"Un!" [trans: “Yeah!”] Chihiro answers. She continues talking in a language that I take to be Japanese at first, because the sounds of it are characteristic of Japanese, but after listening for a few seconds, I realize that the words are actually Spanish.

[Dreamskip.] I'm on foot, exploring some old, pretty brick buildings.

I wake up in my bedroom in House #1 again. P. is sitting at a table in the room, writing an essay.

I'm telling my family about the DreamViews website, but lying about its nature and telling them that it's strictly fandom-related. I tell them that my username there is “Stupid Top.” When P. finds out that I've been writing about the dreams that I've had about her, she gets sad and angry, and cries.

I wake up again in a variant of my bedroom in House #1. P. and I are in the bottom bunk together. Elsewhere in the house, there is a larger room that resembles the patio of our grandparents' house. A bunch of people from church come into the bedroom, and I explain that this is our old bedroom, and we used to share the full bed (we had just pushed our full mattress off the top bunk and onto the floor), not this twin bed. A woman in the group corrects me, calling the full bed a [something I can't remember] twin. I go along with it. The youngest S. girl is put into the full bed by her parents, but she doesn't want to take a nap.

I'm in a parking garage, and I randomly find some panties.

I'm reading a book that introduces the reader to a code of spiritual laws and rules that I realize are of Mormon origin when I see a citation that says something like “Uses 21:7” [e.g., a citation from a book whose name I don't recognize]. One of the rules in the book specifically forbids entering holes populated by worms for long dreaming. It surprises me to find that the people who wrote this book both knew about lucid dreaming and made a rule about it. [Yes, I did read the thread about why it's hard to get to the moon, and I think that's what inspired this dream.]

I'm exploring a building somewhere, and my friend Mary T. is there. [Day residue; I'd seen her the day before I had this dream.]

I'm driving over the bridge on W. Road that crosses over I-15, heading toward a buffet-style cafe, where I routinely go for breakfast [only in this dream, not in real life].