lucid

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of June 18-19, and it's one of the most fascinating lucids I've had yet.]

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

I'm shopping at the old Toys 'R Us that we used to go to when I was a kid. [In real life, it's been closed for several years.] I've driven up there all the way from my current town, by myself, and I told my parents where I was going before I left. I've come there just to get the purple hippo stuffed animal that I saw advertised. I find it, go to a checkout stand, swipe my credit card through the card reader sitting on the floor near one of the checkouts, and then walk to the other side of the line of checkouts and get in line to check out. There's quite a long line, but it's moving fairly quickly because there are a lot of checkouts open, and all the checkers are calling people over from that one line. The line is in a rectangular, dark, warehouse-like space in the front of the store, separated from the store proper by high, dark gray metal shelf racks that reach all the way to the high ceiling. When it comes my turn to check out, the checker waves me through when I show her my toy and the receipt that was printed out of the credit card reader.

I exit the store and get into my car [our current, brown Honda]. I examine my purple hippo. It's smaller and narrower than the teddy bear I already have [in real life], and therefore not as good a shape for use as an arm pillow, but still, it's kinda cute. I can feel that it has a plastic cup built into its nose, so that its nose holds its conical shape. I set it down on the floor of the passenger seat, start the car up, and drive out of the parking lot via the ramp behind and to the right of the store.

This ramp forces me to turn right, putting me onto a one-way street. “This is why my parents never went out this way,” I say to myself. I end up driving through a neat, clean, inviting-looking urban downtown area, with lots of modern, glass buildings, concrete parking structures, and trees on the sidewalks.

[The dream shifts.] I'm walking the darkened halls of a big, old apartment building whose halls form a continuous square. Stuff involving Muppets, a bird named Gloria, and an alarm clock happens. [This was another elaborate and plotty dream, but I don't really remember the details anymore. I don't particularly care, though, because the next part is the really awesome part.]

[The dream shifts again.] I'm out on the town, in the same cool, modern downtown I was driving around earlier, only now I'm on foot. While walking across a plaza, I see several of my friends from [$SocialClub] [an organization I belong to in real life]. I recognize that I've been in this downtown before, and am very happy to be here. Somewhere around this point, I become lucid. [As usual, I don't remember precisely at what moment I did so. It may have been that recognition that I'd been there before that triggered lucidity, but I'm not sure.] I also pass by my friends from [$Class], who are on their way to class. I think of going with them, but choose to go off by myself and explore instead.

I end up on a particular street corner where there is a restaurant with a live band playing inside. I enter the restaurant to listen to the band. The restaurant is named “Café Debussy.” [ :gape: Whoa. That is so awesome. That's the name of the cafe where Cobb gives Ariadne her first lesson in shared dreaming in Inception. That is just so cool that I have my own version of it. I may have realized the significance of this name at that moment, or it may not have been until after I woke up, I'm not sure.]

While I'm in the restaurant, I meet and get into a conversation with a female dream character, who asks me who I am. I say the same kinds of things I would say when meeting someone for the first time in real life: that I live and work nearby, what I do, that I'm a member of [$SocialClub]. When I finish, she looks at me with an expression that shows that she's disappointed in me, and that she can see right through the baloney I'm giving her. “Who are you, really?” she asks.

I sigh and start telling her the truth.

“I'm from another world, that's not like yours,” I say. “I only come to visit here when I'm dreaming.” I stop myself short of saying that I'm dreaming all this that's around us.

As I speak, we start rising up off the ground. I'm either flying us up or causing a tower to grow up from the ground under us. [I'm not exactly sure, but I think it was more likely the latter, because] I'm making the buildings all around us grow taller or shorter, or change shape, just by thinking about it. I'm doing this because I want to show my companion the city from up high.

“Because I'm dreaming, I can control the situation, like this,” I say. “It's fun.” [I say a bit more that I don't remember now, and then] I end by sighing again, then saying, “So, here I am, your dreamer.” I extend my hand to shake hands with her.

She takes it. [Surprisingly,] The female DC reacts to what I've just told her with happiness and excitement. She leads me purposefully off in a direction across the city, apparently intending to tell others about what she has learned and introduce them to me. As we go, I realize that in all the time we've been talking, I haven't told her my name, so I say to her, “My name is [$RealFirstName].” I deliberately use the nickname by which I'm known to family and friends in real life, rather than my official, legal name, because I don't want the Fae to know my true name, because that will give them power over me. [Seriously, that's what I thought during the dream. I would never set any store by such an idea in real life.] She doesn't reply, though.

[She didn't introduce me to anyone, though. The next thing I remember,] The female DC and I have walked out to a metal, industrial-looking bridge, from which we're watching the sunset over the cityscape. I ask her, “What's your name?”

“Darla,” she says.

I shake my head and correct her: “No, that's the name of my friend who looks like you. What's your name?” Although she looks like one of my real-life friends, I'm interested in her identity as a separate individual.

From the way she hesitates for at least 15 seconds, going “Hmmmm...” several times while looking all around her at our surroundings, it's clear that she's never thought of herself as having an individual name separate from that of her real-life counterpart before. Finally, she looks over at the setting sun and says, “Umbra.” [She pronounces it “OOM-brah;” it means “shadow” in Latin. Hmmm. Very interesting.]

[Fragment.] Something involving roller coasters that look like snakes.

[False awakening.] I'm comparing notes with my mom about whether or not we just had the same dream about snakes.

[Different dream.] I'm on a ride that has foam seats with over-the-shoulder restraints. The seats are suspended high up in the air from an overhead track in a large building. I've somehow managed to board the ride so that I'm perched in between two seats, rather than fully seated in one of them. While the train of seats I'm on is moving to its destination, I manage to maneuver myself into one of the seats and get the restraints into place.

My train of seats arrives at its destination: directly above a gigantic aquarium tank. That's when I realize what the purpose of this ride is: to allow visitors a chance to be submerged in the tank for several minutes on end. I realize that I was supposed to bring a snorkel or scuba gear with me on this ride, but I didn't, and there's no way to get out of the restraints before I get dunked in the tank. I'm only mildly concerned about this, though.

I hold my breath and the seats descend, submerging me and everyone else several feet underwater. As soon as the seats have stopped descending, I start swimming upward, taking my seat and my restraints with me [I think; I'm not sure]. The moment I break the surface of the water, I found myself awake. I immediately kicked myself for not realizing that I was dreaming and subsequently recalling that I can breathe underwater in dreams.

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the night of June 9-10, 2011.]

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

I'm walking around the downtown area of a city. Every block is covered with tall buildings. Most of one block is covered with a three-or-four-story building with signs that identify it as “Jews' World.” It's their community center and place of worship; it is built around a narrow, rectangular courtyard/entryway with doors to various rooms leading off of it. I look at it and think, Wow, that's pretty cool, having a community center like that.

Directly across the street from this center is a similar, five-or-six-story community center and place of worship for the LDS church. A woman walks out of that complex and walks down the street. We pass each other in the street between the two centers, walking in opposite directions. The woman recognizes me and calls me “Pie [$RealFirstName].” I know that “Pie” is a nickname for [$OfficeBoss] [yes, he is LDS in real life], and that the use of that nickname as a title before my name indicates that I am a member of the in-group associated with [$OfficeBoss]. I'm rather disturbed that the woman both knew who I was and associated me with [$OfficeBoss] in such an intimate and familiar way.

Having realized I was dreaming at some point during this sequence of events [again, I'm not sure when], I decide to start flying. I take off and get pulled in a random direction, backward and sort of sideways. I try to control my flying and start flying forward by concentrating on details of the scenery I can see in front of me and trying to examine them more closely, as I did in my previous lucid [on the night of June 5], but it doesn't work. I attempt this method of control several times. When it stubbornly refuses to work, I just give up. I think, Fine. I'm just going to let myself get pulled along to wherever.

Then that dream faded to black, yet I remained consciously self-aware. I'm not sure if I was actually awake [more likely] or still asleep and self-aware during the gap between two dreams. At any rate, I remember that I knew that I was still asleep [however that works; I really don't even know what was going on here] and that if I just waited patiently, another dream would begin. I did, and it did.

I'm in the central courtyard of a big, old church made of yellow-tan stone. On one side of the courtyard, there is a large, windowlike opening in the wall with no glass, and on the other side of it are rolling vineyards. I briefly think of going flying over the vineyards, but I decide not to. Instead, I explore the building I'm in, and find a large kitchen knife. I pick it up and look at it, reflecting upon it: What's this doing here? We don't do sacrifices of living creatures in my church. We don't have to.

I go into the building, find the kitchen, and put the knife away. To get to the kitchen, I have to go through the parish hall. There are other people in there. I continue to explore more of the building, concentrating on just what a wonderful gift it is to be here in a dream and be lucid. [That's the last I remember.]

[Later, I had another nonlucid.] A whole bunch of the important businesspeople I know in real life, including [$OfficeBoss], have come over to House #2 for an early-morning presentation that I'm supposed to be giving, and they've all crowded into my bedroom. I wake up late for the presentation. In order to get into my closet, I have to ask [$OfficeBoss] and another man to move aside. I'm embarrassed to be seen by all these people while wearing only my black nightgown. [It was the same one I was wearing in real life that night.] I take too long to get ready, and all my guests wander off.

I go out into the rest of the house and see that my mom has put up all the Christmas decorations, even though it's June. I run the vacuum cleaner in the study; P. is there. I get a second shot at doing the presentation, and this time, it works out. I'm grateful that the first attempt, where I got up late for it and everyone left, was just a dream. [LOL!]

[Fragment] I'm in a house or hotel somewhere with MLT [a real-life friend]. I demonstrate to her the fold-out bed that's built into the wall, and she declares it to be too opulent. The building is cylindrical.

[This is both a catch-up post and a repost. Apparently, there was a server crash recently that ate this entry after I posted it the first time.]

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

Some events unfold that I'm not a part of. [I don't remember what they were now, but there was definitely a plotline involved, and I was definitely just an outside observer.] When these events are over, I find myself sitting in a movie theater, watching the end credits of a movie. I realize that all of the preceding events were a movie.

I walk out into the theater lobby, which is long, narrow, and wedge-shaped, growing slightly wider as I approach the entrance. I walk out through the theater's glass front doors onto the sidewalk. There, I meet up with my parents again.

My parents and I are in a strange, [possibly?] open-air, car-like vehicle with a hired driver. I'm showing them around the quaint, seaside downtown of Lake Worth [which, as usual for me in my dreams, looks absolutely nothing like it does in real life; it looks more urban]. We marvel at the awesomely cheesy anti-drug mural painted on the wall of one building.

[Different dream.] I'm flying above M. Road, traveling north, but facing south. I'm being pulled backward by that unknown, unseen force that so often does that in my flying dreams. I realize that I'm dreaming and take control of the situation by concentrating on the details of the scenery around me, as if I were going to stop to admire them. It works as intended: my backward motion slows, then stops. Then, I start flying forward under my own willpower, heading toward home (i.e., south). As I fly, I admire the rich detail of the scene around me and how much like reality it is.

[Dreamskip.] I'm now in a quiet, peaceful, suburban residential neighborhood, on a concrete walking path separated from the backyards on either side of it by fences. I hop along the sidewalk like an astronaut on the moon, making slow jumps that carry me several feet into the air, then slowly floating back down in an arc. I'm enjoying the fun of being in a low-gravity environment, which my dream environments often are.

I get up onto one of the fences and perform several floating glide-leaps from one parallel fence to another, combining jumping with flying. Then, I decide to try to change the dream environment to a different one by closing my eyes and spinning. I think, If I'm going to do that, I'd better start from a standing start. I jump off the fence I'm on and float gently down to the sidewalk. Once I'm standing on it, I think, Neopia, and close my eyes, but forget to spin around.

When I open my eyes, I'm in a much different suburban neighborhood. I'm standing in the middle of a straight street, looking down its length. It's lined on both sides with brightly colored, two-story houses with lush, green trees in their front yards. It doesn't look much like any of the official artwork of Neopia, but nonetheless, I become aware that this is Neopia, and that I've succeeded in my goal of changing the scene and getting there. I'm so excited about this that the scene winks out of existence after about two seconds, and I wake up. [Sigh.]

[Later, different dream.] I'm attending some special event at a theme park on behalf of [the company I've been teaching with]. I'm with SH and TS [two of my fellow teachers]. We're all wearing our white lab coats, and we're walking across a plaza that has a circular concrete beam running overhead, around the perimeter. I see some friends of mine wearing full rubberhead Sesame Street character costumes, also walking across the plaza in the opposite direction. I say to the young man in the Elmo costume who is carrying the head and looking sweaty and tired, “Hi, Mark. Go get some water.”

There are many other people there, changing into or out of costumes. Many of them are hanging their hangers on the concrete ring. TS suggests that we hang our lab coats from it, but I prefer to go back to the trailer, which [only in the dream, not in real life] has sides with panels that open to reveal closets [like my band trailer did in high school]. I want to put my lab coat there because I can make sure that trailer is locked.

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Side notes:

That first scene, where I realized that everything that had preceded it had just been a movie I was watching, was a particularly cool example of day residue. I had just been to the movies the evening before I had this dream. The recent article about how dreaming and watching movies produce very similar patterns of brain activity has informed the way I watch movies now; I always mentally compare the two experiences. In the movie I watched on this evening (Limitless), the ending felt exactly like being suddenly, rudely awakened by an alarm clock when you're still right in the middle of a dream. It's not surprising that that experience gave rise to an actual dream in which a movie ended and I suddenly realized, “oh, yeah, that didn't actually happen, I'm just watching a movie.” Both within the dream and in retrospect, that realization felt very similar to the realization, “oh, yeah, that was just a dream” that I've often had just after both false and real awakenings. Therefore, that moment of realization within that dream felt very much like a false awakening.

It belatedly occurs to me that Neopia is an entire planet. If I chose only one specific locale on that planet and made that the focus of my intentions, I'd probably have better success getting there.

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

I'm in an old, dusty, dark shop with gray-brown, wooden walls, a high ceiling, and lots of rows of wooden shelves. Mr. H. [my first music teacher] is there. When I see him, I tell him that I'm glad to see that he's still around and still active.

There is a sign hanging from the ceiling above a passageway that leads to another room. The sign points the way to different departments of the store. I walk through the passageway into another, larger area of the shop. This area is the grocery store. A large family with a bunch of kids is grocery shopping there. I hear one of the members of the family mention that they only ever buy produce from Ralphs [a grocery store chain in my area], so they won't be buying any here.

[The dream shifts, and] I'm playing Petpet Park. I'm controlling my usual player character from a third-person perspective, just like in real life, yet my computer isn't part of the dream; the world of the game is the world of the dream, and I'm controlling my character using only my will. [That was pretty awesome, especially for a non-lucid.] I'm walking around a spooky, Halloweeny-themed area [that looks nothing like any of the ones that exist on the real site]. I'm inside an old building. While there, I set off a quest by causing a penguin non-player character to start walking forward from his spot next to the wall. He's off on his way to make a potion. This event is the first in a quest series that is accessible to non-paying members as well as paying members. I spend some Nickcash to get into a small room off to the side.

I decide not to go through a narrow doorway into an area where I could start some other quests. Then, the spooky atmosphere of the area starts to scare me, and I decide I want to get out of there. After getting outdoors, I decide to try to fly to Celestial City. [Celestial City is another in-game area with a more beautiful, peaceful mood. In the real game, player characters cannot fly. I think the fact that it occurred to me to try to reach another in-game area by flying indicates that I was gradually beginning to realize that I was dreaming, and not playing the actual game.] I fly away from the ground [or rather, my player character does; the dream is still in third-person point of view], deliberately playing the Celestial City background music in my mind. I close my eyes [somewhere around here, the dream shifted into first-person point of view] and open them again, trying to make it daytime, instead of nighttime. It works for a few seconds, but the sky quickly darkens to night again.

[The dream shifts again, and] I'm watching a scene from a movie involving a flyover view of an airport. I can easily identify the shooting location as Ontario International Airport because of the view of the mountains rising behind the airport buildings. In terms of design, the buildings resemble the old buildings that were all there was to the airport back when I was a little kid. They're bigger than the old ones, though, and in the same position as the new buildings, although they're not as long as the new buildings.

[Dreamskip.] I find myself flying over L.A. and the ocean. I am now definitely lucid. I can feel my pulse pounding in my head. I strongly suspect that the sensation is coming from my real body, but I choose to ignore that thought and focus my attention firmly on the dream. I use the moving-my-fists-together-or-apart technique I've described in previous entries to control my flight.

I'm driving along Pacific Coast Highway. I decide I want to drive to Newport Beach. I know I've succeeded when I pass a motel that has a sign on it that says “Newport Beach.” I also pass another, two-story motel that has water slides built right into the front of it.

When I get to the street that leads down to the beach, I turn left, then peel off to the right to follow the road that leads down from the mesa and over to the beach. [This road exists in real life. The motels do not, as far as I know.] Since I've met my goal of driving to the beach, I think, I am awesome!

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

Night of May 20-21

I'm in the upstairs bedroom of a house. Built into one wall is the entrance to a long slide, which I go down. The first part of the slide is plastic, tubular, and constantly curves back and forth in random directions. After a bit, the plastic tube slide connects smoothly to another section of slide, this one made of polished, light-colored wood. The wooden portion of the slide turns through 90-degree corners in between straight runs, and it goes through a series of spacious rooms that are made of the same light wood.

Later, I'm back in the upstairs bedroom again, with some other people who want to go down the slide. I describe to them what the slide is like.

Night of May 21-22

I'm in the main hallway that runs through the middle of my church. There are tables lined up in the hallway, and I'm sitting behind one of them. Other people from my church are sitting behind the other tables. We're all talking to each other about the church activities we do. [This was all day residue. This dream was essentially a replay of what I had just done that day in real life at our church's spring talent festival. I count this dream as further evidence in favor of the hypothesis that dreams are produced when your brain is recording the day's experiences in long-term memory.]

[I had a lucid dream in the next cycle, but I've forgotten a lot of the details. The following paragraphs contain what I do remember of that dream.]

I realize I'm dreaming and think, Oh, cool. I'm dreaming. That means I can do anything I want to. I find myself in a rectangular room in which all the walls are full-length mirrors. I look at my reflection and notice that I have my long hair and bangs again [which was the hairstyle I had for most of my life until last October], and that my bangs are chopped off all unevenly, with little sections that end in different lengths. I either exercise, or just think about, two or more of the dream abilities I've already learned [I'm not really sure, because I don't remember this part very well], and then I decide to try an ability I've never tried before: changing my appearance.

I close my eyes and visualize what I want my reflection in the mirror to look like when I open them: I want to see myself as an old woman, with my hair gray, but still long. I open my eyes, only to find that it didn't work. My reflection still looks the same as it did before. The thought of trying to shapeshift into some kind of animal crosses my mind, but I decide not to because no animal that I particularly want to turn into comes to mind.

[Different dream, later in the night.] I'm visiting my boss's house, which is huge and very nice. My boss gives me a very kind, generous compliment about my after-school teaching. He says something along the lines of, “You're a great teacher. You treat them like people.” [“Them” meaning the students.] I'm very flattered.

I go outside my boss's house. There is a small, private jet parked outside. A group of people I know and I are about to leave on a trip somewhere in the jet. Before we leave, I decide to go and use the portable restrooms that are located on the opposite side of the grassy field I'm in. One of them is a standard portable restroom, and the other is bigger and wider; it was removed from a commercial airplane, I know. [It made sense in the dream.] I can't get into either of them, though, because my mom is blocking the entrance to them. She tells me that I can't come in because P. is in the restroom right now.

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Side notes:

In real life, I have two jobs, each with a different boss. The boss who appeared in my dream was not the one from my after-school teaching job; he was the one from my office job. It makes sense, though, in a sideways kind of way, that Office Boss would compliment me on my teaching in a dream. Two things that I know I really, deeply want are for my teaching efforts to be appreciated and for Office Boss to like me. I think my mind just combined the two desires and had Office Boss express appreciation of my teaching. (Office Boss has seen me teach in real life, but only once.) This dream, and the one I had on March 26 about being hired for that one job (which I did not get hired for in real life, by the way), lead me to this observation: Sometimes, when you really, really want something to happen in real life, your mind will grant you your desire in a dream.

Cool, my first attempt at forging. It was unsuccessful, but I'm not really surprised. I'm looking forward to continuing to work on that skill.

I begin to understand why we have a thread devoted to pictures “for daily lucid inspiration.” Lucid dreaming is beginning to feel routine and unremarkable, even when I'm in a lucid dream. It felt that way in this one. My initial excitement about the phenomenon has worn off. Now I see why one would want a source of daily lucid inspiration.

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

I'm in a long, rectangular yard with a lawn, behind a building. I find myself flying backward over the grass. Recognizing the familiar dream occurrence, I mentally grab hold of the situation and wrench my movement into my conscious control. First, I start to fly forward, and then I just land and start walking across the grass toward the building, just because I'll have better and more reliable control that way. As I walk, I say something along the lines of, “If it gets me there faster, I'll just walk.”

Inside the building, I walk through several rooms until I find one that contains a table and a bunch of people. [I think they were people I know in real life, but I'm not sure who.] We all sit down around the round table and have a meeting. [I don't remember now what we talked about, but we were all talking about something.] During the meeting, I focus on staying in the present moment, paying attention to it, because I want the dream to go on for as long as possible. It works, for a bit, but then I start thinking, I wonder how much REM time I have left? I don't want to wake up. Of course, the dream starts to collapse and I find myself waking up shortly after thinking about that.

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Side notes:

I achieved this MILD by focusing intently on my feelings of intention and desire to have a lucid dream, mostly without thinking in words, and for a sustained period of several minutes. When I did think in words, they were, Lucid dreaming is easy. Everyone can do it, even me. I had this dream after several nights in a row without any dream recall at all, which made those feelings of intention and desire particularly intense and easy to focus on.

I'm in a big building of some kind. I'm high-school-aged, and I'm walking around in the building as part of a group of other high-schoolers [none of whom I recognize individually]. There's a tall table with a bunch of half-sheets of paper on it. They're sign-up sheets where we can sign up for the activities we want to do at an outdoor camp we're going to go to. I and several of my friends sign up for tennis. I think, Since when am I interested in tennis? [I'm not, in real life; I haven't even played it since high-school PE.] I also notice that one of the activities we can sign up for is beer pong. This strikes me as odd, too, since we're high-school students. Then I recall that in a previous dream in this setting [which, once again, I don't recall at all now that I'm awake], I learned that either the drinking age here in this setting is 18, or there isn't one at all, I'm not sure which.

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Side notes:

I managed to have a lucid dream last night, despite having drunk wine several hours before going to bed. I think the fact that the last thing I did before bed was writing and posting a dream journal entry helped a lot. In this dream, I was aware that I was dreaming, but the thought of going off and doing my own thing, rather than going along with the dream plot, didn't even cross my mind. I don't know why not. I also don't remember why or how I became lucid.

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

I'm traveling to Epcot on a highway. The highway is elevated relative to the park, which is long and narrow, and lush and green. There is a giant, inflated jack-o’-lantern in the center of the park. I’m dismayed to realize that the jack-o’-lantern has become the park’s de facto icon; it was never meant to be.

[Different dream.] I'm at a summer camp somewhere. [The day before I had this dream, I'd suddenly, randomly come to the nostalgic realization that it had been a very long time since I'd been to a camp of any kind. Thanks, brain! :-) ] I arrive at a wooden pickup station (sort of like a bus stop) at 8:15 A.M. [I think], in time to get picked up by a horse-drawn, wheeled wagon. I climb up into it and sit down on one of several benches. The wagon takes me and several other campers to an Old Western town where a reenactment activity will take place.

When I get there, I'm really glad I got up in time to catch the wagon, because the town is pretty cool. There are a bunch of animatronic figures that re-enact the shootout at the OK Corral. They have guns that fire styrofoam bullets, which stick to designated, smooth, flat target areas on the other animatronic figures. I move out of the way and take cover while the shootout is going on, not wanting to get hit by the bullets.

When the shootout is over, a large bunch of balloons comes floating toward me. I understand that it’s to transport me back to the point where I entered the town. I take hold of the ribbons on the balloons and allow them to pick me up and float me over some buildings to another part of the town.

I touch down in front of some town official, possibly the mayor or the sheriff. He asks me, “What do you think of the town?”

“I think I’ll stay,” I answer. When I say this, what I mean by it is that I want to get a souvenir picture taken in period costume. There is a kiosk nearby where you can do this. I’m about to do it, but when I look at the signs on the kiosk, I see that the pictures cost $5.00 each. I don’t want to pay $5.00 for a photo, so I change my mind and turn away.

[Dreamskip.] I’m floating with my bunch of balloons again [I think], heading toward a theme park with a roller coaster. I’m thinking about how theme parks are architectural works of art, and should be appreciated as such.

[I waited too long to start writing this, so I don't really remember what happened between the end of that scene and the beginning of the next one, nor do I remember how or why I became lucid.]

I'm in the entrance corridor of a big, fancy office building with a beautifully decorated interior. In front of me is a long wall with a door in it, and a sign next to the door indicating that these are the offices of a financial company. I know that it's a subsidiary of another company, and that it's in charge of the other company's finances.

I think, Okay. I'm going to try to walk through a wall again. I start walking forward, thinking about that goal. I begin to pass through the wall, and the room on the other side becomes visible. I continue moving forward. Even when I've gone far enough that I should be all the way through, I can still see parts of the ornately-decorated wall; they linger in my vision, semi-transparent and seeming to stick with me, like the strands of a spiderweb stick to you when you walk through it. I think, Just keep going forward. They'll go away, and you'll get through. You can do it. I keep moving forward, and the last strands of the afterimage of the wall finally fall away behind me, leaving me standing in the financial offices. There's no tactile sensation this time, though, unlike in my previous lucid dream when I went through the car door; this time, I don't feel anything at all from the wall. I'm happy and proud that I've finally walked through a wall without leaving a hole in it.

I wander through the financial offices a bit. There are employees of the company there, walking around, going about their everyday work. I think, I'm invisible and inaudible to them. Or, if I am visible, I just look like another employee. Somehow, I just know intuitively that one or the other of these things is true.

Eventually, I end up in front of another long wall, this one made of mirrors. [I don't remember now how I got from one scene to the next.] When I find myself in front of this wall of mirrors, I think, Now that I've figured out how to walk through walls, I'd like to try out another dream ability. I wonder if I can create a portal. Remembering what I read in somebody’s DJ here on DreamViews, I use my right index finger to trace a circle on the mirror-wall. [I don't know what exactly made me pick this destination, but] In my thoughts, I pick “heaven” as the destination that I want to be on the other side of the portal. When I'm finished drawing the circle, the area inside it doesn't transform into a portal; instead, it swings inward, like a door on a hinge. I go through the doorway.

The doorway is on one of the short sides of a rectangular room. The floor, walls, and ceiling of the room are all the same dark, metallic slate-gray color. At the opposite end of the room is a raised stage, also that same color, and on the stage is a smaller-than-life-size, cartoon lion. He's very definitely alive, though, and I know who he is immediately. I kneel down on the floor where I am and exclaim, “My Lord Aslan!” [Hmm. Well. That's reassuring.]

[I don't really remember how I got to the next scene. I remember attempting to create another portal and finding only darkness on the other side of the circular door because I hadn't been thinking of any particular destination, but I don't remember whether that was before or after the above scene. In any case, here's the next scene that I do remember.]

I'm now outside the building I was in before, walking across a grassy field. I happen to glance down at my feet and notice that I'm barefoot, and that I appear to have an unusually large number of toes, sticking out at odd angles and overlapping each other in unnatural ways, just like my fingers sometimes do when I look at them in dreams. I look down again, and this time I see that I have eight toes in a neat row on my left foot. It makes me smile to discover that toes can exhibit the same odd behavior as fingers in dreams.

I'm very pleased with my achievements so far tonight, but no other ideas for new abilities to try out come to mind, and the sky and the grass are so inviting, so I decide to fly. I kick off the ground with my right foot and take off. I find myself being forced backward by some unseen, unidentified force, just as I have many times before when I've started flying. I move my fists into the position I learned from my dream dad in my previous lucid, with my left fist close to my chest and my right one further away from my body, and move them back and forth relative to each other, trying to use that new technique I'd just learned to gain control over my flying. It works. I stop feeling the unseen force, and begin flying forward.

[That’s the last I remember of my dream.]

I woke up and found myself still in sleep paralysis. I didn’t feel any vibrations this time, though; it just felt like my arms and legs were really heavy, and like I couldn’t move them even if I tried. I waited a few seconds before moving my arms from their position up over my head. I didn’t even remember putting them there before falling asleep. A few minutes later, the feeling goes away.

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Side notes:

I get to check another goal off my list of lucid-dreaming goals! Yay! I really look forward to continuing to improve my intangibility skills. Now that I've more or less gotten the hang of going through things, my new big goal is to get good at defining, creating, and getting into dream environments of my choice.

[This is a catch-up post. I had another good lucid dream on the night of April 27-28, 2011. It took me a long time to get around to finishing the writeup of this, but here it is.]

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

I'm at a meeting of my local community advocacy and action group. It's being held in a big, spacious, public multipurpose meeting room. There are no chairs or tables in the room, just empty floor space. A lot of the people there are wearing our team color, orange. We're electing the new secretary for the group. The election process begins with everyone who wants to run for the position walking out of the crowd and going and standing in a line, facing the rest of the crowd. My friend J. is there, and she starts to go and stand in the line of candidates. I tell her something like, “Oh, don't run for this. You already do so many things.” I'm specifically thinking of choir when I say this. [In real life, J. and I are in choir together, but she's not part of the advocacy group.] I say this to her because I don't want her to get overwhelmed with too many responsibilities.

[Later, different cycle.] I'm walking through House #1. Everything looks gray, dimly-lit and fuzzy. Because of that, I suspect that I might be dreaming, so I do a reality check. [I don't remember what it was; I think it was trying to go through a solid object.] It doesn't work. “Aw, nutbunnies!” I say aloud, disappointed that it isn't a dream.

And yet, a part of my mind is still suspicious. As I continue walking through the house, I decide to try doing the nose-pinch RC. This time, it works. I'm delighted to find that I really am dreaming! Breathing through my pinched-shut nose feels really cool, too. I do it several times, to verify that I'm dreaming and to experience that cool, weird sensation. It's been a while since I've experienced it.

As usual, I'm eager to just explore the world of this dream and see what there is to see, so I leave the house through the front door and go outside into the yard. It's a bright, sunny, breezy day, and now everything is in color, rather than shades of gray. I walk through the front gate and out into the front yard. Standing on the front lawn between the hedge and the liquid-amber tree, I allow myself to be lifted up into the air on the breeze. It's really fun. “Wheeeee!” I say aloud, enjoying the moment with pure, childlike playfulness. The wind blows me into the branches of the liquid-amber tree, which are pointy and scratchy. I return to the ground.

Our brown car is sitting on the north side of the driveway, the side furthest from the front lawn. [I think it might have been the Mazda we had when we lived in House #1, not the Honda we have now.] I decide to continue practicing my intangibility skills by passing through the closed car door to get into the car. As I start to go through the door to the back seat on the passenger side, the door becomes semi-transparent and stretches inward, like a rubber sheet. I get all the way through and feel the door pull away from my body as it snaps back into place. It feels like rubber, too. I'm now sitting in the back seat of the car. “Holy s***, that was awesome!” I exclaim aloud. I'm really proud that I succeeded in going through the car door like that.

I sit in the back seat of the car for a moment, just taking in the realism and detail of its interior and basking in the glow of my achievement. Then, I decide to get out of the car the normal way, by opening the door. By the time I get out, a van has parked on the other half of the driveway, right next to my car, and there are people getting out of it.

I think, Hey, I'm here in the dream version of my old neighborhood. This would be a great chance to go fly up to the top of the baseball backstop in the park. So I start flying toward the park. To get there, I fly above the streets that lead to it. “I’m not exactly going as the crow flies,” I remark to myself. I realize that I'm following the same route to get from my house to the park that one would follow if one were driving between the two points; I'm just following that route out of a habit that was ingrained into my mind in the real world. The thought crosses my mind that I might wake up from this at any moment, but I immediately push the thought away and ignore it, because I want to stay in the dream.

I arrive at the park. “I’ve always wanted to do this!” I exclaim. [Some background for DV readers: As a child, I once came across a book about out-of-body experiences in a bookstore. I didn't buy it, and I was too afraid to try to induce an OBE, but I thought the idea was really cool. I fantasized that if I were ever to have one, the first thing I would do would be to go to the park, fly to the top of the chain-link baseball backstop, and sit on the edge of it. I wanted to do that in this dream because it was something I had wanted to do for many, many years.]

I start flying through the park toward the baseball backstop. My dad is there, and he stops me and shows me a way to hold my arms that will help me fly better and faster. I do what he shows me: hold my arms out in front of me, elbows bent, fists out, right fist in front of my left one. He tells me that I can fly faster by pushing my right fist further away from me and pulling my left one in closer to my chest, as if I were pulling a rope taut. I try it, and it works. During this training session, I notice that I’m suddenly wearing red boxing gloves.

Using this new method, I continue flying toward my goal. It's a long, long way to the place where I think the baseball field should be, over wild, natural terrain. When I get to where I think it should be, there is no baseball field there, just a broad area filled with rocky hills. I spot the backstop among the hills and land next to it.

“What?” I say aloud, surprised and confused. There is a metal baseball backstop, but it's tiny [maybe two feet tall], overgrown with weeds, and covered with the spiky seed pods from liquid-amber trees. “That’s pretty lame!” I say in disappointment. I turn away and fly back the way I came.

I eventually fly back to what appears to be the counter of a sporting-goods store. I land there and take off the red boxing gloves I'm still wearing, and the bicycle kneepads I have on my feet. I then leave the store by flying through the big, high, square window above its front door. Flying through it creates a sort of flashing, ripple effect in the glass, somewhat similar to what I saw the first time I went through glass, but more visible and flashier. I knew I could fly through glass intangibly because I’d done it before.

I'm now flying outside. There is a concrete parking structure that looks a lot like the one at the local mall right in front of me, and there is another park off to the right. I head toward the park to fly up onto one of the baseball backstops there. As I’m making my way over there, I hear the very faint sound of smooth jazz music. I realize that there’s only one place that music could be coming from: my parents’ clock radio. [I notice that the music is playing at normal speed, too – this demonstrates to me that time does indeed pass at the same speed in my lucid dreams as it does in the real world.] The combination of the music and my knowledge of where it's coming from cause the dream to fade and me to wake up.

Awake, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

The moment I see my old college campus start to appear out of the darkness, I realize, Oh, cool, a dream is starting. There are lots of multistory buildings all around me, and it's a beautiful day with a vivid blue sky and puffy white clouds. The dream is fairly vivid [and remains so throughout its entire length]. I observe that the environment around me is consistent with the environment I've observed in previous dreams set on my old college campus. [Although, now that I think about it, I think the dreams I have that are set there feel similar more than they look similar. Being in the environment always feels the same, but I think the layout, the spatial relationships of buildings, is slightly different each time. The style of the buildings is always pretty much the same, though.]

I walk along among the buildings, and eventually [possibly after a dreamskip?] find myself inside somebody’s house. The living room has been filled with chlorinated water and turned into a big, deep indoor pool. The second floor of the house is open to the living room, and has a balcony-like walkway that surrounds the living room on three sides. The water comes almost all the way up to the level of the walkway. When I see the pool, I think, This is a dream. I should be able to breathe underwater. I get into the water and start swimming down into the pool, testing this hypothesis. It proves to be correct. By consciously focusing on the knowledge that I can breathe underwater here, I can breathe underwater. While I'm swimming, I feel the resistance that one normally feels from the water when swimming, but not the wetness; I still feel completely dry. I also notice that breathing feels exactly the same as it normally does when I'm breathing air; those parts of my body don't feel any resistance from the water, whereas my skin and limbs do feel it. [I think this experience further demonstrates the same phenomenon that lies behind the nose-pinch reality check: doing something that would obstruct your ability to breathe in reality will not obstruct it in a dream, because your real body is still breathing normally.]

I resurface, then dive again, this time going all the way to the bottom of the pool. I find a small, square sticker there, part of a board game. I retrieve it and bring it to a dream character who is sitting on the walkway at the side of the pool opposite where I came into the room. He's playing the game that the sticker came from. I hand him the sticker, saying something like, “Here. This is part of your game. I brought this back for you.”

The dream character accepts the sticker and asks me to go over to the far corner of the room (near where I came in) and retrieve another, similar sticker that he dropped. I agree to do so. Before I dive under the water again, I pretend to take a deep breath and hold it, for the sake of appearances. I don't want any of the several dream characters who are around to realize that I have superhuman abilities. I dive toward the bottom corner of the pool at the far end of the room, where two walls come together at an acute angle. I find not only another sticker like the first one, but also a die, a playing card, and other, similar small objects from games. I pick them all up.

I decide to try to get back to the second floor by flying. [Apparently because I want there not to be,] There's no water around me anymore. With a short grunt, I try unsuccessfully to take off. I decide to just climb the nearby stairs to get up to the second-floor walkway.

I walk along the walkway and stop in front of the male dream character playing the game. He asks me, “What was that grunt?”

“I was trying to jump up and fly back to the second floor,” I answer.

“Why?” he asks.

I throw my handful of small game pieces at him. “Because you're a dream character!” I exclaim. [Or it might have been, “Because I'm dreaming!” I don't quite remember. The main point is that I dropped all pretense that I was a regular person with no superhuman abilities at this moment, and admitted to being the dreamer.]

A second later, my conscience kicks in. “Wait. I don't know why I did that,” I say. “That was rude. I'm sorry.”

A woman about my age with short, dark hair joins our conversation at this point. She starts off by addressing me, saying something like, “That's right. You're dreaming.” She, the game-playing DC, and I all proceed to have a long, in-depth conversation on the subject of lucid dreaming. [Unfortunately, I don't remember much of what we said. What I do recall is an overall impression that this woman was an expert on the subject, and that her attitude toward me was that of a supportive older mentor. She seemed interested in my progress and how much I had learned so far.] The dark-haired woman asks me something like, “This is your fortieth or so lucid dream, right?”

“Forty-seventh, or fiftieth, something like that,” I answer.

At another point during the conversation, another guy my age, named Andy, is also there in the room. The dark-haired woman points him out to me as another dreamer. [I had no intention of anything like that happening to me. If it did, it was completely without my desire or consent.]

Andy, the woman, the game-playing DC, and I all walk out of the building onto the coast by my university. We're facing a sea cliff with train tracks running along it. We walk along and come to the grassy, topmost level of an amphitheater, built into the land where it slopes down toward the beach. Below the grassy part are many levels of bleachers made out of a metal mesh.

“I really like floaty things,” I observe, addressing the woman. I point out that there are a lot of colorful helium balloons around, and a lot of the other people who are around are flying small, colorful kites. I have one myself.

The other DCs who are there are passing around a strange contraption. At its center is a device that has a chamber in which marijuana leaves are burning, and a fan. The fan is keeping the semi-transparent plastic garbage bag that surrounds the device inflated. The bag is there to keep the marijuana smoke in, but there is a tear in the plastic near the knot, allowing the smoke to escape at a limited rate so that one might inhale it. One of the other, female DCs in the scene comes over to me and my group and offers us the contraption. The other DCs in my group accept it first and take hits from it, then offer it to me. My immediate reaction to getting the opportunity to try marijuana is, Yay! I can do this without getting in trouble or risking the health of my real body, and if I do it, I can brag about it on the forums! [Meaning DreamViews, of course.]

I accept the blown-up garbage bag and maneuver it so that the tear in the plastic is near my face. This isn't easy to do with the fan device constantly inflating the plastic from the inside and making it move around. When I've gotten the tear as close to my face as I can, I inhale some of the smoke through my nose. It has a plant-like smell. The drug doesn't make me feel any different, nor does it change the environment around me.

My companions and I sit down on the metal mesh bleachers to watch a concert [or something like that]. As I sit down, I try to be careful not to get the string of my kite tangled up with the strings of my companions' kites.

There is a blue reusable shopping bag from Wal-Mart lying just to my left on the metal bleachers. It comes to life and starts wrapping its handles around my left arm and constricting its handles tightly, much like Devil's Snare from the Harry Potter universe. I'm not sure if this occurrence is a weed-induced hallucination or just ordinary dream weirdness. I look up and to my right at the dark-haired woman, who is sitting next to me. She looks back at me with an expression that communicates, “Yeah, this is what I was expecting would happen; how are you going to deal with it?”

I'm a little frightened by the shopping bag attacking me, but I'm still secure in the knowledge that this is a dream, so I'll be safe and sound when I wake up. I close my eyes and think to myself, Take me home. [By which I mean, “Take me back to the real world.”]

I then woke up for real, just as I had desired to do. I was amazed to discover that a full 6 ½ hours had passed since I'd gone to sleep. When I recalled my reaction to the opportunity to smoke marijuana, I laughed derisively at myself and thought, Oh, boy. I need to sort out my priorities.

-----------------------------------
Side notes:
It's certainly fitting that I dreamed about smoking marijuana on the morning of 4/20. I first learned about 4/20 from peers in college, but on a conscious level, I had completely forgotten about it until I found the “Happy 4/20!” thread on DreamViews this morning. My subconscious sure remembered, though. :-)

I've never tried marijuana in real life, so I can't compare the reality to the dream. That might also be why it didn't really make me feel any different: my brain doesn't really know what it's supposed to feel like to be under its influence. I have drunk alcohol in real life, but I haven't done so in a dream yet. If I ever do, I expect it will probably feel just like it does in reality.

I noticed something today: When I write dream journal entries, I write like a scientist. I write down what I've observed and compare my new observations to previous ones. Sometimes I draw conclusions from all these observations. Often, I perform experiments within the dream and report on their results.

[This is a catchup post. This dream is from the night of April 8-9, 2011.]

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

I'm in my current bedroom. I have my mom's purse, and I'm on my way to take it out to the living room and put it on the cedar chest, where it goes. I think I must have just woken up normally, so as I walk to the living room, I'm thinking something like, If this is the real world, then that's fine. But if this is a dream...

By the time I get out into the living room, I've figured out that it is a dream. No specific trigger or dream sign tells me this; I just recognize the feel of the world around me, and what it feels like to be in a dream. I set my mom's purse down on the floor next to the cedar chest and turn to walk out the front door. As I move my hand away from the purse after letting go, I can see that no part of the purse or its strap is touching my hand, and yet I feel resistance on my hand, as if the strap were caught on my wrist. I realize, I can't just carelessly set it down and walk away, like in the real world. I have to think that I'm setting it down. My mind is controlling everything, and I didn't think about wanting to put it down, so it feels like I still have it. So I consciously think about letting go of the purse, and the feeling of the strap goes away.

I turn my attention to the front door. The main door is open, but the screen door is closed. It's a beautiful, sunny day outside. "This screen door..." I say to myself. I decide to take this opportunity to work on my goal of becoming intangible and walking through things. I concentrate on the ideas that door is not solid when I will it not to be, because this is a dream, and I am able to pass through it, and start walking through it. It works! I get part of the way through it, but I'm so pleased to find that it's working that it takes some of my concentration away from those ideas, which immediately causes the door to become solid again. I end up with the door stuck around the middle of my body. The door is now parallel to the ground, and my body is sticking through the hole I've created in the middle of the door. I can feel the ends of the metal wires poking me in the stomach and back. I feel very silly.

I give up on that for now and decide to just go flying again, since I know I'm good at that and it's fun. I turn back toward the interior of the house, take a step inside, and kick off the floor with my ankles, like always. I launch myself toward the ceiling and find I can easily stay up there, flying just under it in a lazy arc. I laugh out loud, feeling contented, pleased with myself, and so happy to be back in another lucid dream.

[Dreamskip.] My mom and I are riding on a train through our old town. The train runs along Church Street, which is lined with very large, elaborate church buildings in a variety of different architectural styles. [In real life, that street only has one, fairly small church building on it.] Some of the churches are still open, but others are empty and closed, and still others are now being used for other purposes. One of them is now a Ralphs grocery store. My mom says something about how our church is still open, even though several of these are closed.

The train comes to a stop. I say, “Isn't this our stop?” [I think I was still aware that I was dreaming throughout all this, but it completely didn't occur to me to do anything other than follow along with the dream plot.] We get off the train and walk through the high-ceilinged train station until we get to the entrance of a bird exhibit. The exhibit consists of a series of crooked, jointed tubes through which visitors have to climb upwards. There are chains hanging down from the ceiling of the tube near the entrance. There are windows in the tubes so that you can see out into the birds' habitat.

I start climbing up into the tubes. There is a guy climbing in front of me. There are lots of small handles attached to the walls in convenient locations for climbers to grab on to. As I climb, I notice that one of my hands [my right, I think] is partially numb. My ring and pinky fingers, especially, feel like they've fallen asleep. This makes it more difficult to get a solid grip on the handles with that hand, so I have to rely more on my left hand and arm.

[Dreamskip.] I'm now in this shop/museum exhibit place. I see a procession of people leave the room through one exit, including Willy Wonka as portrayed by Gene Wilder. I turn back to the interior of the shop, and see that my mom is at the checkout counter, buying something. There are several other people gathered around it. I ask an employee standing in the middle of the shop for directions to the exit. She makes a sarcastic reference to flying to get there. I reply, “Besides that.” She gives me directions to another exit. I follow her directions into another room of the shop. [At some point during this sequence, I don't remember when,] I see a page with lines from a musical written on it.

[Dreamskip.] I'm flying through an area where there are a whole bunch of big rectangular swimming pools, each with giant humanoid robots designed to look like sports players standing at either end of the pool.

[Dreamskip.] I'm flying up into space, flying backward and watching the view of the Earth below me. I go up high enough that I can see the entire round Earth at once. Then I decide to start going back down again. As I do so, I pass through a field of light-brown, rocky asteroids that surround the Earth. I see the ground getting closer and closer as I descend. I'm heading toward the center of North America.

I end up someplace in Kansas. I find myself in a large room with a bunch of other young women, all of whom are wearing old-fashioned green-and-white dresses with aprons. I tie a green cloth around my waist in an attempt to blend in with the crowd. A white pattern appears on the cloth as I watch.

The group of young women walks out of the room, and I go with them. The room proves to be underground; we exit it and go outside by walking up a sloping tunnel into the sunlight. When we get outside, I see that we're in a very well-done historical theme park with a richly detailed environment. I decide to start flying again, and I fly over the theme park, admiring the view of it from up high.

[Fragment – not sure where in the sequence this was, but I remember dreaming it.] I'm in the ocean, with waves moving around me. The waves are washing me up on to a shore. I think, Oh, crap. Is this the shore of my own subconscious? [I don't remember what came next, though.]

[The next thing I remember,] I find myself back at the area with the pools and the giant robots, still flying. I fly up in front of a robot who looks like a giant football player. He throws a football to me, and I try to catch it, but miss. He says something like, “That would have been complete for 10 yards!” I answer in a smart-alecky tone, “Yeah, it would have been complete... if my feet were on the ground!”

[Dreamskip.] I'm now in an airplane hangar, still flying. The hangar has very large windows that can't be opened. I decide to try to fly through them. I succeed.

“Holy s***! I did it!” I exclaim aloud. I've finally successfully gone through a solid object without leaving a hole in it! I'm very excited and pleased.

I fly around a bit more outside. I see that the hangar is one of many like it, all painted tan on the outside and all built in a big, dusty lot.

I woke up to discover that I'd fallen asleep with my forearms still resting against my ribcage, thus cutting off most of the circulation to my right hand and forearm. I realized that in the dream, when I had been climbing and noticed that one of my hands felt partially numb, it must have been because of the sense data coming through from my real body.

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Side notes:

Wow! This was a really long, elaborate lucid. The dreams that I remember probably lasted a total of between 15 and 30 minutes. I accomplished this via two means:
- setting a WBTB alarm for about 6 hours after I'd gone to bed and staying up for about 5 minutes, reading entries in my paper DJ
- MILDing for longer and with more tenacity than I have been lately, using phrases that included "I will have a lucid dream tonight," "When I'm dreaming, I realize that I'm dreaming," and "I bring awareness and clarity into my dreams."

When I woke up and was recalling my dreams, I made a connection that I hadn't made while I was dreaming: I've passed partway into mirrors in dreams on two separate occasions before. I always know that they're going to be intangible to me, and they always are. Mental techniques and expectations similar to the ones that have allowed me to pass through mirrors should also allow me to pass through other solid things, like walls. In fact, going through the screen door worked similarly: I knew that it would be intangible to me, at least when I first set out to go through it. In the future, I just need to sustain that thought/belief/knowledge for long enough to get all the way through the object.

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

I'm at the park in the neighborhood where Houses #1 and #2 are. I'm in a building in the park that houses a snack bar. There are various types of junk food available for sale, and there's a young man staffing the snack bar. I talk to him, saying something like, “It's nice to see this snack bar open! I've lived here since I was one and a half, and this is the first time I've ever seen this place staffed.”

I go into a back room of the same building. There are a whole bunch of little kids there, and I'm supposed to give them a speech, explaining about some kind of event that's going on. I climb up on top of the bed, stand on it, and speak very haltingly. I'm sleepy, so I go to sleep in one of the beds that's in that back room.

I'm in an underground garage, where racing cars are getting ready for a race. Each one starts out from a different parking space in the garage and drives up one of several ramps to get out onto the outdoor, ground-level race track. I stand close to one of the pillars, afraid that one of the cars will run me over if I get in the way. There are some other people standing around in the garage, and I try to ask them how to get out. I try to shout to make myself heard over the noise of the car engines, but they drown out my voice.

After all the cars are gone, the people answer my question. They give me directions up and out of the underground garage and into a garden. They tell me to climb on top of this boxy wooden frame thing and balance there, while holding a potted plant with bright red flowers on top of a long stem. I do so. The people and I start singing a little song, the last line of which is, “I'll spontaneously combust!” I know that this is what will happen when I reach the end of the song, but I'm not afraid, because I know that that's how I'm going to get out of this place and back to the real world.

Indeed, right before I reach the last syllable of the last word, I suddenly can't see anything, and I feel a sensation come over my entire body. It doesn't feel like being burned with fire, though; it's the pins-and-needles feeling of random feedback from nerve endings. I find that I've woken up.

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

I wake up in my current room, go out to the kitchen, and start attempting to make coffee. The coffeemaker is big and complicated, with lots of buttons, and I can't figure out how to use it properly. While it's percolating, I decide to take the carafe out [I don't remember why], and press the Stop button, but it doesn't stop completely. Six thin jets of coffee continue to come out of it, streaming down onto the heating element and boiling and sizzling away. I look in the cupboard for breakfast, and find lots of mini-donuts and other packaged foods there. All the time I'm getting breakfast, my mind is on the fact that I have to get out of the house in time for my 8:00 A.M. meeting. [I actually had such a meeting coming up in the morning in real life, and it was on my mind as I went to bed, so, not surprisingly, I dreamed about it.]

I have another false awakening in which I check the time on my cell phone and see that it's only 6:17 A.M. Good; there's still plenty of time to get to the meeting.

I woke up, for real this time, at the end of a sleep cycle, and said sarcastically, “Well, that was wonderful.” I didn't bother to get up to check the time on my phone.

I'm on my college campus, walking around outside the dorm buildings, which are big and L-shaped and multistory. I'm trying to get to my room, which is room number 16999-A (that is, bedroom A in suite number 16999). I stop and talk to a resident assistant (RA), who asks me where I'm going. I tell him [her? not sure], and he [she?] consults a list and says that someone else is already in that bedroom. I know I'm supposed to be in that room, and I say so, showing the RA the key I have to that suite. He [she?] permits me to continue on and go to the room.

I continue walking, outside, among the dorm buildings. I pass another RA at the entrance to a new part of the complex of buildings, and speak to her as well. She tells me that there's a game of Sardines going on in that part of the complex, and offers me a raffle ticket, which shows that I'm participating in the game. I accept it and continue walking. I find the entrance to suite 16999, which is at the corner of the long, narrow building, on one of the longer sides. I stick my head in the door, but don't go in. [So I never did find out whether or not anyone else was in my bedroom.] All throughout this part of my dream, my mind is still focused on the fact that I have to make it to an 8:00 A.M. meeting.

I continue exploring around the sunny side of the building. There are basketball and handball courts there; it looks a lot like the playground of an elementary school. The sunlight is very bright and cheerful. On the other side of the courts from the building, there is a chain-link fence on the border of the playground. On the other side of the fence is a river.

Not far from the playground is a covered pavilion housing the queue for a tram that offers tours of the campus. It's the same kind of tram used at the parking lot at Disneyland. The tram passes through, setting out on its tour. A group of five students with ski masks on, their heads wrapped in white cloth, and dark sunglasses are walking alongside the tram. They're tour guides, and this is their on-campus job. They're holding a series of signs that say something like, “Be sure to pay your tram driver.” I wave at them as they pass, and they wave back. As the tram pulls out of the pavilion and drives away, a group of five or six people runs out of the queuing area, trying to catch up with the tram. They wanted to get on it for the tour, but they got there too late.

[Dreamskip.] I'm walking across a parking lot. I recognize that I'm dreaming, and that I've had this dream before. [Now that I'm awake, though, I don't remember having had it before.] I begin to concentrate on my feet, watching them move as I walk. I'm wearing dark red-brown, slip-on, closed-toed shoes with big bows on the toes that are made of the same shiny, leather-like material as the rest of the shoes. As I approach my car, I attempt to ensure that my computer backpack will be in the trunk when I get there by expecting it to be there this time. It doesn't work. Other stuff is in there, but no computer backpack.

Some guy starts talking to me as I look into my trunk. My boss is there, too. The other guy gives me a long, ornate, old-fashioned, brass key with a long, thin black string tied to the loop on one end. When he gives it to me, he says something like, “These instructions are very important. You must never let this item leave your possession.”

“Because it represents my soul?” I ask.

“It represents a lot of things,” he answers. I infer that my soul is one of those things.

[I don't remember the rest of the instructions, but they probably included the following information, because I do remember knowing it:] I understand that this key is a skeleton key. It's not just an ordinary skeleton key, either; it is magical and can unlock any door in the dream world.

That guy, my boss, and I go exploring somewhere else together. I use my key to unlock a door at one point. At another point, I ask that guy, “Do you have a name?”

“Karim, or...” he begins.

“Karim,” I say. “Okay.” To me, the way he said “or...” after his name implies that he has many names, and I'm welcome to use any of them, but I just go with the first one he says.

Karim, my boss, and I are climbing a ladder up through a narrow shaft. I look up and am intimidated by how long the shaft is, but I can see the top of the ladder, far away. [That's the last thing I remember from this dream.]

When my alarm finally went off, I was relieved that I was back in reality, and that there was still plenty of time to get to the meeting.

------------------------
Side notes:

I don't remember having the high level of conscious self-awareness in this dream that I've had in past lucid dreams, but if I started trying to use dream powers, I must have known that I was dreaming. Also, when I was receiving the instructions about the key, I was definitely aware that the context to which those instructions applied was my dreams, which I was in.

Have I met my dream guide? I can't say for sure. I feel uneasy about it. What I can say is that I hope Karim and the key show up in future dreams.

Non-lucid, Possibly lucid?, [Commentary made while awake]

I'm at the mall in my town, standing at the outside edge of the big parking lot on the north side of it. The parking lot is empty because it's been blocked off, and the route for the annual Race for the Cure, which runs around the edges of it, has been marked off. There are lots of people walking and running around the track. This is a practice run for the actual event. I remark to myself that I need to train for this event, because it is a race, and that I'm glad to see that they've repainted some of the lines on the parking lot while they've had it blocked off, because the lines really needed repainting.

From there, I start flying around the west side of the mall. [I think I remember realizing at some point during this sequence that if I was flying, I had to be dreaming. I'm not totally sure, though.] As I go from the north to the west side of it, the terrain changes from flat parking lot to natural land that rises and falls slightly. I'm holding onto a small, rectangular, round-cornered, solid plastic board, slightly larger than a sheet of paper. It catches the wind, and I fly by using it like a sail to pull me along, holding it perpendicular to the ground, with both hands, with my arms straight out in front of me. It's a lot of fun to fly this way. The wind carries me up and over each little rise in the land; every time I go over one, I have to pull my legs up to make sure my feet clear the top of the rise. They do, every time. This entire scene is very clear and vivid; I can feel the air moving around me, the pull of the wind on my arms, and the motions I make, and can see the land and the trees around me clearly.

Someone else passes me on my left, flying past in the opposite direction. As she does so, she holds up a bunch of white pieces of paper, fanned out, with big, black letters printed on them. They spell out “SLOWPOKE!” I don't take any offense at this, because that's fair; this method of flying is indeed slower than my normal self-powered, superhero-style flight.

[Different dream scene.] I'm at a place that seems to be a restaurant, but has a dark ride in the back, meeting a man named Harley Davidson, for whom the company was named.

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

I'm in dream!Las Vegas. At some point [I don't remember when or how], I realize that I'm dreaming. From the top of one of the lower, more square buildings, I admire the view of the city around me, with its many tall, themed buildings. “Beautiful day for it,” I remark. It is indeed: sunny and clear with a few puffy clouds.

Looking down and to my right, I can see a big, broad swimming pool. I say, “There's a pool, if you're into going swimming.” I'm not that much into it, myself. [True in real life, too.] Nonetheless, I find myself swimming in the pool at some point, once again naked. [I don't know why dream!me likes skinny-dipping so much. I've only ever done it in reality when I was totally alone in our backyard spa.]

Later, it occurs to me, “Just let yourself drift... drift...” I start floating upwards off the ground, very slowly, not really flying, just sort of drifting away. [Clearly, the subconscious influence of the wording of the “Hypnosis for Sleep” audio recordings was at work here.]

I eventually end up in a grassy field where hundreds of golf balls are flying at me in a thick, fast, continuous onslaught. I firmly determine in my mind, “This is a dream. I'm going to let those golf balls go through me, instead of hitting me.” It works. I feel one of them bounce off my shoulder, but it doesn't hit nearly as hard as it would have in real life. I don't feel any of the others touch me at all, so they must be going through me. [Awesome! I finally convinced myself that I can become intangible to objects in the dream world! I'm one big step closer to walking through a wall without leaving a hole in it now!]