memorable

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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

[I had several different dreams last night, two of which were lucid.]

[Dream #1] I'm playing Neopets. [In this particular dream,] Neopia is a fully-realized, three-dimensional world, but it's still a computer game that I'm playing using a mouse. The art looks just like it does on the real site. The game is played from a first-person perspective, and there are lots of rooms and areas to explore [just like the plot adventures on the real Neopets Web site]. One such area is filled with Neopets who are dressed in vaguely Arabian-looking clothes; they all have their noses covered with veils, which strikes me as somewhat ridiculous, since they all have such different shapes and sizes of noses. This scene makes me think, So Neopia does have something resembling an Islamic culture. I click my way into a hidden area and receive a special reward for finding it.

[Dream #2] I walk into my family's house, which is big and spacious and has two stories [and looks nothing at all like any of our real ones. House #2, our only two-story house, was nowhere near that big and was laid out very differently]. Suddenly, there are several men in the house with me. They're there to challenge me to a martial-arts tournament. I had known in advance that this challenge was coming. In the course of my conversation with them [which I don't really remember now], one of them eventually says that there is no challenge. Having become semi-lucid at some point during the conversation, I say boldly and firmly, “I have better things to do.” I begin making my way out of the house.

Then, I hear my mom yelling from behind me that the house is on fire and I should get out. I do so, thinking, I know I should just get out without stopping to try and rescue other people. I go out the front door and walk down a front walk that leads to a fairly high, steep flight of concrete stairs, which leads down a steep embankment, at the bottom of which are the public sidewalk and the street. I jump off the top step to get down to the front sidewalk more quickly. I fall in a long, slow arc, taking several seconds to get down, and land softly and gently on my feet. I had kind of known I was going to fall that way; I always do in dreams.

By this point, I'm definitely lucid. From the street, I take off and fly up over the neighborhood. Once again, it takes me two tries to take off. After the first time, I realize, I messed up – I wasn't concentrating right. I try again, kicking off with my right ankle and thinking about becoming airborne, as I always do, and this time it works. Flight feels like it always does, too.

I fly up and observe the neighborhood from above. I can see a little bit of the fire coming from the house I just left. After a minute or two, I land back on the street and see a little model of a single-story house standing on a table. I examine the model, concentrating on it, and succeed in making tiles blow off the roof with my mind. This action is directly inspired by the scene in Inception where they're at the cafe and the dream starts collapsing when Ariadne first realizes that they're dreaming. While I'm making the model blow itself to pieces, I think about how, when the characters from the movie are dreaming, they might use Michael Caine's name [*see Side Notes at end] in exclamations of surprise/anger/frustration, etc., as if he were their deity, because he was the inventor of the dream-sharing technology. I immediately dismiss this as a silly idea, though. I keep up what I'm doing, and eventually blow away all the broken-up pieces of the roof, exposing the interior of the model. It has separate rooms inside. There's a small, light brown, flea-like insect inside, with a sort of sail on its back. I know that the insect is my dad. [I don't even know.] I let it crawl onto my finger, rescuing it from the destruction of the model and setting it down gently outside the model.

This scene is immediately followed by an animated sequence of two foxes romping around in a grassy field and falling in love. I know that this means that both of my parents are still alive and got out of the burning house all right.

[Dream #3] I'm outside, in the daytime, on a series of tiled walkways, terraces, and stairways, elevated and built into the side of a hill. Some boy is following me around, singing a creepy version of some children's song at me, changing the words all around to suggest that he would like to do something sexual with me. At the end of the second or third repetition of the short song, I stop, sing the end of the verse for him, then smack him in the face. Then, a passing man helps me throw the offending boy over a wall and down a long flight of stairs. I see him get up after he reaches the bottom, and am glad to see that he can still get up and that nothing's broken.

The scene shifts slightly, and now I'm on the surface-level streets, walking around a city that I remember visiting in a dream before. [Except now I don't – false memory, apparently.] The city is bright and clean and filled with big trees. There is a train station across the street from where I'm walking. On my side of the street, there is an enlarged replica of one of the stores on Main St. at Disneyland. Upon seeing the prominent train station, I remark that my dream city doesn't necessarily have to be in the States; it could just as easily be in the UK. [This, despite the fact that said train station had a sign on the outside that very clearly read “Amtrak.”]

I walk in the main entrance to the store that replicates the one from Disneyland, and find myself in a shop that is part of a mall. I walk through that first shop and into a second one that resembles a Hot Topic (all the walls are painted black), only it's girlier (there are a lot more dresses). This store also has living mannequins that look exactly like the ones they have at Old Navy. One of these mannequins tells me that she wants to try on the dress I'm wearing, which I had gotten from that store earlier. It's a strapless, knee-length black sundress with little pink polka dots, pink lace decorating the top of the bodice, and a pink tulle underskirt part that makes the skirt puff out. There are lots of similar dresses on the racks in the store. [For some strange reason,] I'm wearing mine over the T-shirt and shorts I was already wearing. I'm really enjoying just walking around, exploring this dream. I exclaim aloud, “My mind is so awesome!”

I walk out of that store and around a corner, through one of the hallways that form the connecting core of the mall. I find myself wishing I could change out of the shorts I'm wearing under my dress, and just wear the dress. I go into another store, this one a Sephora. While I was in there, the dream ended.

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Side notes:

*Michael Caine's character's name is Stephen Miles (per the shooting script); that's what the other characters would say if they were to do that. I forgot that while dreaming, though.

Last night, when doing mental affirmations while falling asleep, I focused more on recalling the memory of what it feels like to be in a lucid dream, recalling past lucid dreams, and visualizing and imagining what it would have been like if I had become lucid in one of my memorable non-lucids. It worked really well.

As I was taught when I first tried to ski, people who are right-handed are generally right-footed as well, and are instinctively inclined to lead with their right foot and do most of their controlling of their movement with their right foot when skiing or snowboarding. I'm very pleased and not at all surprised to discover that this principle applies to my flying in dreams as well. I'm right-handed (and right-footed) in real life, and from the beginning, I've always instinctively used my right foot and ankle to kick off from the ground and launch myself into a takeoff.

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

[I had four different dreams last night.]

[Dream #1] I'm at the apartment building where I lived in Japan. There are several different landlords who own parts of the building, which is reflected in the fact that different parts of the facade have different designs. [Of course, this was not the case in real life.] Inside the building, though, instead of many small apartments, there is one big, open space crisscrossed by wooden support beams. A few other people my own age are in the building. Several of the wooden beams are arranged in a tall pyramid shape, supporting a large heating/air conditioning unit at the apex of the pyramid. This pyramid collapses and the unit crashes to the floor. At first, I think it's killed the young man who appeared to be standing directly under it, but then I see that he's okay, just scratched up a bit.

One of the other people in this large, open space is President Obama. I follow him up into an enclosed hallway and eavesdrop on a phone conversation he's having with his wife. From the conversation, I gather that he's going to pay for repairs to the damaged support structure and HVAC unit.

[Dream #2] I'm riding on Ellen's Energy Adventure in Epcot. The ride vehicles move up to get to the room with the screens for the film portion of the attraction; I can feel the vehicle moving upward. We get to that room, and the film begins. The film starts out on only one screen, then widens to fill the wraparound screens on either side of it as well, but there are no curtains that pull back to reveal the additional screens. [There were curtains when I went on this ride in reality back in 2000, but according to an article I just read recently, they're not working anymore.] The film contains lots of exciting action sequences, punctuated and made more immersive and realistic by air jets built into the backs of the seats. The seats also have lap bars; I can feel mine. At some point during the film, it dawns on me that I'm dreaming. When the film ends, I exit the ride along with everyone else. As I walk along my row of seats, I say to the guy walking in front of me, “Hey! You're a dream character!” Again, I don't get his attention at all. I continue walking through the passageways that lead out of the building. They're very dark; I make sure to pay close attention to the people and the edges of walls that I can see by the few dim lights, because I know that if I don't, the dream will fade. As I walk, I sing a song aloud, which was my lucid goal for the night. [I don't recall now which song it was, but I have the vague impression that it was a current country song, one I know well, sung by a male singer.] It doesn't even occur to me to do anything other than go along with the dream scenario; this is a ride at Epcot, so of course I'm going to go along with it and enjoy the experience.

There's a bottleneck along the exit route that slows down the flow of foot traffic. This makes me go, “Huh? What's going on?” Then I see what's causing the bottleneck: Suspended by individual cords from a track on the ceiling are multiple pairs of 3D glasses with polarized lenses, with no earpieces, so you have to hold them up to your eyes. Each cord is attached to a little wheel inside the track, so you can move the 3D glasses back and forth along the track. This passageway is filled with painted, Star-Wars-themed scenery, and when you look through the glasses, the scenery looks 3D. I take a pair of glasses and walk with them the rest of the way out of the building. I say aloud, “Oh my God! Rope-Trak!” [While in the dream, I remembered a dream I had when I was a kid that featured a very similar system, only with harnesses attached to the ends of the cords instead of the 3D glasses. In that dream, the purpose of the system was to make sure everyone at a museum followed the same path through the exhibits. I named this system “Rope-Trak” after the fact, when I was awake and used the dream as inspiration for a school project.] I'm surprised and pleased to see this concept reappear in another dream.

I reach the outside of the building. This outdoor space looks very much like I remember it, and I can see everything clearly in the natural light. However, the sky is overcast and cloudy, and it's either raining or just about to; a hurricane is coming in. The dream ended here.

[Dream #3] I'm at my high school, just outside the gymnasium, looking south. Apparently, just being there is enough to make me realize I'm dreaming. It's nighttime, and the quad is filled with students. I decide to fly; it takes me two tries to take off. My first try turns into a big, parabolic jump. The second time, I succeed in getting airborne. To help launch myself forward, I kick off the wall of the gym with my foot, as one might kick off the wall of a pool while swimming. Among the crowd, I see the B. brothers again as I pass overhead. I think, They didn't go to my high school. I fly higher and see that the school is surrounded on two sides by ocean, which makes me go, “Huh?”

[Dream #4] I'm riding in the back seat of the brown car down a street in my old city. It's nighttime. I know where I am because I recognize the trees and landscaping on either side of the car. Looking out my window, I see a white car flying along, above and to the left of our car. This clues me in that I'm still dreaming. I wonder if I can make this car fly. Almost as soon as I've decided to try to do so, I find myself sitting in the driver's seat, alone in the car. I immediately realize that I'm now alone and driving the car, rather than riding in the back seat while someone else drove, because I had wanted/expected to be the driver. My dream control is improving. Cool.

The car is still going down the street at the same speed it was before. I make the same effort of will I used in my previous dream to fly on my own, only this time, I try to focus my will on the car rather than on my own body. As before, I concentrate on the thought of the object of focus rising up, on how that should feel. It takes noticeably more effort, but it works. I get the car into the air. However, I find that it's now traveling backward, and I can't get it to go forward. Looking out the front windshield and over the landscape, I notice that the moon is low on the horizon ahead of me and to the left, looks normal, and is full. Then the dream faded and I woke up.

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

I'm at a set of buildings that look kind of like an old-fashioned elementary school. I'm there to sign up for offline 'HITs' [Human Intelligence Tasks, small jobs for which I will get paid]. There are various organizations offering HITs to people, such as the Registrar of Voters. To work on each organization's HITs, you have to go to that organization's counter to sign up for them. When I get to one of the counters, I discover that signing up requires you to show an ID card, and I don't have mine with me. I have to go back to my car to get my purse and driver's license. Before I leave the counter, though, I notice a sheet of paper lying on it with P.'s name written on top. That means she's signing up for one of that organization's HITs, too.

When my next dream begins, a boy from my high school class appears. As soon as I see this happen, I lock on to him as the focus of my attention, knowing that the appearance of an image out of darkness like that must mean that a dream is beginning. Then other classmates of ours begin to appear around him, followed by the environment we're all in. We're in what appears to be a restaurant seating area, sitting around long, high tables on chairs designed to match their height. This area is covered and enclosed on three sides, and it's on our high school campus. Every single student sitting in the area is someone I recognize from high school. A female teacher I had and another, male staff member are also in the crowd there, walking around between the tables.

I get up from my seat and walk out of the seating area, heading out into the main part of the campus. Beautiful morning sunlight illuminates the campus. I take two steps, then take off from the ground and start flying around, staying at about the height of the roof lines of the single-story buildings. Typically for me, flying is the first thing I think of to do when I find myself lucid dreaming. Flying is fun, as always, and feels good. I have good flying control this time, but not perfect control. I don't feel like I'm being pulled or pushed in any direction, but at one point, I start losing altitude, and reach out to touch the top edge of a concrete-block wall with my fingers as I pass by it. It feels exactly like it would in reality, but I get the strange sense that it takes a split second for my brain to generate the simulated sensation, creating a tiny delay between touching the wall and receiving the sensory input. I recover and continue flying along.

As I pass the edge of one building's roof, I notice a crawlspace that you can't see from the ground. It's formed by the flat, real roof and the pointy, upper edges of the building's decorative facades, which extend above the real roof and slant toward each other, creating an empty space shaped like a long, triangular prism. I try to make a 90-degree left turn and enter this space, but I find I can't; I just start sinking down again. I shrug off this failure, recover, and continue flying across the campus. I reach an area where the long walls of two buildings run parallel to each other, and have crenellated ramparts [those square things on the top of the walls of a castle] at the top. As I'm flying along in between these two walls, the dream ends and I wake up.

I make a post at the beginning of a thread on a message board that turns out to be ridiculously, insanely popular, so that my computer is flooded with e-mail notifications from people posting to the thread at a rate of about one or two per second. [This dream may or may not have been at the beginning of the previous sleep cycle, I don't remember.]

I'm in a building that consists of a bunch of interconnected rooms that are filled with a colorful, random assortment of furniture and stuff. It kind of looks like a cross between someone's house and an antique store. [I just visited a bunch of antique stores on Friday, February 4.] I know I'm dreaming without any particular clue. I walk through the series of rooms, admiring the details of the dream environment, observing it with close attention. [That has been my lucid-dreaming goal for the last couple of days.] I think, I have to stay here as long as I can.

I reach a point when the sequence of rooms ends in a short T-intersection of passageways. I come up to the place where the long passageway I had been walking through ends. There is a piece of light-blue yarn hanging down in front of a low wall that stands in front of the back wall of the room. I touch the piece of yarn, running my fingers down it; it feels real. Then, I realize that the low wall it's hanging in front of is a mirror. It's a very speckly, dim mirror, and I can't see my reflection in it very clearly, but I can tell it's a mirror. I think, Hey, in a dream, you can walk through these and get to somewhere else. I straighten up and step forward with the intention of walking through the mirror.

First my arms, and then my head and part of my upper body go through the surface of the mirror. It is the coolest feeling. Like when I walked through the wall, I feel a slight resistance at first and then it yields to me, but this time, instead of feeling like something thin and hard breaking, it feels like going through a thick, liquid membrane. The membrane stays where it is as I go through it; I can feel it on my skin. There's nothing beyond the surface of the mirror but blackness, though. I realize that I didn't really think about what I expected to be on the other side before I started going through the mirror. Not wanting to go into the unknown, I pull back, out of the mirror.

I notice another, smaller mirror to my right. Just to continue experimenting with this newly-discovered ability, I start putting my fingers through the surface. Once again, they go right in. I don't really want to try to get anywhere else anymore, though, so I pull them back out. They come away with a silver coating of liquid mercury on them. I shake my hand to get the stuff off my fingers, but I'm aware that liquid mercury can't really hurt me in a dream.

In the small room off to the right, there is a slightly fat, female DC. I know her from somewhere, and know that her name is Melody. [Which is strange, because I've known several people named Melody and this DC didn't look like any of them.] We talk briefly [I don't remember about what], and then I turn away to explore the other side of the T-intersection, the small room off to the left of the big mirror. As I'm going into that room, I go, “Oh, yeah.” I remember the basic Task of the Month. I turn back around and say, “Melody. Melody!” She starts approaching me, and I approach her. When I get close enough, I put my arms behind her head and shoulders and lean in to kiss her. She realizes what I'm trying to do and pulls away with a look of revulsion. I say, “Just on the cheek. Please?” She stops pulling away and just stands there and lets me kiss her. I give her a kiss on the closest, most convenient spot I can reach, which is on the forehead, just above her right eye. Then I let her go, and she leaves. I look back at the big mirror and consider trying to get to Neopia by going through it, but I decide not to because I don't trust my dream control abilities that far. I've never done that before, and I'm afraid of it going wrong.

False awakening in my current, real room. I hear a sound that I recognize as the sound of fish splashing in a fishtank. I also hear P. moving around in her bed, which is on the other side of the room, parallel to mine. I don't open my eyes to look, but I do say aloud, “No! P. can't be here, and neither can her fish!”

“Yes, I can!” says P.

“When did you get home?” I ask her.

“Yesterday.”

“Oh.”

When I woke up for real, I found this FA rather amusing. Also, I was surprised that I'd had a dream that consisted entirely of sounds, with no visuals at all.

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of January 4-5, 2011.]

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

I'm flying around a large, elaborate, indoor shopping mall that has an upstairs and a downstairs level. [I don't remember how I became lucid, but I did.] Like real malls I've been to with upstairs and downstairs levels, there are lots of open spaces connecting the two. I fly down through one of them to get into the lower level and explore it. Some of the people who are in the mall see me flying, and I talk to some of them.

The lower level is completely enclosed with no windows. It's all painted off-white and appears to be mostly offices, rather than shops. When I get into this enclosed area, I start walking. I encounter a female DC and we start talking. At one point, I actually tell her, “You're a dream character!” She either ignores this or doesn't hear me, I don't know which.

While exploring the corridors and passageways of this enclosed lower level, I find a door that is an entrance to the Arlington Theater. [Although I identified it as such, it didn't quite look like that in the dream. It looked like a big theater for live performances, but without the decorative, themed walls, and even bigger and wider than the real one.] When I enter the theater, I exclaim, “I was looking for this place!” Then it occurs to me, Couldn't you have used an ability to get here faster, rather than just searching for it? I go to take an empty seat next to some of my high school friends. The performance we're watching is a live-action version of Jaws. At the end, I walk up to the very front of the theater and take a picture of the audience.

Then, I feel a need to start floating upward, just like a helium balloon, so I allow myself to. The ceiling of the theater is made up of several layers of pieces of canvas stretched out with ropes. I make my way between the pieces of canvas, sometimes detaching a corner and folding it back, until I float out of the building and into the sky.

The next thing I remember is being on a street corner. My dad and sister bicycle past me and tell me to stop at the corner before crossing the street, to be safe. I say yes, I will. I walk along the road I'm on. I think vaguely of trying to do something else cool, like run really fast, but I don't do it. I look at a photo [presumably the one I took of the audience in the theater; I'm working off brief handwritten notes here] in what I at first think is reality before I figure out that it must still be in my head, because I know that I was dreaming when I took that picture.

While still outside on the street [I think; not sure of the specifics of the transition here], I suddenly find that I'm lying down, and my entire body is vibrating. When I look up and to my left, I see a sleep paralysis monitor. It's measuring how much I'm vibrating. It looks like an oscilloscope, kind of like this one, only in the dream, the screen is all black and there's only one bright-green line across it, that grows thicker and takes up more of the screen as the SP intensifies. Below that line is a numeric readout, also bright-green, that jumps from 40% to 88% as I watch. Below the numbers, I see the words “You did it!” appear on the screen.

So this is what sleep paralysis feels like, I think. I know what it is, but I'm still just a little freaked out by the all-over, shaking, vibrating sensation. I realized that I had to be waking up and thought, No! I don't want to wake up yet! Go back! I tried to DEILD, but I couldn't think of a scene to visualize, nor could I calm myself down enough to visualize one. Eventually, the feeling went away, and I was awake and back to normal. [First time I've ever woken up into SP. Very interesting.]

When I went back to sleep after that, I had another non-lucid dream. This time, I'm in my church. The room seems to be the same size and shape as it is in reality, but lots of things about it are different. The piano is front and center [rather than off to the side], and I'm sitting a few feet behind the piano bench, with my chair up against the windows that form the front wall of the room. I'm watching Wendi play the piano. We talk to each other about something. We're attending Betty's memorial service [which was held the Saturday after I had this dream, and I knew that both Wendi and I were planning to attend].

Later, when we're at the burial service, I look down into the box that forms the underground enclosure for the coffin, and I can see furniture inside it.

After the service, I leave the church building. Outside it is a big, complex interchange of road overpasses and underpasses that spans across a straight main road. Airplanes are using this main road as a makeshift runway. I walk across one of the overpasses with my family to get to the overpass on the other side.

----------------
Side notes:
This was the second night that I wrote down a goal before going to bed. This time, I wrote: “Goal: become lucid, look around at scene, make sure it's stable, then see what other verbal commands I can use.” This time, I accomplished the first two, but forgot about the second two. So far, based on two nights of experience, my working hypothesis is that writing down my goals is definitely helping me to achieve them, but that in the future, my goals should only consist of one or two actions at most, not three or four, because I don't seem to be remembering more than two.

Non-lucid, 'Video-game-controller mode' [see side notes], Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

My dad and I are on a bicycle ride together. I've just checked out a thick paperback book from the library, and it's in the rack on the back of my bicycle.

I'm outside a movie theater in Florida, with my mom. Directly across from the entrance to the theater is a small kiosk where you can get drinks in plastic cups. She and I get some drinks from it for the whole family.

False awakening in my current real room. I hear the sounds of people shouting something about a surfer dude, and decide to follow the shouting out to the creek, but decide not to wake my parents. As I'm walking out of the house, I see that there's a bunch of writing in thick, black letters on the back wall of the dining room, as well as several papers with more writing on them taped to that wall.

I'm entering an upstairs apartment. My uncle is there.

I'm walking past a junior high school. I see a large group of kids in PE uniforms setting off on a run around the perimeter of the school.

I continue walking, and my route takes me along the street in my old neighborhood that goes around the edge of the park. I'm going in the direction of House #2. I turn around and see a tiny, cartoon kid with a BB gun standing behind me on the sidewalk. I'm a little worried that he's going to shoot me with the BB gun, but in the end, I ignore him and continue walking.

I reach House #2. In the garage, floating vertically in midair, is a menu of choices, like on a DVD. They say something like 'imaginary ideal' and 'reality' [I think; I don't really remember.] I select the former first, and find myself standing in my bedroom at House #2. The room is arranged the way it was in reality, but everything in it is completely white. [I really wouldn't call that design choice 'ideal.' However, when I lived there in reality, almost everything in that room really was white, and I was pretty happy living there.] I return to the menu, and this time, I select 'reality.' After making this selection, I find myself back in the same bedroom. It's still arranged the way it was in reality, only now the bed has a green bedspread with flowers, kind of like the one I have right now in reality [which I bought when we moved to House #3], except that the pattern is bigger and bolder.

I look out the window of my room and see a wide view of rolling grassland, with a lot of people walking around all over the place. There's only sunlight shining on one small, roughly circular section of the scene, though; the rest is in shadow. I speak aloud to the scene, saying something to the effect of, “It should be sunny all over the whole scene!” The sunlight spreads to cover the whole scene.

The scene shifts without my noticing it. The window of my room is now a doorway that opens onto a scene of an arctic landscape, with a wide, shallow pool of water in it. [An aside: After all those times I complained last month about the lack of snow in my dreamworld, I finally had a dream with snow in it, and not only did I completely fail to remember that I was supposed to make a snowball and hit somebody with it, but that Task of the Month is over now, anyway! Argh.] I walk out into the scene. From the far side of the pool, I step into the water, trying to walk on it, but I quickly give up the attempt because I get scared away by an orca and a walrus approaching me through the water. I walk back out. I then get the impression that they weren't really threatening me, after all. I go back toward the house. My mom is standing outside the doorway, and I tell her she can watch me do this if she wants to. I start walking back toward the pool of water again, concentrating on continuing to walk forward, straight into the pool, while believing that the surface of it will be just as solid to me as the ground is. It doesn't work; I end up standing ankle-deep in the shallow water again. [That's all I remember.]

-------------------
Side notes:
I'm really not sure for how much of the above sequence of events I was actually asleep and dreaming, and for how much of it I was awake and actively using my regular old imagination. I felt like I was doing the latter for at least part of it, hence the green text, which I always use to indicate a sort of half-awake, half-dream state where I know that I'm using my imagination like a video-game controller to control what happens. The division between green and purple text (indicating a lucid dream) is mostly an arbitrary guess. Then again, I was definitely aware that I was dreaming by the end, so it's entirely possible that I really was dreaming the entire time, and that's what dream control feels like. If so, that's really cool! I really advanced a lot in the area of dream control last night. I will have to experiment with this further.

I'm mildly annoyed, but not at all surprised, to discover that verbal commands work really well to control my dreams. As much as I love Inception and would love to be able to alter the dreamscape just by thinking about what I want to happen, that idea is relatively new to me. I've been a Star Trek fan for years, so it's not surprising that the older and better-entrenched idea that one can change one's surrounding environment by giving verbal commands, like they do when using the holodeck on Star Trek: TNG and later series, would take precedence over the newer idea that one can change one's surrounding environment just by thinking about it. Now that I know what works for me, though, I guess I'll go along with it.

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

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of December 21-22, 2010.]

I'm at a ticket booth in a train station, trying to buy a round-trip train ticket from home to L.A., where I plan to spend the day. The train ticket costs $35 and change; when I receive my ticket, it's a plastic card with my picture on it.

I'm at a desk at a music studio, explaining that I'm there because I want to record a demo. The lady at the desk doesn't want to accept a demo from me, until I mention that it's for a contest. She takes out the CD she has of demos for the contest, puts it in her computer to see how much space is left, and sees that there's enough space on it for one more song: six minutes. She tells me I'm lucky, because I'll be the last person to enter a song in the contest.

I'm standing outside some building [the music studio? I'm not sure; I get the impression this may have been a different scene], near the side door, waiting to get in to do something. I realize I'm dreaming and turn away from the door, looking at the other buildings on the street around it. Again, the scene looks just as sharp and vivid as reality. I hesitate for a moment, deciding whether to go along with the dream plot or go off and do my own thing. I choose the latter and take off, flying away. All it takes is an act of thought and willpower and a very slight push off the ground with my legs and feet. I have no problem taking off, but I immediately find myself being pushed backward again, unable to fly forward. Then I realize that it's only the wind pushing me in a particular direction, and if I let it carry me instead of trying to fight it, I'll have an easier time of flying. So I let the wind push me along, and it is, indeed, much easier.

I'm flying over a town. I remark aloud, “And, of course, it's another beautiful, perfect, sunny day here in the dreamverse!” I'm complaining again about the lack of snow.

While flying, I happen to pass over the backyard of a gray building that might be an older apartment building, and I spot two duplicates of myself there. I land in the backyard to get a closer look, but I don't want them to see me, so I try to will myself to be invisible to them. I can't tell whether or not it works.

I wake up in my bed. I'm a little disappointed to be waking up so soon from a lucid dream. I can clearly see a single eyelash moving back and forth in front of one of my eyes as I open and close them. I'm lying on my right side. Looking across the room from this position, I can see my closet. I think, I can't see the closet when I'm lying on my right side in bed in the room I have now. This is my room in House #1. I'm still dreaming! This is just a false awakening!

So I walk out into the living room of House #1. I look around to see if there's anyone else around, but there isn't; I'm all alone in the house. Since there's no one around to see me do it, I decide to try to walk through a wall. The wall I choose this time is the one directly to the right of the front door (as I'm facing the front door from inside the house). This wall separates the living room from the kitchen. [This is exactly how that house is laid out in reality, too.] I say to myself, “I'm going to walk through this wall,” and start walking through it. It's not completely solid to me, but I do feel a slight resistance at first. I continue pressing forward, and feel something hard, but thin (like a very thin sheet of balsa wood) break under the pressure my body is exerting. I continue walking, and end up on the other side of the wall, standing in the kitchen. Looking back, I see that on this side, the section of wall I've just walked through is blank except for a couple of metal panels with doors in them, like the kind that cover circuit-breaker boxes. [In the real-life House #1, there are kitchen counters and cabinets attached to that section of wall. Go figure.] Said metal panels are on a flap of drywall that is now sticking out from the wall at an angle, like a door. My passage through the wall has left a big, rough-edged rectangular hole in the drywall, the same height as I am. I can see the inside of the wall, and how thick it is, because the hole goes all the way through. This wasn't what I had been expecting to happen, but nonetheless, I say aloud, “Hell yeah! I did it! I just walked through a wall!” I'm pretty proud of myself. [Actually, that does make sense. I've had enough experience helping to build houses and doing home improvement projects in real life that I have a very detailed and complete schema for what the inside of a wall is like. I'm not surprised that when I said, “I want to walk through a wall!”, my mind answered, “okay, but you know that means breaking a hole in the drywall.” Interestingly, though, there were no studs to be seen in the dream.]

After that, I go out onto the street that House #1 is on. I climb up on top of a car that is parked on the street in front of my house, just because I can do so with almost no effort (unlike in reality,) but I don't start flying again. I just climb down the other side and walk along the streets of my neighborhood, which are also laid out just like they are in reality. The dream starts to fade, but I focus my vision and attention on the environment around me, and successfully bring it back into focus. Then, off in the distance, I see several tall, scary-looking metal structures rising up above the houses. They're as tall and narrow as construction cranes, but they aren't construction cranes. I'm frightened, so I run off and hide in a nearby public restroom.

[At this point, the dream transitioned from a lucid dream to a long, elaborate non-lucid dream that I don't remember much of now, so I'll summarize:] I'm watching a sci-fi story unfold from third-person perspective, like watching a movie. In it, people are punished for using long words. My dad is one of the people being punished.

When I woke up, I discovered that I actually had managed to fall asleep while lying on my right side in reality, corresponding to my position in my false awakening. I also realized: It's my dream. I don't have to be scared of anything I see in a dream - I can make it go away, by ignoring it, if nothing else. I can also transition to new scenes at will, and could find some snow that way. I just need to learn that these things are true.

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

I had this dream the night after I had had a small, private celebration of lucid dreaming, as I'd announced in this thread. I was so proud of myself that I'd not only had a lucid dream that night, but had accomplished one of my lucid goals in it!

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

[Another really long entry, but it's a really good one this time. Sorry for taking up so much page space again.]

I'm on the playground of my elementary school. It's dusk, and there are lots and lots of kids and teenagers on the playground, some playing games, others just milling around. I see one group of kids playing something that they call tackle football; it involves one person on the team holding a bowl of green beans and others holding and occasionally eating spoonfuls of the green beans, while the entire team moves around the field. Curious about the game they're playing, I approach the group.

“Are those green beans?” I ask.

“Yes,” someone in the group says.

The group spreads out a little, and I see that two of the people in it are P. and Thomas[, who first appeared in my dream dated December 7]. The instant I see him, I know for sure that I'm dreaming. “Thomas?” I say, looking at him. He acknowledges me. I'm pleasantly surprised to see him again, and amazed at how completely real all the people around me look. Throughout the rest of this dream, I make a special effort to pay attention to the environment around me, including paying attention to the physical sensations of touching things whenever I can. I'm aware that if I don't, they'll stop existing and fade away.

I start wandering through the playground, heading back toward the school buildings. P. and Thomas are following me. It's now fully dark, but the playground is still crowded. I end up on the sidewalk of the street that runs along the south side of the school and passes the kindergarten before the dreamscape shifts on me.

I don't notice the shift itself, but I find myself walking through the streets of a charming, slightly old-fashioned downtown with square, orderly blocks. There's no one else around. I stop and turn around, attempting to summon P. and/or Thomas by expecting them to be there. It doesn't work; I'm all alone. I shrug and continue exploring. As I had in the previous scene, I continue to notice and marvel at how vivid, detailed, and realistic the environment around me is. Everything looks and feels exactly like reality, yet I know perfectly well that I'm dreaming. I can even feel the asphalt and pavement under my feet. [It didn't occur to me until I had woken up and was lying there, recalling my dream, that I must have looked pretty funny wandering around in public places with no shoes on. ] I remember one of my lucid goals and attempt to walk through a wall into one of the shops. I try it twice, but it doesn't work either time; I'm not surprised at all to discover that the wall is just as solid and “real” as everything else in this dream world. As I continue walking, I think, Wow, this dream is really stable and seems to be going on for a long time. What should I do here? Oh, yeah – the Task of the Month is to hit a DC with a snowball. I'll have to go find a snowball. But there is no snow in this setting, and the weather is clear and bright.

I pass a small shop front on a street corner, with a red brick facade and a walk-up window where you can buy things. I recognize the woman inside as Lisa D., a real-life friend. I stop and talk to her. I say, “Lisa, do you happen to know where I might find a snowball?” She invites me to come into the shop through the door on the side. I stand just outside the door. [I don't know why; recall is a little vague here.] The small shop is actually a short truck, which is backed up to the brick facade with the window in it with its back cargo door open, forming the interior space. Lisa starts up the truck and starts driving it away from the facade and along the street. I walk quickly along with it for a little way, holding on to the frame of the open, narrow door on the side and keeping pace with it. Then I step up into the truck through the doorway and ride in it. I say aloud, “I could float along with the truck, but when the truck is moving, why make the effort?” I vaguely remember another person being in the doorway with me, but if so, I don't know who it was.

I ride inside the truck as it drives up into the mountains. While sitting in the truck, I hold onto the handle of a plastic bucket, feeling the sensation to ensure the dream remains stable. The truck takes me to a town on a mountaintop. I'm on or near a different, fenced-in school playground [I think; again, my recall isn't very good here.] I can see buildings on the tops of nearby hills, and I think I catch a glimpse of a patch of snow on a distant hilltop, but I'm not sure.

[I think] The scene shifts again, and I'm walking around on the campus of a community college. [Day residue; I walked back and forth across my real community college campus several times yesterday.] There's no one else around. This community college campus has slightly more traditional-looking architecture than my real one does, has a different layout, and there are more plants around and they're more mature, making the campus greener than my real one. This is a pretty campus, I think. I'm still admiring how vivid and "real" my surroundings are as I explore them, and I'm still looking for snow, but not finding any.

[Dreamskip? Another scene shift? I'm not sure, but the next thing I remember is that] I'm walking through the interior of a large, recreational building. I'm in a spacious, high-ceilinged indoor space with two swimming pools in it, a large, deep one and a smaller, shallower one, at right angles to each other. There are people in this room, many of them kids, walking around, swimming, and getting into and out of the pools. In one corner of the room is the entrance to a child-care room, which is full of brightly pastel-colored play equipment with little kids playing on it. It's separated from the room with the pools by glass walls. One of the glass walls has sticky gel letters on the inside of it, so that they look backward from outside the room. I can still read them backward, though. When I first look at them, I read them as “Children Sno” and think, Yay, snow! Then I approach the room for a closer look and realize that I've misread them; they say “Children Glo.” I leave the room, walking on the path between the narrow end of the larger pool and the longer side of the smaller pool. As I walk, I complain aloud: “There's no snow here! I mean, I know I've lived in Southern California all my life, but come on! Can't I have some imagination?” [I was complaining about the fact that, even though I wanted to complete the Task of the Month, my mind wasn't creating any snow in my dream world. The explanation I came up with for this observation was that I've never spent a winter in an area where it snows, so my mind can't re-create snow very easily, because I've only experienced it in real life a couple of times, so I don't know what it's like very well.]

Outside the recreational building, there's a courtyard or patio where a large group of people are having a celebration or reception. I walk among them without speaking to anyone. No one takes any notice of me. There are folding tables with paper tablecloths and lots of food set out on them, including oatmeal cookies. [I wish I'd thought to try one! This was the first time I've had the chance to try dream food while lucid, and I missed it! Dang!] Still in search of a snowball to throw, I decide to try summoning one by reaching under a small table of food next to a wall, without looking, and expecting a snowball to be there. It doesn't work. When I look, the only thing under the table is a small, open-topped cardboard box with some kind of party supplies in it, like paper napkins. [I note that in my attempts to summon people or things in this dream, I did not have the same quiet assurance and confidence that it would work as I had at those times in the past when I successfully summoned an object. I wasn't truly focusing on it or believing in it this time, which, I think, is why it didn't work.]

I get up from looking under the table and look around at the people celebrating. I sense that the dream is about to end. I close my eyes, hoping to use that method of teleporting to get to another environment. I just end up looking at the inside of my real eyelids.

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

This dream came at the end of a very bad, emotionally draining day and a late night. I was too tired to really try to induce a lucid dream. All I did was get up for a minute or two and go back to bed right before I had this dream, do a minimal amount of affirmations (maybe one or two), and wear my cardboard-square wristband on the inside of my right wrist, which I hadn't worn at all in a while. It may have been one of these things that caused such a long, vivid lucid dream, or maybe it was just the fact that I'd had a bad day and wanted to escape from it all (even though I consciously told myself before bed that that was stupid). I sure did feel a lot happier and better after waking up from my dream, though.

After waking up, I realized two things about this dream:
A) Expecting to be able to summon a snowball was stupid because, unlike the seed pod that I successfully summoned before (see entry dated October 26, 2010), a snowball doesn't naturally exist as a discrete object. You have to make a snowball yourself.
B) I was surrounded by DCs several times. I could have talked to my subconscious and asked for the answers to the questions from my exam that I missed because I had studied those subjects months ago, forgotten about them, and failed to review before the exam. (I'm not saying for sure that it would have worked, but it would have been fun to try. I'm curious to know if it can work.) I actually thought about doing that before I went to bed, but I didn't even think of it while I was dreaming. The only thing it occurred to me to do was to hit a DC with a snowball. Silly me! I will have to add “ask a DC about stuff I should know, but have forgotten” to my list of goals.

One final note: Wow. I now have a recurring, original, named dream character who is neither a pre-existing fictional character nor anyone I know in real life, and seeing him made me go lucid because I remembered meeting him in a previous dream, and here he was again, so I had to be dreaming. That's pretty neat. I can't say for sure that that officially makes him my dream guide, though, at least not just yet. It didn't occur to me to ask him if he was one. If I see him again, I'll try to remember to do that.

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of November 25-26.]

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

I'm attending a writers' workshop at the home of author Beverly Cleary. Every single wall of the house is completely covered with filled bookshelves. I'm walking through the house, picking my way among people in sleeping bags lying on the floor.

Dreamskip. Now everyone is awake and listening to Cleary speak. She announces to all the attendees that she's retiring from writing. Her assistant says: “Does anyone have any questions? Real questions? Realer questions?”

One of the other attendees asks if anyone else there is willing to answer a question, and I volunteer to answer it, saying, “I can make a halfhearted effort at answering.” I say this because I don't think my answer can possibly be anywhere near as good as Cleary's. The assistant introduces me to the other attendee with the question as the author of the forthcoming novel “Artist.” In the dream, I know that the assistant is referring to my current NaNoWriMo novel [the one I was working on in real life when I had this dream], but I think, That's not the right title. [At that point, I hadn't given that novel a title yet in real life, but I still somehow knew that that wasn't the right one.] The other attendee gives me a thin ARC [Advance Reader Copy] of his (or her? I'm not sure) new book, and asks me if I'm interested in reading it and how long it would take me to read it. I am interested, because it has Piers Anthony's name on it as a reference, and is obviously high fantasy based on the cover design. I flip through it and say, “I could read this in an hour, maybe two.”

The other attendee and I walk through the house, which is crowded with workshop attendees. In the room where we end up, there are some people sitting around a picnic table, and David C. is one of them. The other attendee who gave me the ARC asks me something about what the group dynamic at this writers' workshop is like. I answer, then start telling him (her?) about the characteristics of the T./M. Writers' Group [I don't know of one in real life, besides the NaNoWriMo group] and F. Writers Read. Then I woke up. This one was so cool that I thought about trying to DEILD back in, but I didn't because I knew I'd already moved around too much.

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

This dream was awesome. Not only did I have particularly good recall, especially for the many spoken conversations in the dream, but even better, somebody introduced me as the author of a forthcoming novel. Being the author of a published novel is one of my biggest real-life goals. Also, the night I had this dream was the night before Black Friday, and I had set a goal for that day of breaking my previous personal record for the most words of fiction written in a single day. I succeeded. I think this dream indicates that my intention to finish the draft I've started without stopping at the end of November had taken root firmly in my mind. Rawk.

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

[I apologize in advance for how much of the page this entry takes up. It was my longest lucid dream to date, though, and I wanted to make the best record of it I could.]

I'm at my old high school, outside the entrance to my mom's old classroom. The open-air entrance on one side of the classroom and the semi-enclosed atrium on the other side are reversed from the sides they're on in real life. I'm listening to an old woman [Betty J.? Aunt Edie? I'm not sure] talk about life. I also remember reading some text about how in the old days, we just lived together with love and respect for one another as a matter of course, without any need for external forces like social programs to manipulate or engineer good feelings between people. [Yep. That sounds like my mind, all right.]

I'm playing PackRat. [Again. I am so sick of dreaming about PackRat, and I know perfectly well that the only way to stop dreaming about it is to stop playing it. That'll happen at the end of this year, I hope.] I discover that the reason an old collection cannot be completed is that they created all the cards, with artwork and everything, but never actually made them available to players.

I'm looking through a rack of envelopes of photo prints, organized by the subject of the photos.

I'm reading a novel on a shiny, black electronic reader. The last page of one chapter has a small illustration of a rolling, bouncing boulder on it [this illustration is from a particular PackRat card]. The electronic reader has small, rectangular “previous page” and “next page” buttons in the lower right corner. It also has readouts in the lower left corner of the screen that show remaining battery life and how many inches from your eyes the screen is. It says that a distance of at least 9 inches is recommended. I see my reflection in its surface and am surprised to discover that I'm wearing glasses. [I don't wear them in real life, but I might have to, someday.]

I go to say good night to my dad. He shows me that he's discovered a way to screw this cylindrical part onto his guitar so that it still has its protective plastic cover.

WBTB at 3:58 A.M. I stayed up for 10-15 minutes, taking notes on the dreams I recalled so far. Then I listened to the second half of my binaural beats file and continued doing affirmations, this time including remembering to stabilize my dream as one of them. I then spent about 45 minutes being kept awake by my coughing and sneezing, but eventually, I managed to get back to sleep. I think I even experienced sleep paralysis for the first time ever; I remember a moment when it felt like my body was vibrating or shaking really fast.

When I find myself in House #1, I immediately know I'm dreaming. [Since I was lucid from the very beginning and can remember a little bit of the sleep paralysis, I think I may have just performed a successful WILD, even though I didn't originally intend to.] This time, I succeed in remembering to stop and take in the scene before doing anything else, in order to stabilize the dream. Once again, I gaze around in awe of the fact that my mind can create such a detailed and realistic environment. Everything looks real, even though I know it's not. I walk around the house a bit, and when I get to the sinks in the bathroom and kitchen, I look at the faucets and quietly expect them to turn on, and they do, without my touching them. [I think that's pretty cool.]

I go out into the study, which looks pretty much just as it did in reality, except that the space inside it is entirely filled with spiderwebs. I turn back and go back into the house, with spiderwebs sticking all over me. When I come back in, I accidentally let a spider into the house, too. It has a big, nearly spherical body with stripes in two different shades of gray. I squash it while it's walking along the wall in the master bedroom. Then I discover another, even bigger, red spider/crab thing on the carpet, and squash that one, too, saying something about how sorry I am for making a stain on the carpet. [The carpet I squashed the spider into was light brown and semi-shaggy. House #1 never had carpet like that; that's the kind of carpet we have in House #3. I didn't notice this until after I woke up, at which point I found it highly amusing that the details of the carpet had been off in one of my dreams and I hadn't noticed. ]

My mom is there in the house. [I don't really remember the specifics of this part, but] I lie down on the bed in the master bedroom and get under the covers so that my parents won't see that I'm quivering and shaking in the throes of SP. [I don't even know.]

I decide I want to leave the house and go explore other parts of this dream world, but I feel obliged to take leave of my parents first and tell them where I'm going, but I want to keep it a secret from them that I'm dreaming. I say to myself, “If I told them I was going to school, would they believe me? Given the setting, they might.” As I say this, what I have in mind is that I'm going to pretend to be setting out on foot for my junior high school. [Funny; that was the only school I ever took the school bus to. I did walk from my house to the bus stop, though.]

I walk through the side yard toward the front gate. I find my parents in the corner of the yard, where the wall with said gate in it meets the wall of the neighbors' house, doing some kind of yard work. I say, “I'm going to school. Bye, Mom!”

“Bye, (Emiko)!” says my mom, and it sounds exactly the same as it always does when my real mom says it. [Obviously, an unaltered memory.] “Have a good day!”

“You, too!” I say, or something like it. I walk out through the front gate and down toward the street. The neighborhood seems more spacious and spread-out than it is in reality. Now that no one is looking, I begin flying, taking off from the middle of the street and traveling parallel to it and upward from it at an angle, like an airplane taking off.

As I fly higher into the air, the dream and my dream consciousness start to fade away. Now, having read the DEILD tutorial, I had some idea of what to do. I lay absolutely still in my bed and concentrated intently on the dream I had just been having, willing myself to start dreaming again. It worked. [First successful DEILD, too! I was really on a roll last night!]

I end up in a group of interconnected, upstairs rooms in a building somewhere. I seem to have flown there. The rooms are white, and there are chairs, upholstered stools, and bookshelves in them. From reading a plaque on a wall near a doorway, I learn that these rooms are reading rooms dedicated to a strange alternate take on Christianity, centered around an alternate set of gospels written by different people. [I didn't recognize it as any sect that exists in real life.] One of the rooms has an analog clock on the wall. It doesn't have numbers, just a circle and two hands, all made of the same rough, gray metal. Even though I already know I'm dreaming, I deliberately look at the clock, glance away, and then look at it again to see if the hands have jumped. The first time I try this, they seem to be in pretty much the same position they were in, so I try again. The second time, they've jumped to a totally different position. I am pleased with myself; again, I was expecting that to happen, so it did.

I leave these rooms and start walking down a flight of stairs. The dream starts to fade again, but again, I manage to stay in it through sheer willpower.

The stairs end in a wide hallway. There is a set of double doors to the right, leading into a room. Judging by the decorations and items outside these doors and inside the room, it looks like there's a wedding going on. Am I the bride? I wonder, but when I enter the large, rectangular room and see the retail-style displays of clothing and stuff, I think, Oh, good. Just a fair, then. I see a real-life friend [I forget who] to my right, who says to me, “Cute dress, (Emiko)!”

“Thank you!” I answer, even though I think this is an odd thing to say, because all I'm wearing is a damp, clammy black blanket wrapped around me. It feels like it's made of swimsuit material. I continue further into the room, turning to my left and walking that way. I look down and to the left, between two racks of clothing, and see another real-life friend, Eleanor B. She's wearing a royal-blue bridesmaid dress [the one she was wearing the last time I saw her in real life, which was at the wedding of some mutual friends]. I call her name twice to get her attention. She looks up, sees me, and stands up to talk to me. I come over and talk to her. When I take a closer look at the clothes hanging on the rack we're standing next to, I say something like, “And are these the new Christmas sweatshirts from Target? Cute! I want!” The sweatshirts are white and have patterns on them of snowflakes made up of narrow lines, either in shades of pink or shades of teal. They also have hems and seams in those colors. I take one pink one and one teal one off the rack and carry them with me. They feel soft.

I leave that room and find myself outside. In the distance, I can see big mountains with snow on top of them. I continue exploring and somehow [I don't remember the exact route I took] make it into an old Japanese temple (or residence, or something). It has a very old, very traditional room with tatami mats on the floor. I pry off each of my sneakers in turn, using the toe of the other foot (suddenly, I'm wearing sneakers, I think). [Yes, I actually thought that while in the dream. Now that I think of it, I think I was suddenly wearing regular clothes, too.] Leaving my sneakers (the exact same ones I have in real life, I note) out in the passageways, I enter the room with the tatami mats and walk around in it. I can feel the mats and my socks under my feet. I say aloud to myself, “Wait – we're allowed to walk around in here? Oh – of course we are; that's what I was expecting.” Yet again, something is so because I expected it to be so. [In all my real-life experience visiting historical tourist sites in Japan, we were never allowed to actually enter the rooms with the tatami; we were only allowed to look into them from the outside. I always wanted to walk around inside them, though, so now, in a dream, I got my wish. Cool.]

Outside of this room are some passageways that are all painted a dusty shade of teal, and have wooden signs hanging in them. I walk around in here for a few minutes. One of the signs says “Telephone,” and indeed, there is a pay telephone on the wall in a wooden box. It looks like an old tourist facility.

One of the doorways within these passageways leads into a spacious, modern restaurant that I recognize as the one inside the onsen [hot spring] that I visited while I was living in Japan. There are a few people sitting at tables here and there. I walk through the restaurant, looking for one of my real-life friends [I don't remember which one now]. I don't find her there, so I decide to head for the restaurant's exit and go somewhere else.

The way to the exit is through a long passageway with a wall on the right side and an upholstered bench on the left side where guests can sit and wait for tables, which separates the passageway from the rest of the restaurant. There are two people sitting on the bench. As I approach the door, I think, What shall I do next? Task of the Month – cell phone – oh, yeah! For a split second I think of getting out my cell phone to text somebody, but then I remember the new Task of the Month for November. I turn to one of the two DCs sitting on the bench, the one sitting nearest the door, who happens to be a black, pregnant woman. “Hey, can I tell you what I'm thankful for?” I say to her.

“Okay.” She straightens, sitting forward on the edge of the bench, listening to me.

“I'm thankful for my family, and [something else I can't remember now], and my computer, and for being able to come here!” I say. [Meaning, to the dream world.] Unfortunately, the dream starts to fade again just as I'm finishing my sentence.

FA in which, instead of being me, I'm Cobb. Mal is there when I wake up, the real one. [They're characters from Inception.] We talk about something, probably the dream I just had. [I don't remember now exactly what it was we talked about, but dude. That was a really weird FA.]

FA in which I count my fingers while they're spread out against the legs of my jeans. When I find I have a sixth finger on my left hand, my reaction is, “Oh, damn. Gosh-darn it!” Apparently, I really want to actually be awake. But I'm still feeling sleepy, so I lie down, sprawling over the sides of the white, wooden bench I'm sitting on.

When I woke up for real, I just lay there for several minutes because my body still felt heavy. I recalled my dream and was pretty impressed.

--------------------------------

Side notes:

That was the longest lucid dream I've ever had. I'm also very impressed and pleased with the number of times I succeeded in controlling what happened just by expecting something to happen. I really got the hang of that skill last night. Finally, I'm amazed that I managed to stay lucid for that long, and to force myself to keep dreaming so many times when the dream threatened to end. Wow!

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.]

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, [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.]