The Lab Notebook

[Now I'm all caught up. This one is from last night.]

I'm in a [completely unfamiliar] house where my family is staying. My mom is temporarily adopting a baby named Ana from some woman. Inside the house, I pick up P., who is maybe 5 or 6 years old (small enough for me to pick up and carry around) but still thinks and talks like the 19-year-old she currently is in reality. I'm supposed to call her Ana in front of our mother, but I accidentally slip up and call her P. [I don't even know.] There is an actual baby Ana somewhere in the house; I see her there. While walking around outside the house, I pass by the baby's mother as she's leaving.

Our family has also gotten a small, fluffy white dog. While I'm lying in bed in my room in the aforementioned house, the dog comes and jumps into bed with me, and I pet him and snuggle him. He's warm and soft, and I decide I like having a dog. [I've never had one in reality.]

My family and I are walking around on a street outside, at dusk. The neighborhood we're in looks rundown and old, all one-story houses and vacant lots. A bigger dog runs up to me and jumps up onto my clothes. I'm scared and try to tell him to go away [just as I would in real life], but he doesn't knock me over with his paws, and I decide the experience isn't actually as scary as I had thought it was. [Hmm. That's the second time I've encountered and overcome a longtime fear while dreaming, although I wasn't lucid this time. I hope this trend continues!]

We continue walking through the neighborhood. I recognize a lot of the people living in it as students from my ESOL classes at DePorres, which I know is also in the neighborhood. I say to my family, “If I randomly say hello to people, they're my students.” After a short while, there's a crowd of at least 20-25 people accompanying me on my walk through the neighborhood, and I recognize at least two-thirds of them as my students. I say aloud, “This is the best neighborhood ever!” [Not only were my students much more spread out across the area than that, but the neighborhood around DePorres isn't quite as rundown as it was in this dream. Also, I notice that when I dream about Florida, sometimes it's bright and sunny, and sometimes it's darker and grittier than it actually is (well, darker and grittier than the part of Florida where I lived actually is, anyway).]

We come upon a vacant lot that is all dug up because people are in the process of building a playground there. Standing on top of one of the piles of dug-up dirt, I say, “This wasn't here two years ago.” It makes me happy that something is getting built there.