non-lucid

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

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of December 22-23, 2010.]

I'm riding in the back of my parents' car as we drive to the home of a friend of mine in Wrightwood. As we drive along the winding mountain road [which has appeared in at least one dream before this one, but I don't think I bothered to write it down], I notice that a Walgreens has opened in this remote little mountain town, and I am bothered by its presence there. I feel that it spoils the natural, rustic ambiance of the place. As the drive goes on, I start to feel sleepy.

We arrive at my friend's house. I meet their dog, and I'm nowhere near as afraid of being met by a new dog as I used to be [in real life]. Inside the house, there is a party going on, with lots of people. I eat dinner with some of them in the living room. The topic of conversation is how people who move out here to the mountains do so because they want to be 100% original and avoid letting big corporations influence their lifestyle too much, which is why the presence of a Walgreens is so offensive to the people who live here.

I wander into another room of the house, where I find a dog and a cat. Oh, great, I think. Now I'm going to have an allergy attack. [This is exactly how I would react to this situation in reality, by the way.] There are a whole bunch of different games set up on two different tables in this room. One of them is a stack of bowls, each with a vocabulary question and answer printed on it and a logo that reads “OKWords.” Another is a fallen phrases puzzle whose solution is an invocation to some mythological (possibly Norse?) god of death. There are quite a few people in this room, too. One of them is wearing a purple dinosaur suite, and another has some Pokemon dolls. As I'm walking around in the room, someone sends me back into the other room to find out what everyone there wants to drink. I walk back into the first room to find out. There is a large tray of cookies and other goodies on the table in that room; I eat a blueberry off of it.

The dream shifts to a new dream. Now, I'm in a movie/book titled Tron. [It has absolutely nothing to do with the real-life Tron.] The story I'm in involves an alternate dimension, which is accessed through a big, hidden doorway. Said alternate dimension is a typical epic fantasy world, and the story that takes place there has a lot of the universal mythic feel of the original Star Wars trilogy. I can understand why people are so insulted by the lightshow that is the new Tron; it has none of this mythic feel at all. [In real life, I've seen the original Tron, but not the new one. The content of this dream was based entirely on Internet hearsay about the new one.] There is a very clear scene in which the bad guys get through the aforementioned hidden doorway, and watch the good guys' actions on giant magical screens that are really interdimensional gateways.

The scene shifts again. Now, rather than being in the scene from the old Tron, I'm watching it with a group of people I know in real life, including Guy and some of my fellow students from his classes. As I watch, I realize that the scene we're watching was shot at Disneyland, due to the disguised but clearly visible Matterhorn in one broad shot of the landscape. I say aloud, “Wow, awesome! I won't say it, I'm just thinking it very loudly.”

The scene shifts again. Now that same group of people and I are on the train that goes around [this particular dream version of] Disneyland. We pass several other park landmarks that have been disguised to look like other things, like the Matterhorn was. The train passes behind a large, white, curved, several-story office building. I am shooting ahead of the train, flying on hover boots. As the train and I approach the Tron station (where we started our train trip around the park), I tell the boots to slow down, because my legs are starting to hurt from being kept bent at a 90-degree angle at the knee so that I can stay upright while using the hover boots. I say aloud, “Slow down, boots. Please?” They don't slow down. My alarm woke me up out of this scene, which disappointed me, because it was a really cool dream. I was also dismayed to realize that meeting the dog and not being afraid of it had been a dream.

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.]

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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.

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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 dream, [Commentary made while awake]

[This is a catch-up post. These are dreams that I had between December 16 and December 20, 2010.]

Night of December 16-17

I discover that every time the “Looney Tunes” theme music is heard on TV, it's always being played live by real live musicians, even nowadays. I tell one of the live musicians how awesome I think it is that Warner Bros. [yeah, yeah, I know, “AOL Time Warner”] still does that.

There is a research project going on. The goal is to research people with innuendo-y names, but without using the Internet. I am asked to make the necessary phone calls because of my “dulcimer” voice. [Um, I think the word you're looking for there is dulcet, brain.] Several of my friends, including Brianna G., are also involved in the project. We're all on vacation together, so, to help us out with the project, my mom reads silly names out of the newspaper every morning.

Night of December 18-19

[Fragment] My mom is entered in some kind of radio station contest.

[Fragment] To get a particular piece of e-book reading software to work right in Firefox, I have to install some Firefox extensions. The e-reading software works after I've installed them, but I discover that they've taken up all the remaining free space on my hard disk.

I'm going out to dinner with my parents. I don't want Mexican food for dinner because I've just had it recently. We're having dinner near the Starbucks that has taken over the cafe and adjacent motel that had originally occupied that particular building in Cayucos.

[Fragment] I'm pulling my car out of the garage when my cell phone rings. I answer it and talk to some salespeople.

I'm reporting in to work for a marketing agency. Usually, my job is to give out free samples of food in stores [this was my first real-life job, by the way], but today, my assignment is to go to Knott's Berry Farm and evaluate my experience there, like a mystery shopper. I'm running late, and I know I'm going to fall behind on the schedule the agency gave me, which includes seeing a show in a theater near the entrance to the park, but I'm still happy to be going there.

Night of December 19-20

[Fragment] I'm in line for Star Tours with P.

[Fragment] I'm in an underground complex of preschool classrooms.

I watch a full-length opening sequence for an animated show that is a fusion of “Bewitched” and “2 Stupid Dogs.” The animation looks like it was done by Hanna-Barbera. The opening sequence is followed by a behind-the-scenes clip of the Animated Actors who played some of the dogs. This clip was interrupted by my real alarm.

[Fragment] I'm in a grocery store, sitting at a disused checkout stand. The store has recently been rearranged so that the checkout stands that are actually being used are on the opposite side of the building, but the old ones were left in place.

I'm parking my Saturn [the car I had in Florida] in the parking lot of an Albertsons grocery store [none that I've ever been to in real life]. I notice that the temperature gauge on the car is maxed out [as it usually was in reality]. I think about how I have to make this car last all year because, in my situation, there's no other method of getting to work that will do. [In this dream,] I'm back in Florida for a second year.

When I went back to bed after having taken some handwritten notes on the above dream, I noticed that my body already felt heavy. I decided to roll with it and try to WILD. I had attempted to do so a few days before during an afternoon nap, and had gotten as far as one of my arms starting to go numb before my mom interrupted me with a question. This time, I succeeded, and to my surprise, it wasn't nearly as scary as I had thought it would be. My hypnagogic hallucinations consisted of a buzzing sound in my head that seemed to go on for a few minutes. Then it stopped, and a few seconds later, I find myself lying in my bed, looking around at my current bedroom. I immediately recognize the false awakening for what it is, since I had been expecting to be dreaming. I did it! I think excitedly.

None of the lights appear to be on, and yet I can see everything clearly. In other words, the room looks very much the way it does when early-morning sunlight is coming in through the window, and yet I'm aware that it's nighttime. I get out of bed and start walking out of the room. Just before I walk out the door, I do the nose-pinch RC just to verify what I already know, and for the cool experience. I can still breathe, which I still think is the neatest sensation.

I go out the door and walk down the hallway. This looks exactly like my real house. There's no one else around. As I pass by the door to P.'s room, I notice light coming from underneath it, but this is normal in our house, so I don't investigate. I go to the front door and open it. It's exactly like the real one, too; I even have to unlock the deadbolt on the screen door before I can open it and go outside.

I walk along the front walk. I notice that I'm wearing one of my summer nightshirts, the one with the teacups printed on it and the pocket in the front. It occurs to me that I could have stopped and gotten dressed if I had thought of it, but I didn't, and it doesn't matter anyway because this is a dream, so it's only natural for me to be wearing sleepwear. I'm not cold at all, though. [The strange part, which, of course, I didn't realize was strange until I'd woken up, was that I wasn't wearing that nightshirt in reality; I was wearing my new purple pajamas. It does get cold at night in the winter here, so I always wear pajamas in winter.]

The scenery outside my house looks just like reality, too. When I get to the driveway, I take off and fly in the way that I've learned to do it, by pushing gently off the ground with my legs and feet while thinking about initiating the act of flying. [The mental process involved is very similar to the mental process involved in starting my bicycle moving with that first push on the pedals, now that I think of it.] It works, but once again, once I get airborne, I immediately start getting pulled backward. I try to relax and let myself be pulled along, as before, but it seems I'm not being taken anywhere in particular. Then I hear a male voice that seems to come from the air around me, and yet sounds like it's coming through a radio speaker. It says something along the lines of, “If you always expect life to go the way you want it to go...” but doesn't finish the thought. I finish the thought with, “...you won't be able to control it?” [Hmm. Very interesting.] [Because, once again, I've forgotten to concentrate and pay attention to the scenery,] the dream fades and I wake up.

[This next dream is from my next sleep cycle on this same night. I'm adding this section on 1/15/11. I didn't have time to write all this out on the day I had the dream, but I did today.]

I'm watching a series of commercials and reading some poster-sized ads for kids' day camp programs at a chain of big, fancy hotels. There are two such programs: one is called “adventure camp” and features soccer, while the other is called “non-adventure camp” and features poetry and other non-athletic, creative activities.

Then, I'm at one of the big, fancy hotels, sitting on the floor in the lobby, leaning up against a wall. I use my laptop to log in to a game website, not Neopets but similar to it, that I've been to before. I wonder, Do I remember my password for this site? The login screen plays music. A lady comes by and asks me to go outside, where the music won't disrupt the quiet of the lobby, so I do. I go out to a wooden patio with several metal table-and-chair sets on it. There are people sitting at the tables and studying, though, so I press the Mute button on my laptop. I ask one of the girls on the patio if the chairs at her table are taken. She offers me a seat, and I take it. Another girl sees my laptop screen, and we have the following conversation:

Girl: Is yours a dragon?
Me: (after figuring out that she's talking about my pet on the site I'm logging on to) Yes, it's a silver dragon.
Girl: They know about it.
Me: Who?
Girl: Your 'rents.

I haven't told my parents about this site. They know about my Neopets account, but not my account on this site. I wonder about the girl, Are you my dream guide? but don't ask her. [Yes, I managed to think that without realizing that I was dreaming. I don't even know.]

Me: We don't get along very well right now. This is part of the reason.

I log in to my account anyway. The screen shows animation of the digital creatures on the site fighting each other by shooting beams of various things out of their mouths, like some Pokémon and Digimon do.

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

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

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

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

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

“Mm-hmm!” she answers cheerfully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Non-lucid dream, [Commentary made while awake]

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the night of December 11-12, 2010.]

[Fragment] I see a panoramic overview of the city of Austin, Texas. It's very bright, with lots of city lights and several brightly-lit casinos.

[Fragment] Two mascot characters, a monster and a yeti, are having an argument over where to find America on a globe.

[Longer dream begins here] I'm in the brown car with my mom. The car is in the parking lot of an Applebee's restaurant, which is in a shopping center. [The shopping center we were in looked nothing like any of the ones I know in real life.] I tell my mom that yes, I do actually want to wait there for Dad and go to dinner with him. We park the car in the space underneath a long van [or something like that] that is being held up off the ground by two other cars. I'm surprised that our car fits under there.

Dad arrives. We get out of the car and start walking toward the restaurant. [In this particular dream,] I have a second body and can switch from using one to using the other at will. As we're walking along the sidewalk in front of the other shops in the shopping center, I say to my parents, “Nobody's home, so I'm going to go pretend to be asleep.” When I stopped using the first body and switched to the second one, the first one had remained standing there near where we'd parked the car, staring blankly at nothing because there was no consciousness animating it. My plan is to switch back to the first body, lie down somewhere and make it look like I'm asleep so that no one else will figure out that I have two bodies, then switch back to the second one and carry on with what I was doing (going to dinner). As I walk back toward where I left the first one, I mentally debate whether it would be less illegal to (pretend to) sleep on the sidewalk, or in the front seat of the brown car. I know you're not allowed to sleep in parked cars on the street. [I thought the having-two-bodies thing was pretty darn cool. ]

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

[I dreamed for a subjectively really long time last night, but my recall is a bit fragmented. I don't really remember the transitions between most of the scenes, which is reflected in the absence of flowing transitions between paragraphs in this entry.]

I'm lying in a bed that I'm sharing with a man I know. It's not sexual; he's asleep. He rolls over onto me, apparently completely unaware of my presence. I struggle to get out from underneath him, and succeed, standing up.

I'm now in a long, wide, rectangular space with white walls that serves as the entryway to our church's offices, which are within a really big building. A long, straight hallway leading to other offices on the floor forms one of the long sides of the rectangle, and the doors into our offices are on the other side. The center of the rectangle is filled with a row of wide, square, dark-colored, upholstered seats. I'm lying on one of them, with my knees bent over the front edge of it and my feet on the floor. Several people from my church walk by, coming in and out of the doors. They see me, and I say, “Hi.”

I'm in another room in the same really big building. It's being remodeled. There's a couch that's completely wrapped in newsprint, because someone is going to paint this room. I'm standing near the doorway, and I see L.M. [a teacher from my real high school, whose class I was never in] walking by out in the hall. I introduce one of the other people who's in the room with me to her: “This is L.M. She teaches biology.” L.M. is wearing a name tag that says “Sakura Lily [Something-or-other beginning with M],” in Roman characters. I think, I didn't know that was her real name.

I'm looking out the wall of the really big building that's make up of one really big window, at a sky filled with pink and orange clouds. I realize that it's already 3:00 in the afternoon, and I've already wasted most of the day. I'd better hurry up if I want to do the studying I still need to do for my final. [In the dream, I actually remembered having experienced most of an entire day in that really big building, including lunchtime.]

I'm in another living-room-like room, similar to the one that was being remodeled, except that this one isn't. At this point, it hits me: This isn't a real place. I'm dreaming. That explains why I wasn't really hungry for lunch earlier: my real body is asleep, and I had a big dinner before I went to bed. Oh! Since I'm dreaming, it's not really 3:00. The day hasn't even started yet! I still have time to study! Strangely, thinking about the fact that I'm dreaming causes me to feel woozy, dizzy, and sick, and the whole world to tilt. [Probably because I was rereading parts of the Inception shooting script again, in which telling someone that they're dreaming causes the dream to destabilize. Dang it! I know it doesn't have to be like that.] I think, No. I have to keep the dream stable. I kneel down to feel the carpet, which, this time, is a little like the carpet in my real room, except lighter (more yellow than brown) and slightly shaggier. The dizzy, tilting feeling goes away. Standing up, I put my hands under running water. At first, I can't feel it at all, but then I feel the warm water running over my hands. Then, I reach into a fish tank on a nearby table to touch the goldfish in it with my fingers. I've done this before, I think. What did it feel like? This. It does feel pretty much like I remember it feeling when I had my own goldfish tank in reality.

I return to the room that was being remodeled, to find that they're done remodeling it. The couch has been unwrapped and all the other furniture has been returned to the room. This room will be serving as the first-aid station for some kind of event; there's a handwritten paper sign on the door saying so. I feel the need to leave this room clean and neat before this dream ends (I sense that it will soon), so I pick up all the trash and used tissues that are lying all over the middle of the floor.

I'm outside, at night, looking at a couple of brightly-lit city blocks. I think, Oh, cool! Those are the blocks just to the south of home! [What home, I don't have the slightest idea.] I start flying, this time taking off with more of an effort of will and belief than by jumping (it also helps that I'm feeling happy and excited), and go straight up, so as to admire the view better. When I get up high, I start being pulled backward again [see this DJ entry and this one], but this time, it doesn't frighten me. I think, Oh, I must be going back to my real body now.

It turns out that I'm wrong. I find myself in another unfamiliar place [I don't remember where it was]. I pinch my nose and can still breathe through it, which is a pretty neat feeling. I'm still dreaming. [I remember doing this on two different occasions, but I'm not sure when the other one was.]

I'm entering my family's house [but it's none of our real houses]. P. is waiting for me inside, and expresses frustration that I've been gone so long. I'm still aware that this is a dream, but I decide to play along with the dream plot. I enter the kitchen, and my parents are there. I look at the whiteboard/calendar attached to the side of the fridge and see that something I wrote there before has been erased, and the magnets on it have been moved around. I follow my family up the stairs in the house, and we end up in a room filled with barrels of wine.

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

This dream seemed to go on for a really long time, especially considering that I remembered being in the dream building for most of a day. I only wrote down the most memorable moments. I think this is because time dilation was the topic I was reading the most about here on DV before I went to bed last night. I am pleased with this development, and now I'm even more motivated to learn better control, so that I can really take advantage of the time and stability I now seem to have in lucid dreams.

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.

Non-lucid dream, [Commentary made while awake]

[This is a catch-up post from two nights ago, which was the night before an examination. As I was going to bed, I tried to concentrate on the ideas that were going to be on the exam, hoping that I would dream about them. It worked... but not in the way I'd hoped. My commentary on the dream will include explanations of what parts of it relate to the exam.]

[Dream #1] I'm making a scrapbook. I'm brushing clear, rubber-cement-like glue onto the bristles of another kind of brush, to glue it onto something flat. The handle of the brush I'm using to apply the glue breaks, so I have to apply it by holding on to the outer part of the bottle instead. Satoshi and other characters from the Pokémon anime series are there. [I can see why I was dreaming about scrapbooking: it's a method of committing things to memory, which is what I had been doing all day to prepare for the exam.]

[Dream #2] I'm visiting Fallingwater.

Picture #1

Picture #2

As I approach the entrance, I feel absolute awe at the beauty of this place, and it shows on my face. There's a big, dramatic, semi-enclosed entryway with dark brown walls; the main doors are on the left as you're walking through the channel that the entryway forms, and directly across from them is a low patio coffee table and some patio chairs, facing onto the walkway. Several of my professors from college are sitting in those chairs, including the one who taught the art history class focusing on architecture in which I first learned about this building [in real life]. I stop and chat with him about how wonderful it is to be there. He remembers me, and says that he's there to work. I say that I'm there on vacation.

I enter the building through the entryway. Inside, there's a child-care room, full of older kids and teens who would be bored by the tour of the place. There is a silent radio in the room to announce when kids who are in there are being kicked out of it for bad behavior and released back to their parents. It says things like, “(Kid's name) is now under the direct guardianship of her mother.” I watch from a third-person perspective as one of the teenage girls in the room offers to have sex with one of the teenage boys. There follows a non-graphic, narrative description thereof, without any visuals.

The child-care room is located just off of a large, open entry hallway, also dark brown and clearly built after the fact, especially for the tourists. There is a sign that says “Photographers will be shot,” as in, with a sniper rifle. [I know it's a famous landmark and all that, but that's awfully harsh!] [The exam was on the subject of data network architecture, so of course, it makes sense that I would dream about one of the most famous works of architecture ever built. Even though it didn't help me with the exam, I thought this was a pretty awesome dream. I'd love to visit the real Fallingwater someday.]

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

Night of December 7-8

I'm in the kitchen of House #1, looking up somebody's phone number on my cell phone. It looks like a calculator, but it has a two-line display, and the number is stored in it. Then, my dad, P. and I have a conversation via text messages about camping. I see the text messages on the screen of this calculator-phone thing. My dad says, “Want to go camping?” I say, “I love camping! Do we have to go in winter, though?” My dad says he doesn't expect us to go in winter. [There was a text message from P. in there somewhere, but I don't remember what it said.]

Then, my dad comes into the room, and he and I argue about how to retrieve the phone numbers of past incoming callers from the house phone. [My dad and I had figured this out together in real life the evening before I had this dream, but the phone in the dream had a much bigger, much more complicated two-panel display than our real house phone has.]

Night of December 8-9

There's an area where some sort of armed conflict has been taking place. There is an organization of people called “Help the Hungry” who are providing food to the survivors by parachuting in with it and by air-dropping it.

I'm in the bombed-out, roofless, empty remains of a small, single-story house that had only one or a few rooms. There is a rectangular box in the middle of the floor of the largest room. All the sides of the box are on fire, but there is a single hard-boiled egg in the center of the box, and it's not burning. I know that it was air-dropped there by Help the Hungry. Oh, a dream, I realize. I decide to go out of the house and explore. I turn around, toward another section of the house, a rectangular section where the wall at one of the narrow ends has been blown up. There's too much rubble between me and the opening for me to walk through conveniently, so I fly over it.

Once I get outside, I discover that the house is in the middle of a wide-open, flat, grassy field, lined with trees around the edges. [Now that I think of it, it resembles the one at the park closest to House #1, only the one in the dream is bigger, has more trees, and has no roads or other buildings in sight.] There is only one other person there, standing right near me as I'm flying just a few feet above the ground. He says something to me [that I don't remember now]. His tone doesn't sound hostile, but I know that he's part of the group responsible for bombing the house, so I want to get away from him quickly. I start flying straight up to escape. He makes a grab for my legs to catch me, but misses. I continue ascending, and the dream starts to fade. Gray blotches appear and spread, blotting out the sky around me.

When I found myself back in bed, I thought, No, I'm not done yet, with resolve. I didn't want this dream to be over already. I remained perfectly still and concentrated on visualizing the dream I'd just been having. I remember thinking, Please... please... please...

...and then I'm back in the sky above that same grassy field, falling toward it just as fast as I had been flying away from it. I do a faceplant into the grass, but feel no sensation at all, neither impact nor deceleration nor pain. I'm now lying on my stomach in the grass. Three or four people about my own age are crouched down in front of me, watching me as I push myself up. I try to speak, but for some reason, although my mind is sending the right commands, my mouth won't work. Instead, I smile and wave at the young woman on the right, who smiles and waves back. As I'm getting up, I keep trying to speak, and after a few seconds, I succeed in getting my mouth to work. I say something like, “Hi, I'm (Emiko). Hide me from anyone other than the Help the Hungry people, will you? I don't think they like me very much.” By “they” I mean the group responsible for bombing the house, and the reason I don't think they like me very much is that I ran (well, flew) away from them. The others seem to accept me, and we all walk away across the field as a group. [That's the last I remember.]

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

I was getting to be kind of annoyed that I'd had dreams featuring House #1, one of my dream signs, for two nights in a row without going lucid. Last night, I started to do more serious RCs again, and changed up my before-bed affirmations, making them more along the lines of, “When I'm in an unfamiliar place, especially House #1, I realize that I'm dreaming.” It seems to have worked.

Also, this is the second time that a dream has started to fade right when I've been flying upward. I think it's because both times, I was concentrating exclusively on the act of flying, not paying any attention at all to the environment around me. Lesson learned: In the future, look around more when flying. (Yay for DEILDs, though! I'm so glad I know that trick and can pull it off successfully. )

Non-lucid dream, [Commentary made while awake]

Night of December 5-6

I'm attending a service at an unfamiliar church. I'm in the choir. The bishop is there, and he shushes the choir, ending the song we're singing early. Two other famous people are there: Arnold Schwarzenegger and H. [a writer who is on the Internet and likely to search for himself]. The two of them and the bishop pose for a group picture. H. is wearing a big, floppy USC baseball cap. We all tell him to turn it around and wear it so that the logo is showing, or else there's no point in having it on at all. He actually looks more like my real-life friend Victor K. than he looks like H.

The service also involves honoring some military people. There is a man in a very highly decorated, green military dress uniform there.

Night of December 6-7

[This was a long, fun, interesting dream with a really cool setting and particularly good recall, especially for dialog.]

This dream is set within the world of a TV show called “Cruiser Island.” Cruiser Island is one of a small group of small, tropical islands, very close together, located just off the coast of Florida and connected to each other and to the mainland by bridges. One of its neighboring islands is called Alo Island. There is a large, single-story building there that says “Alo Island Public Hospital” on the sign on the front.

House #1 is located on Cruiser Island. My family is hosting a sort of sleepover there. I'm in my bedroom, in the top bunk (which is mine), wearing pajamas, ready to go to bed. A boy who's maybe 8 or 9 years old climbs up the end of the bunk bed to get into the top bunk, and we talk. He says he's afraid of some kind of wild animal, and I reassure him by saying that we're in the middle of downtown, and no wild animals are coming here. The rest of the conversation goes something like this:

Me: What's your name?
Boy: Thomas.
Me: Yeah, I thought you kinda looked like a Thomas. I'm (Emiko). (we shake hands)
Thomas: You know that guy who sings with the Parish girls... I'm his younger brother.
Me: Oh, you're Dom's brother!

I decide I enjoy spending time with kids.

[Note: In the dream, when Thomas mentioned his older brother, I knew who we were talking about and knew that he shared a first name with, but wasn't, the protagonist from Inception. In real life, both brothers sang with the Parish girls, but only once, two days ago. They also have different first names in real life.]

I'm standing on the floor next to the foot end of the bunk bed. There are two Vietnamese women, a mom and a grandma, who are sleeping on the lower bunk. Two more Vietnamese moms are standing around in the room and in the hallway, along with a whole bunch of their kids. One of the moms says something about how she doesn't have magical Japanese eyes [I don't even know.] and then sternly commands all the boys to go and brush their hair, now, so that they can go to bed. All the girls have their hair in braids or pigtails, so they'll need their moms' help to comb it out. I think, With all these people in the house for the sleepover and all this excitement, my sleep cycle is getting completely thrown off. I'm not going to get a chance to try to lucid dream tonight. That's too bad. [And yet, I still somehow managed not to realize that I was dreaming at this point. I laughed when I remembered this thought upon waking up.]

I go into the bathroom to toss a few of my stray hairs into the trash can. I don't just toss them on the floor because of all the guests we have in the house. While I'm in the bathroom, I see that my gold cross necklace has fallen into the toilet. Also, I find some bedbugs somewhere in the house, crawling all over some white paper thing. I take it outside, showing it to my mom and explaining to her, as we walk along a sidewalk outside, what they are and what it's like to have them in the house. I say that I'm pretty sure I just got rid of all of them.

My mom and I continue walking through Cruiser Island's downtown, which looks a lot like San Luis Obispo's downtown, until we reach a small light rail station on the street. We look at the big, dark-blue metal signboard there to find out what its schedule is. We continue walking along the streets, turning at least one corner and passing one more light rail station. The street signs are white on blue like in L.A. [not white on brown like in the real SLO]. I talk to someone I pass on the street about which of the streets will be closed for the parade that's going to start soon.

Night of December 3-4

I'm in a house or apartment somewhere. A friend [no one I recognize from real life] is holding up a gallon-size plastic bag full of pieces of cantaloupe and honeydew melon. I say that honeydew melon always gives me stomachaches [true in real life]. She says that we should take all that fruit and put it in our lunches, which are at the bottom of the hill, on the school playground [the playground of my elementary school]. I answer that if I'm going to haul myself all the way down there to get our lunches, I'm going to take my computer down to the school while I'm at it. My computer's hard drive needs to be reformatted, so I do that before I leave for the school. The computer's hard drive is stored within a big, black AC adapter box [like the one on our electronic keyboard, not like the one for my laptop]. When I finish reformatting it, I unplug it from the hard drive and say, “Congratulations: it's a hard drive.”

I'm sitting at the kitchen table in House #1, working on my old laptop (my first one). P. has been using it. She's opened up a whole bunch of windows with video clips in them (VLC, or Quicktime, or some program like that that shows video), and a video editing program called Star Producer. She shows me how to get to the folder Star Producer created for her videos. There's someone else there in the house with us [I don't know who, exactly, but I got the impressions 'young' and 'female'], looking for her sweater. I point her sweater out to her; it's lying in a heap over the arm of one of the two pale green armchairs in the living room. [We actually did have those at that house.]

I'm walking around outside, on a street lined with trees, houses, and small, old apartment buildings. It looks like it might be in Louisville, because most of the buildings seem to be kind of old, and a lot of them are made of brick. A woman with long hair (or possibly a veil or shawl over her head? I'm not sure) and long, flowing clothes is on the street, going along it by floating about a foot or so off the ground. I think, Oh, she must be dreaming. [Evidently, I now take for granted that flying/floating is normal when one is dreaming... and yet, it still completely failed to occur to me that I was dreaming.] I start floating, too, but then come back down to the ground [for a reason I don't quite remember now] and continue walking. I see Arthur, Ariadne, and Eames [from Inception] there, also walking along the street. [Day residue; I was reading part of the shooting script the day before.] Eames also starts to float as they go, but comes down after a minute. I walk behind them. I hear Eames say, “I'm a little bit married,” meaning, to Arthur. I repeat this, giggling at it a little. They don't notice me at all.

Night of December 4-5

I'm at Disneyland again, in the old Carousel of Progress building. It has been filled with some really neat ride/exhibit/something-or-other. [I remember that it was much, much cooler than the one that's actually there now, but I don't remember what exactly it was because I was too lazy to write it down.] Later, after leaving that building, I meet my parents at a restaurant elsewhere in Disneyland.

Last night, I remember waking up post-sleep cycle and thinking, Man, that dream was awesome. I don't wanna sit up and write it down, though. I already stayed up too late and am not going to get enough sleep tonight. I'll do it in the morning. And, of course, now I don't remember what that awesome dream was about I really need to start going to bed earlier and writing dreams down as soon as I wake up from them again. Since I couldn't remember that one, I decided to enjoy some time thinking about dreams by spending the morning getting caught up on DJ entries from the past two weeks that were still only in handwritten-note form, and now I'm all caught up.

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

Night of November 26-27

[Fragment] I'm listening to one of Guy's lectures in person and/or via cell phone.

My parents have remodeled our kitchen. The color scheme is the same as before [the same as it currently is in reality], but the stove and the sink have switched places. [Also, the layout is totally different from how it is in reality.] My mom and I are in the kitchen, making tea and coffee. I look through a canister of little packets of coffee and tea for something I like.

[Longer dream begins here] I'm driving down a street in my mom's car, with the top down. [My mom's car isn't a convertible in real life.] I'm in an old residential neighborhood that's apparently somewhere in the UK. Throughout the rest of this dream, all the environments are incredibly detailed and realistic. I turn around and drive back up the street and through an open gate in a stone wall, into the old center of town, which I explore on foot. The plaza is made of stone. There's a castle on the right and a bell/clock tower on the left.

I take the train to get up to the next town. The train car is full of old, plush couches and seats. An old man on the train starts telling a story. Looking out the window, I see fields, trees, a sign that says something like “You are now leaving (town name),” and a train on another track that looks just like the commuter trains I'm used to here in the US.

The train reaches its destination. I remember visiting this town once before. The train station there is inside an enormous hangar complex, which is also an airplane museum. Several small, old airplanes are on display. There are a fairly large number of people there playing tourist, but it's not crowded. There are also several restaurants in the complex, including a pub and a taco place. I think of getting something to eat, but I know I have no cash on me, and I worry that my credit cards won't work.

Night of November 27-28

I drive through the mountains and enter something that appears at first to be a half-underwater base, but later turns out to be a big ship, by going through an underwater airlock. There are lots of other people on the ship. There's a storm going on; big, pretty snowflakes are falling, and big chunks of ice are falling from the mountains onto the ship and into the water around it. We can't sail out in this storm, so we'll have to spend the night on board. I see Tracy F., who is in charge of the ship and all the people on it, bustling about on the deck of the ship. Either I or somebody else [I don't remember] says, “Poor Tracy's so busy she hasn't even had time to notice the storm, much less make an announcement.” There are bathrooms on board; I absentmindedly wander into the men's bathroom, which gets me some weird looks.

I'm at M.V. High School to watch an athletic meet. I've left campus, so I have to sneak back onto it by hopping over a gate in a fence. I have a shopping cart, but I abandon it somewhere. I explain to some sort of security officer what I'm doing on campus. I also meet a big, omnivorous alien that I recognize in the dream as belonging to one of the Siglerverse alien species [but who doesn't look anything like any of them], who tells me a story about something.

[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.

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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.