non-lucid

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

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

I'm in the upstairs bathroom (mine and P.'s) at House #2, with P. She has really long, pale blonde hair worn in a ponytail, and she also has an actual tail, like a horse's, the same color. She asks me to help her disentangle the two. I do so, once I figure out what she means: the hair from the two tails has gotten tangled up together, and she needs help separating them.

False awakening. I wake up in a dormitory room at my university. It's 6:15 A.M. according to my clock radio, which either didn't go off at 5:45 like it was supposed to, or it did go off and I missed it. Either way, I'm annoyed, because now I'm going to run late for my 8:00 A.M. meeting. I turn on the clock radio, which is tuned to KFI [a local talk radio station] [that I would never choose to listen to on a weekday morning in real life, by the way], figure out how to turn the alarm function off, do so, then turn the radio off again.

Looking out the window of my dorm room, which is on the ground floor of San Nicolas Hall [I lived on the second floor in real life], I see two of my friends, a guy and a girl, walking across the quad to the other dorm building to use the shower in the bathroom there. They're carrying their baskets of shampoo and other shower supplies. I'm annoyed, because I was going to use that shower. Another friend, a girl with short, curly black hair, is coming back toward my building. She tells me to use one of the bathrooms in our hallway. I decide to do so.

Before I go and do that, though, I look through my paper dream journal, which is an old, wrinkled composition book. [This composition book exists in real life, but it belongs to my mom; I've never used it for anything myself.] I reread an old entry, which contains a sentence that says something about having a monkey as a dream sign. I think, This wouldn't make any sense to anyone who was reading it unless they already knew what a 'dream sign' was. And then my real alarm went off, at 5:45. I really did have a meeting to go to at 8:00 that morning, and I really did need to get up early to shower and style my hair. All of this carried over into the dream (probably because it's not part of my usual routine, so it was on my mind), but the dream put it in a different setting. If I could have slept longer, might I have realized I was dreaming based on what I was reading about in the dream journal in my dream? Maybe, but probably not; I'm not very good at picking up on those cues.

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from November 19-22.]

Night of November 19-20

I've just taken some sort of computer certification exam (A+? Cisco?) along with a large group of my peers. We're all looking at the exam results, which are printed on a strip of the kind of paper most store receipts are printed on. On the strip of paper, the students in the group are ranked in order of how high they scored on the test; I'm ranked third.

We go into another room to receive our rewards for completing the exam: students whose ranks were odd numbers get a red bottle of soda (red Fanta or Dr. Pepper), and students whose ranks were even numbers get a purple bottle of soda (grape Fanta). The sodas are in a room that resembles the social gathering room at my church.

I also remember walking across a wide, beautiful, gray flagstone courtyard in the sunshine.

Night of November 20-21 (or possibly 21-22, I'm not sure because I wrote it down too long after the fact)

I'm on an amusement park ride with over-the-shoulder restraints. I think the trains are suspended from an overhead track. It takes me up an upward-sloping section of track that goes through a tunnel. The ride simulates reduced gravity, which I think is pretty cool.

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the night of November 18-19, 2010.]

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

I'm in a theater, watching a film that turns out to be really scary and disturbing. The film begins with one Congressman sitting behind his desk in his office, while another is standing in front of his desk, calling him out on his shenanigans. The one behind the desk dies of a heart attack a few seconds after the one standing up finishes ranting. The ranter then starts an investigation of the one who died.

At this point, the film's narrator says, "The more he found, the more he refused to see." The Congressman performing the investigation stays in one place [I think it may have been the dead one's office, but I'm not positive] for such a long time that he eventually survives by cannibalism. One of the things he finds while investigating is a bag of marijuana, which he goes through, looking for cigarette butts. At the end of the film, there is a message from his family, left in vinyl-cling letters on the window: he got out and is now getting help.

The film ends, and I exit the theater and walk down the long flight of wide steps leading up to it. The theater is located inside Disneyland. [I've been having dreams featuring bizarre versions of Disneyland since I was a child, but this one really takes bizarre to a new level.] It's a beautiful, sunny afternoon. I walk through Fantasyland and into Toontown; the two share a long, open border with each other, with no transition point or hard line of demarcation between them. Riding on a moving walkway, I go past a turnaround mechanism for the Skyway - the big wheel that keeps the cable with all the buckets attached to it moving and allows the buckets to turn around and go back the other way. It is at ground level. The cable is there, has buckets attached to it, and is moving, but there's no loading/unloading station there, just the turnaround mechanism, all by itself.

I walk past Mickey's house. The path through Toontown dead-ends into a section of the queue for the Roger Rabbit ride. I decide I might as well stay there and get in line, now that I'm there; it was only about 4:00 P.M. the last time I looked at the time, so I have plenty of time to enjoy myself. [D'oh! Should have RCed.] I get in line, walking through an opening into the enclosed, indoor space where the queue is. I walk past a group of Cast Members who are singing a barbershop-quartet rendition of "Stray Cat Strut." I wait for them to finish, then tell them that I know where I'm supposed to go to get to the back of the line, and I'm not taking cuts in the line. They understand and let me pass. One of the Cast Members lets me get in line in front of him. This puts me in line directly behind Gary Coleman and some other little people. We introduce ourselves to each other politely; he goes first. I realize that I'm dreaming just as it's ending, when it's too late to do anything; I can already feel my real body.

I'm at a high school, in a room that has chairs in it, but no desks (possibly the drama classroom). One DC is talking at great length to a group of other DCs on the subject of her facial reconstruction surgery. I pull up a chair, joining the group, and listen. I introduce myself to the DC who has been talking. As we're shaking hands, she introduces herself to me as Anne-Marie. She says that she's ugly, and I automatically answer, "No, you're not." [She reminds me a little bit of real-life friend Dawn B. from college, now that I think of it.] She has dirty-blond hair in a ponytail, pale skin, and sunken, brown eyes. She has a black eye on one of them. I know nothing about her appearance is her fault, though, and I like people to be happy with themselves, so that's why I told her she wasn't ugly. In reply to my denial that she's ugly, she says, "Oh, are you another furry?" I answer, "No, but I am an anime fan." I know that she's an anime fan, too. We chat a bit more, and the conversation ends with our agreeing to eat lunch together.

At the end of the conversation, I have another “Oh, yeah, I'm dreaming” moment. The realization comes easily and naturally, the only specific trigger being that I'm in an unfamiliar place. [I had been MILDing again, so when I found myself lucid dreaming, I accepted and realized it readily because it was what I was expecting.] I take a look around. The classroom is irregularly-shaped, high-ceilinged, and sunlit from skylights. Visual clarity is good. I get down on the floor to feel the carpet, which is short, institutional, and gray. I start crawling on the carpet through the room, remarking to myself aloud: “I don't have any energy today. It's my own fault; I should have gone to bed earlier.” My dream body feels just as tired and sluggish as I know my real one does at this early hour of the morning. I've never experienced this in a lucid dream before, so I find it strange, so I comment on it and come up with a logical explanation for it.

“Why am I wearing this heavy backpack, anyway?” I say to myself, because, I realize, I am wearing one. It feels just like the ones I carried in junior high and high school, so it must be full of textbooks. I take it off, one strap at a time, and let it roll off my back and onto the floor. “That's better... a little,” I say. I can feel the absence of its weight, and I feel a little less tired, but not totally back to normal.

There is a full-length mirror on one side of the room. I stand up and go to look at myself in it. My hair is wavy again, and this time, it reaches all the way to my waist. “Oh, cool!” I say. “That's so pretty! I've always wanted it to be like this!” [While it certainly was pretty, I know very well that actually having hair that long would be really impractical... but, yeah, there evidently is a part of my mind that misses having long hair.] I'm wearing a bright sky-blue T-shirt with pink hearts and gold and silver swirls and sparkles on it, and a long, blue denim wraparound skirt. While looking at my reflection in the mirror, I reach for the outer flap of my skirt with my hands and try to touch it, but I can't feel anything there. When I look down at the skirt itself and try again, though, I can feel it. [That's a pretty cool and interesting difference between dreams and reality, and more (anecdotal) evidence that whatever you concentrate your direct perception on, your mind works harder to create.] I woke up after that.

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

I'm at Disneyland, in a large, covered outdoor amphitheater, watching a new stage show that consists of Sorcerer Mickey waving an oversized magician's wand around (the black, cylindrical kind with white tips on both ends). Mini-fireworks, red foil streamers, and red confetti shoot out of the end of the wand in turn while the “Fantasmic!” theme music plays. [The part of the music that played in my dream starts at 1:41.] [I don't think I've ever heard an existing piece of music that clearly in a dream before. Awesome!] A few minutes into the show, the wand stops working. Looking between the seats and the other guests at the floor where Mickey is standing, I can see that there's an extra wand there, waiting to be picked up and used if needed. There's also an entire bundle of replacement wands descending from the ceiling in some sort of holder. The show stalls while a replacement wand is selected. While the show is on hold, Cast Members start giving out free stuff by passing it around through the audience. One of the things that gets passed to me is a small basket full of pin-on plastic name tags that are shaped like, and designed to look like, license plates from Cars. They all have different organization names and titles printed at the top and bottom of the name tag, surrounding a blank space to write your name in. I read each one, looking for the one I like best [I could read them in the dream, but I don't remember what any of them said now], so it takes me forever to choose one.

Dreamskip. I'm in an elevated, landscaped parking lot to the west of my high school campus. I can see the brown car, and I'm walking toward it. I realize that I'm dreaming and decide to get to my car by flying, instead of just walking. I try to take off by kicking off the ground and jumping up at the same time, but it doesn't work very well. The move takes me a lot higher than it would have in reality, maybe a couple feet off the ground, but I jump up and then float right back down again in a symmetrical, parabolic arc. [I don't remember how I did it, but] Somehow, I end up flying. I say, “Screw the car. I'm going to fly.”

I'm flying over the west side of the high school campus, but am now facing toward the center of campus rather than away from it. The view is panoramic and beautiful from up there. However, I find myself only flying sideways and backwards. I can feel myself being pulled in those directions through the air. Why am I not going forward, over the campus? That's the direction I want to go, but apparently, I can't. I don't understand this. I think, “There's going to be a wall behind me for me to kick off of and start flying forward.” The next moment, there is one. I'm being pulled backwards through the air until I feel my feet hit the wall, which stops me. I kick off the wall, propelling myself forward. I fly forward for a little way, but I still find it difficult to do. I end up getting pulled sideways again.

[I think some other stuff happened at this point, but I don't remember it now.]

I wake up and I'm lying down outside somewhere. It looks like a park. It's bright and sunny there. There is a cartoon dog looking at me, dressed up in a Halloween costume to look like some other kind of animal. I say hello to it, calmly and happily. Then it dawns on me, Oh, this is a false awakening. I'm still dreaming. I'm going to wake up for real soon. Then I did wake up for real.

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Side notes:

Last night, I listened to the first 15 minutes of the Subliminal Lucid 3.0 mp3 as I was getting ready for bed and going to sleep, while doing MILD affirmations at the same time. I also had my cardboard-square wristband on my right wrist. I did not listen to the binaural beats file at all. Therefore, I can conclude that the binaural beats file is not a necessity for me to have a lucid dream. I'm pretty sure that the most important factor is the focused affirmations and the desire to have one.

I'm pleased to see that I still have my previously-discovered ability to make things happen or appear in dreams by quietly, passively expecting them to happen or appear. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't have better control over my own flying, but admittedly, I am out of practice. I actually have a large backlog of handwritten notes on my dreams that I haven't had time to type up and put into my dream journal. I'll get around to it when I can.

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

I'm standing just outside the window of a cream-colored building, looking up and into the building through the window. There is a sort of rectangular tower or column inside the building, wide enough for the name of the building to be displayed at the top in tall, narrow, bright teal letters made of molded metal. [The font is Times New Roman, or something like it.] I'm controlling what letters appear there by typing on a keyboard. First, I type “Walgreens Bookstore.” Then, my mom is standing next to me and rebukes me gently, telling me to put in the real name of the building. I backspace over what I've typed, and the teal letters disappear. I then type the real name of the building, “Public Library.”

Once again, I realize easily and naturally that I'm dreaming. Saying something like “Wait” to my mom, I turn away from the window and look to my left, intending to go and explore. The sidewalk I'm standing on outside the public library runs right along the edge of a river, which has more sidewalks and buildings all along both sides. The dream only lasts a couple of seconds before fading, though.

I'm lying on a mattress on a floor somewhere. There are blankets covering me, and my dad is bending down closely over me, as if to tuck me in. I'm breathing hard, and it feels like I'm being smothered. I start to panic, but then I think, It's okay. It's just a memory. I can't breathe because I have a stuffy nose in reality. [Which I don't, by the way, but it seemed logical at the time. Also, that must have been either a false memory or one from when I was really little.]

Dreamskip. I'm still on the mattress on the floor, but my dad is gone and the blankets aren't over my head. I'm in between two raised platforms [loft beds, maybe?] with shelves built into the sides, and there are all kinds of toys and books and stuff all over them. Someone says something about being in seminary. [I don't really remember this part.]

I find myself looking up at a white stucco ceiling high above me. Thinking I've woken up, I try to DEILD back in, and succeed. [LOL, I just performed a DEILD within a false awakening! Awesome!]

I'm back on the mattress on the floor again. This time, I reach out from the mattress to feel the carpet beneath it. It's brown and semi-shaggy, the kind we have in our current house. I'm not fully immersed or engaged in the dream, though, and it only lasts a few seconds.

When I woke up for real, I remembered and remarked aloud: “This house doesn't have stucco ceilings! All its ceilings are flat!” Only then did I realize that that had been a false awakening.

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Side notes:
I really like that brown carpet. I've noticed that in my dreams, any indoor space where I'm residing usually has that kind of carpet, even if it's not my current house. I think the reason I'm so attached to it, and therefore, the reason it shows up so much in my dreams, is because I helped pick out the carpet for this house, unlike at either of the other two houses.

Also, that public library is so going into my current NaNoWriMo novel. Most of it is set in a dream world version of Louisville, where I lived once and which is by a river.

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

I'm at the camp I went to as a kid [Not the one mentioned in the catchup post below, another one] with my dad. The lodge is a Marie Callender's [Cool!], and we're going out to dinner there. We get a table and order coffee and cookies. Mom is already there and tells us to come over and join her at her table. She's mad at us for not seeing her when we came in, or looking for her in the crowd. Dad and I get up and move to her table, bringing our coffee and cookies with us.

While we're in the restaurant [I think], I start looking back at old pictures of myself on various camping trips. One of them is of my and several of my Literacy AmeriCorps friends, including Laya, Jen, and Chelisa. The oldest picture is from junior high school. It's a big, panoramic picture with lots and lots of kids and their camp counselors in it. I'm near the far right, next to Erica. [She didn't even go to my junior high.] Those of us who are on that side of the picture are standing near the grassy edge of a cliff; one of the boys on in the picture is pretending to be about to step off.

I wake up in my current bed. I try several times to turn on the lamp next to it, but the bulb just flickers and sputters every time I try. I turn the knob until the flickering stops, tighten the bulb in its socket, then try again. Still nothing. I go out into the hall to look at the digital clock on one of our cable boxes, to see what time it is. It says 7:39, which disappoints me. Aw, man! It's time to get up, I think. Then I look again and see that I made a mistake: it's only 2:39. So, I get my notepad and start taking notes on the dream I just had.

...And then I woke up for real. This time, I remembered to do the nose-pinch RC. I was very annoyed with myself for not doing any RCs before and not catching the FA, especially when I realized that I had missed not one, but two of the classic dream signs, one right after another. My mind is great at giving me clues that I'm dreaming; I'm just oblivious.

After that, it seems to take me a really long time to get back to sleep. While I'm trying to do so, I think, Oh, crap, I can't talk to Cj on the phone tomorrow at 9, because that's when I'm meeting with Frank. I get up, take my laptop into the study, and sleepily start writing her an e-mail explaining that we'll have to postpone our date to talk on the phone because I have a conflicting appointment. I'm working in Yahoo! Mail [which is what I use for my main e-mail account in reality], and press Send. Suddenly, annoying, circus-y music starts to play out of the computer's speakers, and the screen is filled with a weird, old, basic HTML page with a colored background. The page appears to scroll down automatically. One of the first things to appear on it is a single sentence of text that contains my name. This is what makes me realize what's going on: I've stupidly allowed my Yahoo password to get phished by entering it into a fake website, and now my laptop has a virus. I let out a long string of curse words (actually, the same curse word repeated many times). Windows starts scanning my computer, trying to fight the virus.

Mom and P. are coming home. According to the digital clocks on the cable boxes, it's 12:02 A.M. Leaving my laptop on the floor of the study, I go outside to the street to meet them. They're coming home in a red VW New Beetle (where did they get that? I wonder silently), which they're parking on the curb across the street from our house, because our two regular cars [the ones we own in reality] are taking up both spaces in the garage. I come over to greet them as they're getting out of the car. As we walk back toward the house, I look at the side yard and see that there's a bamboo tree that sort of looks like a fountain there. Ooh, that's pretty! I think. P. goes back to put some more CDs in the New Beetle. [Neither it nor the bamboo tree exist in reality, of course, but I didn't realize that anything was strange until after I woke up. :/ ]

I woke up for real at 5:00 and took down more notes. I realized in hindsight that it hadn't actually taken me as long to fall asleep as I had thought; at least part of the process, and everything after that, had been a dream. I didn't actually have any such appointment with Cj, anyway. I was amazed at how completely and totally this dream had convinced me that I was in reality.

I'm indoors somewhere, and I'm wearing a cowboy hat. I look behind me and see my friend D.W. there, riding in a wheelchair. I think, Oh, good, she got a wheelchair. I feel the cowboy hat on my head and think, Oh, yeah, this is a dream. I can feel the by-now-familiar sensation of lucid-dream consciousness. I open my dream self's eyes and look very briefly at my hands, which appear normal, then up at my indoor surroundings. To engage more fully with my dream self and its sense of touch, I reach up to touch the brim of the cowboy hat with both hands, then take it off. I'm sitting in something [possibly another wheelchair, but I don't see it, so I'm not sure]. I stand up and try to turn around and talk to D.W., but just then, I heard my mom talking out in the entryway, which took my attention away from the dream, which instantaneously kicked me back into reality.

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Side notes:
I should choose my MILD affirmations with more care. The ones I focused on the most this past night were “I am self-aware and in control in my dreams” and “I bring clarity, lucidity, and stability into my dreams.” These backfired rather spectacularly in my second dream of the night. It was perfectly clear and stable, and, as far as I could tell, I was just as self-aware and in control of my own actions as I am in reality. And yet, I never realized that I was dreaming. I focused on that aspect more as I was trying to get back to sleep after 5:00, and it worked, if only briefly.

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

[These are all my dreams from the past week or so that I hadn't gotten around to typing up and/or posting to this DJ, until now. Most of them are pretty fragmentary because I wrote about them from notes long after the fact. None of them were lucid. My most recent dream, from last night, will be in a separate post, because it's longer.]

Night of November 10-11

I take a lengthy tour of a camp I've been to several times, answering questions asked by people who have never been there before. We're all there for our organization's annual fall conference. There are two cabins up high on a ridge, and a big meeting/dining hall on the low ground, right near the entrance. [I knew it was that camp while I was in the dream, even though it has a completely different layout in reality. This was a pretty long dream, but I can't remember any more details now.]

I'm with Ariel from the Disney version of The Little Mermaid. We're finding our way through a Little Mermaid-themed maze. It's one of several mazes at Walt Disney World.

Night of November 11-12

Mom, P., and I are out to dinner at a restaurant with an outdoor patio. P. asks me if I got any gumbo the last time we were there. I answer that no, Dad ate it all.

I see a two-year-old girl on the street. I walk with her back to my grandparents' house. The front door of the house has two separate sections that can open and close independently of each other. We get into the house by opening the top section of the door first. When we get inside, we discover that my grandparents have a new, upright, Scrabble-like electronic board game in their house. It involves a countdown timer.

Night of November 12-13

I'm in my current house, and I listen to a voice mail from a publishing company. I return their call and talk to them. We try to organize a live interview in 30 minutes' time. They're even willing to give me directions to their office over the phone. We don't schedule the interview for 30 minutes from now, though, because that's not enough time for me to shower and get dressed. They put me on hold for a bit. When they come back, we agree on next week instead. They expect me to bring a completed, polished novel manuscript with me to the interview so we can talk about it, and I don't have one, so I think, Okay. I only have one week to finish one of my novels. My hair is long and in a French braid, and I decide to leave it that way and not wash it before the interview.

I'm with my friend Jane R. She's trying on a cute dress made out of a towel-like, terry-cloth material, and I'm helping her adjust it.

I'm watching an episode of “Rugrats” in which one of the babies helps teach another how to use the potty, and they are found by one of their moms.

When I woke up, I went, Oh. I guess I don't have to have one of my novels finished by next week. Although that would be nice. I think I had that dream about the interview because I was worrying about how I was going to balance writing, studying, and job-hunting just as I was going to sleep.

Night of November 14-15

A Christian band sings a song about their dying dog.

I'm watching the pilot episode of a superhero TV show. The show will have a superhero team consisting of 5 boys and 3 girls. I will be one of the girls on the team. I know this from watching the show's opening.

Night of November 15-16

I'm at a church camp, standing outside the little trailer where the leader of the camp is staying. His wife is sitting on a chair outside the trailer. She tells me that I can't talk to him right now because he's sleeping.

I'm getting ready to leave the camp. I'm in the process of moving my stuff out of the space in and around a twin bed in a cabin, but I'm not done yet. I come back into the cabin to continue packing, and there's another girl already lying in my bed. I tell her that I was using the space, but I'm vacating it and she can have it now, but she has my permission to play with my teddy bears. Three of my teddy bears are lying on the end of the bed [I own all of them in real life]. She answers that no, she'll take the responsibility for cleaning the place up.

A third girl who is also in the room asks me, “Can I at least do your makeup?” I look at my face in the mirror next to the bed and see that it has red blotches on it, and several large zits, including two on the left side of my jawline. I agree to let the girl do my makeup, and we go over to another wall of the room, where there is a dresser with various cosmetics on it. I see that one of the bottles of makeup is labeled inception, and I think, Oh, cool. I didn't know that was the brand name of the makeup I used. [*facepalm* Oh, dear. That really should have clued me in that I was dreaming.] I reach for this bottle, but the girl who offered to do my makeup chastises me, snapping at me to spray myself first with an alcohol-based antibacterial cleanser that comes in a pale teal bottle. I do so, wiping it over my face with a cotton ball.

[This is a catch-up journal entry. This dream is from the night of November 8-9.]

I'm at a live performance that [somehow] involves stuffed animals. The show is over, and everyone in the audience is walking in a long line through the amphitheater-style auditorium to return their stuffed animals.

I go outside to get some kind of chicken and some kind of appetizer from an outdoor food stall. The recipe for the appetizer is on the side of a box of Ritz crackers. One of the steps in the recipe is to cut up some kind of food by pushing the two halves of a kitchen gadget together. The guy running the food stall has this gadget and is working on preparing the appetizer [I think; I'm writing this from notes an entire week after the fact, so I don't really remember]. I ask him, “Zucchini wo tabete mo ii desu ka?” [Translation: “Is it okay if I eat the zucchini?”] I use those exact words because I can't think of the word for “zucchini” in Japanese. [Other than that, though, my dream!Japanese was perfectly correct and accurate to real!Japanese this time.]

[Fragment] Something involving Tinkerbell being able to “grow” to human size, e.g., to be played by a human, in another live performance.

[This is a catch-up journal entry. This dream is from the night of November 6-7.]

[Fragments] Something involving making a delivery of some kind using my car. I remember wondering where my car keys were just as I was waking up from the dream. I also remember riding my old, green GT bike in the rain.

IHOP and Denny's are having a TV commercial war. I'm watching a series of commercials for the two chains, one after the other. One of them [I'm not sure which restaurant it was for] focuses on the repetition of the phrase, “Accurate fries, accurate donuts,” accompanied by images of the two items. It means that when you order fries or mini-donuts as a side item there, they always serve you the correct amount. Later, I'm at Denny's with my mom.

I'm riding in a car, passing by the fields of a local high school. I can see their marching band rehearsing, in their uniforms. Some marching band members from my own high school are there, too, also in their uniforms and rehearsing in a block.

I'm walking through the hallways of an unidentified high school. A female student is there, loudly crowing away about something political. The TV monitors mounted in the hallway are showing political advertisements. There's one pro-Whitman, anti-Brown ad that ends with the spoken line, “Last chance to come together, California.”

I'm in a UCSB dorm room, thinking to myself: What's the date today? April 9? 2 months. Meaning, in two months, I will be graduating and leaving the university forever. I think about how hard I'm going to cry when I have to pack up the contents of this room and leave it for the last time. I remember [or maybe I just inferred this after having woken up, I'm not sure] that I went to Kentucky during fall quarter, then returned to UCSB for the winter and spring quarters to finish up the last of my studies. [As opposed to real life, where it was spring quarter that I missed to go to Kentucky.] My roommate Sarah M. is in the room. I have to be on my way and go to math class without my math homework completed, because I've been goofing off all weekend.

A group of Chinese international students and teachers come into the dorm room. One of the female teachers notices a magnet I have as a decoration. The magnet has five Chinese characters on it. She reads them aloud, in Chinese, but stumbles over the last one, giving two different possible readings for it. As she puzzles over the characters, I say to her, in Japanese, “Imi mo nai na no da.” [Translation: “They don't even mean anything.”] I know this to be the case because I know that this particular string of characters came from Hanzi Smatter. The female teacher understands what I said, and agrees with me. She and the other teachers and international students then start a conversation, all in Japanese. When they ask me a question in Japanese, my reaction is, “Oh, God, now I've started it!” I'm nervous and self-conscious because I haven't spoken any Japanese in a long time. It takes me a second, but I manage to formulate an answer to the question in perfectly good Japanese. [I don't remember what the question and answer were, but I do remember that] At some point during the conversation, I say something like, “Kono kanji wa imi ga nai to itte kumatta desu.” I know what I mean when I say it, which is, “I heard that these kanji don't mean anything.” [But I know perfectly well that those aren't the proper Japanese words for “I heard that...” There goes dream!Japanese being weird again.] [Also, what I meant is that they don't mean anything as a phrase. Most likely they mean something individually, or else the teacher wouldn't have been able to identify readings for them.]

[Not sure if this one is in the correct chronological order.] I'm with my church choir, and we're singing a pretty Advent hymn. [I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist in reality, yet. I managed to record six notes onto my phone when I woke up, and someday I plan to compose it.]

I'm driving up toward UCSB with my parents. We see Dale C. performing live on the side of the road, by the exit off Highway 217 that leads to the airport. He's singing and playing the bongos.

I'm reading a little cloth book that Dale wrote about his music career. In the book, he says that he was more excited about the full-time income he would earn from being a musician than any other aspect of the career. This makes me think less of him.

I enter an unfamiliar house to get something. P. is there, and there is an unknown woman sleeping in the back room.

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

I'm taking some sort of computer certification test using Prometric's testing software. I get to the end of the test, and the software gives me a message saying that the computer hasn't been recording any of my answers after the first four or five, and there are only 4 minutes left on the test's countdown clock, so there's no time to go back and answer them again. The timer runs out, and the software gives me a big fat zero as a test score. Very distressed, I run down to the end of the row of computers where I'm sitting, which is in the center of a large, open room. There's a desk with another computer on it in a cubicle at the end of the row, with one teacher/supervisor sitting at the desk and another standing outside the cubicle. I tell the one standing outside the cubicle what happened, but I see that the one sitting at the desk has my green-and-white CompTIA ID card right there, with my picture on it and everything. That tells me that I must have passed the test; otherwise, they wouldn't have made an ID card for me.

Guy is there. I follow him into another room, where there is a big, black laser printer. He explains to me how sometimes, the test results get sent directly to the printer without being saved on the computer, and that's what happened to me. I say, “So I didn't just lose an hour and a half of work?” He says, “No.” [In the dream, I actually had the false memory of working on that test for the last hour and a half.]

Woke up at 11:55 P.M. (after having gone to bed at 10:20 P.M.) and was really surprised at how short a time I'd been asleep. I exclaimed, “That was only one cycle?! Wow!” That was a really long and detailed dream for a first cycle. I felt that this was a promising sign, and decided right then and there to try for a lucid dream later. (I'm supposed to be cycle-adjusting right now, but I was feeling impatient. Sorry.) I took some notes, then went back to sleep.

[Fragment] I'm interacting with all the characters from Inception this time. [I don't remember anything we did, except that] At one point, a bunch of us are sitting around a dark wood dining table, apparently in a restaurant.

[Fragment] I'm in House #2, upstairs, and I shoo a cat out of my bedroom. I know that it's already too late; it's been in the room long enough that I'm going to start having allergic reactions when I go into my room.

Woke up at 4:25 A.M., took down some more notes, then listened to the second half of my binaural beats file and did some MILDing. It worked.

I'm following my friend Sam K. and his girlfriend [who I can't identify as a specific person in this dream] through the entrance to a department store in a mall. There are other people in the store. I pass two different old men who are really tall and each have two sets of eyes right on top of each other, and are wearing two pairs of glasses on them. I think to myself, Those men must have an unusual deformity. Or I might be dreaming. I don't attain full lucidity or self-determination yet., though. [I didn't think to RC, either. D'oh.] I continue following Sam and his girlfriend. They start climbing a wide, white flight of stairs up to the second floor of the mall. I speak aloud to them, saying something along the lines of, “Guys! We could just take the elevator!” They either ignore me or just don't hear me.

Very short dreamskip. I'm on the second floor of the mall, looking up at a raised, square, brown section of the ceiling. I recognize it as the ceiling of the mall we used to go to all the time when I was a kid. [Which doesn't look at all like that in real life. Weird.] At that moment, I definitely know I'm dreaming, because I'm somewhere I wouldn't normally be in reality. I think to myself, F*** yeah. I'm here. [“Here,” in this case, meaning “in a dream,” not “at that particular mall.”]

I stop to take a good look around and touch things, to make sure the dream is stable so that I can explore it. [I'm learning to do this as a habit – yay!] I touch the carpet and look closely at the pattern on it. It's dark gray with little rectangular flecks of various colors on it in rows. I start walking around in the mall. Sam and his girlfriend are gone. This part of the second floor is the food court. I cross over the walkway that bridges one side of the mall and the other. There are white tables and chairs everywhere. One of the fast-food restaurants in the food court is an Orange Julius. I pass it, then turn around to listen and watch while somebody makes some kind of public announcement about something. [I don't remember what they said now.]

It occurs to me that since this is a dream, I can climb over the chairs and tables with impunity. I climb up onto a table, walk across it, step down onto a chair, then hop back down onto the floor. The impact feels lighter than it would have in real life. I say something like, “Sure enough, no one cares!” [Wow. That's quite a shift from the respectful attitude I had toward the DCs in my journal entry dated 05-Nov-2010. This worries me.]

I continue walking along through the food court, then think, Why am I just walking? I can fly. I can explore faster if I fly, too. So I start flying, going only a little faster than I'd been walking, and staying at about the same height above the floor of the mall as my eyes are when I'm standing up. [I'd never flown indoors or in front of DCs before, so it makes sense that I would be cautious about it.] There are two vaguely gangster-ish guys in front of me, one of whom says to me, “You're lookin' at me the wrong way.” I ignore them and fly right on past them. I head toward a row of glass-and-black-metal doors hung with dark red curtains. This is the entrance to another department store. Strangely, I find it difficult to fly toward them with any speed at all. It feels like trying to push one pole of a smaller magnet (me) toward the same pole of a much bigger magnet. I realize that it would be much easier going if I started flying backward, so I decide to release my deliberate control over my flying and let myself be pulled backward, just to see where I end up. The unknown force pulls me backward through the air very quickly. Much to my dismay, I wake up. I might have guessed that that was what would happen.

-------
Side notes:

I didn't wear my cardboard-square bracelet at all tonight, which suggests that it isn't the deciding factor in whether or not I succeed in inducing a lucid dream. It has to be either the MILD affirmations or the binaural beats file. (Or both; how do I know that the combination isn't more than the sum of its parts?)

[Fragment] I'm in dream!Las Vegas, passing behind the back sides of several of the large casinos. There is a wide strip of empty desert between me and the buildings.

[Longer dream] I'm in a sort of club with dark-brown wood on all the walls, being followed around by a cartoony-looking blonde girl with pigtails, close to my own age. While I'm there, I get a phone call from the coordinator of our tour group (yes, I'm on a tour as part of a tour group) saying that they're offering me the opportunity to extend the tour for a couple of hours, and if I want to take them up on it, I should meet them at the nearest [some kind of store whose name I can't recall].

So I head for the exit of the club. There are steps leading down from the door of the club onto a large, open space of concrete, which is on a street corner. As I leave the club, I realize that I'm surrounded by several of my favorite actors, who are leaving it at the same time as I am. Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor are there, and I hear Patrick Stewart's voice. I don't speak to them, though, because I don't want to bother them with my fangirling while they're trying to hang out and have fun. I know that I'm in Barcelona, and that the club I'm just leaving is known for being a popular hangout for famous people.

Out on the street corner, I see the aforementioned some-kind-of-store directly across the street from the entrance to the club. It has a green awning with white letters on it. I decide not to go there, though, because I see all the other people from my tour group walking along the street and turning the corner to go up a side street. I decide to stick with the group. The cartoony-looking blonde girl is part of the group, too, but she hasn't come out of the club yet. “She'll catch up,” I say, and start walking up the street with the group. The street goes uphill. We walk several blocks, turn at least one more corner, and end up on an open-air elevated light rail car. I sit in the corner seat on the end of the car that points in the direction it's traveling. It starts moving and goes really fast along the track. It's quite thrilling when it turns a corner, and I cheer and whoop in exhilaration, as if I were on a roller coaster.

Eventually, the track for the vehicle we're in ends abruptly, high above a river that has broad beaches along its banks. Somehow, the vehicle has morphed into one of those circular whitewater rafts, like the ones they have on Grizzly River Run at Disney California Adventure. Our raft shoots off the end of the track and starts falling toward the river. I know that we're not actually falling all that distance, because we're inside a simulator ride. The raft starts tumbling and turning end over end as it falls through the air, but I don't feel the sensation of being turned upside down, and I know that that's because I'm not actually being turned upside down, it's just the video in the simulator ride making it look like I am. Just before our raft hits the water, I realize that it's going to hit with enough force to plunge pretty deeply into the water before floating back to the surface again. I hold my breath just to play along with the simulation, even though I know it is one, and, indeed, there is no real water; I don't feel wet, but I see the deep-green-tinted underwater video all around me. [LOL! Maybe this is what happens when MILDing is only partially successful? ]

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!

[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.

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.]

[This is a catch-up journal entry. These dreams are from the night of October 30-31.]

My parents and I are visiting Epcot. We're walking to the entrance through a city. There are signs pointing to Epcot and the Magic Kingdom.

I'm at a pizza restaurant. There's an eating contest going on to see how many slices of pizza you can eat in 15 minutes. I have most of a pizza in front of me and start eating it, going through the slices, which aren't very big, quite quickly. When I'm in the middle of my third one, I look at the remaining slices of pizza and try to decide which are the smallest ones, so I can eat them. It occurs to me that this is a form of cheating. I keep track of how much time I have left by looking at the clock up on the wall. [Figures! The one time I actually see an analog clock in a dream, it works correctly! ]