The Lab Notebook

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.

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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?)