The Lab Notebook

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

I woke up just before 5:00 A.M. last night and was disappointed that I'd slept through most of the night, couldn't remember any dreams, and wasn't going to have time for another full sleep cycle before the rest of the house started getting up at 5:30. I decided to try to go back to sleep anyway, focusing once again on MILD affirmations and visualizations. It worked.

At some point between 5:00 and 6:40 [when I woke up for real], I have a false awakening where I'm in my current room and my bed is parallel to the closet doors [not perpendicular to them, as it is in reality]. I'm lying on the floor between the bed and the closet, all tangled up in my blankets. [I'm not sure when this happened relative to my other dreams, so I'm just sticking it here at the beginning.]

I'm looking at the results of a Google Image Search for something involving the terms “japan” and [I think] “front.” Almost all the photos that are coming up are of cherry blossoms, but one of them is of autumn leaves. I say something along the lines of, “There are about ten hundred billion pictures of cherry blossoms, but almost no pictures of the leaves.”

The next thing I know, I'm lying on my back in a wide expanse of grass. Several big, flat leaves in bright red, yellow, and green gently float down onto me from the nearest tree. The sky is blue and the weather is sunny, clear, and calm. There are trees spread out all over this grassy area, all with leaves that are turning autumn colors. Somewhere in here, I recognize that I'm dreaming, but there's no specific moment that triggers this realization. Saito is there with me, and I want to show him a seed pod from a magnolia tree. So, one comes rolling down the hill toward me, and I catch it. It's bigger than it would be in real life, and I say so when I show it to him. He says to me, “It's your mind.” Indeed; by now I'm not only aware that I'm dreaming, but I've caught on to the fact that this is my mind's rendering of what autumn is. I look around for an acorn, but find none. I say, “Of course there aren't any acorns – all my trees are are liquid-ambers.” [That's because that's what most of the trees in the neighborhood where I grew up were.]

This big, tall, flying guy in a blue costume with matching blue makeup, who looks like he came straight from a Cirque du Soleil production, comes and lifts me up in his arms and flies away with me. As I'm being lifted off the ground, the thought of hot-air balloons crosses my mind, and [for some inexplicable reason], I ask myself, “Which city in Canada is the balloon city?” The blue flying guy flies us through a series of very large, rectangular rooms with movie projection screens on all the walls and the ceiling. At first, the screens are showing immersive views of natural vistas in Canada, accompanied by some appropriately dramatic and inspiring music that I don't recognize. I'm not afraid, because I recognize that the movie screens and the guy flying me through them are all part of the Disney theme park attraction I'm now on. The attraction is kind of like Soarin' meets the CircleVision movie at Canada's pavilion in Epcot. The film footage is filmed in a style very much like that of Soarin'; it's obviously intended to make it look like you're flying, except that the shots are designed for the big rectangular screens. The film in the last room of the attraction shows the transition over the border into the U.S., and flies us over Mt. Rushmore and then under a waterfall projected on the back wall. We go under the waterfall by going through an opening in the wall.

Once I'm through the opening, I'm standing on the ground, and the blue flying guy is gone. I recognize the place where I'm standing as the interior of the Snow White's Scary Adventures attraction from Disneyland. There are no ride vehicles anywhere to be seen, though. The Evil Queen is just a little way in front of me. I approach her, and she turns around and says something scary [just like on the real ride]. I scream really loudly and high-pitched. For a few moments, terror completely overtakes all my awareness. While screaming, I think, Wake me up! Wake me up! hoping that the dream will end. [Remarkably,] It doesn't this time. I finish screaming, and observe that the dream hasn't ended, I'm still standing there, and the Evil Queen is also still standing there, turned to face the path where the ride vehicles should be, but is now motionless and silent, as she has finished saying her prerecorded phrase. So I start punching her in the face. I do this repeatedly, but I don't feel anything. While I'm beating her up, I shout at her: “You're an AAT*! I carry more complicated devices than you around on my back every day!” Which is true; she may be computer-controlled, but my laptop is much higher-tech. No longer afraid of her, I walk along the path and into the next scene of the attraction, where there is another AAT figure of the Evil Queen [this is the case in reality, too, but the track layout there is completely different]. This one turns around and starts to shriek something at me to try and scare me, but her words stop and peter out halfway through, because she can see that I'm not afraid of her. I continue walking through the scene. [*My personal shortening of “Audio-Animatronic™,” the robotic technology used to create characters in many attractions at Disney theme parks. I think I shouted more things than this, but this is all I remember shouting now.]

The next thing I know, I'm outside again, but surrounded by buildings this time. I decide to rub my hands together, only to discover that they're really hot. I realize that that's because my real hands are really hot under my blankets. That's the last thing I remember from that dream, but it seemed to take me a little longer to wake up fully. When I did, my face broke into a smile and then a laugh when I remembered the encounter with the Evil Queen. In reality, I had been pretty scared of those moments on that ride when I was a kid, and I still dislike them now. I'm really, really proud of this dream. I think facing something/someone you've been afraid of for a long time and standing up to it is quite an achievement, and a good, worthwhile use of the ability to lucid dream.