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Awake, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

The moment I see my old college campus start to appear out of the darkness, I realize, Oh, cool, a dream is starting. There are lots of multistory buildings all around me, and it's a beautiful day with a vivid blue sky and puffy white clouds. The dream is fairly vivid [and remains so throughout its entire length]. I observe that the environment around me is consistent with the environment I've observed in previous dreams set on my old college campus. [Although, now that I think about it, I think the dreams I have that are set there feel similar more than they look similar. Being in the environment always feels the same, but I think the layout, the spatial relationships of buildings, is slightly different each time. The style of the buildings is always pretty much the same, though.]

I walk along among the buildings, and eventually [possibly after a dreamskip?] find myself inside somebody’s house. The living room has been filled with chlorinated water and turned into a big, deep indoor pool. The second floor of the house is open to the living room, and has a balcony-like walkway that surrounds the living room on three sides. The water comes almost all the way up to the level of the walkway. When I see the pool, I think, This is a dream. I should be able to breathe underwater. I get into the water and start swimming down into the pool, testing this hypothesis. It proves to be correct. By consciously focusing on the knowledge that I can breathe underwater here, I can breathe underwater. While I'm swimming, I feel the resistance that one normally feels from the water when swimming, but not the wetness; I still feel completely dry. I also notice that breathing feels exactly the same as it normally does when I'm breathing air; those parts of my body don't feel any resistance from the water, whereas my skin and limbs do feel it. [I think this experience further demonstrates the same phenomenon that lies behind the nose-pinch reality check: doing something that would obstruct your ability to breathe in reality will not obstruct it in a dream, because your real body is still breathing normally.]

I resurface, then dive again, this time going all the way to the bottom of the pool. I find a small, square sticker there, part of a board game. I retrieve it and bring it to a dream character who is sitting on the walkway at the side of the pool opposite where I came into the room. He's playing the game that the sticker came from. I hand him the sticker, saying something like, “Here. This is part of your game. I brought this back for you.”

The dream character accepts the sticker and asks me to go over to the far corner of the room (near where I came in) and retrieve another, similar sticker that he dropped. I agree to do so. Before I dive under the water again, I pretend to take a deep breath and hold it, for the sake of appearances. I don't want any of the several dream characters who are around to realize that I have superhuman abilities. I dive toward the bottom corner of the pool at the far end of the room, where two walls come together at an acute angle. I find not only another sticker like the first one, but also a die, a playing card, and other, similar small objects from games. I pick them all up.

I decide to try to get back to the second floor by flying. [Apparently because I want there not to be,] There's no water around me anymore. With a short grunt, I try unsuccessfully to take off. I decide to just climb the nearby stairs to get up to the second-floor walkway.

I walk along the walkway and stop in front of the male dream character playing the game. He asks me, “What was that grunt?”

“I was trying to jump up and fly back to the second floor,” I answer.

“Why?” he asks.

I throw my handful of small game pieces at him. “Because you're a dream character!” I exclaim. [Or it might have been, “Because I'm dreaming!” I don't quite remember. The main point is that I dropped all pretense that I was a regular person with no superhuman abilities at this moment, and admitted to being the dreamer.]

A second later, my conscience kicks in. “Wait. I don't know why I did that,” I say. “That was rude. I'm sorry.”

A woman about my age with short, dark hair joins our conversation at this point. She starts off by addressing me, saying something like, “That's right. You're dreaming.” She, the game-playing DC, and I all proceed to have a long, in-depth conversation on the subject of lucid dreaming. [Unfortunately, I don't remember much of what we said. What I do recall is an overall impression that this woman was an expert on the subject, and that her attitude toward me was that of a supportive older mentor. She seemed interested in my progress and how much I had learned so far.] The dark-haired woman asks me something like, “This is your fortieth or so lucid dream, right?”

“Forty-seventh, or fiftieth, something like that,” I answer.

At another point during the conversation, another guy my age, named Andy, is also there in the room. The dark-haired woman points him out to me as another dreamer. [I had no intention of anything like that happening to me. If it did, it was completely without my desire or consent.]

Andy, the woman, the game-playing DC, and I all walk out of the building onto the coast by my university. We're facing a sea cliff with train tracks running along it. We walk along and come to the grassy, topmost level of an amphitheater, built into the land where it slopes down toward the beach. Below the grassy part are many levels of bleachers made out of a metal mesh.

“I really like floaty things,” I observe, addressing the woman. I point out that there are a lot of colorful helium balloons around, and a lot of the other people who are around are flying small, colorful kites. I have one myself.

The other DCs who are there are passing around a strange contraption. At its center is a device that has a chamber in which marijuana leaves are burning, and a fan. The fan is keeping the semi-transparent plastic garbage bag that surrounds the device inflated. The bag is there to keep the marijuana smoke in, but there is a tear in the plastic near the knot, allowing the smoke to escape at a limited rate so that one might inhale it. One of the other, female DCs in the scene comes over to me and my group and offers us the contraption. The other DCs in my group accept it first and take hits from it, then offer it to me. My immediate reaction to getting the opportunity to try marijuana is, Yay! I can do this without getting in trouble or risking the health of my real body, and if I do it, I can brag about it on the forums! [Meaning DreamViews, of course.]

I accept the blown-up garbage bag and maneuver it so that the tear in the plastic is near my face. This isn't easy to do with the fan device constantly inflating the plastic from the inside and making it move around. When I've gotten the tear as close to my face as I can, I inhale some of the smoke through my nose. It has a plant-like smell. The drug doesn't make me feel any different, nor does it change the environment around me.

My companions and I sit down on the metal mesh bleachers to watch a concert [or something like that]. As I sit down, I try to be careful not to get the string of my kite tangled up with the strings of my companions' kites.

There is a blue reusable shopping bag from Wal-Mart lying just to my left on the metal bleachers. It comes to life and starts wrapping its handles around my left arm and constricting its handles tightly, much like Devil's Snare from the Harry Potter universe. I'm not sure if this occurrence is a weed-induced hallucination or just ordinary dream weirdness. I look up and to my right at the dark-haired woman, who is sitting next to me. She looks back at me with an expression that communicates, “Yeah, this is what I was expecting would happen; how are you going to deal with it?”

I'm a little frightened by the shopping bag attacking me, but I'm still secure in the knowledge that this is a dream, so I'll be safe and sound when I wake up. I close my eyes and think to myself, Take me home. [By which I mean, “Take me back to the real world.”]

I then woke up for real, just as I had desired to do. I was amazed to discover that a full 6 ½ hours had passed since I'd gone to sleep. When I recalled my reaction to the opportunity to smoke marijuana, I laughed derisively at myself and thought, Oh, boy. I need to sort out my priorities.

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Side notes:
It's certainly fitting that I dreamed about smoking marijuana on the morning of 4/20. I first learned about 4/20 from peers in college, but on a conscious level, I had completely forgotten about it until I found the “Happy 4/20!” thread on DreamViews this morning. My subconscious sure remembered, though. :-)

I've never tried marijuana in real life, so I can't compare the reality to the dream. That might also be why it didn't really make me feel any different: my brain doesn't really know what it's supposed to feel like to be under its influence. I have drunk alcohol in real life, but I haven't done so in a dream yet. If I ever do, I expect it will probably feel just like it does in reality.

I noticed something today: When I write dream journal entries, I write like a scientist. I write down what I've observed and compare my new observations to previous ones. Sometimes I draw conclusions from all these observations. Often, I perform experiments within the dream and report on their results.

I'm lying on a mattress on the floor. My sister is sleeping next to me. As I stare up at a red balloon which is resting in the branches of a small tree (potted plant next to the bed) I'm wondering how to make sure I have a lucid dream when I next sleep. I decide that every time i see something that can fly I will do a reality check. Now I'm walking across the room, following my sister (she seems distant and unconnected to me). I pass a table covered in small metal disks (like coins but smaller). As I wave my hand over them they all move as if I have some magnetic pull. Finally I realise that this is a dream.
So as not to get over excited and lose the dream like last time, I stare down at my hands, taking in every detail to stay grounded in the dream. As I do so, my hands start to grow and warp. I watch this happen and it seems to be working a little. However, still feeling dangerously close to waking, I remember what Stephen La Berge recommends and start spinning around on the spot. As I do this, I lose the dream scene and find myself in a gray void, still lucid. I'm annoyed that I've lost my sister and ask myself "what now?". I decide I want to see my deceased father and shout/intend to do so. I start flying around the dream space while giant rolls of wallpaper appear. I zoom around the folds until they become a long white corridor which I fly along until I'm walking out of the end and meeting my dad in some kind of laboratory. He's young, maybe 40, he looks slim and healthy. He says "I'm glad you could make it". We hug and walk off so he can show me his work. As we walk, I'm explaining how I decided to see him in my lucid dream and I remember that I should be asking the dream about healing mjy wrist. The dream fades.

Last night I wasn't even trying to have a MILD but I had a lucid dream, I think.
I am sleeping in either an apartment in a tall building or in a hospital bedroom. I see green curtains and cool air is blowing in through the window which is wide open. I get up and do a reality check. I do many reality checks in this dream. About three nose pinches and one gravity check. And also stabilized by rubbing my hands together.
I see colored balloons briefly. And they have writing on them. They are floating in front of a blue background. There is a red and a green balloon and possibly a blue one.
I am walking in a mall at B-2. It is dark or very dimly lit. I see people vaguely walking around. They look a bit like zombies.
I am still wondering if I had a lucid dream or not so I try to fly (thought: because I can't do that in real life). And I see a picture of myself flapping my wings like a duck. Again I see myself against a blue background. And I am not wearing clothes.
I ask some guys if I'm dreaming. There are about three people. There is one old man. They say that I am not dreaming. Then I say, "so I've been doing all these things awake?"
Very low lucidity though. Or even none. Need expert opinion here.

I was going to Barnes and Noble with my friend for school.

"I used to go a Roman Catholic church, but now I go to a Christian church," she said.

"Ok," I said. "So what church do you go to?"

"St. Joe's," she replied. She then handed me something. It was a piece of platic grid about the size of the palm of my hand, with fake flowers woven into it. On one of the bottom corners, there was a small balloon, about a quarter of the size of the grid, maybe larger. It was a happy face balloon.

"Remember when you made this at my party last year?" she asked.

I didn't remember, but I thought it was cool. "Oh yeah." I pretended I did. "Thanks."

We walked over to a long table amid the large bookcases. There were several laptop computers on it, and we both sat down and got to work. After awhile, I wandered off to the end of the table, where there was a turning rack filled with various things. There were a couple of strange looking notebooks, labeled "miniature notebooks". It was a square with about two inch sides. The covers of the notebook were wooden, and you pulled them apart pulling one up and the other down. The paper in the middle opened like a post-it stack. I checked the price. It was five dollars. I thought that was a bit too expensive, so I set it back down. My eye caught something else, though. It was a balloon on a stick.

It was small, the stick being maybe eight inches tall. The balloon was very tiny, smaller than a baseball. It was a yellow happy face. I immediately wanted this, but the price was $9.08. I thought that was way too expensive, so I set it down sadly and went to look at some books.

I saw a search computer that you could use to find books in the store. I searched first for a book on lucid dreaming but I found it had bad reviews, so I searched for another book on it. This one looked good, so I went and found it. It seemed way too short, though, and not something I wanted to buy, so I put it back. Then I remembered that I had wanted to read Ender's Game. I searched for it and didn't find anything. I saw this guy I know also looking at books, and then I went back to the table.

By this time, other people were there, and I had to squeeze in. The computer that I had been looking at before had been closed, and the top of it looked like a Nintendo DS. I thought this was a bit strange - why would there be a large DS on the table? But then somebody flipped it open and I saw that it was a computer.

A few of the people at the table and I went back to my house, because I was going to have a party. I grabbed my sweatshirt.

My other friend, Michelle, came up to me. "Only you would wear that sweater," she said.

I thought about it. Maybe I shouldn't wear my sweater after all. I set it back down and went home. We went up to my room where this other girl, Jessica, and I sat down. She put down her bag, and I put down mine. I was a bit jealous of her bag, because it was prettier.

Several other things happened, and I'm not sure what they all are.

However, after that I was sitting down, thinking that my party that was supposed to be so fun was a complete failure. I was upset, and then I woke up.