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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.

It started of as the first day of my digital cinematography class with M.S. (which I had already irl). Everyone accepted everything as normal but I realize after waking up that the classroom looked like a chamber of some sort of space ship. It had curved, metal, sleek walls and was deep in the building.

M.S. Asks us if we had projects to present, and everyone said yes. Although it was apparent to me that no one even knew about it, but people started presenting anyway. After the first person or two she turned to me and asked what I had to show and I told her I had a guest speaker that had not arrived yet. She seemed excited and said that that was great.

I (apparently) could transform into John Smith, the main character from "The Dead Zone". And I figured that I could come in as him and speak, only I had to do it before anyone noticed I was gone. I was trying to find a place to transform. It took me awhile but I did, and I was on my way back when the dream changed.


The next dream started with me on the 4th floor of one of the buildings of my college (irl) waiting for an event I was running to start, but there were administrators in there so I had to wait until they were done before I could get anything going.

Behind them was a giant rocking horse that was rocking by itself. It was rocking at different speeds and different intensities. Slowly it began to sink into the floor. I seemed to be the only one that noticed it so I told people to look behind them, that the rocking horse was sinking. They turned to me and explained how the rocking horse rocked at different speeds and there was nothing to worry about. It was not my horse so I did not persist trying to tell them for long, if they did not care if it sank in the floor, that was none of my business. I watched it as it slowly became lower and lower, still rocking as it sank into the carpet until it was gone.

Everything was fine for a few moments, then the entire building began to fluctuate, ripple and begin to flop apart like baking dough. I yelled to everyone that the building was coming apart and they all began to run for the elevator. I yelled to them to stop, that this was an emergency and we had to take the stairs. Everyone quickly changed course and we began to run down the stairs as the walls seemed to be melting, and the stairs were missing sections.

Everyone got out of the building, and we all stood back to watch it basically deflate into a mushy mass. We thought everything was fine until we saw the buildings next to it begin to ripple and fluctuate as well. I soon realized that it was a chain reaction and soon the whole city would melt into blobby puddles.

A team was there quick with scaffolding to try and hold one of the buildings up, but the scaffolding began becoming floppy as well and some began to fall off. Others grabbed pieces of the building causing it to break off and gently fold to the ground to safety. At that point I realized I should warn the other building in my school that they were going to collapse soon.

I run over to the building and start yelling to everyone, they rush to the windows to hear what I have to say. Before I can warn them, someone on the ground grabs a megaphone and says "Nothing is happening, stay in class, thank you." I suddenly have a megaphone also and yell to them "The building you are in is going to melt! You have to leave now!" People seemed to hear, but did not think they could leave class still. I yelled "I know all of you have always wanted this kind of excuse to leave class! Are you going to pass this up?!" And with that everyone began evacuating.

I go into a false awakening of my roommate S telling me that I was screaming in my sleep.

I then "go back to sleep" to have pieces of the same melting building again, so strange

02.04.2011

The legendary cooking tray (Non-lucid)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

For some reason, I was going inside a cold storage. It was one of this huge walk-in refrigerators.
I walked some stairs to the door. The stairs were wooden and crackly. They were painted in white and some of them looked cracked.

I reached the cold storage's door. The door was metallic and very cold. The metal looked rusted and dented. The handle was also made out of steel.

I entered the cold storage. I could see some fog of the sheer cold inside. I could feel the cold in my skin. The ground of the cold storage was frozen solid. The tiles looked white with ice around them. Inside the cold storage I found boxes, most of them were made out of cardboard, but some where wooden too. I also found a few small carts with some food on them.

I found a cooking tray and picked it up. I was looking for it because it very important and it was needed somewhere.
I left the cold storage, walked down the same stairs and entered inside a one story building. The store looked like a bakery.

Some stuff happened with customers that I cannot recall well. I remember there was a big line and I walked towards the employee, who was a good made up friend of mine.

He was surprised of what I was doing. I knew I had some sort of legendary try that one is placed in the oven, it could generate a lot of candies right away. I threw a bag of chocolate candies in front of the employee and told him he wanted the tray.

Something else happened, but I woke up.

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

[Dream #1] I'm at the offices of a certain company. [The layout is slightly different than it is in real life.] I'm wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with some logo on it. As far as I know, I'm there to volunteer for the day, to test-drive the job I'm being considered for. [Specifically, the one I'm being considered for in real life.] From the part of the office where all the workstations are, I go out to the front reception desk for something. The person at the desk asks me to stop and let her take my picture for my ID badge. I'm surprised. If I'm getting my picture taken for my permanent ID badge, that must mean that they're actually giving me the job! I hadn't realized that today was officially my first day on the job! I had thought I was just there to volunteer and see what it was like. I'm so happy and honored that I actually got the job!

I speak to the lady at the front desk, expressing some of that excitement and those thoughts, and adding something along the lines of, “If I had known today was my first day and I was getting my picture taken, I would have dressed up more!” She tells me that since I'm not wearing any makeup or anything, I should go back to my workstation and look through my paperwork from the interview and application process, to see if there's still a good, professional-looking photo of me in there. I go back to my workstation and do so. There is, indeed, a good photo of me among many other pieces of paper in a manila folder. I bring the picture back to the front desk and give it to the lady there. “I have a nice smile in this picture,” I say when I give it to her. She accepts it, and we shake hands. I start to say something like, “You have no idea how much this means to me! This is only my second full-time job ever...” I kind of stop after that, because I've just realized that mentioning how inexperienced I am probably isn't the smartest thing to do at my new job.

I go down some stairs, which lead down and out of the building in a spiral. The outdoor part of the stairway is carved out of stone. On my way down, I pass my friends Linda N. and Janet [they're both friends of mine from real life]. I smile at them and say hello.

When I woke up and discovered that my first day on the job had just been a dream, I was genuinely surprised, then immediately became genuinely angry and disappointed. [It makes sense both that I would feel that way and that I would dream about getting that job; I've been waiting all week to hear whether I got the job, so it's been on my mind a lot and I really, really want it to happen. Also, I'd like to note that this dream was actually much longer and much more detailed, elaborate, and vivid than described above. I didn't get a chance to write about it until just before bed the following night, though, so I no longer recall all the details.]

[Dream #2] I'm out on a road trip with my family. At a store where we stop along the way, I buy a small children's book that is [somehow] about the song “Friday,” on impulse. We're on our way to stay at the home of some friends. When I get there, I sit on the floor in the living room and read the book. [I could read perfectly normally in the dream, as always, but I don't remember now what it said.] While I'm there, three teenage boys come into the room.

The house we're staying in is huge, and has lots of people living in it. I watch some younger kids get up to the second floor by climbing some stepladder steps that jut out from the wall in one corner of the living room and lead to an opening between the first and second floors. To get to the bottom step, they have to stand on the couch.

I wander into [what is most likely] the dining room, passing the woman whose house it is along the way. On the back wall of this room is a normal staircase leading to the second floor. The woman asks me if I want an entire room, or just a place to sleep. I answer, “I just need a place to sleep.” The woman tells me to go upstairs, and I do so. The staircase ends in a bedroom with a kid-sized bed; this will be my place to sleep. I'll have to sleep with my feet and probably half my lower legs hanging off the end of the bed, but I just accept this. Beyond this bedroom are other bedrooms and bathrooms, and even a third floor to the house, really just a loft bedroom situated in the highest gable of the house.

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

It's after closing time at a big, fancy modern office building, but I have to go back inside to retrieve something. On my way in, I see a couple of my friends from a club I'm in, and say hello to them. Someone closes the door that leads deeper into the interior of the building before I can get to it. There is a sign on the wall next to it that reads “Shift Workers.” Since I don't have a key to this door, I decide that whatever I was going to get can wait until the next day, and abandon my errand. I walk back out of the building and through the glass front doors.

Outside the doors is a wide, concrete entry plaza with concrete stairs leading down to the street on the side opposite the doors. The plaza and the stairs are crowded with people. As I cross the plaza, I meet Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. We walk down the stairs together, talking. At the bottom of the stairs, a guy in a movie-quality Darth Maul costume is greeting kids in character.

Ellen, Joe, and I have to get to a meeting or event somewhere else, so we start walking there. Ellen is wearing her teal evening gown [the one she's wearing in the picture I linked to above]. As we walk along a road in a semi-rural area, she carries me by holding her right forearm straight out to the side and parallel to the ground, and letting me sit on it. I can feel my pelvic bones digging into her arm. I wonder if she's doing all right carrying me all this way, since I'm bigger and heavier than she is, but I don't say anything, and she doesn't complain. She starts singing a song in Japanese, one I recognize and know well, so I join in and sing along. I think, I didn't know she was an anime fan. When we get to the end of the song, I identify it: “Digimon, season 1, ending 1.” [That ending song sounds like this in real life, but the song we were singing didn't sound like that at all. It sounded a little more like this one, but not really.] I think, The only other people I've had friendships this close with have been my AmeriCorps friends.

We come upon a park. There are several people there with some dogs that they, and Ellen, identify as Rottweilers, but they have reddish fur and look kind of fox-like. I somehow manage to drop my purse and the series of plastic bags containing the components of our picnic lunch all over the grass, and have to get them back without the dogs attacking me. I start picking them up, saying to Ellen, “I don't give a s*** about the food, I just want my purse back!” I'm scared of the dogs. One of them does end up biting my hand, but more playfully than viciously; I can feel its teeth on my hand. I try to get my hand out of its mouth without tearing the skin on a tooth. [I think] I finally succeed, after I've removed the mask that has slipped down over my eyes so that I can see it again. [I was, as usual, wearing a sleep mask in real life. I also remember having to remove covers from my ears in order to hear people at some point during this dream, but I don't remember when. I didn't have anything in or covering my ears in real life.]

We leave the park, and continue on our way down the road. I am now riding bareback on a big, black cow. Ellen is walking next to it. [Joe had disappeared from the dream entirely by this point.] I can feel the cow's fur, warmth, and movement. We're almost to our destination, which is a boxy, white, one-story set of office buildings on the next block. I think about how many different forms of transportation I've taken on my way to this place: walking, being carried by Ellen, riding in a golf cart, and now riding on a cow. [I don't remember the part of the dream where I rode in a golf cart anymore.] The office building is set back from the road a little bit. Before we get to it, and right up next to the road, there is a stable with a whole herd of black cows in it. The cow I'm riding stops in front of the stable, facing it, and moos. All the other cows moo back. This exchange repeats twice. I dismount from the cow so that she can go into the stable. She gets scared of something and climbs one of the support beams holding the roof of the stable up. She clings to the top of it, now about the size of a human child.

I turn back to face the way we just came. A woman is approaching me on the road. She has a geometric pattern of straight lines with corners all over her tan skin, and is busy putting on a silver loincloth-skirt thing as she walks toward me. I call her “Charissa” as I approach her. That's the last I remember before waking up.

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Side notes:

Two of the last things I did before going to bed last night were watching a Star Wars fan video and working on my current Arthur/Ariadne fanfic. I'm slightly surprised both that those elements showed up in my dreams immediately (unusual for me) and that it wasn't the characters themselves who showed up, but the actors who played them.

This was a really cool, fairly vivid dream with a lot of tactile sensation. I was also amazed to realize upon waking up that I'd slept right through my parents' morning routine, the sounds of which usually prevent me from getting back to sleep for that last cycle. This difference can probably be explained by the fact that I didn't get to sleep until after midnight last night, which is later than I usually do these days.

A dream that came back to me from a few years ago. It skips around a bit, but stays within the same narrative.

I was walking in the snow with my wife and child (I was a man in the dream, I would estimate I was 35-40yrs old). We were just enjoying the calm when we decide to walk to the library were I used to live irl.

We make our way in, but it is a trap and my wife and daughter disappear somehow (nothing mystical, I just loose sight of them).

I end up at the top floor of the building, which ends up having many floors. I just know that I have to find my way down to find them.

There were many people I had to fight, and trials I had to face on my way down the stairs. The only one I remember was one with yu-gi-oh cards, or something of the like, that he was summoning or using magic to get in my way.

I finally make it to the bottom and find them on the first floor looking for me.
I grab them and run out of the building. We all begin to get in the car discussing how strange the events were that just happened.

I had a sudden realization "hey" I say "we didn't driver here" the fake image melts away and we find that we are still in the building.

We fight our way out again and walk home together, and I wake up.

I found it strange enough that I was a married man with a child, but I loved them so much, I have never not been another gender other than this dream to date.

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

I'm at my new church. The sanctuary is big and sort of round [more so than it is in reality]. I'm sitting on a pew near the front of the room, from which I can see both the altar and the center of the room. In the center of the room is an elevated circle with six thick, round columns spaced evenly around its outer edge. Beyond the outer edge of the circle, centered in the back of the room just in front of the main doors, is a lectern. I recognize it as our regular lectern, even though it and all the columns are festooned with decorative constructs made out of LEGO toys. A sort of mesh made of bright orange axles and connectors from a LEGO set hangs down a little way over the sides of the top of the lectern. The columns are all similarly decorated. The woman standing at the back of the room places a LEGO construct that she refers to as her “crown of thorns” on top of one of the columns. This causes all the columns to start moving vertically, changing their relative heights. I think about how cool all this is, especially the hydraulic-powered columns.

The sanctuary is filled with people. We're there for the Children's Stations of the Cross [an event that actually is coming up in just a few weeks]. There are lots of kids there, going through the stations in small groups. A group of kids walks by in front of my pew, and I hear one of the girls in it complain that there aren't enough girls in her group. I decide to join the group so that there will be more girls in it. [I was my adult self in this dream, but no one took any particular notice of me.]

I follow the group to the back of the room, out the main doors, and into the narthex. We stop at the location of the plaque designating the first station, which is hanging on the wall between the narthex and the sanctuary, just to the right of the main doors to the sanctuary. Another adult woman is operating this first station. She's ready for us with a toy that someone at the church put together to make Stations of the Cross more interactive and engaging: a pretend PASIV device. Inside the case, I see a piece of equipment from Verizon's network, a white metal rectangular box with the Verizon logo on top. I know that the box contains telephone cables on coils that allow them to be pulled out and then retracted. You can pull out the cables through holes in the side of the box, and that's what the woman does. The plastic jacks on the ends of the cables plug into matching ports on the bracelets that the kids and I are all wearing. The jacks and ports are the same size and shape as the ones used for the LEGO NXT robots and their sensors, I note. [The cables, however, are satiny silver-gray in color, not black like in real life.]

When all of us are plugged in by our bracelets and the device is turned on, the bracelets start pulsating, contracting and expanding in a way meant to simulate the sensation of an increasing heart rate. The experience is intended to help us identify and empathize with someone who is in mortal terror. While doing this, we all lie down on the tile floor and pretend to be asleep, because we know that this is what we're supposed to do when playing with a pretend dream-sharing device. [When I woke up and recalled all this, I thought it was hilarious both that my brain had created this scenario directly inspired by Inception, and that I had never realized that I was dreaming.]

After this, I walk through the parish hall [both the narthex and the parish hall are exactly like the ones at St. Mark's in Upland] and pick up some snacks. There seems to be some kind of meeting going on in one part of the room.

[Next cycle.] I'm walking on a wet, slippery stone-and-concrete courtyard in the middle of some old buildings with lots of dark-brown wood. The ground is wet because it has been raining; it's a gray, overcast day. I recognize this as an unfamiliar place and realize that I'm dreaming. This no longer shocks or startles me. I immediately start touching all the walls and handrails I pass, even crouching down at one point to lick up some of the water in one of the rain puddles. All of these actions evoke the corresponding sensations accurately.

I see a flight of wooden stairs leading up from the ground, attached to the outside of one of the buildings. I think, I wonder if I can turn these into an infinite loop. So I start climbing them, keeping track of how many segments of stairs separated by 90-degree turns I've climbed, counting them aloud. “One... two... three... now, when I get to the end of the next one, I should be back where I started from, right?” I say. When I get to the end of the fourth segment, though, I'm not back where I started from. The stairway just ends in a level, wooden, elevated walkway leading off to the right. “Damn you, astrophysics!” I exclaim aloud, expressing my disappointment that the normal laws of reality have prevailed despite this being a dream. [Why “astrophysics,” I have no idea.] I quickly shrug it off and continue exploring, walking along the walkway.

The walkway leads to the top of some steep, grassy hills. I crouch down near the top of one of them. I'm a little cold, so I try to summon a blanket to wrap around myself by thinking about one. Then I remember, No, just consciously, deliberately concentrating on it like that doesn't work. You have to know and expect that it will be there. I don't proceed to do this, though.

On top of one of the hills [the same one? A different one? I'm not sure], there is a concert stage with an amplifier sitting in the grass in front of it, to stage right. There's supposed to be a concert going on, but it's just beginning the process of being canceled. A rock band is on stage, but they aren't playing; they seem to be telling the audience at the bottom of the hill that there's no show to see, and some of the audience is beginning to wander away. They're canceling the show because the amplifier isn't working. I open up the top of the amplifier and find an AAA battery sitting half out of its battery cradle, which is itself only partially wired up to the rest of the amp. I reconnect all the wires and push the battery back into the cradle, and then the amp works. The band un-cancels the show and starts playing, and the audience stays and watches. I walk down the hill to join the audience. I notice that I'm now wearing the same two layers of coats that I often wear in real life. The dream starts to fade. Then I woke up.

29.01.2011

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

I was going to a party with a disgraced pop star (she was a blond girl who had done something wrong in an erlier part of the dream that I can't remember she also wasn't a real pop star, just someone I made up). We entered a building and had to go down some huge crystal spiraling staircase. The whole place was very well decorated. There were some people by the stairs that we had to avoid because they'd recognise us. The pop idol said we'd manage it because no one would think that she'd come back after what had happened. While we went down the stairs I looked up and thought that they had reconized me, but I hurried down the stairs. I descended into a huge black dome illuminated by disco lights. Now I was with J and saw some other people that used to be in my class. They told us they were leaving even though it was only 10pm.

1/11/11 - Mall Excursions
Dream Non-dream Lucid

The longer dream took place at a huge mall. I was at Barnes & Noble, my favorite place ever, but it was more like a library for some reason. My friend Angela was there, and told me that was where she worked. We sat down by a weird machine; Angela told me it was for donating or renting out books, but for awhile we used its many attached screens to watch NCIS. After awhile I decided to rent out my InuYasha books, since I'd already read them. Angela helped me put them on a sort of conveyer belt, which rolled through the machine and electronically stored the books elsewhere. At some point I changed my mind and wanted my books back. Angela didn't know what to do, though, so I called out, "Can I get some help from someone who actually knows what they're doing?!" The whole store was staring at me, and a man walked up to me. He asked if I'd donated some books, and explained that this machine was for donations only. I was pissed at Angela for screwing up. I told the man that there'd been a mistake, and asked for my books back. He said he could get them back for me, and sat down at a computer on the opposite end of the machine. After typing for awhile, he stood up and told me to go to the back of the store, and that my books were at the reception desk.
I went to the back of the store and looked around. I saw a little podium labeled, "Reception," but saw no books there. I looked around some more and noticed a huge desk with lots of manga sitting on top, just a couple of feet away. I looked at all the books, but couldn't find mine. I did notice something labeled "Elemental135," but apparently it was the title of the manga. I also saw a Death Note book and, I think, some Dragonball Z.
Finally I decided to go back to the man at the machine. "My books aren't there," I told him. He asked me what books I'd been looking for, and after some thought I remembered having InuYasha VizBig Edition, books 1-3. He went back to the manga I'd been looking at and pulled out a book, saying it was mine. I looked at it and it was something I'd never heard of before.

I somehow ended up in a different scene. I was with B&N's owner's daughters, three little girls around ages 6-10. I was supposed to babysit them, and the owner and I were on friendly terms, so he trusted me. I found myself in a big room with a weird stairway formation that led to the ceiling. *The girls were all running to the highest point they could reach, in fear of something. They told me about an evil thing coming to get us. We climbed up the stairs and onto some banister-like things near the ceiling; it was pretty high up. Suddenly, through a large gap in the stair formation, I saw spurts of water shooting up in a circle. I asked the girls if it was the "evil thing" and they nodded. I told them it was just a fountain, and we were all relieved. Right then, their parents came home. I was switched to 3rd-person view, and saw myself, though I looked and acted like another person, a young woman with thick black hair, suddenly feign anger and yell, "Get down from there!" as if scolding the children. "I" jumped down to the floor, and a couple of the children fell from their perches in the banisters. I believe the were hurt. Their father rushed over, pissed, and ordered me to leave. I tried to explain about the "evil" fountain, and he said they had done the same thing earlier, and that they'd already been told it was just a fountain. I felt like, somehow, the children's memories had been erased. The father tended to his children.

That was the end there, but I remember something else happening at the same mall. I was with someone, possibly Will, and we were in a small shop. It was empty except for a long counter at one end, where an old man, supposedly our grandpa, stood. On each side of the counter was a door. He went through the door on the left, and emerged with two baby bears on chain leashes. We were supposed to walk them, so Will and I each took a chain and took the bears out the door on the right, which led into the mall. I don't really remember where we walked. At some point we returned the bears to my grandpa, and repeated the process with a second set of cubs. We were still walking them when I woke up.

I went back to sleep for a few hours, and had another dream. I remember being at my house with a new puppy, a pug or boxer. I think its name was Boulder. I was trying to decide where it would sleep, when it peed all over the bathroom counter, at which point I decided it would sleep in Will's room.

Fin.

The title pretty much says it all. I'm dressed in all black, stalking into my old high school with a flute in my hand to play for their Christmas concert. The place is well lit and pretty busy, so I sneak into a stairwell and slide underneath to hide in the darkness. I feel the approach of something evil, so I sprint up the stairs to the top floor. When I look out, I see that the whole floor has been cut away, replaced by a huge hole and some unknown machine surrounded by catwalks. Scientists in white lab coats surround the machine and enlist my help in turning it on. This I do, and an energy beam shoots out from its center and starts to cut through everything in its path. I realize that it's supposed to drill to the center of the earth.

Interconnected elements of this dream:

THE BACKGROUND. Something in the dream just told me that we were out on a vacation with my usual adventure buddies. The plan was to gather a daypack after checking in a hotel...a rather grand one.

THE BOAT. When I was about to board a small boat, I saw people in the boat which the dream states are my buddies though their faces were not recognizable. They were in bright orange life jackets waiting on me. but suddenly they told me the trip was an overnighter on an island. I ran as fast I could thru the hotel grounds, grasses (first person point of view) to quickly re-pack for an overnight.

THE HOTEL. Trying to return to my room, I got lost. My keys had a 4 digit number in it and the first two digits of that number I can see on the hotel doors, implying i was in the right floor. But something in the dream said that it was in the wrong building/tower. I scrambled to another building, but was unable to get to the 8th floor, which the key number seems to indicate where I was supposed to go. I then found myself in the 4th floor instead and asked around hotel staff. They said best to take stairs up. I tried looking for the elevator but can't find and since my buddies were waiting on me, I decided to run up the stairs.

THE STAIRS. Halfway thru the first flight, I tried to retreat (wanting to still find an elevator), but a big cat..something like a cheetah was growling at me. I tried to give the cat a quick kick to protect myself and continued to run upstairs. I only ran up 3 floors...but somehow I was in my room.

UNPACKING. I went to my closet to get my bigger bag & unpack some stuff to place in my daypack. It was a bit dark, the scene was grayish. as I unpack, several contents seem familiar but can't quite remember now what they were. something in the dream told me it's been already 10minutes since I took off from the boat, whereas I promised my buddies I'd be back in 5.

Then I woke up.

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?)

July 4, 2008

I was at a high school that had the theme of Hogwart's (kind of) and I was trying to find my brother to give him a book. The high school was built out of amber colored stone with big pillars and bridges. I then went to a big majestic building that looked like the Taj Mahal. The sky was bright, sunny, and blue. A man with a long white beard then just said out of nowhere, "Spin the Stones." What then happened, was that the big building started rotating very slowly. Just imagine the Taj Mahal on a sunny day and it is tilting slowly like the leaning tower of Pisa. Here is a picture to best describe the scenery. The weird thing is that I had this dream in 2008 and had no idea what the Taj Mahal was at the time. And this picture looks exactly how it did in my dream. Also, just imagine a humongous glass dome above this palace.
Anyways, after the man said, "Spin the stones," it sounded like a bunch of gigantic rotating gears like in a clock were turning. I looked up and there was a boy chained to the top of the dome by his wrists just hanging there. I could not see his face because his long brown hair was covering it. He started to clench and fidget like he was in pain, for he was, and shed one tear. The tear rolled down his face and dropped on the tip of the big building. The tear quickly rolled down the smooth stone and kept going until it slid frictionless on the white stone floor and into the water. (My dream camera angle changed to underwater still watching the droplet at this point.) The droplet turned into a water fish and swam until it went inside a black hole in the wall. Then the water burst out and turned into little tiny colored creatures. They looked like they were made up of little geometric 3-d shapes and they had little faces on them. They formed a stairway with air supporting them. This phenomenon that just happened stuck in my mind as what is called a Mackinaw. I have no idea what it means but that's what it was called in my dream. So yeah. After that its foggy.

I'm not quite sure how to explain the interior of this dream. It looks like a giant foyer or boiler perhaps where all the floors are that material where you can see down to the floor below you. In the middle of this wide expanse is a big hole where a set of spiraling stairs goes down an uncountable number of floors. It's very dark inside, but somehow I can still see everything that goes on. People are pressed against the walls along all the walls on every floor, as this seems to be a series of races. I'm actually involved in the first race around.

When we start, you're not allowed to stand up and run. Most of the races consists of you trying to crawl at a fast pace to every stage on your knees. I'm allowed to stand to run down the stairs to the next level, but I'm required to crawl to the next actual stage. At this point I seem to be very far ahead of everyone else. Once I reach the first stage, I stand up and have to do some tasks. I don't remember what it is other than it had something to do with archery. I continue on the course, but cannot recall what all stages I have stopped at or having gone down all the rest of the stairwells. The next thing I remember is passing the finish line, somehow on the top floor once more and I'm not at all our of breath.

My prize turns out to be a HD T.V. of some sort. I instantly turn in my dream and go to hand my prize to some little boy's father. He tries to reject the gift, but I insist that he takes it anyways, so he does. I then return to sit with my family to watch more of the races. I hear names of people I recognize being whispered, and I actually see one of my friends tumble off the side of the top floor of the foyer. I can actually perfectly see her crash several floors down, but she just gets up like she never actually fell. The races continue on, but I wake up just as a group of contestants make it down the first flight of stairs.

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.

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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!