The Lab Notebook

(This one is from last night, bringing my DJ up to date again.)

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

I'm in House #4, which is enormous and elaborate and has lots of rooms [far, far more than in real life]. I go into one room that I had been using as an office/storage room, turn on the lights, and wonder why the lights in the ceiling fan don't turn on when I flip the switches, like they always have. [Arrrrrgh! *facepalm* It's been a while. I completely forgot that this was a dream sign until just now, when I was writing about it!] Then I notice that the room has been completely redecorated and filled with all kinds of objects and belongings. Someone has moved into these rooms. That someone has left a note on a rectangular sheet of yellow paper, attached to the wall, and has signed it with her first name, Emily.

While walking through the house, I pass a seating area with couches and a coffee table in an open area of the second floor, on a sort of landing next to the walkway that leads to the other bedrooms.

I'm in a dining area, sitting at a table, eating a meal with my roommate, LB. We talk about how I have this is my last night in the house, and I have to return to my original home.

I go downstairs and walk out of the house, which is now a small cruise ship sitting at a dock. Someone says something like, “If you don't come back, the ship will leave without you.” And I'll be marooned, I think. Well, Long Beach sure is a great place to be marooned in.

I wander off, along the city streets, heading toward the ocean. I find the frontage road that runs along the edge of the beach, and follow it to the next cross-street that leads inland. [The intersection I came to looked a lot like this intersection here, a place I know well from real life, but that intersection is actually in Santa Barbara, not Long Beach. In the dream, this area looked like that intersection, except grayer, more urban, and more built up - more like Long Beach, in other words.]

I turn right and head up that street that leads inland from the ocean. I come to an enchanted-forest-themed park area, where there is a gently-curving path through a forest of tall trees, and little statues and figurines, including one that plays a chipper, pre-recorded message when you touch a marked panel in front of it. The companion I'm with does so, and I turn around and walk back the way I came along the path, annoyed by the recording.

While retracing our steps, my companion and I come to a section of the pathway where there's a little toy train that runs along a ledge, about three feet off the ground, on one side of the footpath. The train consists of a toy engine, a toy caboose, and a whole bunch of random, small objects in between them. Any object placed in the line of objects between the engine and the caboose levitates a few inches above the ledge, and is pulled along as part of the train. The idea is that you're supposed to stand on the objects and ride the train along the ledge. I take my totem out of my pocket and place it on one of the flat objects in the train, and look at it for a moment. However, I then put it back in my pocket, because I don't want my companion to see that I have it. [Again, how did I not realize I was dreaming? Apparently, in my mind, that totem object is associated with the idea “This is a secret - no one else must know you have this” much more strongly than it is with the ideas “This is a symbol of your membership in the lucid dreaming community, a reminder to do reality checks, and a way to do them.” Great. :/ ]

Color-coding key:
Awake, Non-lucid, Possibly lucid? (not sure), Lucid, Lucid 'dream within a dream,' [Commentary made while awake]

[This morning, my alarm went off at 7:30. I had planned to get up and write, but I still felt so sleepy that I decided to sleep in. I believe I had all these dreams during the extra hour I slept in. Again, I don't remember the transitions that connected them, if there were any, which is why this entry may seem fragmented.]

I'm out somewhere with my parents and T&P [some real-life friends of ours]. We're in a gravel parking lot, getting into our cars to go somewhere. I'm driving my own car by myself. I follow the other car, which has my parents and T&P in it, out of the parking lot and along a narrow, gravel-covered alley. There are two big rocks in the middle of it. I watch the other car drive over them and worry that my car isn't high enough off the ground to clear them, but it does, with no problem.

I have a small patch of thick, dark-brown hairs growing out of a mole on the right side of my chin. I want to pull all the hairs out with tweezers, but I look for the tweezers and can't find them. Later, I look in the mirror again and have a short, but thick beard, with only a couple of long hairs straying outside of the beard zone. I still can't find the tweezers, so I try to pull them out with my fingers, but can't; they're too solidly rooted. I continue playing with those hairs with my fingers as I go about the rest of my day. [Funny how at no point during this sequence did I think to question the situation; I'm a girl! I do, however, find and pull on stray hairs like that often in real life.]

I'm explaining to someone, over the phone [I think], that J&L have passed away. The conversation continues, and I say something about how hard it must be for the other person to find this out. [J&L are the original owners of the house I'm now renting. I've had this conversation over the phone at least twice in real life. Even though I never actually met them, it's still hard to tell people that news.]

I'm in a body of water, and there's this little cartoon guy swimming in the water. He has a mask and a snorkel on. There is a song playing: “let's go swimming under the sea!”, it says, or something like that. I'm following the little cartoon guy as he swims through the water. I have my own snorkel, but no mask. I don't really need it, though, because when I duck my head below the surface, I can see underwater just as clearly as if I were wearing a mask, and the water doesn't sting my eyes at all. Then, the little cartoon guy starts diving deeper under the water. I think to myself, It annoys me when cartoon characters do that when they only have a snorkel. [Somewhere toward the beginning of this dream, I became aware that I was dreaming, but I don't remember precisely when, nor what triggered it.] I want to continue following him under the water, and I think to myself, I can breathe underwater in dreams. My known dream ability to breathe water activates at this thought. I abandon the snorkel and continue following the little cartoon guy. We're in what looks like an ocean. The water is deep blue, and there are sea creatures of some kind swimming in it.

I'm in an unfamiliar bedroom, going to sleep. I even feel sleepy. While I'm getting into bed and falling asleep, I think about the fact that I'm going to be in a a dream as soon as I fall asleep, and that I'm going to be lucid and take conscious, intentional action while I'm there. [I remember having a specific mission in mind, but I don't remember what it was.] After a few seconds, I roll sideways out of bed and know that I'm in the dream world. [I think some kind of dream followed, but I don't remember it now. After that dream ends,] I'm back in the same bedroom again, and I go through the same sequence of falling asleep and knowing that I'm about to enter a lucid dream. This time, I sit up in bed to enter the dream, and then climb out of bed and step away from it, towards the door of the room. I cast a sidelong glance over at the bed and get a glimpse of myself, lying asleep. I quickly look away. I think, I know this is a dream room, and that that isn't actually my real body, but still, it's creepy. [I'm pretty sure I was aware that I was dreaming throughout this entire sequence, even the parts where I was falling asleep.] The reason I know that the whole experience is just a dream is that the bedroom I'm in isn't mine. The walls are painted a dark, cool color, the bedclothes match the walls, and the room is longer and narrower than my real one.

From that unfamiliar bedroom, I walk out into a plaza surrounded by buildings. It is a sunny day. There are signs in the plaza directing people to an area where a birthday party is being held for a child. I walk into that area and find a table with a bunch of party food set out on it. From that table, I take a cupcake and start eating it, without bothering to take the paper off first. I want to take advantage of the opportunity to do that. I know that this is my dream body, so I don't have to worry about the paper doing me any harm, and in addition, I don't have to worry about what the DCs around me will think if they see me eating the cupcake paper. The cupcake itself feels and tastes exactly like cupcakes do in real life. I walk around while eating it, observing all the people walking around and the kids running around and playing in the courtyard.

As I continue to explore the dream environment, I come upon another sign reminding everyone that it's time to go and complete the paperwork to register their cars. I follow the directional arrows on the sign, and end up entering a building that contains an office with a reception desk front and center as you walk in the front door of the building. I go up to the reception desk, tell the woman there my name, and ask for my car registration form. It turns out that the form is filed under my old address from when I was living in Florida. She gives it to me to update. The sheet of paper she gives me is the top sheet of a piece of carbon paper. It's a sheet I already filled out back when I was living in Florida; it has all my information from those days on it, in my handwriting, in blue ballpoint pen. I start working on bringing the information on it up to date.

The top section of the form contains several multiple-choice questions with checkboxes below them. These questions are all about your religious beliefs, and they're really only on the form as a formality. They ask about whether or not you believe in the Bartel Water Bug, and the boxes indicating non-belief are already checked. I read over this section and then start updating the form with my current address, but then it occurs to me to think: Why am I wasting dream time filling out a form? I look up from the paper to see what the woman behind the desk is doing. She has turned away to do something else. I set down my pen, turn around, and walk quickly out of the building while she's not looking.

Back in the courtyard, I discover that the item I've decided [in real life] to use as a totem, which in my case is a thimble, behaves in a very interesting way when thrown or tossed in a dream. Namely, it acts like a magnet. Whenever it comes anywhere near another person [yes, even if the other person is just a DC], it flies away from them as if it were being repelled by their presence. Then it flies back toward me, straight into my hand, as if it were magnetically attracted to me. I encounter a family that I know in real life, walking along the edge of the courtyard. I say something like, “You're gonna get this thing thrown at you,” to the 7-or-8-year-old daughter in the family, and then I throw my thimble at her. When it gets within about a foot of her, it flies away from her and back toward me, and I catch it. [That's the last I remember.]

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Side notes:

When I woke up for real and reflected on the part of my dream where I kept dreaming about waking up and falling asleep within the dream, I thought, "Cool! My mind came up with a kind of hybrid dream experience, incorporating characteristics of the lucid dreaming experience that I learned from Inception (the knowledge that I was about to fall asleep and immediately find myself in a lucid dream, the experience of entering that dream from within another dream), as well as characteristics that I learned from DreamViews and from EWOLD (the perception of rolling out of my dream body and the knowledge that that room was itself a dream)." To those people who looked down on the newcomers who jumped on the lucid-dreaming bandwagon after Inception came out: I was one of those bandwagon-jumpers, even though I tried not to be too obnoxious and annoying about it, and I believe that we newcomers are perfectly capable of learning and growing into the world of lucid dreaming as it is actually experienced outside of the movies.