The Lab Notebook

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

[I had several different dreams last night, two of which were lucid.]

[Dream #1] I'm playing Neopets. [In this particular dream,] Neopia is a fully-realized, three-dimensional world, but it's still a computer game that I'm playing using a mouse. The art looks just like it does on the real site. The game is played from a first-person perspective, and there are lots of rooms and areas to explore [just like the plot adventures on the real Neopets Web site]. One such area is filled with Neopets who are dressed in vaguely Arabian-looking clothes; they all have their noses covered with veils, which strikes me as somewhat ridiculous, since they all have such different shapes and sizes of noses. This scene makes me think, So Neopia does have something resembling an Islamic culture. I click my way into a hidden area and receive a special reward for finding it.

[Dream #2] I walk into my family's house, which is big and spacious and has two stories [and looks nothing at all like any of our real ones. House #2, our only two-story house, was nowhere near that big and was laid out very differently]. Suddenly, there are several men in the house with me. They're there to challenge me to a martial-arts tournament. I had known in advance that this challenge was coming. In the course of my conversation with them [which I don't really remember now], one of them eventually says that there is no challenge. Having become semi-lucid at some point during the conversation, I say boldly and firmly, “I have better things to do.” I begin making my way out of the house.

Then, I hear my mom yelling from behind me that the house is on fire and I should get out. I do so, thinking, I know I should just get out without stopping to try and rescue other people. I go out the front door and walk down a front walk that leads to a fairly high, steep flight of concrete stairs, which leads down a steep embankment, at the bottom of which are the public sidewalk and the street. I jump off the top step to get down to the front sidewalk more quickly. I fall in a long, slow arc, taking several seconds to get down, and land softly and gently on my feet. I had kind of known I was going to fall that way; I always do in dreams.

By this point, I'm definitely lucid. From the street, I take off and fly up over the neighborhood. Once again, it takes me two tries to take off. After the first time, I realize, I messed up – I wasn't concentrating right. I try again, kicking off with my right ankle and thinking about becoming airborne, as I always do, and this time it works. Flight feels like it always does, too.

I fly up and observe the neighborhood from above. I can see a little bit of the fire coming from the house I just left. After a minute or two, I land back on the street and see a little model of a single-story house standing on a table. I examine the model, concentrating on it, and succeed in making tiles blow off the roof with my mind. This action is directly inspired by the scene in Inception where they're at the cafe and the dream starts collapsing when Ariadne first realizes that they're dreaming. While I'm making the model blow itself to pieces, I think about how, when the characters from the movie are dreaming, they might use Michael Caine's name [*see Side Notes at end] in exclamations of surprise/anger/frustration, etc., as if he were their deity, because he was the inventor of the dream-sharing technology. I immediately dismiss this as a silly idea, though. I keep up what I'm doing, and eventually blow away all the broken-up pieces of the roof, exposing the interior of the model. It has separate rooms inside. There's a small, light brown, flea-like insect inside, with a sort of sail on its back. I know that the insect is my dad. [I don't even know.] I let it crawl onto my finger, rescuing it from the destruction of the model and setting it down gently outside the model.

This scene is immediately followed by an animated sequence of two foxes romping around in a grassy field and falling in love. I know that this means that both of my parents are still alive and got out of the burning house all right.

[Dream #3] I'm outside, in the daytime, on a series of tiled walkways, terraces, and stairways, elevated and built into the side of a hill. Some boy is following me around, singing a creepy version of some children's song at me, changing the words all around to suggest that he would like to do something sexual with me. At the end of the second or third repetition of the short song, I stop, sing the end of the verse for him, then smack him in the face. Then, a passing man helps me throw the offending boy over a wall and down a long flight of stairs. I see him get up after he reaches the bottom, and am glad to see that he can still get up and that nothing's broken.

The scene shifts slightly, and now I'm on the surface-level streets, walking around a city that I remember visiting in a dream before. [Except now I don't – false memory, apparently.] The city is bright and clean and filled with big trees. There is a train station across the street from where I'm walking. On my side of the street, there is an enlarged replica of one of the stores on Main St. at Disneyland. Upon seeing the prominent train station, I remark that my dream city doesn't necessarily have to be in the States; it could just as easily be in the UK. [This, despite the fact that said train station had a sign on the outside that very clearly read “Amtrak.”]

I walk in the main entrance to the store that replicates the one from Disneyland, and find myself in a shop that is part of a mall. I walk through that first shop and into a second one that resembles a Hot Topic (all the walls are painted black), only it's girlier (there are a lot more dresses). This store also has living mannequins that look exactly like the ones they have at Old Navy. One of these mannequins tells me that she wants to try on the dress I'm wearing, which I had gotten from that store earlier. It's a strapless, knee-length black sundress with little pink polka dots, pink lace decorating the top of the bodice, and a pink tulle underskirt part that makes the skirt puff out. There are lots of similar dresses on the racks in the store. [For some strange reason,] I'm wearing mine over the T-shirt and shorts I was already wearing. I'm really enjoying just walking around, exploring this dream. I exclaim aloud, “My mind is so awesome!”

I walk out of that store and around a corner, through one of the hallways that form the connecting core of the mall. I find myself wishing I could change out of the shorts I'm wearing under my dress, and just wear the dress. I go into another store, this one a Sephora. While I was in there, the dream ended.

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Side notes:

*Michael Caine's character's name is Stephen Miles (per the shooting script); that's what the other characters would say if they were to do that. I forgot that while dreaming, though.

Last night, when doing mental affirmations while falling asleep, I focused more on recalling the memory of what it feels like to be in a lucid dream, recalling past lucid dreams, and visualizing and imagining what it would have been like if I had become lucid in one of my memorable non-lucids. It worked really well.

As I was taught when I first tried to ski, people who are right-handed are generally right-footed as well, and are instinctively inclined to lead with their right foot and do most of their controlling of their movement with their right foot when skiing or snowboarding. I'm very pleased and not at all surprised to discover that this principle applies to my flying in dreams as well. I'm right-handed (and right-footed) in real life, and from the beginning, I've always instinctively used my right foot and ankle to kick off from the ground and launch myself into a takeoff.