Almost Lucid

I'm driving through a green valley that has industrial buildings in it, and I think I'm in Seattle, and the factories are the Boeing plant. Overhead, strung up on supports over the road, is a model of the International Space Station, which has been built a lot bigger than I remember it having been, with lots and lots of solar panels.

Then, in one of those dream transitions, I'm in the space station, in orbit around the Earth. It's part of some government program to build support of the space program by sending ordinary people into space. I've just gotten onto the station, having been brought up on a shuttle. I'm feeling slightly queasy, and I'm wondering whether I will have trouble adjusting to zero-gee conditions. I notice with curiousity that the doors between compartments look like ordinary doors in buildings on the ground. I think that I would have expected that they would be different. My nausea is staying with me: not growing, but not going away either, and I'm starting to become concerned about it.

Another dream-transition, and I'm standing in a cafeteria. I notice that I'm standing, with weight on my feet, and think that this means I'm not on the space station any more. Did I dream being there? Am I still there, but dreaming now?

Across the room, I see my friend Elise Matthesen. I wave to get her attention, and go over to talk to her. "Are we on the space station or not?" I ask her. "Are we dreaming or not?"

"Well," she says, "we're definitely feeling weight, so we're not in space." As a final confirmation of this, I take my cell phone out of my pouch and let it go. It falls into my other hand. We're definitely on the ground.

"As for dreaming, you know you can tell if you are dreaming if you look at a clock and you can't read the numbers." I recognize this as being a detail from the movie Waking Life. There isn't any clock visible, but by now I've come to the conclusion that I am dreaming. But the thread of the dream slips away into deeper sleep at that point, and I remember no more.