Back to School

Do I need to tell you I didn't sleep in my own bed last night? I didn't, you see. Does that make any difference to the kinds of dreams I have? I dunno. It didn't seem to. I woke up in the middle of the night and it took me a while to figure out where the hell I was. It was cold. The duvet had fallen off in the night and I had snuggled under the remaining blankets to stay warm enough, but my face was very cold. The bed was unfamiliar and the GPS part of my brain floated around in scanner mode testing and rejecting locations until after a free-falling amount of time I finally landed on the right location: I was at my parents' house in the downstairs single bed.

The dream I'd had wasn't a recurring dream, but the theme was familiar. I've had several flying dreams and a couple of dying dreams and quite a few elevators dreams and this was a back-at-school dream.

I had the same thought on waking as I've had for about a week now, "How the hell am I going to write this one up?" And then on the heels of that another recurring thought, "Oh, we'll just skip this one."

But here I am, writing for me and we'll find out together (me and me) how exactly I'm going to write this up. I guess it'll be like this:

On an airplane ...

(This isn't part of the dream yet, not exactly, I'm setting the stage here, a thought that has just occured to me as my brain runs ahead of my typing fingers....)

On an airplane the black box records the last thirty minutes of cockpit conversation. Chuck Palahniuk wrote a book called "Survivor" where the hero was supposedly narrating the last 30 minutes of his life on a cockpit voice recorder (and the chapters and pages all run backwards which is a pretty cool touch). I wonder at the moment of writing this entry if dreams are like this; I always know when I start to write up from what I can remember that there was more, dammit. I know there was extra stuff that happened earlier than the stuff I'm writing about, but I can't remember what exactly it was. Maybe the "dream recorder" has only a certain amount of space and so the new stuff records over the old stuff.

Except now that I've finished writing this piece and I'm circling back to edit, I feel like there was more at the end of this dream too but maybe that also evaporated.

So remember, I'm at my parent's place having this dream. Is it significant that I'm at my parents having a back to school dream? Who knows.

I'm back at college, military college. And I know there's been more to the dream because I'm walking down a corrider in a dormitory with my room key and I've been to my room already, but now I'm having a hard time finding it again. I can't recognize my room from the placement of the doors. It's like the floor of a hotel where you can mark your room by how far away it is from the elevator waiting area. So in this building there's no elevator, but this same sorts of gap in the wall is what I'm looking for to help identify where my room is, but all the gaps seem to be gone.

I'm lugging a bunch of stuff with me. It's not clear what I'm carrying.

It's a military college. I don't know which one ... actually it's neither of the ones I attended based on the unfamiliarity of the setting, but there's no name to the college unlike the dream I had earlier in the week when I told Ian we were at Royal Roads.

After going up and down the corridor a few times, vainly looking for my room, I finally look at the key I'm holding and the room number is engraved on that. After this, I find my room without significant effort.

I enter the room and close the door. There are other people in the hallway that I can see through the windows. The thing is, when I was roaming the hallways looking for the door, there was only the blank facades of doors and walls. Now that I'm inside the room, suddenly there's windows. There's a guy peering in at me. I don't recognize him from real life, dark-haired, young and handsome in a mean sort of way. I know this guy and I don't like him. I'm happy to close the blinds on him. He looks at me as I roll the blinds closed with a knowing expression on his face. I can see by the look of him that he expects I'm going to start jerking off as soon as I shut the blinds. He is mistaken, but I don't give a fuck what he's thinking. There's a shade I also pull down over a smaller window. The room goes darker. There's a couple of buttons by the door and I push them causing lights to go out in the hallway making it darker still. I accept that people in the hallway might not appreciate losing their light, but again, I don't care.

The room is dim, not dark. The very large windows opposite from the door I came in through look out on what I remember as a sea-green metropolis. It's like looking at a modern cirty through aquarium glass.

There's another guy in my room. I'm disappointed not to have this space completely to myself but I accept that he's supposed to be there. I don't know him either. He's bigger than the guy in the hallway and lighter complected, lighter hair. Heavier. And there's a girl too. She's blonde and heavy and not particularly pretty. The three of us don't share a single word of conversation. I fell like I ignored them the best that I could. There are three separate bedrooms and a bathroom in this place. I think I busied myself in the bathroom with something (not masturbation) but I can't remember now what it was. I think from there I lie down on my single bed and try to sleep.