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.

Escape and Attack

At times I felt like I was in some sort of co-operative video game. There were the bad guys all dressed as soldiers with faces painted the same charcoal grey as their steel helmets, and there was us, the good guys with a set of supernatural powers ... and playing cards. The reason why the bad guys were after us was because we belonged to them. I guess we were some sort of Charles Xavier's School for the Gifted except that instead of a school we were in a prison.

But no, not a prison, a laboratory.

My first earliest recalled visual from the dream is standing at an observation window looking out on what might be a combination storage bay, or factory floor. The huge space on the other side of the window is dark and dim seemingly lit only by the colour of flames and underwater lights. It may have once been a huge tank of water with pumps and pipes and industrial machines. On far side of this factory floor are four kennels which at first all seem each to hold a single dolphin. (Was that room all under water?) But when one breaks from his cage and rushes the window it's an orange-coloured gibbon, not a dolphin. He's hit the window so hard it has cracked. The window is a security widow, one of those reinforced glass things with wire webbing and so when the window cracks almost to shattering, it's startling. The cracks are in the shape of a punch. On the other side of the window, the gibbon does not jabber, it speaks. Its strength and its ability not only to have escaped its cage but to speak (!!!) are indications of how far these experiments have gone.

I listened hard to gibbon as it spoke but I can't remember what it said. The sense of it was: Let's get the fuck out of here. Right now. All of us.

It galvanized our group; it's the beginning of our escape, our flight to freedom. The group of us (are we five? Seven?) ... we adopted our fight pose, a particular way of standing as we fought that seemed like some sort a comic book pose when I thought about it after waking. Until this very moment of writing it down, I couldn't exactly put my finger on what it reminded me of ... but I just got it. It was from Iron Man , the first movie. Iron Man standing flatfooted with bent knees, chest jutting toward the enemy, raising and pointing his palms at the bad guys and then blasting them with his repulsors.

That's exactly how we engaged the bad guys. We didn't have repulsors in our palms, we just blasted them with the force of our psychic abilities.

This is how we broke out to the street.

It was night. The bad guys swarmed us, identical clones with charcoal Kevlar and guns, shadows in the dark of night.

They didn't have a chance.

I remember studying one of the unconscious ones after he'd been blasted, taking some moments to really appreciate and marvel how his face was painted the same colour as his helmet and wondering who this individual was. I remember vaguely thinking, "How are we going to keep score?" Who was keeping any kind of tally of the bad guys we put down? How many for me? How many for all the rest of them? Had any of our own been knocked down yet?

One of the last sequences I remember was being mentored by an older, more experienced member of our group. I had a deck of cards, big cards, each a little larger than the size of my hand. There was something funny about the deck and I realized that some cards were taped together. The tape did not wrap around the cards, a loop of tape was stuck to the middle of the card so that a second card could be attached, hiding the tape. There were a few other "sets" of cards similarly joined. I took the one out I had noticed first, three cards taped so that all the edges still lined up perfectly, the ace and queen of spades and the four of clubs. My mentor explained to me the special ability that came from attacking with these specific cards held between my palms. I spent the rest of the dream pulling these three cards apart and practicing perfectly putting them together again, their edges all lining up just so.

Fun in the Sun

Sometime in the early, empty hours of this morning I realized I was awake, having just had an epic dream. It had been grand in scale and grand in scope and it was almost completely gone. I mentally grasped at the wispy, smoky remains of memory but they all slipped away. I had to coax myself from trying harder to remember. It was very early and if I let my mind gear up I would be awake until the alarm went off which might be a long time. I let it go and the dream was lost. Two nights in a row, I remember thinking. I've lost the dream.

I fell back asleep.

And dreamed again.

I was walking amongst a long, undisiplined line of people. There was an uncounted crowd of us happily gaggling and trudging our way up a green hill. The hillside fell away to our right into a stand of trees. There were many children in this procession, in fact I think it was mostly children ... except for the pretty girl I was with (or next to). We crested the hill and a series of stairs and slides led the long way down the slope to an inlet connected to some tropical sea. The coast was alternately lined with red rocks and white, sandy beaches and the view stretched out for miles and miles and miles. We all made our way down the wooden steps and it seemed that our procession was being watched by a great collection of adults who were massed on the hillside. These must have been the parents of that throng of kids that walked with us. It was great fun, navigating through steps and ladders and wooden beams, descending the cliffs down to the inlet. Finally at the bottom I remember looking up into the clear blue sky at the noise overhead. It didn't seem so much to be a plane but a toy plane, yellow with red trim along the wings and fuselage. It could have been a Mattel version of a plane from some Dr. Seuss book. It looked like a cartoon or a drawing and, in fact, it had a picture of the Cat in the Hat on it. Just his happy, smiling face under his hat.

"That must be the Dragonfly!" I said to the group and sure enough, written on the fuselage near the tail was:

Dragon-
fly

We merrily slopped through the shallow water of the lagoon and continued our parade line into and through someone's house. It was bright and clean with white walls and archways instead of doors. The girl and I made our way to some remoter part of the house where I kissed her. One button of her blouse was open just above her belly button and I slipped my hand through the gap to feel her breast. I bent my head down. Her breast had come free from the satin white cup of her bra, half-revealed to her nipple which I took in my mouth until an approaching noise made us separate. It was someone, a man, some mysterious stranger who invited us back to be with the rest of the group.

Being with the kids was fun and all, but she and I decided that we really needed to find our own beach where we could enjoy each other privately and uninterupted. We hung back from the group. I could picture the coast in my mind's eye, how it moved off to our left, here it was rocky, here it was sandy and at the extreme end of my knowledge of the coast was a secluded sandy beach and a waterfall. We set out for it, just the two of us, swimming through the amazingly clear, warm water. We weren't in a rush. I swam happily, lazily on my back, the coast to my right and a collection of little islands off to our left. These piqued my curiosity. How long would it take to swim there? Would they have sandy beaches? They were surely private. We'd surely be completely alone at any one of these little islands. In the end, we kept going to find the farther-away sandy beach until the man appeared again and stopped us. He gave me a pair of shorts to put on. They weren't mine, but they were nice enough. Different from the ones I must have taken off. I noted with no alarm or embarrassment that I was swimming naked in the water, natural enough, after all, with this beautiful girl in this tropical clime. So if he was going to ask me to put the shorts on I would. I think actually there were even two pairs I put on.

He was some sort of agent. And whatever "side" I'd been on before he showed up again, he brought me back to the other side, the right side, the good guy's side. I was happy to be back on the good guy's side. The girl and I were in a bright kitchen and after my reconditioning the agent served us oatmeal for breakfast. It was not the instant Quaker kind that I usually have, it was the from-scratch, oats-boiled-in-water kind and it tasted not quite as good, but good enough.

Shue

I have dreamed of being with famous people before and I have dreamed of acting with famous people before. In the case of Mick Jagger, we died
together:

Mick was in the passenger seat of a black van and I was in the seat behind him. I don't know who the driver was. We drove down the length of a dock toward the harbour and were unable to stop, going over the edge. As the van sank under the water, I calmed myself, figuring that the van would settle on the bottom and we would all get out through the windows. Alarm and panic overwhelmed me as I realized that the van was sinking much deeper than I ever would have expected, much deeper now than we could ever hope to get back to the surface and the shock of death as it approached made the dream go black.

I had a dream about being with Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes and we
were on the set of some Star Trek show where I was either an extra or a bit
player and at some point in the dream, reality shifted such that I was no longer
doing a movie, but was on the USS Enterprise with Picard and Riker,
participating in some thrilling space adventure.

Last night's dream had that same kind of reality shift.

The hiss and splash of tires moving along the rainy streets outside my window
woke me up this morning well before the alarm went off. Part of the drawback of
this blog is that as soon as I'm awake my mind kicks into high gear to grab the
memory of the dream before it fades. Sometimes I get it all (I think).
Sometimes, like last night, there are parts of it that are tantalizingly close
to the edge of memory but which refuse to be drawn back. I lie awake (mostly)
trying to coax those missing pieces back, feeling them slip through my fingers,
so close.

The part I remember is doing a scene with Elizabeth Shue.

The set-up was simple. I was the guy, hopelessly fallen for her and she was the beautiful girl, oblivious to the effect of her charm. She smiled and leaned her head close, looking down and away at something and I was captivated by her, playing the part subtly; I was so in love with her and everyone in the world knew it except her. I leaned ever so slightly toward her as she looked off. This was our scene. Then reality shifted and it became life, not acting. She was my friend and I ached for her. She smiled and cocked her head. I signalled an update of my intentions by taking her earlobe into my mouth.

Little Blue Pills

Jason Bourne and Jake Gyllenhaal were both in this dream and maybe they were all the “me” character of the dream. It was a bit confused. At one point, from “offstage” of what was happening in the dream I heard someone say, “I’m Jason Bourne. And I’m not sure if that’s even my real name.” I think maybe, as some of my other dreams have gone, I started watching the dream where Jake Gyllenhaal was somehow the protagonist and by the end of the dream it was me. Somewhere in the middle, the two of us, the watcher and the watched, became the same person.

It was a caper, an investigation. It had the amped up feel of a thriller that was (ultimately) to have absolutely no payoff. I started in one place (or Jake did), the dark entryway of a bar (maybe) and a dead body (maybe) and a plastic bag full of pills.

There were three different kinds of pills. There were white pills that looked like elongated grains of rice, there were white pills that looked like aspirins and there were blue pills.

It was the blue pills that were the concern.

These pills were capsules, like Advil liquid gels only a royal blue. I was in a bedroom with this bag of blue pills and behind me was my grandmother and I commenced to separating the blue pills from all the rest of the pills. This sounds like a simple task but it occupied almost the rest of the dream. I was picking out the blue ones two or three at a time before I found that shaking the container a certain way would release the blue ones to the top and I could separate more of them faster, occasionally pushing the rogue white ones to the side. As I laboured over the pills, it occurred to me that when I was done I would need a bottle to put them in. This was only a vague concern, in fact, concern is an overstatement; I was confident I could find a bottle or that my grandmother could get me one. Two blue pills came out in a blister pack and I used my teeth to open the blister pack and free the capsules.

I bit into one of the blue pills by accident and it squirted bitterly in my mouth.

I stopped what I was doing immediately. I didn’t know what these pills were only that they were Bad. I went into the bathroom, careful not to swallow, and I spat into the sink. I pushed my head under the tap and rinsed my mouth with water, spitting again into the basin. I was ultra-sensitive to any new feeling in my mouth or in my body, on guard for something to happen to me, anxious about how much of what was inside the pill might have been absorbed through the dermis of my mouth and tongue and wondering if such a small amount might be enough of a dose to seriously harm me.

I was alarmed but calm.

The real life clock hit 5:50 and my BlackBerry sounded the real alarm.

Picture from Illusive Mind

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It went like this. Completely separate from the rest of the dream(s):

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V.O. Announcer: The new iPod Touch. From Apple.

The Breakup

I walked with my girlfriend into an old house with high ceilings and old wood and windows, the old style, rectangular with a semi-circle on top. The front door opened on a entrance foyer and then to the right, a dining room. There was a lot of angry activity going on. My brother-in-law John arrived and seemed very surprised to see me there. His daughter was with him, but not his real-life daughter. This girl had dark scraggly hair and a pointed chin, looking almost crone-ish in a young girl way. I was speaking on the phone to John’s sister, my ex-wife. The girlfriend also seemed to be my ex-wife. My ex-wife on the phone and I were trying to negotiate a timing where she wanted me to be available to take care of something and I was describing to her how, due to someone else being sick and unable to mind Ian, I wasn’t able to do it (whatever it was). I felt very self-satisfied in the strength of my alibi. My girlfriend/ ex-wife in the house was arguing with her mother (my mother-in-law) over getting supper ready. I had a round casserole dish in my hand, about four inches in diameter. It had some treat in it with cheese and rice on top. I offered it to her to temporarily try to make some peace out of this situation. She whirled on me and said, “Shut up!” Her mother said something to her and was told the same thing, “Shut up.”

I had a clear moment of, “Fuck this.” I could walk out the front door with no explanation and just be gone. This would be the perfect break-up. Besides, I had another girlfriend, so really, who needed this one?

And so that’s exactly what I did. Without a word to anyone I walked out the front door into a beautiful sunny summer day, where, on the raised land at the top of the wall next to the sidewalk, Phil Mickelson was practicing driving golf balls.

Connections

I was walking through some sort of mega mall: multi-level, spacious, bright. This was at least my second time around the complex. I knew that there was a shorter route to take because I'd taken it, but I'd previously gone this way around too, the longer way, circling sort of to the outer edge of the complex and one floor down, heading to this very slick set of escalators to get me up to the floor I wanted to go.

The girl behind me put her hand on my ass. It felt very good.

I knew it was a girl, one of two girls actually that I'd seen before. I wasn't sure which one of the two girls she was. One had been a really nice looking girl, the other not-as-nice looking. Whoever she was was keeping her hand on my ass underneath the long, dark coat I was wearing. In the dream I felt absolutely no guilt over hoping that the one with her hand on my ass was the really good looking girl. But I didn't turn around to find out. If it wasn't the good looking girl with her hand on my ass, I could be okay with that, because, boy, it felt nice.

Finally at the top of the steps, I turned to see. It WAS the good-looking girl who had her hand on my ass. I walked to find more steps to climb.

This wasn't a mall. It was an airport and we discovered we were both there to catch the same plane. I savoured the implications of this.

At the gate were her parents and Ian. As Ian played on the top of an eight foot high dark cube and the parents were out of site closer to the gate, we began to kiss surreptitiously. And then a lot.

I still didn't know her name.

By either spoken or unspoken agreement, the two of us decided that we really, really needed to have sex. And there wasn't much time. The plane was due to arrive. There was the issue of the parents and of Ian, all of these things compounding the urgency each of us was feeling.

I had a key to my upstairs hotel room. A key on a large, beige and red-trimmed rectangular fob. Right there in my pocket.

I gathered up my shirt and brown tweed jacket from the floor (things must have been progressing nicely) and began to move off to the elevator, fishing for the room key in my pocket.

From here, I believe I had a brief encounter with her parents (shirtless?) before the dream skipped WAY forward and I finally discovered her name from an e-mail she'd sent. Her nickname was Day. Her first name was somethingday ... I can't remember the first part, except that it wasn't a day of the week.

Dangerous Rain

There was me, my mom and dad plus a few others and we were all together after the bomb went off.

I didn't recognize the other people (there were at least two of them) but I seemed to know them in the dream.

The bomb was nuclear.

In my dream I had the sense that I'd witnessed the explosion, or in fact had NOT witnessed it, having turned my head and closed my eyes, but this was more of a memory within the dream than an "actual experience".

We were in a house, a one story house with a large window looking out on a grey suburban/industrial landscape. My dad was in PJs and a housecoat. The rest of us seemed to be dressed. There was a feeling of anxiety that was almost panic. I had to get these people out of here before the radiation got us. One of the people I didn't know rushed outside and got into the white van that was collectively ours. She was resolute and leaving. It wasn't that she was leaving that alarmed me, it was that she was planning not to wait for anybody. I followed her out and pleaded with her as she got in the van. It was raining. The rain left a sheen on the side of the white van like the rainbow colours you'd see in an oil spill only fainter. It was ominous, a sign of poison in the rain and I was standing out in it. Despite my pleas, she drove off, leaving the rest of us behind. But there was another car, a smaller red Toyota. We would have to use that.

Back in the house, Dad didn't want to go anywhere.

I argued with him as I got myself ready to go, brushing my teeth and thinking maybe the water I was using was already poisoned. I ruminated over all the changes that were likely to come; things as simple as teeth brushing were already fundamentally altered. Things that had always been routine and safe were suddenly, shockingly dangerous.

I insisted that we had to go. Dad claimed that the glass window would keep the radiation out. I knew this was wrong but couldn't convince him. He said that the people in Gagetown had been declared safe. I said, "Dad! Gagetown is an 8-hour drive away!" (Before this I thought we were somewhere in Europe.)

He would not be moved.

So Mom and I, a small dog and one other person, we all made our way out through the rain to the red car. We got in and drove away leaving Dad behind.

Hockey Tech

It started with curling.

Somewhere in the hazy back corner of this particular dream room was a sequence about curling. I remember nothing about the game in the dream, only that as I jotted notes of remembered dream-things, I suddenly recalled something about curling and the curling had come before all the rest of it and it was as vague as that.

It was a sunny outdoors day and I was driving. It felt like I was repeating some steps from previously in the dream. I was going to get a ticket for an NHL game, just like before, at some place I’d already been, but the second time, this time, it didn’t seem quite the same as it had the first time. And it left me feeling vaguely puzzled, a common emotion in my dreams.

But first I had something to buy. It was very clear and specific in the dream but after waking up I couldn’t quite remember what it was. It fit in my hand, well, slightly bigger than my hand. A tablet? Some sort of electronics? I paid $80 for it. Four twenty dollar bills.

The moment I left the store I realized, hey wait a minute, I don’t really need this. I went back inside to return it. The guy behind the counter was stoic and cooperative and returned to my hand four twenty dollar bills. I can use this to buy the hockey ticket, I realized. There was a game and it was likely to be mostly sold out, but I only needed one ticket, just for me, so I figured the odds were good that there would be a single seat somewhere. I left the store and was driving in the car.

A sunny day. I remember this. It was very clear and sunny. It felt like I was in the United States somewhere, sunny and warm and unfamiliar. In front of me the road was blocked off. In my notes after I woke up I wrote "road construction" and maybe there was some of that but mostly I remember the road being blocked off because of people in the street. A Flea Market, or a street festival. I had to detour around them to the left. They looked like they were having fun. I ended up heading toward a highway or interstate that I didn’t want or need to get on so I turned right onto the grass, eventually up a gravel driveway and parking near a sports field where a group of young men were playing … was it soccer? I was careful as I parked not to run over any of them. Ian was in the passenger seat, making his only appearance in the dream. I told him this is where I went to college and even though the geography was all wrong and the views were completely unfamiliar (a sports field beneath large shady trees of brilliant green, single level office buildings to the left and behind it), I told him this was Royal Roads.

I got out of the car and went alone into the building on the left to get my ticket. This was the repeated part of the dream but the office was a little different and there was a tent card sitting on the counter advertising the tickets with inked letters. I thought the tent card looked like it had been moved from where it was supposed to be, that is, where I had seen it last time. At the far left of the counter was a basket with 8 ½ by 11 envelopes stacked on their sides. They had names of the upcoming games written on the front. I leafed through the envelopes looking for "Montreal versus New York Rangers", but I couldn’t find it. Was it sold out? Really? Not one ticket? I saw "Montreal versus Ottawa", but that wasn't the game I wanted.

I realized that the reason I couldn’t find it was because it was a Rangers/Toronto game ... being played in Montreal. Ah. That’s probably why. I asked the people in the office if I could use their computer to do a search and make sure I had the facts right.

This was the weirdest part of the dream, the part that came next.

I spent the rest of the dream trying to Google the information. I got to the Google homepage which had a small, strangely warped, squished and elongated “Google” graphic. The computer wasn't anything I would have recognized outside of the dream. I fumbled around trying to operate it. There was a white button that had to be pushed in; it reminded me of the Choke on an outboard engine, but it was more of a protruding, plastic rectangle, about the size of my thumb. I pushed it a few times (the button, not my thumb). There was also a board with a set of geometric shapes or crystals that glowed with their inner light when you touched them. By either trial and error or intuition, I touched a brown sideways diamond and the computer went to the page I wanted. The monitor was some kind of 4x4 inch screen in a mirror set on a cantilevered arm. It looked a bit like the top mechanism on an overhead projector. I struggled to peer into its mirrored screen while I tried to figure out the keyboard: a white rectangularish box, pearl white, curved on the top with raised keys, about 6x4 inches and looked like a fat Palm Pilot. Eventually (with relief) I noticed the Qwerty keyboard within a greater collection of keys whose symbols I could not understand. All of the keys were a luminescent white and slightly larger than the ones on my BlackBerry.

I had an inspiration to adjust my seat higher. It seemed like a smart idea but only resulted in me having to hunch down to peer into the monitor. From this new angle, the image reflected badly in the mirror. I struggled and struggled to type something into the search box. I was successful in entering “NHL” but the rest of what I tried only resulted in frustration and gibberish that eventually faded into wakefulness.