Dream Journal #20

Also, a brief notice that there won't be any posts next week.

12 June—13 June

I was at school, wearing nice clothes, as I left the gym area along with several classmates. While we were taking a shortcut through a grassy, hilly area, an alarm started to blare. I wasn't quite sure what the plain, on-off rhythm was meant to warn us of, so I just followed the others as they fled. One of them told me the sound was a fire alarm, and, when I looked back, I could finally see smoke nearby. Braden* came after it with an extinguisher. The smoke went down briefly before the fire flared up again, and it took a few cycles of this before the fire was finally put out. My classmates and I congratulated him and returned to our business.

I walked on and entered my dorm room, a den-like area with a short step down stretching across the middle. My roommate was a plump Asian girl who stayed at the lower side of the steps. I sat at the middle, my feet on her side, as I took off my black church shoes. Then I removed the hose-like socks just beneath them; then the thin, white socks beneath that. I briefly thought it might b e rude to put my shoes on her side of the room, but I went off looking for lunch, anyway.

The normal place was not offering lunch at the time, so, rather upset, I started toward the alternate eating place. One the way there, I had to get through some sort of lounge room where several adults sat on a couch watching television. A fluffy, bright blue rug stretched over the only area I could walk across, but a dull, green liquid was pooled all across it. I tried to step onto it regardless—and managed to put my toes somewhere they didn't get wet—but Becky** was on her knees trying to clean the thing, and I gave up.

Frustrated, I went back to my room and decided I would just go to the sandwich store at the edge of campus because it would be easier. I sat on the little step in the room and put on my shoes. My roommate was on the couch on her side watching a cartoon I didn't recognise. She had the English subtitles on since it was in Chinese, and I wondered if she was trying to learn Chinese.

I left my room into the larger building surrounding it and tried to figure out how to get out. There was a door to the outside in a sunlit storeroom, but it was blocked by a man calling his mother on the telephone there. My roommate told me this happened a lot. I didn't acknowledge her as I kept trying to find an exit, and it took me a minute to realise that that might have been rude.

Finally I came up to a door-like area with four stacked, horizontal metal sheets; each was a series of joints so that it could curve whatever way it was pushed. I squeezed through one of the panels into a garage area and found a second set of the things inside. I pushed one partway open to check, and it did, in fact, lead outside. I shut the flap and prepared to go through before I paused and took another look out. As I had suspected, the truck outside, its headlights on, was drawing closer. I let the flap go and hurried back through the first set of flaps to hide.

Then I was in some kind of classroom. The subject we were learning there was never made clear, but Hemingway and certain other assignments mentioned made me think it was a creative writing class. We were getting our final assignment before the class was to be dismissed when the teacher called two of my friends and me the top three in the class.

*A sort of exaggerated figure with whom I took some Japanese classes.

**A family/church friend and my oldest friend's mother.