My sleeping mind works (overtime) at home

I had two ridiculous dreams last night.

Part I

It was summer, a bright and sunny day, ostensibly at school. There weren’t many people around, but I found myself at a house in the middle of a field of grass. My professor was there, and she had us take a quiz in an issue of the Argus that had also been a coloring book. Matt Ragins’ phone kept going off, and he kept resting it on my arm, and it would frustrate me and I would throw it across the table. Someone kicked my shin under the table.

The professor looked on disappointedly as I struggled to write answers and fill in circles and blanks. My fingers weren’t holding the pen correctly, and I couldn’t keep my hands on the pamphlet in which I was writing. I ripped the pages out and flipped through the coloring book portion.

Then I found myself at the bottom of a staircase in the house. I had gloves on, which I took off to go searching through my pockets. The doors in the hallway off of the staircase were locked, and I searched my pockets for the keys, but they weren’t on the key ring. It was here that I started to sense that my inability to fill in the answers or understand the quiz or see the keys on the key ring were due to some sort of delirium. I fought the darkening reality that I may not be sane, and kept looking for the keys in my pocket, but couldn’t find them.

I was increasingly unable to talk, or think to myself. My thoughts were coming out in mutters, and I couldn’t say certain words, they’d come out as silent air. I ran across a field of green grass and trees and arrived at the back door to a white house, the white house where I lived with Janet and Jeffrey and Claire. I went through my key ring again, but couldn’t find the key to the house, so I waited outside. Then I went through the key ring again, and the keys were on it. I let myself in and walked through my huge room and still couldn’t talk.

Then we were all in a porch of some kind, and Claire and Jeffrey were looking at me as if I were retarded. I motioned for water, and then ran to the faucet with a cup and crazily drank eight glasses of water as fast as I could. I opened a fridge and saw a small bottle of Gatorade, somehow asked whose it was, and with Claire’s permission, I drank her Gatorade. It went down my throat so fast that I became disoriented, but I took two more gulps like that.

My delirious state slowly went away, and that’s when I remember waking up. My throat and mouth were entirely dry (it happens sometimes when I eat lots and lots of food right before bed and I must become dehydrated through digestion or something), so I ran to the bathroom, turned the faucet on, and just drank… so much water. Then I went back to sleep.

Part II

I’m pretty sure this second dream was a continuation of the first.

After rearranging some furniture in my huge room (I had two beds!), I went into a living room-type area of the house and met the rest of them. Somehow it opened up into what I’d best describe as an airport terminal. Sam Martin came running down a hallway towards me. I got up to go to a bathroom across the room; I went in and locked the door, and a man in a wheelchair kept trying to get in—I could see him through the cracks around the door; he was knocking and I kept saying, “Just a second!”

I looked around and apparently could no longer control my balance; I leaned against a post as I pissed into a sink. Several problems: there was popcorn (whitish and orange-ish) and (I think) sausage links and feces in the sink, but mainly on the right side of the sink. There was feces on the floor, around the toilet, and smeared on the post against which I was leaning. I got it on my left hand somehow and washed it furiously, but remember being terribly concerned that it was still there.

There had been no one else in the bathroom; there were stalls off in the other direction, but they were broken-down and dark. Black doors. I didn’t use them. I went outside and some other friends from Wes, whose faces I can’t now remember, had congregated in this living room area, which was now more like South Station. It had clear plastic-type squares for the ceiling and vendors had stands on the floor. We were near an airport, because planes flew ridiculously close overhead, and I could see the tails of parked airplanes just outside the building on what must’ve been a tarmac or runway.

One plane, a tiny American Airlines thing, flew in slow-motion over us. It flew way too close; the belly of the plane bumped into the ceiling, and the plastic windows contorted to fit its shape. It continued getting lower, to land. Then I saw it on the other side of the building, through the plastic ceiling, and it was doing some weird flip thing before it landed. But something went wrong, it hit another plane’s tail or something, and the bottom half of the plane got sheared off. No one was especially concerned.

Then the plane somehow crashed into the far corner of the building I was in (the corner opposite near where its bottom had been taken off) and some people ran away, but again no one was especially concerned. I looked around and wondered why no one was doing anything about the crashed plane, and then thought that it was about to explode. So I ran across the terminal-thing and through a glass door into a gym space, resembling Freeman Athletic Center.

There were plenty of people using various gym machines, and I went through another door or two before I found another glass door that was an exit. There was a security card reader on the door, but it didn’t work. I went through, and found myself on the upper floors of some kind of shopping mall. There was a display, an intended-for-kids kind of mini-version of a playground, that I used to get to the bottom floors. It was a maze of bridges and ramps and one part of it was labeled something about Rosie O’Donnell and instead of following its miniature theme and walking down the bridges and ramps, I swung from them until I got to the bottom. Down there, I ran out another glass door and into the bright sunshine again.

I was in a place that I recognized from a previous dream, a place that doesn’t in actuality resemble any of the towns next to Middletown, but that my mind told me was a town next to Middletown. I came out into a field, through which I ran across, came into a parking lot with several lanes of entrances and exits, and ran across that. Then I hitchhiked along a busy street. Somehow I had a copy of the New York Times folded in one hand, and a crumpled paper towel (I think) in the other. As cars and trucks zipped by me on my left, I looked in the many recycling bins along the road that people had put out for trash collection day, but I found bottles and glass in most of them, and didn’t want to put my paper products in them.

Finally I found an empty one and offloaded the paper; I don’t remember now what happened to the paper towel. I walked up a rock formation with a dirt path on top of it, on the side of the road, and came to a farm and the sidewalk was now a bunch of wooden planks that led right into the back of a box truck. They were loading farm products, or maybe flowers, into the back. The driver said something to me; I think it was friendly, but I didn’t go in the truck.

Somehow the truck left the scene, and I noticed another thing I’d seen in a previous dream: a weird combination of gas station, ice cream shop, and diner, off the road. I got angry at myself because usually I’d have parked my car there, but I hadn’t today, I think I left it at the train station, and so I had to keep walking.

And that’s about where my memory fails me. I don’t remember what happened after that, or when I woke up. Bizarre.

EDIT (2:18 PM): I also remember a part of the dream where I was in an elementary school classroom with (I think) my fourth-grade teacher, but I was my current age. There were beds with lots of blankets on them, and yellow window shades and it was still bright and sunny outside. We were watching something on a TV; a movie, I think it was, and I kept opening the shades for light until I realized that she had been closing them because it caused a lot of glare on the TV screen.

I don’t remember where that episode fit in, or if it was a separate dream altogether.