D R E A M S

I am a student. It's the first day of class. My professor, a woman of about 50, lectures at the front of the room. I can't quite remember what the topic of the class is, but I believe it's something to do with literature. She makes a comment that is somewhat profound about the text of a novel that we are supposed to read. I turn to someone sitting next to me and say, "That's what I wrote my paper on."
"You already wrote your paper?" The boy balks.
"Yeah, I met the professor over the summer and she told me about the book and it got me so excited I read it and wrote the paper a few weeks ago."

Later, I'm in another classroom. It is a geology class, but it's definitely a lecture hall, not a lab. I am late. I have registered for this class late. Indeed, I am not even thrilled with being in it, but I also feel confident that I know the material already. Strangely, when I enter this classroom, my dream-consciousness is divided into both the professor and my student self. My student self is pompous and a class clown. He keeps making off-topic remarks. One in particular that I remember is when we're talking about drawing building materials from the earth. He says, "What if you build a building, and it's completely wrong for holding all of the babies?" My professor dream self is slowly becoming aggravated, but he is a teacher at heart and he really wants to make my student self understand the importance of the material, so he is patient with me. Or, rather, I am patient with myself.

Suddenly, we (the students, the professor and my dream student self - I have found myself mostly occupying the student self at this point) find ourselves on a field trip to something that resembles a modern monastery on an island as part of a field trip. I believe the monastery has been decommissioned and now the building acts as maybe a research facility. The only reason I think it's a monastery is there is this central hall that seems very much like a chapel. One of the most chapel-like aspects is this great pipe organ in the center of the chapel.

My student has been his general smart-alec self for most of the time, but then he discovers the organ. The keyboard is divided into three sections. I begin by playing the middle section and the keys cause the pipes to emit sounds of thunder. Different degrees of thunder and rain. It sounds really beautiful and I immediately begin composing a song of thunder and rain. I start to incorporate the left and the right sections of the keyboard. I can't recollect at all what the left section emits, but the right sounds like an organ with an electronic buzz to it. I only play a few moments, but the woman who was lecturing comes over and tells me I shouldn't be playing it. She touches the keys and all of a sudden, it sounds like a regular pipe organ. She is befuddled, but I just walk away, already sort of losing interest. But during the time that I was making the music, it was rapturous.

I walk to another section of what seems like a former monastery, and suddenly it is very domestic. I am in a small kitchen area and there are some people preparing food. An Hispanic woman puts a bowl of green beans into a microwave. As she does so, I notice the power of all the room surge a bit. She hits the "start" button and nothing happens. She opens the door to the microwave and says in a heavy Spanish accent, "It no work."

It's at this time my student dream self senses something is wrong.

Suddenly, as the professor self, I am on a speedboat, speeding away from the island. There is a woman at my side, perhaps another professor. I sense some sort of chemistry between the two. I am saying something about "doing what had to be done."

Suddenly, a large red duffel bag starts to unzip and my student self climbs out of the bag. I am saying to three other students as they climb out, "I knew something was going on when the power surged!" Just as I'm finishing the sentence, the entire island we were just on explodes in a huge ball of orange flame. We all nearly fall over from the explosion, but are otherwise fine. We continue boating toward the mainland. When we arrive, there are police waiting and the arrest the professor character, whom I sort of realize to be some sort of agent. I believe, for some reason, that his motives were altruistic, but I don't know what they were.

For the rest of the dream, I only occupy the student self.

At this point there is a middle part whose details completely escape me. All I can remember is that I am in a somewhat lavish setting for a while. Maybe it's a party. Me and the three other students are picked up by a man driving a long snowmobile. We are all able to get on the back. It is snowing and the ground is covered in white. It is dark now.

(n.b.: It is my understanding that one cannot sense changes in light intensity once entering the dream state, but I clearly can remember two different intensities, therefore, it is my belief that I exited one dream and re-entered r.e.m. in order to experience this shifting of light intensity.)

The driver takes us to a home. In a strange snowmobiling trick, the driver sort of spins us in a donut and we slide up the side of a small hill. It is exciting and a bit scary.

As I get off the snowmobile, I say, "Thank you very much."

In complete mockery, the way an annoying younger brother might, he sneers, "You're welcome very much."

I can't fathom why he is annoyed with me, but I am anxious to get inside the house. I have this sense that the professor will be there waiting, but I don't know why.

Once inside, I am greeted by a woman. She is preparing some food. I am taking off my boots when I realize that I did not tip the snowmobile driver. One of the other students is coming in the door and I ask if he tipped him and he tells me yes and I am relieved and sort of realize that maybe that's why the driver was mocking me.

I walk toward the back of the house, down a hallway (again, rather inexplicably, I'm pretty sure it was brighter inside the house than outside, but not as sure as how sunny it was on the boat earlier) and I see claude has just showered. He has a towel around his waist. I get the brief sense that he might be the professor, but it remains unclear. He tells me he'll be ready shortly, but I never see him again for the rest of the dream.

I walk into another room and inside I hear this sort of loud experimental-sounding music playing. I know there are brass instruments and guitar and bass and drums. Tim Kinsella, former singer of Cap'n Jazz, and singer of The Owls and Joan of Arc, is in the room. I say, this sounds a lot like The Flying Luttenbachers with Tim Kinsella singing. He sort of lights up and says, well, it's really just some of our earliest recordings, back when we were good."

The other students get to the room and Tim turns off the music, I assume because he thinks no one else will like it. The other students consist of two girls and one more guy.

One of the guys has taken a large plastic bag and dumped a huge pile of cocaine onto the carpeted floor. He begins cutting it into lines on the carpeting. One of the girls - the "prettier" one, says, "I want a line." The guy says, if you want a line, they're on the wall." I look over and indeed there are all these little cut lines of cocaine on the wall. She goes over and covers one nostril and sniffs a line. I don't want any coke, so I pass. The guy starts to give me some shit about not wanting to do some coke and the pretty girl says, "It's up to Brian if he wants to do it."

I am grateful, but my graciousness turns to discomfort as the kid that had poured the cocaine has now gotten a bowl and a hypodermic needle out. The bowl is glass and long and at one end the glass is exceptionally thin. He alights his lighter beneath the thin glass and some crystals melt. Then he sucks it up with his syringe. After he shoots up, he passes the needle over to the pretty girl. She is almost giddy to get her hands on it. She passes it to me when Tim Kinsella's mom is making some noise outside the room. I quickly hide the bowl under a couch and sit in front of it so that as Mrs. Kinsella enters the room, she can't see it.

She says something to Tim intimating that he's gay. He gets mad and frustrated and goes to hit the desk he's standing near, but doesn't even make a fist as he slams his hand down, so he doesn't make a very good argument defending his sexuality (even though I know and you know that masculinity and homosexuality aren't directly linked - still...). He starts advancing toward her saying how can he prove he's not gay, and she is backing up out of the room. Most of us follow. We are in the kitchen and he says something along the lines of, "maybe this will prove it," and he kisses his mom passionately, which naturally freaks her out. The the "pretty" girl is kind of outraged and she says, "what does it matter if he's gay anyway? Look I can kiss you and not be gay," and then she kisses Tim Kinsella's mom, too.

(I should note, not that it makes much difference, that by this point in the dream, the Tim Kinsella character has lost most of the physical attributes that make him Tim Kinsella, but I keep calling him that out of convenience. The person he has become is taller, has darker hair, is of a heavier build and has less delicate features as the real Tim Kinsella.)

Back in the room, the guy who had cut the coke looks over to the "nerdy" girl. He decides with all the kissing, he's not going to miss out. They kiss too.

Suddenly, we are all lying on the floor in Tim's room. There's sort of camera shot's of all our eyes. We are all wide awake (the rest of them, of course, because they've just done a bunch of coke) and our eyes are darting this way and that. This is the last image I have before waking up.

Brian posted at 8:21 AM.