I realized fully just now that the logic of a dream is impossible for me to recapture once normal thinking is restored, or perhaps there is no logic, and I just take things at face value. I wonder whether that's an obvious observation, or is true for most people. Dreaming is one of the common human experiences I know least about, as I haven't been able to remember a large number of them since I was little. I want to try to recall more of the nightmare I had this afternoon by describing it here, even if it doesn't make much sense.
I was young. I'm not sure how old I was but I was more vulnerable than I can remember being. I was on some kind of grade school field trip. I'm not sure where it was to, but it was one of those trips that were always filled with mixed emotions for me, as most of those trips required students to bring a lunch, which was more of a strain on my mother than the usual school lunch price of somewhere between free and $0.20, and the teachers encouraged us to bring a small amount of money for a souvenir or something of that nature, which I could rarely bring, or bring enough of. (Have you ever walked into a museum gift shop with three dollars? How useful is a keychain to an eight-year-old?)
Anyway, somehow, I got separated from the group, and they all left without me. Sometime along the tour of, it think now, it was a supermarket, I met a really nice car (a white Volkswagen Beetle, I think) who offered to take me back to the school. I accepted, but the thing broke down right there in the parking lot. Just then, someone who'd been sent by my school arrived. He was a cross between my PA freshman year and Groundskeeper Willie from The Simpsons. He was really kind, and since, for some reason, he happened to be driving a tow truck, he took me and my motorized friend back to the school.
When we approached campus (because where we were going was somehow both Stephen Decatur Classical Elementary and Cornell College), the weather worsened. We were in the middle of a freak blizzard, but I was somehow aware of this knowledge and not worried, half-asleep and basking in the glow of being in extremely friendly company. We drove up a hill of the campus I know so well, but because of the weather, he was forced to turn off into a steep side parking lot.
By the time we got up there, I'd dozed off, and woke to find myself in the cab of the truck in the lot. Thinking that I'd been again abandoned, and annoyed that I'd have to walk a long distance back to the main building of campus, I went to the back of the truck to unhitch the Beetle. Apparently, I didn't know what I was doing, because the white Beetle rolled into a black one that was parked right behind us, destroying them both. Even worse, the tow cable came up and snagged the nice truck driver I hadn't noticed behind me by the neck, yanking him up to that crane-y part, whatever it's called, and snapping his neck, instantly killing him. He looked surprised, and happy to see I was awake.
I grew up instantly into who I am today, excepting something of the increased sensitivity which I'd had until that point in the dream. About this point, I think I realized I was dreaming, but felt incapable of escaping it. So, I ran to the train station which was conveniently located where the train bridge is in real life, and hopped a train to some place that reminds me of my favorite malls in Chicago. On the train ride, all I thought about was whether or not I'd get to see "her" again.
I don't remember the inside of the mall, but as I left, I was approached by a small group of people dressed in killer sunglasses and long black cloaks. They told me that I wasn't actually in any trouble and offered me a ride back to school. The mocking sneer on the face of the woman who headed the group convinced me that while I wouldn't come to any harm in their care, that I would not enjoy the ride back. After leaving them, I was hailed by another friend of mine (this one, I think, had the look of Chris from Cornell, but was a compilation, as everyone else in this dream was) and offered a ride to campus, but I refused, wanting to reflect on my guilt and remorse as I walked back; and not feeling that I deserved a ride.
I started the long journey, but was soon obstructed by a road block similar to one you'd experience in a video game if you were not supposed to go to that area yet.
On the side of the road there was a pickup truck owned by the woman who was engaged to the man who owned the tow truck. I was wary of her, afraid that she'd hate me for being responsible for the death of her fiancé. However, though she was saddened, we sat in her truck and reminisced about the tow truck driver. Afterwards, she encouraged me to call "her" and I tearfully poured out not only the events of the dream, but everything in me. I realized that I'd let a mistake control me for so long from when I was too naive to know any better. I woke up, sweating, as much from the sun shining in my eyes as anything else.
A professor that I respect once told me and a few others a story about this other professor who was relentlessly unforgiving about students' mistakes. He had once started the building plans for an aqueduct with the equation 6+4=24; a simple, but understandable, mistake. Several other people checked his work, and no one caught it. They built the aqueduct with this mistake underscoring all of their work, and when they turned the valve to start the flow of water, only a trickle came forth, and his career as an engineer was over. I understand that man's obsession with error-free work, but I have little desire to be like him. I don't want to let past mistakes dictate my future, and I have a tendency to be somewhat critical of others' mistakes and entirely unforgiving of my own, which I'm trying to outgrow. I'm glad that I'm old enough to have caught at least a few of the trends that dominate my behavior thus far, and young enough to use the positive ones to my advantage and try to reverse the negative.
Someone told me not too long ago that after I finish up at Cornell that I can always go wherever I want, and for far from the first time, I thought of that and it scared me. I wish I knew where I wanted to go. I'm somewhat glad I'm here for now, living with Dear Friend Hope and pseudo-living with the ever trusty Rusby, but this arrangement isn't meant to last. There are a number of groups of people I want to be near spread out pretty far from each other, and a few people that I want to be near badly who could be anywhere by then. It's too bad that I don't have money and look down on kidnapping, or many of my loved ones would wake up one day from a chloroform-induced nap in a ranch built specifically for them. If it were any way to survive, I'd live out of a van and travel around helping people, like an ascot-less one-man Scooby gang.
I've been told that my sense of humor can be inappropriate based on considerations for others. However, I'm never sure what that means. After all, the fundamental nature of humor is itself, inappropriateness, or that which isn't expectable. For example, I find slapstick funny not because someone is injured, but because of the frustration of ordinary aims or movement, or when more than one person is involved, the "wrongness" of their interaction. (To be entirely fair, I never found that much humor in slapstick, and this is the source of what little enjoyment I have been able to glean from it.) Most other jokes are the same. A joke can be about any subject and be funny, so long as it's recognized that the source of humor isn't the suffering or inferiority of others, but the clash of the everyday and the expected, or even the surprise and shock of not paying a subject the amount of respect that it normally warrants. Maybe I'm just trying to excuse myself, but I have a feeling I'm onto something.
