Friday, May 07, 2004

Dreamscapes

Okay, my life has officially hit the realm of the impossibly pathetic. Although I'm reassured that this happens to others frequently, I'm still bemused at my immense reaction to this.

The other day I was having a strange dream. And I do mean strange. Part of it involved my superpowers. Yes, superpowers. I was able to set things on fire with the sheer power of my mind. Wait, it might have been the power to make things explode. Well, something like that. At one point in the dream, like Drew Barrymore in Firestarter, I had to turn my attention to a large tank of fish to make sure I didn't do anything disastrous. (Unlike Drew's, however, my re-channelling of energy caused poor little fish to jump out of their tank, which has suddenly become a teakettle thanks to me.)

Then I came to realize that the strange superpower I had was actually in context: I was somewhere pretty much akin to the Xavier Institute, where everyone basically had some kind of power. I know this because everyone else around me was a student (because, you know, I'm so young as to still be in school), and because no one really batted much of an eye when my superpowers threatened to go awry.

At some point in this dream, I was actually unable to restrain my powers, and entire plates of sheet glass which served as windows to the academy shattered. I laughed and basically just said, "Uh, oops. At least that shit is replaceable." (I know what you are thinking. You are thinking something else happened at the same time that this big explosion occurred in my dream. You are wrong.)

But the point of my patheticness (is that even a word? Well it is now) comes from this: At some point in my dream, a really cute boy starts hitting on me! I mean, he was really cute. Despite the fact that I dream-lived right across the street from the school (now complete with tremendous amounts of shattered glass), he was insisting that I hop into his car and spend the night at his apartment. And the thing is, I was going to go. I was actually kind of excited (again, no pun intended), in a freakishly schoolgirl kinda way, that some really cute boy was so into me.

At that point, my alarm clock started going off. Somehow, Bush's economic recovery theories made their way into my conversations with this boy. Which, I think you'll agree, is just plain wrong, on many levels.

My patheticness derives from the fact that I spent the better part of the waking morning quite sad that, in fact, I was awakened from my delightful slumber before ever getting to see my (literally) dream boy naked. I guess you can say I was a victim of premature awakening.

***

Earlier in the week, I had my recurring dream again. The one about the algebra test. As usual, no one in the class was remotely sympathetic to me about my dilemma. It's amazing how stressful those dreams are. It's amazing how quickly I revert to the stress of academic life. The strangest thing is, I'm pretty sure I'm capable of controlling my dreams, at least to some degree. I remember once I dreamed I was making out with someone who looked remarkably like an ex of mine. In my dream, I promptly changed his name and even the color of his hair because, Gawd, who wanted to be making out with him? And yet, I remain unable to change anything in my algebra anxiety dreams, and I continue to panic over a non-existent set of LaPlacian transforms.