5/6/98

I had a high fever, and during this night I had the following dreams. I am quite sure that all of them were separate dreams, but due to the fact that they were in my recent memory, aspects of some surfaced in later ones.

I was at this mental health therapy centre that was built like a Greek temple with a bunch of columns and ionic capitals and the whole lot. The way their system was set up was that you would go into this first room where three doctor-types would show you flash cards of different scenes that they called "elements." When I went in, one card was of a hill, one was of a building, and one was looking out over the ocean. What the patient was supposed to do was to figure out which two of these three cards applied to their problem and how, and convince the third doctor-person that their card was irrelevant. If the patient chose correctly, with a good enough reason, they would move onto the next round in an idential room with two other patients. In this round, the patients would each have their own card and they would do the same activity only this time they would be an active part of the therapy. Each patient would decide if it was the other two patients who held applicable cards or if it was himself/herself and one of the other two patients. But always it would be two that applied and one that wouldn't.

There was a series of extremely lifelike robots called Decompo-5 made in 1988. Every five years, one of this series would self-destruct. I was standing by a beach as one walked out into the ocean and began swimming out until its circuits fried.

In my dream, I dreamt I was watching an advert for a new Wes Craven movie. It was about this girl who, as a child, was tied up one night as her mother was murdered right before her eyes. As a result, she suffered from insomnia, always fearing that the killer(s) would return to get her while she slept. She also hated wearing clothes, as the memory of being tied up made her freak out when anything was too tight on her skin. She also always had to have one of her friends stay the night with her so that she would be slightly comforted. Because of her disliking of clothes and her constant craving for company, she became branded by the people of her town as a slut, but only because they didn't really understand why she was like that. The movie was narrated by her, and it started out with her talking about the sounds and voices that you think you hear when you're awake in the night, but you tell yourself they're all in your head so as not to scare yourself. Well she went on to say that they are real, and that they're this group of people who call themselves the Federal Bureau of Insomniacs and they take it upon themselves to find, monitor, and if the need be, kill insomniacs around the country. The scene it showed in the advert was when this girl and a friend of hers were awake one night and a spotlight shone on them but they couldn't see who was there. The light went out, and when it came back on, the friend was gone, and all you see in the dark are these gleaming eyes and then outside there's a van with FBI painted on the side.

I woke up from this dream, in another dream, thinking that I couldn't have dreamt that and that I must have actually seen it somewhere else because it was just too clever to dream. You see, it was a very scary movie, and I thought it was so clever to make a movie like that, where after watching it, you couldn't go to sleep because of how scared you were, but then you'd be scared more because you couldn't go to sleep, and not being able to go to sleep was what made the movie so scary in the first place.

Cross country practice was being held at my house but Mike Fass and I didn't want to do the workout, so we ran across the road and hid in the ditch across from the house. Emily Reich saw us, and we knew from her loud tattle-tale screaming, so we ran west down the ditch to where a lane crossed the ditch from the road to a field, hoping to hide on the other side of it. It did no good, as Mr Brady (our coach) spotted us. He said that today's workout was going to be a swimming workout, so I didn't mind so much. The ditch filled with water and we swam east where another large water-filled ditch led southwards and eventually made a big loop. We all had floatation devices which we were to keep under our chest to take stress off of our backs or something like that.

I was doing quite well and passed the rest of the team very early on. After a while, this ditch-course became a regular swimming pool, and I began to encounter small children in the water. For the most part, I would ignore them and swim right over them. Occasionally, though, I would make an attempt to go around them. But most of them were Auburn children, and most Auburn children are repulsive little delinquents, so I couldn't be bothered not to trample them. I remember hitting one with my feet and he did a full flip in the water and apparently didn't realise it because he began swimming the other way. After a while, Mike caught up to me and we talked about how easy the workout was. Then I realised that part of the reason that it was so easy for me was because I was floating about 10 feet above the water. Apparently my floatation device got a little too light, so I let some air out of it and sank back down to water level.

The radio was playing at the swimming pool just like in the good ol' days. The song "Laid" by James was on, and I remember they played an edited version that said "But she's underneath when she's on top" and I commented to Mike on how dumb that sounded. It was then that I realised Rusty Crotty, an Auburn child, was hanging onto my feet so I asked Mike, who was slightly behind me, to kindly thwack him off.

I was at the Auburn City Rec baseball fields watching a non-existant Disney movie that was projected onto a hillside. I really hated it. I noticed that halfway up on the picture, over on the right side, you could faintly see the amount of time left in the movie clicking down, and there was still one hour and 12 minutes left. I told my mom, who was watching the Disney movie as well, about that movie advert and she asked me if Paul Weller played the bad guy and I couldn't remember.

The Auburn volleyball and soccer teams were having a big race around the big area where the baseball fields and football practice fields are and they were just about to finish just above the top of the "screen." Monica, my sister, was in 8th place, but right before the finish line she turned to the right and started doing another lap. Apparently she lost count and thought there was another lap left, and because of that, she ended up getting like 30th place or something. Erica, my other sister, who shouldn't have been old enough to even be in the race, was wandering around a residential area nearby, as she apparently got lost halfway through the race. My mom and I went and got them and we went to watch a Nebraska football game at the Auburn Middle School field.

Nebraska was playing Florida, and Nebraska kept scoring and scoring but the score stayed at NE 7, FL 3 until Florida scored a touchdown and extra point and it was NE 7, FL 10. Then the game ended. On the TV post-game show, the sports people made a big deal about Tom Osborne losing his final game. They interviewed his son, who was playing for Florida, and he said "I had Nebraska's score fixed at 7 and the game arranged so that it would not end until we won. I did that cos I know my dad would have rather had me beat him in his last game. He appreciates the whole son-beating-father thing. It all goes back to his deep Christianity."

Later on the news they had a feature story on Chad Kelsay, the famous football player from Auburn Nebraska. In this story, they told how he was a starting defensive end for Peru State College (in real life he actually plays for UNL), maintained a 4.0 GPA, and worked afternoon shifts on the Peru Railway Express, the official trains of rural Nebraska. Even later, they showed a clip from the Wes Craven movie. The main girl was sitting on her floor holding the white papery stick that suckers come on and Paul Weller was sitting there too, and she looked at it and then at him and made some sort of connection and then he tried to kill her.

I checked my email after the news. I got a letter from Andrew Ensz, guitarist of Residential Goosing fame, that was written all press-release style, saying how in Andrew Ensz's garage-turned-studio, Ensz, M.R. Cain, and Charles Rutherford managed a task that had never before been accomplished--recording 70 songs in one day. It would now be up to each individual musician to "funktify" (that's what the letter said) the 70 songs in their own particular style. When I read the letter, I got all depressed because I knew Andrew wouldn't want to play with the re-formed Residential Goosing again if he had this awesome other band to play with.

I was on a plane with my mom and we kept flying in circles around the Auburn high school. We'd fly straight at the sunrise, and the freaky chemical-treated airplane windows would cause the sunrise to look all computerised and psychidelic at the same time. Whenever we'd fly that direction I would say "Monk monk monk!" and then my mom would tell me to stop. But then the next time around I would do it again. Finally, we got right above the teacher parking lot, but the door on the airplane was positioned so that if the pilot would have landed there, we would have gotten out on the grass instead of on the pavement. Then he started to fly straight up and then pulled back so far that we flipped over and landed on our top. Everyone applauded at his innovative landing technique. As people started to get out, this middle-aged woman came up to me and said "You know when you kept shouting 'Monk monk monk'? My husband thought that was really weird." I told her that I hope I didn't upset him.

I got off the plane and went inside where Monica was sitting in the upper commons. I gave her two yellow flowers, which I was supposed to bring her. She told me to wait there with the flowers while she went and found her friends. Apparently she was giving these flowers to her two best friends as some sort of present. While she was gone, Rusty Crotty came and sat down beside me and I told him about the dream I'd had where he was holding onto my feet as I swam (see above). He told me that he had the exact same dream, only from his perspective and not mine. He didn't know the James song, though, but I attributed that to his age. We thought that was so weird that we both had the same dream but then we realised that it wasn't a dream and that we had both just been at the swimming pool on Saturday.

Monica came back with her friends so I gave her the flowers, which were lying on a piece of that brown paper towel that they always have in schools that chafes your hands when you use it. It's even worse when they're out of toilet paper and you have to use it as a substitute.

I walked down the hall towards the math department, not because I wanted to go to a math class, but because my friends and ex-classmates Josh and Ryan were there. I talked to them for a while and they were talking about how they had tons of coursework for their biology class that was due in a little while. I told them that I didn't know if I had anything due, but probably not because I graduated from high school 2 years ago.

Then I saw Brandon, another classmate of mine, walking through the upper commons. I asked him how the first weekend at the new apartment was, and he said that it was terrible. Apparently he and Mike and Brian got in tons of fights, including physical exchanges. We went down the stairs to the lower commons, but the gate was shut. I cried out for Mr Poppe (government/psychology/current issues/sociology teacher and lunchroom supervisor) to come open the gate. He did, but we had to look away because he didn't want us to see his face. I did see his arm, though.

The gate was open and I walked out into the hall where the toilets and water fountains and trophy cases are, and there Southeast Consolidated and some other team were playing the last game in the state championship tournament. It was the last play of the game and Southeast was behind by 3. The snap went all crazy and missed the quarterback completely and somehow bounced off the tight-end's back. It ricocheted into the hands of the quarterback, though, and somebody named Yates, number 190, was wide open in the endzone. The quarterback threw it straight at him, but he started running before he had a good grip on the ball and dropped it. The game was over and Southeast lost. Both teams went into the mens restroom. All except Yates, who went over to the trophy case by the big American flag. He was this short little kid with the stature of a 10 year old. He started throwing his helmet and his shoulder pads and anything else he could get his hands on. I walked over to him and picked him up and told him to stop it, because this wasn't his school and the way he was acting it was likely he would break something. He told me that he could do whatever he wanted. Nikki Edwards, another classmate of mine, walked into the building. I asked her if she was good with children. She said yes, so I told her to babysit Yates until his team came out of the bathroom.

Return to The Dreams Page.