Dreams I Have

Context: Over the Summer I stayed in Colorado working at the YMCA of the Rockies. Last night I wandered around downtown Urbana while I talked on the phone to Riley. After our conversation I worked on a paper about Freudian psychology.

I was living in an apartment on an upper floor of a skyscraper in downtown Urbana. At some point I know that I ran into someone who was Asian and started talking to him about the roads in Colorado and how they wrap around the train tracks like braids of hair. I had to show him a picture off Google images to prove it to him.

But then all of a sudden I was back in Colorado.

I remembered that I had accidentally left my yellow Mustang and a red sports car under the highway and needed to bring them back to Urbana. I drove my black car down the roads until I reached them. But then I had to figure out how to transport three cars by myself. The only way I could think to do that was by putting them all in neutral and then sticking my arm through the windows so I could drag them down the street. Despite the fact that my arm would have to be dozens of feet long for that to work, it did anyway.

As I traveled through the vast desert of Colorado I ran into a house on the side of the road. There was a funeral inside for someone in my family, so I packed my cars into some suitcases and walked inside with them.

In retrospect, I have no idea who any of the people at this funeral were, but at the time I knew they were all supposed to be members of my family. My middle-aged wife found me and started to talk about my inheritance. I don’t know exactly what was going on, but I’m pretty sure the whole family wanted my inheritance and was plotting to kill me for it. It was sinister.

Part of my inheritance was an old family heirloom: a violin in a rectangular case. There was a secret compartment in the case with a glass trophy in it.

Just then, the guy who was apparently my dad walked over and wanted to know what we were doing. I closed the compartment so he wouldn’t know that I saw the trophy. He was acting really suspicious and I think he wanted to kill me.

He started talking to me, but I wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying because I realized that the violin bow was made of plastic and ribbons, and the strings on the violin were just plastic too. That’s when I realized that this violin wasn’t worth anything, it was the trophy that was special.

I knew that I had to get out immediately or someone was going to kill me for this violin case. I went outside and unpacked my Mustang (I wanted to drive the sports car but the Mustang had a bigger trunk). I loaded up the suitcases that my other two cars were in and my wife got into the driver’s seat, ready to leave.

I walked back into the house, grabbed the violin case, and ran out to the car. The guy who was my dad chased me and definitely wanted to kill me. I locked the door just in time and we drove away.

We returned to Urbana, knowing that my family would hunt me down for that violin case. I became really paranoid and suspected that everyone was trying to kill me. And it didn’t help that the whole town was full of red cartoon people. They always look like they’re up to no good.

I returned to my apartment in the skyscraper and met up with some people whose identities I don’t even remember. We all tried to skip town and had to travel on rooftops and through alleyways. I was too scared to jump off one ledge so everyone stood behind me waiting.

Then I realized that I didn’t want to be late for class because I had a paper to turn in. I freaked out that I missed class.

Then I woke up.

Context: A few weeks ago I made the Edith Piaf song Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien my alarm on my cell phone. This is the song used in the movie Inception to warn them when they will be woken up. I hoped that by making this song my alarm something interesting would happen. It finally did.

I can’t remember a majority of my dream, but I do distinctly remember winding up in the first-floor computer lab in my high school. I sat in the back because I already knew everything we had to learn. Since the teacher couldn’t see me in the back I decided to play video games on my laptop. Suddenly, the music began.

“Did I accidentally set my alarm to go off in the middle of class?” I thought. “That’s embarrassing.”

I searched through my pockets for my phone so I could turn it off before I got in trouble.

That’s when it hit me.

“Wait a minute. What if this is just a drea-“

Then I woke up.

Context: Earlier in the day Carissa had come over for connect group planning. It’s the first time all year that I had invited anyone into my apartment. After she left I decided to take a midday nap while listening to the new Arcade Fire Album.

I woke up and it was already dark out. So I kind of moseyed over to the living room, where I saw my roommates J and Dan talking to Carissa, who I guess had never actually left. In fact, she had invited Melissa and Tim over too.

            “Oh,” I said. “Hey.”

I invited everyone back to my room. Apparently Tim also invited a guy over who I had never seen before. They talked in my doorway while Tim kept stepping on a laptop that I recognized was for impoverished children in Africa.

            “Hey, could you watch it with that laptop?” I asked. “You’re kind of stepping on it and I don’t want it to break.”

            Tim looked annoyed with me.

            “Yeah, well, I brought my laptop, so if I break this one I’ll just replace it.”

            Tim was always thinking one step ahead. Regardless, I was still moving my own laptop off the floor. But for some reason all the shelves were covered in envelopes, which I couldn’t remember my mother ever giving me. I found a spot for my laptop.

            “Can we finally look at AOL now?” Melissa asked me. She didn’t explain beyond that but I remembered that AOL had become the new Craigslist, so I said sure. She sat on my bunk bed, which I completely forgot that I owned.

            Just then my teenage brother Evan walked by. I forgot that he lived there too.

            “Hey, don’t we only have three bedrooms?” I asked. “Where do you sleep?”

            “I don’t remember.”

            “Do you sleep on the couch after people leave?”

            “Oh yeah, I do.”

            “Do you want to sleep in the top bunk of my bed instead?”

            “Yeah.”

            He was a man of few words.

I had never been on the top bunk so I decided to check it out. But I never found out what it was like up there because I was distracted by the narrow hallway hidden behind the ladder. I realized that this was the system of caves that connected each room in the apartment to the bathroom. I couldn’t believe that I never checked them out before. I forced my way through the caves, getting spider webs tangled in my face. To make things worse, the spider webs were filled with dead bugs and Cap’n Crunch and they got in my hair.

            I finally made it to the bathroom and noted that the secret caves were much less practical than just walking down the hall. As I walked back to my room I ran into Brooke and Casey handing out gifts to people from the second-story balcony that I guess I never noticed before. It was a night filled with revelations about my apartment.

            My roommate J got a propeller beanie as a gift. Casey got a wheelchair. I forget what I got. It wasn’t memorable apparently.

            By the time I got back to my room everyone told me that we were leaving. So my roommates stayed behind and the rest of us explored Urbana. But not that one guy, the guy Tim brought. I don’t know where he came from and he kind of weirded me out. He wasn’t invited.

            Casey decided to ride his wheelchair downhill. We all watched as he kept building speed faster and faster until he reached maximum velocity. This was a sweet wheelchair. The streets were empty, but I was still concerned that he might hurt himself. As he approached the intersection suddenly a blur flew into Casey from out of nowhere. The figure stood up and revealed that he was a construction worker with a gray reflective vest. He tackled Casey to keep him from speeding through the intersection.

            I was relieved that Casey had been stopped, but still thought that tackling him was unnecessary because there weren’t even any cars around.

            Of course, that’s until I looked up and realized that we were standing in the middle of downtown Chicago.

            Brooke said that maybe she should have given Casey the propeller cap instead.

            At that point we all decided to go home. Brooke and Casey drove back to their house. Tim left for his place. The rest of us headed back to my apartment, led by my brother, because seriously I don’t know how to get to my apartment from Chicago.

            Evan ran ahead and we lost him, so Carissa, Melissa, and I tried to find him by cutting through a construction site that was empty except for a giant gateway and a velvet carpet leading from the street.

            As we reflected on the night Carissa mentioned that I’m so focused on being self-dependent that that I couldn’t even pretend to be Casey’s employee during some party game we played once.

            I didn’t really remember that ever happening, but since I had been having memory problems all night I figured that it was probably true anyway. Plus, I could totally see myself doing that.

            Then I woke up.