I’ve been having very vivid dreams during this Christmas break. Maybe it’s because my mind has more time to linger on random thoughts since I don’t have to think about teaching classes (well, I’m ALWAYS thinking about my classes, but i just haven’t had to structure my entire day around them). I’ve also been spending more time with friends in less structured time frames, which allows me to just be in the moment without having other thoughts lingering on the back burner.
Last night, I met up with a friend and her sister. Ok, the sister is a “friend” too, I guess, but she’s also a student at my school so I think I’m forbidden from calling her a friend or whatever. To make things easier, and way less personal, I will call them S1 and S2 (if you know who they are, please don’t identify them in the comments). They had decided to shoot a little horror movie at the local firehouse and I went to participate in the madness.
The shoot was fun but that’s not the main point of this story.
I had a dream last night, and S1 and S2 were in it. There were plenty of other people there too but I can’t really remember any faces. Other details are slipping away too, but I can recall that we were in a big building that had a banquet hall and many other little rooms and corridors. Before we got to the building, we had to drive over a really big pile of snow and somehow I ended up being the only person left in the car. Flash forward to the building. A bunch of us were walking around, and I just remembered that all of my co-workers were there too. I think it was a graduation ceremony, and my fellow teachers and I were getting ready to enter the banquet hall. But I think I was hanging back to help videotape the ceremony, so I was in the kitchen. Oh yeah, S1 and S2 were helping me videotape. I’m remembering more now.
The ceremony was in full swing and people were all over the building doing behind the scenes work. S2 decided to take a camera to the other side of the building and get some shots from a different perspective. At that moment, I remembered that someone had set some kind of explosive charge under that part of the building. For some reason, in the dream, I remembered that a similar thing had happened at another school’s graduation. I told S1 that her sister might be in trouble and we started running toward that side of the building, but we were too late. A huge fireball engulfed that wing. I remember feeling very panicked and worried, and that I should have remembered the other incident so that S2 wouldn’t have gotten hurt.
Once the fire died down, we found S2. She was alive but had third-degree burns all over her body. The paramedics started to treat her. S1 and I sat there for a long time. I honestly can’t remember what we were feeling at that point. But then, S2 walked over to us and said that the paramedics told her that she would be fine after a few days and that she didn’t have to go to the hospital at all. The burns started to disappear, and within a few minutes, they were completely gone.
Then I woke up, feeling very relieved that none of what I had just experienced was real. My alarm had been going for a few minutes and I finally heard it. I’ve been waking up to the track “Time” from the Inception score, which is the music that plays in the final scene of the movie. It was a really cool feeling.
So, in thinking about why I had that particular dream, I can make these connections:
- S1 and S2 were the last people I saw before going to bed.
- We had just been shooting a horror movie in a firehouse with a banquet hall, many dark corridors and side rooms.
- We had talked about the character that S1 was playing burning to death at the end of the movie.
- The way S2 looked after the explosion was exactly the way that Ripley looked at the beginning of Alien 3, which I had been watching in the afternoon. Ripley was covered in dark mud, and most of it washed away as she was carried away from the wreckage of the escape pod.
- The explosion happened in a very similar way to the explosion of the medical facility in the snow level in Inception, with part of the building falling away.
- There’s a ton of snow everywhere in north Jersey right now, and I had to drive around and over many patches of it for the past week.
- School starts again tomorrow, so I guess I’ve had that on my mind.
- S2 did most of the camera-work yesterday, which she was nervous about at first. (She did an amazing job, by the way.) There was a point where she and her sister wandered all over the second floor of the firehouse with just the camera and a flashlight. I waited in a dark corridor so that I wouldn’t accidentally get in the shot. I am very afraid of the dark. I wonder if my paranoia-inducing imagination somehow translated into the fear I felt in the dream when I realized that the explosion was about to happen.
Dreams are so interesting. But they put me through the wringer at times.
