Sleep to Dream 03.14.03

Like the one song I learned in grade school on the recorder, someone has shaken my dreamland tree and down comes lovely dreams for me, sleep baby sleep. Or maybe there are apples in my dreamland tree. I wake up with the feeling of being bonked in the head by manifestations of Newton’s Law. And always, I rouse myself a little confused, a little tired from running through my own mind all day.

Two days ago I dreamt that I was some sort of protector of people’s little sisters. Not just their little sisters-- the little sisters they never knew they had. And there I am adventuring about with a rifle and comfortable clothes, the kind you can jump over storage boxes down at the docks with. There were accidents, guile, trickery, and I think I posed at the window like Malcolm X looking out, rifle in hand.

Last night, I dreamt that I was in my high school. Which had added on three or four floors and became a complex with a multi-floor library; many dank hallways for “maintenance” except they looked like they were hallways for “drug deals, murder, and the collection of brackish muck”; a huge auditorium that President Clinton came to, started to speak and then left from. The kids, one of whom looked distinctly like the kid from Star Trek: Voyager and now Reba, asked me about my college and I told them about the bedtime stories we used to get as one of the most charming draws. They knew that doesn’t happen anymore. (does it? I don’t even know.)

There was a café on the sixth floor, untended, with bathrooms the size of cabinets. But I tried anyway. A not-so-kindly grizzled maintenance man suggested the fifth, a floor covered in kindergarteners and kindergarten words and teachers in anachronistically formal teaching dresses. Hallways were empty and all the classrooms were busy with learning.

No escape!

I woke up with words scrolling across my vision. This sleep thing has got to go.