dream a little dream

I just woke up from a four-hour nap. I got to go into work this morning for a little mop-up sort of session and so had to wake up way earlier than I have grown accustomed to over the past couple of weeks. In any case, I had a nap dream. I don't if anyone else finds nap dreams to be the most vivid, unusual, and meaningful dreams that thy have, but I often do...and the one today was no exception. I woke up with thoughts racing through my brain, as if I had been told some mysterious secret that I do not yet fully comprehend. It started rather normally...with me visiting I think San Francisco, hanging out with a friend that I had only just been reacquainted with (which itself is rather telling) and regretting that we aren't doing more...just hanging out and doing stupid shit we could do anywhere. Anyway, it gets good as I gt into the army somehow which is where I start off on a recollection that I wrote as quickly as I could....

I am in a battle meant to be hand to hand, sword drawn and ready to attack the forces which are strangely wating across a sall fence, ready to squeeze their forces through a small gate. I am the first one waiting for them at the door and manage to thrust my sword through the chest of the first enemy combatant that makes it through the gate. I retreat as more run through, allowig my fellow soldiers to make their first strike. As I move fifty feet in from the center of action, turn around to see two enemy uniforms being worn by the sort of 18-year-old man-boys that fill armies coming towards me. I stab the first through the chest with my sword with no effort and withdrawl my steel. The second, seeing me in an akward position, seems happy to see that he will easily defeat me but I simply use the body of the dead foe in my hands as a shield, and thrust my sword through both, killing the other.

I am sickened by what I have done, looking at my sword and seeing the now coagulating blood oozing down the blade. I walk from the battlefield. Into a mall.

I walk through the mall grasping my sword in an upward position, wandering from store to store wanting desparately to wash it clean only to ened up at a K-Mart where there is some sort of celebration going on that doesn't permit my leaving through the front gates outside given that they are padlocked. I look around, lift up the chainlink fence, and scurry under.

I make it to the luxurious home of some sort of frat-brother of mine who is having some sort of foormal dinner to which I am not only invited, but am to be honored as a war hero. I take every opportunity to tell anyone who will listen that I am a deserter and that, though I killed three of the enemy with no effort, I still left the field of battle without leave and that I cannot kill again. I am given a seat at the second highest table.

I run away in this humungous house which has suddenly become the palacial mansion of some fictitious rich family member and decide to hide in the third floor living area where I know no one goes but to sleep.

While there, getting ready to take a seat in a big comfy chair, a girl walks in, towel wrapped around her as if she had just stepped out of the shower. She is beautiful – blonde with a nice face – but with some neo-cool hairdo. I apologize for being there, but she says “no. sit. stay” By this point I am no longer in my bloody uniform, nor carrying my blood-stained steel and I do not feel of myself as a war-hero-deserter as I had been downstairs. In fact, she doesn't even question why I am there, but rather makes some statement of the vanity and stupidity of the whole affair – the wrangling over position among her family(who is hosting the dinner) and the lawsuits that go between them all and how she wants nothing of any of it. This girl, she tells me that she is 18 and a high school senior, sick of the rules and bullshit of high school and oh so very ready to enter the “real world”. When I tell her that the real world is not so grand, she laughs at me and tells me that I am being stupid. She says that I am lucky because I do not have to do what anyone says, take classes that I don't want to take. She says, “You can take advanced math classes if you want, read what you want, live hoow you want. You can write what you want, not just what they tell you...”

It is then that I woke up, feeling very refreshed and somehow renewed in a dream which I do not yet fully understand, but feel as though it is a wake-up call of srts to myself. My mind trying to tell me that I needn't feel so determined to play by any set of arbitrary rues like those set forth in war, in social situations, or in romantic ones too. It's okay that I am different, that I am appalled by the world in which we live and that I, as an adult, have every right to step forward and do things my way. There is so much to think about.