The most thoroughly awesome dream I've ever had

Originally posted May 11, 2009

Let's face it: there just aren't enough opportunities for you, the reader (and hopefully dear friend of mine) to get inside my head, so I've decided to write a note and tell you about a dream I had.

Not just any dream though. This is the most thoroughly awesome dream I've ever had, if only because when I woke up after I had it, I felt spectacular.

This dream took place during a 2 hour nap in the late afternoon / early evening. I've also made a few notes about some of the kookier things in the dream. They are at the bottom.

It takes place in high school. It's the first day of the semester, so I'm carrying around a class schedule, trying to figure out where my next class is. I'm also carrying around a box of Frosted Flakes. (Although Frosted Flakes are delicious, the actual brand of cereal is unimportant. The box of cereal itself plays an important part though. I'm not real sure why I have it, but this is dreamworld after all, so...)

The classes are scheduled with some kind of weird block scheduling, so it's listed like this on the paper

(*1)

:

9:00 - 9:50 CLASS A

10:00 - 10:50 CLASS A

11:00 - 11:50 CLASS B

etc...

It wasn't like this when I was actually in high school, so I'm not used to it. I'm headed to Class A, but I must not have read the top of the sheet, because it's 10:00, which makes me late to class. I'm still not sure what I was doing from 9 to 9:50 in the dream.

I find the room and open the door to the classroom. The teacher, who is a middle aged balding man with glasses, was in the middle of a lecture. When I go in and shut the door, he goes silent and everyone is looking at me. The desks are arranged so that they're across the walls in kind of a square-ish circle, so there's a big open space in the center for the teacher or whoever else to stand in and talk. Unfortunately, my desk is exactly diagonally across from the door I came in, so I would have to shamefully walk in front of the entire class to get to my desk. On the bright side, I'm seated next to a tall, thin blond girl.

To get to my desk, I do that goofy looking tip-toe jog with long strides that people (OK, maybe not regular people, but buffoons) do when they're interrupting something to get to their seat and are trying to do it faux-discreetly. This ends up working against me, because as soon as I step over to my desk, I slip and fall right on my back and my butt.

Everyone in the class starts to laugh at me.

Naturally, I'm mortified and I'd like to try and minimize my embarrassment. I quickly decide the best way to do that and go for it: I start to laugh along with the class, and then slowly increase the volume, turning it into a really obviously sarcastic, overpowering laugh. Pretty soon it takes over the room, and everyone else stops laughing, leaving just my loud sarcastic laugh, which stops soon after that.

Suddenly, I didn't feel so embarrassed any more. I successfully diffused a really awkward situation, which is soon to be replaced with another one, just by trying to entertain myself.

The teacher, who's upset that I'm late and disrupting his class with my tomfoolery, says to me in a really stern voice, "Explain yourself in front of God

(*2)

, this class, and everyone else involved."

Without missing a beat, I instantly reply, "Well I'm pretty sure God is laughing, since he must know that my entire life is a big joke anyway."

Everyone in the class laughs. Between this and the exaggerated laugh, I feel like my wit and comic timing are both as sharp as a tack. The teacher is unimpressed.

I'm not sure what he meant by "everyone else involved," so I look on the back of my cereal box. Lo and behold, there's a long list of names, and since this is dreamworld, he must want me to explain my cornball antics to these people, who aren't even in the room, possibly not even in the same building, state, country, or time period.

I start to read the list of people, which looks something like this:

"xxx, yyy, Rogey, zzz..."

Just the name "Rogey" (pronounced rho-jay, somehow in the dream I knew this) appeared, and I don't recognize it, so when I get to it I ask him, "Who's this guy Rogey?"

He answers, "Oh, that's Peter Mark Roget, the British physician who...

(*3)

"

"Oh, you mean the thesaurus guy?"

"Yeah, that's him."

It's weird, because when he said Peter Mark Roget in the dream, I instantly knew it was spelled "Roget" and not "Rogey" like on the back of the box. When I was recalling the sequence of events after I woke up, it made no sense to me how I would know that right away, since prior to this dream, I had no clue who the thesaurus guy actually was, just that he was named Roget. (Well, it's not like having a box of Frosted Flakes with a list of old British scholars on the back made sense either, but that's what's so wonderful about dreamworld: you just don't question these things.)

"Well, they should spell it like that on the back of the box, so that when I read it I could point to it and say, 'THESAURUS GUY!'"

In reality, I think there's very little that's funny about that statement. In dreamworld, it was my third attempt to diffuse an embarrassing situation with a joke.

Fortunately, it worked.

As soon as I said it, the teacher lightened up, cracked a smile and started chuckling a bit. Ready to resume teaching, he pointed to me and to the blond girl, saying "OK, you two just make sure you get along."

I stuck my fist out to the girl and said, "Come on girl, gimme some," looking for some dap. She hooks it up and pounds my fist.

The class continues and I wake up soon thereafter. I woke up feeling like I was the funniest, sharpest kid in the class, which was a wonderful feeling.

Thank you for reading!

NOTES

(*1) I remember the text in the dream being very clear, which is weird because I was under the impression that written words in dreams were usually blurry and unintelligible.

(*2) I went to a private, Catholic high school, so hopefully this should explain why an authority figure is asking me to explain something to God. Also, imagine everyone in the class wearing uniforms. This made me realize that any time I have a dream that takes place in high school, everyone in the dream is probably going to be wearing uniforms. This raises an interesting question: If you went to a school that didn't require uniforms and have ever had a dream about it, what are the people in your dream wearing? How does your mind create outfits for all the people in a classroom?

(*3) In the actual dream, the teacher didn't say Peter Mark Roget or explain that he was a British physician, because I didn't know either of those things. I looked up the specific details after I woke up so I could relate the dream with as much factual accuracy as possible. (I suppose I should cite Wikipedia.) He did give the name Roget, along with some other first name and a description of who he was (which was probably inaccurate), but in dreamworld I still instantly knew who he was talking about.