A Twofer

Well, here it is almost one month since my last post. As I said earlier, in the event of a "dream dearth", I would be posting "best ofs" from previous dreams. Anyways, I think that one month counts as a lapse significant enough to warrant "dearth" status, and thus was ready to post an old favorite after my Holiday break, when lo and behold, I have two memorable dreams in rapid succession! Credit it to all the sugar plums, I guess. Not that they were particularly good dreams, or high quality dreams, but they were memorable, and that's what counts! So, in the order I dreamed them:

1. An Archetype The classic, middle-of-the-Holidays "Oh Shit! I Forgot to Turn in my (insert course here) Paper!" I have this dream a lot, though it mostly happens at the end of the year and involves the final exams in courses I considered signing up for, but didn't. In this case, it was about having forgotten to turn in a French Lit. paper (a course I'm not taking) to Professor Lennox (A professor I DO have, in Canadian Life Writing). Interestingly enough, in my dream the paper was not yet late, but due on Friday, meaning that if I scrambled like mad, I would JUST be able to turn in a sub-par paper, though I would miss Boxing Day with my cousins. In any case, a fairly humdrum dream.

2. U of Hospital A somewhat more interesting dream I had last night. I'm in my high school, but for the purposes of my dream it's also my university. It's populated by a variety of faces from both those locales. Anyways, because of a mysterious illness (which doesn't seem to have any effects), we're all quarantined inside the building. It's nothing serious, but we all have to remain inside, and nurses will be coming with pills for us. Anyways, nurses show up carrying pills on refreshment trays, and the whole thing has a very "dinner party" type atmosphere; there's no instructions for how to take the pills (those gel-coated ones with the tiny medicine spheres in 'em), so the nurses just circulate around handing them out like candy as people in little groups discuss dinner-party topics like the environment, literary criticism, etc. Anyways, I'm having a fine time chatting and swallowing pills, until I overhear one guest talking with a nurse, and the nurse says that, "one of the main effects is that people seem to have difficulty swallowing". As I hear this, I try to pop another pill, but I gag it back up. Fortunately, no one notices this, but I begin to worry about what a faux pas it would be if I were the only one at the party not popping pills. With this in mind, I unscrew the top of my capsule from the bottom and start eating the horrible-tasting little medicine spheres individually. People, ask about it, and I say that it's just the way I eat pills, but the taste is getting pretty awful, enough so that I am forced to bolt out of a conversation mid-way to try to find a drinking fountain to wash the taste out of my mouth. The dream ends with me arriving at the fountain.

Well, there we are. Hope that these'll tide us all over!

The Drug Free, No-Smoke Cigarette MC-athon

Okay, this isn't as fresh in my memory as I'd ideally like my very first actual dream post to be, but it happened within the past week, so most of the details remain clear. This is a fairly simple variation on the classic "forget your lines in the school play/big speech" dream, but it has some variations which I think make it worth remembering. Let us begin:

So to start, I'm sitting in the front row of my high school auditorium (for those who went to UFA with me, this is the auditorium in old building on Croatia I'm referring to, not the one way out in Runnymede), watching the "Drug Free, No-Smoke Cigarette MC-athon", a school sponsored rap-battle theme around a "just say no" message. It was not made explicit in the dream, but I knew at the time that whoever won this battle would get to tour Torontonian elementary schools to deliver their rap at school assemblies. That was the prize.

Anyways, The dream opens as I watch The Clean Street Crew perform their set. There's all drawn in the exact same style as they appear in the aforelinkèd comic, but I don't really notice. Anyways, it's all very entertaining, especially the MC Horse bits, and it receives a healthy smattering of applause. In fact, I'm still applauding when the announcer calls out my name.

Now we reach my part of the dream: apparently, I had earlier signed up to perform an anti-cigarette rap and completely forgot about it. I'm shuffled onstage by a few vague administrative figures (they had no discernible "features," as such), handed a mic and told to "go on!" as the red jumpsuited DJ lays a beat down from behind me. Nervously, I walk towards the audience and begin to stutter out some of the lamest anti-drug propaganda ever to be rhymed to a crowd. I'm not entirely sure exactly what I said onstage, but I can clearly remember that it was characterized by long pauses, embarrassingly simple rhyming ("cigarette"/"don't smoke et", etc.), and at best sloppy adherence to the beat. I felt really bad about it, too. Like I was letting everyone down.

Nonetheless, the audience seemed to love it. With every tortured or hackneyed rhyme, they would scream louder and louder for me to go on. I can remember, for instance, rhyming "crack" with "whack" (the most clichéd anti-drug rhyme in the biz) to howls of approval. People were lifting lighters, throwing confetti, raising 40's, it was insane. (The irony of raising a 40 to show approval for an anti-drug song did not strike me at the time of the dream). This all just made me really angry. On the one hand, I felt bad because I was letting everybody down with my lame-ass styles; on the other, were these people were so piss-ignorant, they couldn't even tell how terribly I sucked? I started to think that maybe this was all fake approval, like a massive, audience-wide conspiracy to spare my feelings or something. These people should be disappointed, damn them! What the Hell was wrong with them? Plus, through all this I was still stammering, taking long pauses, etc., so it couldn't have been my technique that impressed them. Was I just a William Hung to these people?

Anyway, I ran out of material, so I had to stop. Or maybe I just wanted to. After the applause died down, they didn't even let the other acts go on; they just gave me the prize. I forget who was hosting, but they pinned a blue ribbon to my lapel. I had never felt so undeserving in my life, like I was being rewarded for something I should have by all rights been punished for. I believe the dream closed with me, from the stage, looking out on the dejected Clean Street Crew, who wanted this prize more than anything in the world. Then I awoke.

So there it is, my first dream post. I didn't mention it before, but you Internauts reading this should feel free to analyze and/or review these dreams. My subconscious just loves critical analysis. So do I, in fact. It's the only way I'll learn. Also, I've filed this under "nightmare" because it invokes unpleasant feelings of guilt, not because it was terrifying. I have few real "terrifying" dreams. I haven't concretely figure out all the "labels" I want for this blog yet.