The dream started in medias res, possibly too far into in medias res to even be in medias res at that point. It was like the end of the movie. Luke Wilson played a college dean in a gray suit. He was racing around the campus of his university while total pandemonium raged around him. Crowds fleeing, screaming, mass confusion, the ground shaking, brickwork shifting and coming loose.
Ornate metal trees made of bronze and silver, the size of oaks, grew from the ground in a matter of seconds. Buildings became formless, like amoeba. Luke Wilson made his way to a podium, to try and calm the crowd. It looked like a graduation had been interrupted by this hysteria.
Before Wilson could say much, two huge black leather shoes unearthed themselves beneath him — soles up — and he was thrown to the ground. The shoes were not just shoes, but feet in shoes, wearing dress socks. As ankles and calves rose from the dirt, like a headfirst man from reverse quicksand, the hems of a gray pair of pants appeared. They were duplicates of his pants, his shoes, his legs.
They disappeared as quickly. Wilson again approached the microphone and started shouting.
“The school is alive. It’s tired of being a place of learning. IT WANTS TO LEARN. It wants to create, like its students!”
This was an art and design college. Somehow it had developed an intelligence, and with it, powers of reality manipulation. In this way it could draw, and sculpt, and create. It did not mean to do harm, but it wasn’t human and didn’t share our morals, our ethics, our worldview. It couldn’t.
Wilson shouted into the microphone again. “IT ONLY WANTS TO MAKE ART!”
The chancellor of the school, an old man, hobbled up to the stage to take the microphone, to speak. But before he could, a translucent block of some kind encased him completely. For an instant he couldn’t move or breathe — then the block reconfigured itself internally, completely destroying and scrambling the old man’s body.
In a single liquid stroke, what was the old man now took the form of a very featureless, mannequin-like seated nude. The school did not simply strip the old man and place him in a seated position. It liquified him, and used the components to make a three-dimensional extrapolation of a painting. I remember seeing that the linework that made up the “rendering” was actually thin lines of blood, latticed into place within that clear plastic cube. As the ground shook, the blood shifted gently inside the framework of lines.
The principal then understood that the school did want to make art, but didn’t care how it was made.
After I woke up, I realized that there was a similarity between how this school shifted itself, and the way the house worked in the late 1990s remake of The Haunting. I haven’t thought about that movie since I first saw it, but that’s what this school looked like.
