February 6, 2008
I had a very long, very elaborate dream last night, and sadly I’ve forgotten most of it, but the important parts have stayed with me and colored my day.
The dream was formatted like a movie. It was a story of two people, a young guy and slightly-older married woman, attending a very liberal art school together (very liberal as evidenced by the kind of student work permitted). She had come back to school for a higher degree or extension classes, and he was getting his bachelor’s. Even though he knew she was married, he was attracted to her. She was kind of high maintenance, a little flighty, and brilliant. For all intents and purposes, the guy was me, but I didn’t feel like it was me in the dream; I didn’t participate, I just watched.
The school was right next to a huge lake or ocean or other body of water, and students would often sit on the grass beside it to study or hang out. This was where the man and the woman would occasionally run into each other.
I remember a part where a video was being screened for a class; it was another student’s project, and she’d filmed her and her girlfriends naked underwater in the lake, harassing a really large water snake the size of an anaconda. They kept matadoring the snake into biting its own tail, rather than them.
The man and the woman spent more and more time together, with her egging him on to do stuff with her. Her husband never entered the picture. It started to become obvious that they were falling for each other — but the dynamic was, the guy was DEFINITELY falling for her in a big way, but knew it was wrong, and the woman was mostly enjoying the attention, enjoying a break from what must have been a boring or otherwise failed marriage. She was falling in love too, but it was much slower going.
Much of the dream took place in crowded quads, amid building after building and throngs of students, hot dog stands, tables for campus organizations. It was like UCLA crossed with a mall. I remember a group of students, including our main characters, sitting down in a circle studying on the concrete.
The woman was that precocious type that they used to sing pop songs about in the 1960s. Everyone knows it’s Windy, she’s a mystery to me, all the songs about how girls are these free, bewitching, beautiful creatures that you never can tell if they’re aware of the power they have over lonely men. She was the type to go, in the middle of midnight studying for a midterm the next morning, to slam the book shut and say “forget this. Let’s go get pancakes at that diner we’ve never been to. We’ll just stay up until the test.”
Finally in the dream, something was going on with the huge snake in the lake. It was getting bigger and more dangerous, and there was a buzz that it could threaten the college, even the whole town. It was at this point that the man and woman knew only they could chase away the danger and save everyone. She kissed him, and he said, “what about your husband?” She said this was what she wanted. She took him by the hand and they prepared to face the danger.
I remember that they put on costumes to confront the snake; something about it being an artistic statement that had to be made. The only costume component I remember was that the guy had slip-on Vans that were studded with glued-on Scrabble tiles.
The two of them, full of hope and emerging new love, dove into the lake. This was the dominating mood of the dream — two lovers on that initial romantic journey, and all the wild promise and blind, deep happiness and completeness that comes with.
The camera panned back to a wide shot of the whole school. In the center of the lake, there was a massive explosion that shot a geyser of water into the air, shook the camera as well as trees on the shore.
And the credits rolled with not one but two songs: Pink Bullets by The Shins, and Ashen Shade by Girlyman. I stayed and watched all of them. Then I woke up.
At several points in the dream, I knew I was separate from the action, because I kept thinking “this is getting interesting, so I’ll probably wake up now. Please don’t let me wake up. I want to see the end.”
This really colored my day because I was thinking about the kind of love that the two experienced, that perfect-but-fleeting love at the start of a relationship when no one can do any wrong, all is right, and all you want to do is hold and be held forever.
In my dream the man and the woman had just captured that, and then died doing something they believed in (even if my dream had a silly snake standing in for that), and so that love wasn’t dimmed or altered by the passage of time, fading and settling into what love becomes when a relationship matures. I saw them as fearless and noble, and their experience as whole and perfect and beautiful.
