Student Expulsion

Last night I dreamed that I was substitute teaching.  The brick building I was in looked like it was built in the late 1800s.  I had the impression that it was the end of the school year.  While I was teaching, the students were quite out of control.  I told them that if they continued to misbehave I would send them out.  I proceeded to do so with one student, and I think it resulted in his expulsion.  Then I suddenly found myself seeing the world from his perspective, and learning things about his home life--mainly that he had to share a room with his sister.  I felt a bit guilty as I realized that his acting out was likely only over-compensation.

Blue Hair, Blue Shirt, Used Tissues.

The dream I remember from last night began with me snoozing my alarm this morning.  While the alarm was going, I was imagining Czech words being drilled into my head.  Each beep was another word I was trying to memorize.  I recall turning over and thinking, "this isn't so bad."

Then my dream shifted and I was in my old middle school's library.  I was in a class, and I wasn't paying attention.  I missed the instructions about the homework assignment, so I went to the circulation desk to copy it from a free-standing calendar.  In order to do so I had to ask someone to move out of my way.  It was a guy I went to high school with and he had a bright blue button-up shirt on.  I had difficulty making out the words (in Waking Life [check out around minute 2:45], they would say this is a way to identify lucid dreaming). 

The class had ended and the professor walked in for the next class.  He was a professor that I recognized from my alma mater although I had never had a class from him.  Anyhow, we greeted each other and we started walking towards the table which still contained my belongings.  He asked me when the last time was that I had had undivided time with God, time of focused Bible study or prayer.  I was quite convicted.  As I went to gather my things from under my chair, everything was spilling over.  My bag was quite stuffed, and I spilled chocolate-covered nuts all over the floor.  I struggled to collect them again.  I was putting them into the plastic packaging they'd come in, only I had also stuffed used tissues in the bag, so it was quite unsanitary.  As I clumsily went along my task, I looked up and to my right and saw Lena sitting at another desk.  She had dyed a large portion of her dark hair bright blue.  It was quite becoming on her.

Brother's Cameo

I was relaxed as I woke this morning, ruminating over my dream and considering writing it down--but once I was out of bed, my mind was on the hike to come and the dream vanished.  Hours later I remembered that I had dreamed and scrambled to recall it.  All I know is that it had a positive tone overall and that my deceased brother was in it.  He's actually made quite a few visits to dreams recently, and I am only left with the glimmer of his presence and the strange knowledge that he is the same age as he was when he passed--19--but that I am my current age, which makes me older than him.  And yet, I continue to feel like the "younger sister."

I'll try to be a bit more faithful in jumping on recording my dreams in the future.

Carolina Chocolate Drops and Christmas Cheer

Last night I had a dream that the Carolina Chocolate Drops had set up some sort of arts house in some merge between L.A., San Fransisco, and New York City.  There was an old Victorian era house with art pouring off all the walls.  There were sculptures and paintings, and there was food that was cooked by the kids everywhere.  When I first entered, there was a golf and crayon stained-glass window/alter-esque depiction of the Virgin Mary propped up near a table.  The members of the band were teaching students about art, about cooking, and about Jesus.

The whole place was full of active color and active children, eagerly making art pieces, learning about everything under the sun, and running around like mad.  I saw pictures from previous days where girls had removed paintings and sculptures from the walls and had somehow managed to climb onto the walls and pose as if they themselves were the art.  They had edited the images to flatten themselves into the architecture.

One of the lectures/labs incorporated many historical objects that kept emerging from behind a screen.  This included candelabra as well as random wooden objects that had become fused together.  Later in the kitchen, there was an overwhelming amount of food, and people about my age that were helping were serving the food to the various kids from the neighborhood.  Later, at a workshop, we were given all sorts of candies, fruits, and marshmallows and had to mix them together with our hands until the stickiness of the marshmallows brought everything together.  I was a bit to vigorous, unleashing blackberries onto the walls.  Somehow my mixture was becoming a large tower, and I realized the band member had given me more material to work with than anyone else.  When I went to remove it from it's bowl, suddenly it became clay or sandstone, and as I set it out to dry, I began to remold different parts.  Instead of it being a tower, it suddenly looked like a maiden sitting with her legs outstretched with a leg becoming an abstract form and bits of the hand becoming like feathers.

People stood watching me put the final touches, and my father told me that I would overwork it and ruin the sculpture.  As the various fine arts activities continued, such as putting up photos and sculptures all the way up the wall (salon style), I was snapping away photos.  For some reason, I couldn't upload them to a computer and had to pay to have them put onto a disc or something.  Apparently I had taken so many, though, that I was charged an exorbitant amount of money, which was really rather consistent with the whole dream.

There was something baroque or rococo about the atmosphere.  Everyone was spilling over with life and creativity.  The house overflowed with sound, color, and delicious food.  At one point I was talking with my old friend Jenn H. and I asked her if she was ready for lunch.  I myself was quite full from the wonderful breakfast.  She said she was trying to establish some rhythm to her eating and didn't want to take lunch till one or two.

In the mean time, I went with one girl (who was Czech) to the city center.  We linked arms and sang "Joy to the World" in two part harmony while crossing the street.  It was still October in my dream as well, and we felt that maybe it was a bit out of place, especially since we were suddenly in the Czech Republic again.  But the song seemed so fitting because the house we'd been in was so filled with life and hope and something like Christmas cheer.