Dream Log: May 17, 2003

Preamble: I was discussing lucid dreaming on IRC last night, so I decided to give it a shot. First phase is trying to improve my dream recall. I only remember my dreams rarely, but I need to remember them in order to understand my dreams better. As I went to sleep last night, I kept thinking to myself "I will remeber my dream". This may seem like a silly thing to do, but it worked.

Dream content: I am at my university where I currently have a job as a research assistant, doing surface science work (real). I walk out of the lab, but the hallway layout is different than the real one. I'm walking alone around the hallway and there are various meetings of people in the rooms. I decide to go back to the lab, but there's a meeting there now, too. At some point before this now, I realise I'm just wearing my boxer shorts. I decide to go to the bathroom, so I walk towards the part of the university that I can recognise. (The lab was misplaced into the admin building rather than a lab building, it seems.) As I walk down the hallway full of students, I am aware that I am still only wearing underwear. I am only mildly embarassed, but it doesn't stop me. I realise that I am perhaps dreaming!, but I downplayed this by thinking that it is what I normally do. "Nah, it's real." I reach the hallway that leads to the bathroom, and there's a lineup of people, and a doorman. Like the entrance to some members-only club. The guy in front of me I don't recognise, but in front of him is someone whose name I know -- maybe a friend. The line creeps forward, and the doorman keeps calling out names. He calls out my first name, but I don't move. Somebody at the head of the queue runs forward through the door (my first name is his last name?). My friend's last name is called; he runs forward. My last name is called. I start to run forward, but the unknown guy in front of me starts running before me. Through the door is a short room with a wider opening on the other side, where there is something like a movie theater and a desirable place to be in. My friend and unknown guy run through, but wider opening is slowly being closed by a pull-down door. (I must have been the last in line, and unknown guy ran through in my name. Bastard.) I run to get through the door, and I have to roll under it, movie-style. I get stuck under the door, and am squeezing through the gap ... *end*

I find it amusing that my reality check was unable to tell me I was dreaming. It made things that much more shocking when I woke up and discovered it was truly all a dream. In reality I would be way more shy about exposing so much skin in public.

She was sick. The diseases had been inherited from her father. They helped explain so much, and yet the question remained: why?

"You tell her," the woman said, her stepmother. We stood outside their house, the sky above deeply clouded, the air thick and close. I was leaning against my car, the car that was mine. I nodded back to her. She wouldn't understand me, was the woman's unspoken insinuation. This was my burden. Somehow I knew it always had been.

The girl lay on her stomach on her bed. There was a tension between us that I didn't remember initially. Then it dawned on me. The time was now, not then, not back when this girl loved me. It was today, and today I'm married to someone else, a someone who waits patiently for me in our car outside.

"They said there are really two problems, two diseases at work. One's responsible for the depression, the OCD, the hyperactivity." I paused. "The hypersexuality. The other hasn't really started to affect you yet, but it will, soon. Atrophy of the higher brain function."

She seemed to understand, to accept it. She wouldn't lead a normal life like she had expected, but that was OK. She got up, kissed me briefly on the cheek and smiled. She even thanked me. She walked out of her room and I followed.

"My boyfriend's coming over for dinner," she said. It hurt to hear that. "My boyfriend" - that wasn't me. And soon enough the boyfriend did arrive. It was time for me to go, to do whatever I was really in this, my hometown, to do. The girl walked me out, her jealous phat boyfriend closely behind. At the steps down from the backdoor, I turned. I looked Mr. Phat in the eyes and said, "Go away, I need to talk to her before I go."

We talked for a long while, and then came to the crux of it all.

Hurt sprang from her eyes and slapped me, "If only you hadn't stopped loving me," she said.

"What?," I said, in disbelief. "You were the one who stopped loving me. I still love you, am still in love with you."

"And what about her," she thrust out her chin to indicate my wife waiting in the car.

"Well, that's where the rub is, isn't it."