I dream I was away from school on tuesday. I need to get my dad to sign a sick note. I draft something for him to sign over and over and over, sometimes simple, sometimes complicated with all sorts of
calligraphy, but I always make a small error and have to start again. Finally, I succeed by listing the
alphabet in a long column in the lefthand margin, and then composing the note. I get dad to sign and then forget I did, forging his signature above his real signature. I figure one way or another, the secretary will accept it. At the bottom of the note, I try to fill in my tuesday schedule of classes so the secretary will be able to process it. I rack my brains, but can only come up with
Biology in Block B. I realize that it's my only course, and I don't have it on tuesdays, so the note was pointless. I realize after this that it's my only course and it's in college, so I wouldn't need a sick note anyhow. I am in class. We are having a surprise quiz, the day before the midterm. We're all pissed. I try to find a seat, but they're all taken except for one row at the back, which is all tangled up. I toss aside one desk after another, one with a wobbly chair, one without a top. Finally I look up, and everyone has vacated a row of perfectly good desks. Oh. I sit down, and start the quiz, ten minutes late. It's really unpleasantly arranged - duplicate numbers, material no one studied, and questions about KOH in the intermediate stages of the
Krebs cycle, which was beyond the scope of the course. I'm mad, mad, mad. I ask the prof is this is a joke, if the horrible, vague, unclear questions can be clarified somehow. He says no. I throw my quiz in the garbage (I miss; the crumpled paper sits on the floor.) The prof looks at me oddly. I say "Look, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to disrupt your class. I know it's a melodramatic thing to do. I'm just very frustrated!" Class continues. I'm too angry to take notes. I wander the hallways, looking for my locker.
that one was kind of boring. the next one was weirder.
After reading an adventure book by l. frank baum in a long series, I look over a list of his publications at the back. In the series of 30, I am missing at least 10! I make a note of their titles to order online. I see some gaps in the series are missing and have been filled in after his death by other authors. I'm not sure I want to read those. After the list for this action-filled series (I hear a documentary voice in my head noting how the titles are often misleading. One depressing sounding title is actually about a humourous jail-break; one silly title is about a bleak trek across a blasted wasteland to establish commerce with the scattered peoples there to revive the dying economies of the journeyers' homeland. I haven't read that one, but I read the previous one in the series.), is the list of his oz books. I scoff. I don't need to order any, I've read them all (even the lame last one: Glinda in Oz) when I was younger. Besides, they're for pansies.
I am a small boy, Dsomething, in one of his fictional works. It feels like I'm confusing him with Lewis Carroll, I think this several times in the dream. In actuality it doesn't seem anything like either. There are two companions with me; Jamesie and a girl. Our real names are long and formal and enclose our actual names, but I don't remember them now. (Jamesie is really Hedebrejames or something.) We've been abducted in to some surreal and somewhat sinister fantasy land, I think for the unstated purpose of reproducing. The abduction involved KOH, which in the dream was a kind of chloroform. There are several weird, tall figures. One has black black hair and black black drapy clothes. He's very sketchy. We're let out occasionally to play in a labyrinth or in to grey rooms to play with strange toys. Jamesie and the girl seem oblivious to the strange beings, but I have somehow caught on, and there's an implicit threat: if I don't co-operate, if I tell the other children what is going on, they will be put in physical danger. I reluctantly comply. I know too that if any of us turn out to be infertile, we'll be sent back, never to return, which is somehow also very undesirable.
One day in the weird grey playroom, the black black one, who seems to be the spokesman, comes in and shoos the other children out with pleasant excuses. He has brought in a strange apparatus which he claims is a toy; I know it's surgical equipment. He asks me offhand if I know if the KOH cannister has anything left in it. I don't say anything; I'm too scared or numb to get out the words. He walks over and picks it up off the window seat and shakes it. Still good. It's a bright safety orange jug, like for kerosene or gas. He screws it on to his apparatus, and gently puts a cloth over my mouth. I'm relieved; I don't really want to witness whatever comes next.
I have hazy foggy images of some vital essence of me being sampled, removed, and used to fertilize three holes or troughs in something of unclear shape. As they are touched by my whatever, they turn different colours: red, yellow, blue. More fog.
I wake up. I know the girl, all of seven, will carry my child. I furrow my eyebrows; I can't quite understand it.
I wake up for real a few times in here and I think I dreamed more, but checking what time it is on the alarm clock has made me forget what.