Last night I dreamed that I’d just started seeing someone new.
It was so early in the relationship that nothing had been tested and there was potential everywhere we looked. It was one of those charmed beginnings that’s all wonder and snuggles instead of uncertainty and awkwardness.
It was pretty nice.
After defending them for an unspecified length of time, I have begun to protest against the new train operators like everybody else. I am standing on a precarious platform high above Flinders Street station, hanging onto a railing, while someone tries to arrest me. I laugh at them.
Then I am swinging on a rope above the Yarra River. A woman and her daughter are playing on a beach where a tributary joins the river. The woman points at me and her daughter laughs. I let go of the rope and suddenly I am swimming in the tributary. The water is cold and clear and I feel as though everything is going to be okay.
It isn’t, though. All of the water drains out of the river and a train comes along the riverbed. It is filling up with snow and ice. People are freezing to death or trying desperately to keep their grandparents and their children warm.
I am in a convenience store looking for something to buy. There is a very short, disgruntled ex-employee hiding behind a display and mixing up all the foods in the salad bar. (This convenience store has a salad bar.) When the staff notice they say I have to take her to hospital, but we negotiate and they settle for taking her to the nearest police station.
On the way outside she says she needs to go to the toilet. I ask how urgent it is. It’s very urgent. No good trying to wait until we get to the police station. I pick her up and run to the shopping centre down the road. She disappears into a warren of corridors that is supposed to lead to the toilets.
I sit down in a small room until my friends from high school burst in. They are holding a Christian social activism meeting in the room so I have to either convert or leave. I leave.
I am cleaning out a fridge with the girl from work. We talk about what we think about things and it is impossible to convince her that I am happy.
(The next day in the real world there was a sign on the fridge at work saying it was going to be cleaned out.)
After a few painful seconds of indecision, I chased after you. I caught up just as you started down the escalator. “What kind of music do you like?” I asked, and I practically felt myself levelling up.
***
I waited at the side of my old high school’s hall, long after everyone had gone home. You showed up, walking like you happened to be passing by on your way somewhere else. Despite our desperately affected nonchalance, we had obviously been waiting a long time for whatever we were finally getting around to.
***
I will not risk putting the third instalment into words. It is something to hold close and keep for myself.
I often write notes about a dream in a brief period of wakefulness before I go back to sleep. Usually this helps me remember the dream in plenty of detail when I wake up properly, and if I have trouble looking at the notes almost never fails to jog my memory.
Two recent, notable failures:
1. “Weird airline slash female band thing”
2. “Not yet rendered, pencil, sunrise”
I am friends with Will Smith. We are hanging out at his place, but then someone shows up unexpectedly and things get awkward. He doesn’t want his other friends to know that we are friends, but he also doesn’t want to tell me to leave or hide or something because that would make it obvious.
It is my birthday, and my friends from high school are having a large party that is also a picnic. There are a lot of cakes. I am feeling slightly awkward about being vegan when nobody else is, and most of the food has been provided by other people. I ask somebody about what I can eat.
“There are eggs in the cakes, but there’s only one egg in your birthday cake!” is the reply. Like they’ve done me a big favour.
Then all of the cakes need to be moved somewhere else and we have to carry them in crumbling, slightly damp handfuls.
I am shopping for new school clothes with my mother and my sister. There is an entire wall of socks, and my mother tells my sister off for wanting the socks that cost $3 a pair when with a little bit of hunting she could find the socks that cost $1 a pair.
I am very sad after we have finished shopping. My mother asks me to open up the hatch beside the front seat and put together the mechanism that will make the car capable of driving to the afterlife, because she thinks that will make me feel better and my sister doesn’t know how. I don’t want to do it, but I do.
Later, I am at my high school instead of the afterlife. There is some controversy over whether people who drive to school from Brisbane should be allowed to arrive later than people who only have to come from Goulburn.
A girl walks by with shoes on but no socks. “Nice three-piece suit,” someone calls out to her. “Shut up!” she replies. “Just because Brian May isn’t a cricketer, jeez.” Someone else throws a balled-up pair of socks at her. She doesn’t put them on.
My friends and I are at an art gallery. There is an opening event for a new exhibition; it is not clear how, but we have somehow been involved in putting it together. We are all sitting around a large table, wearing party hats and drinking wine. Someone is being loudly opinionated about something trivial, and everybody else is laughing.
A snooty woman comes over and says that we are making too much noise. I apologise, and everybody quietens down, but she is not mollified. She says that, really, we should not be there at all and it would be better if we just left.
We do not leave. Nobody with actual authority tries to get us to leave, either.
