Dreaming

I just woke from the strangest dream. I was an actor in a two woman play held at my alma mater. I was my current age and had returned to college. The college looked nothing like it does in real life, but I knew that it was my old school. The play was controversial and was being protested by the Ku Klux Klan, and the other performer and I were in danger from a mob. The audience, aware of the danger, had left. One of their plans was to use the props, bizarre things like man sized food items, of our own play as weapons against us. These props somehow multiplied once they were in the hands of the klansmen. We had to scrap performing the play and concentrate on our escape. By arranging a series of traps on the stage and in the theater, we were able to elude the men chasing us. Even though the play was not performed, they felt like they had failed because they had not killed us.

After they thought we had gotten away, they gathered in a room similar to an elementary school cafeteria and were listening to their leader speak. The other actress in the play and I had finally found a police officer, a black woman, and she told us to go speak to the group. I entered the room and was immediately grabbed by one of the men and forced to my knees. As I struggled to get up, I told him that the police were here and had told me I had the right to speak. I made my way to the front of the room, and the speaker insulted me and tried to push me around. Again at the mention of the police, one lone woman, he ceded the microphone to me. What I said inflamed the crowd, and one man rushed to attack me, knocking me down onto my back. I could feel his strength and see details like sweat and boils on his face as he, just inches above me, held my arms down. I twisted until I kicked him in the stomach with both legs, knocking him off of me. I ran then, but I had broken up their meeting. Most left, but some were still lurking, waiting to hurt me.

The police officer walked with me to the parking lot. Depite the drama of the scene we had just left, it was friendly and social, and I stopped and talked to two old sorority sisters I haven't seen in over twenty years. One was the vet (her real life profession) treating a cat I had to pick up from another building on campus. I went to get the cat and found the building being repainted by a crew of men who wouldn't let me in the building. When I whistled, my cat magically escaped its cage and the locked building and ran and jumped into my car. I started the engine and put the car into reverse. It spun in a circle and crashed into another car. The police officer from before told me there was no damage and to go on. Leaving the parking lot, the lights showed every car in the lot as eerie, junkyard wrecks. With me was the other sorority sister, and I was going to give her a ride to her home, several hundreds of miles away from my own destination. I couldn't understand why I was going so far or why we would trust the car whose brakes had just failed. From there we set off into the night.

Certain details like people's faces were incredibly sharp. The lighting was like a good film noir. Some things still make no sense. I haven't been in a play since elementary school. The props, whose details have faded, were funny. Outlandish humor usually lurks somewhere in my dreams. It is just so me to go through something scary and dramatic and afterwards try to be just pleasantly social as if nothing of note had happened. Not to mention, there's always a cat somewhere around me. The sense of danger and fear in my dream was very real. I'm proud of the courage I showed.

I hope that I can make more sense of this in the morning.

dreams