War Prisoners

The year is 1992 and we are in the middle of some sort of  holocaust. I'm not sure what group is being persecuted, but my family and I belong to it. My youngest sister, who is somewhere between two and five and who should not yet be born, get captured and separated from the rest of the family. We are given a task to pack up two sets of survival kits - mostly consisting of toys, with some cookies and candies. We are taking this very seriously, trying to get it done in the time allocated, when we are told that it really is not a very important task and that our captors don't care how well we do and won't look closely at our efforts. I am not entirely convinced and still try to get it all put together properly until we are almost out of time, so I just rush to get things packed and take my sister and the boxes to a classroom place we are supposed to meet up in.

None of the other captives have their boxes with them.

I see Blake sitting in a seat towards the front of the room and take a seat a few rows behind. After I sit down with my sister, I decide to drop off our packages where I suddenly know they are meant to go. So we get up and put our efforts down in this place, where nobody else has dropped anything off yet. I try not to let the guards see that we are the ones attached to these offerings, because I am aware that we fell a little short on the standards given. Then we go to sit back down, but we can't return to the seats we had before. So we go somewhere near the front. I am uncomfortable with where we sit, because I think that's where Blake had been sitting, but he isn't there yet. Then I realize we are on the second row back, and no sane person would voluntarily take seats so close to the enemy at the front. So I realize that Blake must be sitting a little behind us now. I try looking  back for him but am unable to find him.

Blake and I are both around our current ages.

A Wedding That Wasn't

At the beginning of what I remember, I am engaged to be married to some guy who had a name in the dream but I can't remember what that name was. He did not, as far as I can tell, correspond to anybody in my real life. For the sake of the narrative I will call him Matt.

Anyway, Matt and his parents live in a huge, ornately decorated house that used to be a duplex. I somehow know that Greg Jones and his family had formerly lived in the back half.

I wake up on the day of my wedding in their house, and Jennifer, who had married into Matt's family - a cousin or something - was there to help me get ready. She does so, teasing me about the wedding night along the way, I get to blushing really hard. Monica comes in and they entertain themselves by seeing how hard they can get me to blush.

I go out into the house and things are all set up for the wedding, the guests have all arrived, music is playing deafeningly loudly, and I have nothing to do. My family shows up (although Dad is already there) and there is also not much for them to do. So we mess around with the decorations - add some and take some away and move some around. The main reason we do this is to mess with my control-freak future mother-in-law. I also complain about the music level and am told not to let it bother me too much, and that it probably is not an indication of how things will be regularly when I am married.

All the wedding guests go into the backyard, where the wedding is to be held, and I am left alone with my family. I ask for a father's blessing and I am not given specific counsel - I am told I need to make this decision on my own. I decide I can't go through with this wedding because I am not in love with Matt. I am, however, in love with Greg. I also tell my mother that Greg had formerly lived in this house and this helps her to understand that I can't go through with it. Dad tells me to go out back and tell all the wedding guests, but I insist that I want to tell Matt first and eventually win.

So I find Matt in front of the house and say, "We need to talk." I fumble around with my words for a while, trying to figure out how to tell him this. And then I say something like, "I keep thinking of things to say and they are all cliched." And I also mention that it must be hard for him, because he can tell I want to say something he isn't going to be too happy with. Eventually I come out and say, "You're a good person. But I don't love you, and it isn't fair to either of us if I marry you without loving you." He says, "I thought last night proved you loved me," and I respond with, "Last night proved I am attracted to you."

I can only guess what had happened the previous night, but I don't think he had shown up in the part of the dream I can't remember clearly. It doesn't feel right.

So we go to his bedroom to be away from all the wedding guests. His little brother is already there. And then somebody starts to make an announcement, and I guess it is about me calling off the wedding. We sit around, I think the brother is playing video games, as the wedding guests go ahead and dance without us, and then they serve the food without us. And I tell Matt that a former fling of mine and his family had used to live here. He wants to know the last name of the family, so I tell him, "Jones".

As I am leaving, Matt asks his father about the Jones family who had previously lived there. The father tells the story, about Greg Jones and his father, also named Greg Jones, and a sister and the story sounds sort of like a ghost story, although it is completely normal and reasonable and true in dreamland.

A Son, A Party, Chalk Art, and Fights

I am single, pregnant, and have a young son named Simon. I don't know when Simon's birthday is or where he is. Then Mom tells me she put him to bed in a trundle bed by my sister's room. I am worried about getting married and think I need to do it soon because I think no man would ever want to marry a girl who has three children.

I go to a party which has friends of mine from the last couple years and from junior high. It is apparently a corporate retreat, because Toby from the Office is there, trying to lead us in a group exercise, which involves drinking from tubes of colored liquid. Some other guy, a big shot who's supposed to replace Toby soon, takes over and changes the exercise slightly because we had apparently been doing it wrong for years- we are supposed to drink more of the stuff than we had been. Then the exercise ends and we all start drinking shot of this stuff just for fun. It turns out to be a liquid candy sort of thing.

Then I take a little boy - probably my son - to some sort of Halloweeny outdoor art show where the artists are random people who draw on blacktop with sidewalk chalk. My brother is one of them and he is making a pretty impressive comic strip.

We are inside again and I am with my mother and my sister when some lady stops us and asks for our names, which she looks up in a name dictionary. She comes up with the usual given meaning for my sister's name but my name is listed as being derived from the name of some sort of medicine. The lady scolds my mother for giving me a name with no meaning or history just because it sounds pretty. Then I get up in her face and yell at her, telling her that my name has been around for at least a hundred years, no, since at least the 1880s, and that it has real meaning- it is created from putting together the Spanish words for sea and laughter. Her sister says that this lady has a real interest in names and has put a lot of study into it. I yell back about how hard I study names and all the sites and books and things I study regularly.

Then I'm in a cafeteria, by a vending machine. Doug's little middle-school aged sister who I've never met is there with her friends, and she says a lot of really mean stuff to me. I go to find Doug to talk to him about it. When I find him he's gone off to be with his wife, Helen. I say that I need to tell him or ask him about something, and as I try to figure out how to put it, one of them says something like, "Oh, his little sister hates you for no reason." Apparently this happens with all his friends.

Bus Stop Laundromat, Were-Teddies, and YSA Group

October 1, 2010

I am at the bus stop at the University Mall in Orem, and it is filled with industrial clothes driers. Dave gets in one to rest, and as a joke I go over to spin it so it will rock him like a cradle. Then Ken, Luke, and another guy I can't identify get in one of the other driers.

The boys in the driers change into giant teddy bears of different colors. I can't figure out which color bear corresponds with which boy, so they change between bear and boy a couple times while I learn who turns what color.

Then I am in a church gym with a large group of young single adults. It is a meeting for an unofficial YSA organization for young single adults all through the Salt Lake valley. In order to participate in their activities, I need to turn in a medical release with a doctor's signature. They have a doctor on the board who is willing to examine me and sign the form, but I would rather have my regular doctor take care of it. But I had just had an appointment with him and won't see him again for three months and am a little worried that they won't be willing to wait that long and I will miss an upcoming activity that seems exciting.

Curtis is being very open about being single and looking and some girl makes a comment about how it would be uncomfortable to be a girl who really likes him. I beckon her over to me and say that that is just how he is. She starts to leave, and I beckon her to come back and say that I really like him. She walks away again, I beckon again, and then I say that I have been in love with him for three years now.

School Train Trouble

I am a student at a school that I was let into on a trial basis. I passed the conditions of the trial after my first year, so they let me continue on, but am still treated differently than all the rest of the students.

I go to this school by a 2 1/2 hour commute on bus and train. After I get off of my last bus and am waiting for the train, I start to read a book. It gets cold, so I go and get my yellow Care Bear blanket. Shortly later, I am missing my book so I go to look for it on the bus. The train going the other direction pulls up, and I notice that my book is now on the train platform, partially under the train. My train pulls up while I am retrieving my book. I rush to get onto it but it pulls away right as I get to the doors.

I toss the book in frustration. It hits the ground right in front of the train, which runs over it until the book is in about the middle of the first car. Then the train gets stuck. They back the train off, I retrieve my book, which has been wrapped in tape to repair it. I look around for someone to turn myself in to, because tossing the book in the way of the train is illegal, but I don't find anybody. So I get on the train.

This train car has soft green armchair-like seats, and in the back, four pool tables with twin beds standing on top of them.

I get to the school and go to class. The teacher hands out examination results to the students. I apprently did not take this exam because I am not a regular student.

Then she says that apparently there was some trouble with someone throwing a book in front of the school train and asks who was responsible. Before she finishes the question, I raise my hand and confess. She seems a little surprised and asked how I had a book to throw. As I am explaining how I came to have a book in my possession, my alarm goes off and wakes me up.

GRE and Math Class

I am in high school and am going with my best friend, Wallace from Veronica Mars, to take the GRE. We did not sign up ahead of time, but the person in charge of admitting people to the test (an assistant principal?) hands us each one of those three-part sheets for making copies, with the white, yellow, and pink pages, and ushers us into the testing room.

The lady teacher administering the test makes some comment about me indicating that I am trashy. She apparently reached this conclusion because I am Latina. I yell at her about it, and then she offers as further evidence my outfit, which is actually sort of fancy-conservative and which I only wore because I had nothing else clean. I ask the other kids to raise their hands if they agree with the teacher, and nobody who actually knows me thinks that I am trashy at all. We keep shouting at each other for so long that a lot of kids leave because they no longer have time to take the test and make it to their last class. There are one or two more kids than computers left in the room, so I say that I will not take the test since I had taken the GRE before and done pretty well on it and had just wanted to prove that I could do better.

As I am walking through the commons area on my way to class, my brother calls me. I take out the cell phone I had borrowed from him and am having all my calls forwarded to, but it is broken and I can't answer. I push all the buttons on the phone and nothing happens.

I get to my class and can tell from what is written on the board that it is remedial math. I say I don't belong here and ask if I can go to my counselor to change my schedule. The teacher, who has had me before and knows I should be in a higher level class, denies me permission and tells me instead to study a poster on the wall full of equations from calculus. At this point, I realize that because I didn't turn in a form telling which courses I want, I have been put in all remedial classes.

I get out the calculator I have borrowed from my brother to work on the equations on the wall, but most of the buttons are missing.

Then I start working on some project that my teacher, who has turned into Orson Scott Card, is planning to write about in his upcoming column. I am making something that involves mixing several components, including cornmeal and urea. I don't quite finish in class so pack up the project in a cardboard box to finish at home.

Comedy Routine and Jobs

I am supposed to take part in some program put on by a company recruiting for summer sales positions. My job is to come up with a 10-minute comedy routine, which I will be doing with Tom. There will be two other routines during the program and I want to have the best one. But Tom is not helping me at all.

Now I'm at the banquet and it's almost time to perform. But my routine isn't completely developed, and what I do have written I don't have memorized. Somehow I get the message to the sponsors and the comedy competition thing is canceled. So now I'm just one of the recruits, sitting at a long table. The people I am close enough to talk with are Tom, Weevil from Veronica Mars, and a couple Hispanic girls who are vaguely familiar. We get to talking about race and skin color.

After dinner, we all go to another room for an informational session and to officially commit to working with them. They are also giving out company merchandise- I specifically remember t-shirts and socks. The t-shirts all have years on the back. I take one of everything, and choose a light gray shirt with the year 1986 for my graduation year. I think about taking several pairs of socks, but decide against it because it feels like stealing. A bunch of other people load up on t-shirts to take to Lagoon and sell, but that is perfectly okay because there is way more merchandise than is needed and the company is trying to get rid of it all. Anyway, during the informational meeting I decide that this summer sales position is not one I would like at all and try to talk my way into something else- maybe involving inventory. Dad keeps telling me that I gave my word and need to take this job, not go find something else.

Then I go to Grandma's family room, where there is a mess of toys and games laying out that we need to clean up. Among all this I find a box with some old novelty chocolate, the very waxy kind, which I break up and give to a couple cousins and a sister, who are all 10 years younger than they are now.

After handing out the candy, I discover a goblin in the room that used to be Grandpa's office, painting novelty chocolates with some other chocolate. He is very unhappy with the quality of the chocolate and feels that his skills are being wasted with this job. I go to the heads of the company and negotiate for the goblin to get a new job that better utilizes his skills and a raise and for me to take over the chocolate painting.