A Dream

I've just woken from a dream. It is 3 am on the eve of moving day and it is the second dream that I have remembered in the last week. I often do not remember my dreams and this one was so vivid that I felt I had to write it down.

I am at residency surrounded by all the students and faculty who I am familiar with in that environment and we are on our way to a performance piece by someone I know as a publisher for a small press. She has planned a piece that includes some of the other students, music, dance, and spoken word. When everyone goes into the auditorium, I wait outside. I can hear perfectly well what is happening inside, almost like I have a baby monitor filling me in on what is happening inside the auditorium.

Music begins playing and a student in a sing-song chant walks to the center of the room. It is theater in the round that C. has set up and it is filled with bizarre objects big and small. The student introduces C. and hands her a microphone. The performance continues and I am soon bored/annoyed with the performance and I get up and walk out of the auditorium. I go outside and sit against the wall of the building, waiting for C. to finish so I can walk home with everyone.

C. appears outside the auditorium with the microphone and she is reciting more spoken word poetry and she flutters around outside. There is a man with her who I don't recognize who bends down and is trying to smoke the crushed out cigarettes that litter the sidewalk around the auditorium.

I'm beginning to feel unsettled and I duck behind a wall to hide from C. and her friend/fellow performer. C. finds me tucked into a small alcove and winds out her performance with something along the lines of, "It isn't the clarity of expression, but the journey, the Sweet Home Alabama of it all." She plays a couple of notes on something like a large recorder or a clarinet and ends the show.

Outside, where we sit it is silent and before I can stop myself I tell her, "I disagree."

She gets a hurt look on her face and says, "Why?"

I look at her and she holds the microphone/recorder to my mouth so that I can be heard in the auditorium. In a mild, stuttering voice I tell her that I think saying things in its simplest, truest form is what it IS all about."

Her hands fall to her side and she doesn't say anything more.

The audience, my fellow students and our faculty, begin filing out of the auditorium and there is some whispered talk about being confrontational with C. about her performance. I'm embarrassed and try to stick to the shadows. I sit on a curb a small ways away from the gathered attendees.

One of the faculty approaches me from behind, Sandra Alcosser, and sits next to me on the curb. She tells me that she agrees with me and to not listen to the scolding of the other attendees.

She turns her head away from me, it is night and a street light is shining from above and behind her and her hair looks radiant. She says something in a foreign language that I can't make out and I ask her to translate. She says, "Auburn is the place where it all levels out." I wake.

(It isn't until my waking mind has been at work on the contents of my dream when I realize that Auburn could be a place because in my dream, she meant a color.)

So, that's it. That's the dream I remember. It was a fun one and it makes me wish that I could remember the contents of my dreams more often. Well, it is now 3:20 am and I should hit the hay. It is moving day in the morning.