The first thing I remember is that Sarah and I were going to a free Bob Dylan concert somewhere. We parked our respective motor vehicles on a hill. She said she had gotten out of the habit of parking and was pulling her scooter too far through. For my part, we were on a hill and I was worried that I my motorcyle was going to tip over after it parked, and I spent some time making sure it was balanced. We walked down the hill, talking to many people on their way. Someone said they expected 100,000 people there, and someone else said no it was 300,000, and both Sarah and I were worried that we wouldn't get to actually see the concert.
However, we were hungry, so we went to a Mexican place to get food. We also got a fair amount of alcohol. A lot of the people in the restaurant were going to or had come from the concert, and the atmosphere was one of sort of celebratory chaos. The young woman who ran the place had a pretty and distinctive face, and at one point her family came in, and all the women looked almost exactly like her, and the one man, her father, looked very different, tired and careworn. The mother of the woman had a handful of cigarettes and joints, and the young woman took the entire handful and put them into her mouth and lit them, then kept a single cigarette to smoke herself. The mother was also smoking a cigarette at this point. I ate my food, drank my drink. Many people in the place were stoned; it was like maybe the Haight Street Faire in atmosphere. The workers all had the munchies and were eating the restaurant's food.
There's an interval I don't remember, but eventually it was the next day. I was at high school, which is where I went to daily in this dream. I have recurring dreams that I didn't finish high school entirely, even though I graduated and got a degree, and this was one of those dreams. In these dreams I'm basically my age - I've finished college, have my college degree - but for some reason I still have to go back to high school to complete one more year. It was the school day, and I was stoned and drunk still. I was missing my classes, and I sort of didn't care. I did realize however that I hadn't made a single afternoon class the entire year I was there, and in particular I hadn't made it to history since maybe October, and I also hadn't dropped the class, so I completely didn't know what was going on in that class and I had to take the final and write a paper and I didn't know what I was going to do. (This missing-the-History-class is a recurrent theme within these back-to-high-school dreams.)
I had a bottle of wine in my hand and was wandering the hallways as classes had let out and other students were going from class to class. I realized I was obviously drunk and I decided to leave the school and go home. I had already missed 2 days of school that week for being sick, and what difference would one more day make? I dropped my bottle of wine in the trash on my way out. It was raining as I left, and I was getting wet. Another teacher from earlier in the dream followed me out. I noticed that she rummaged through the trash and got out my bottle of wine, and she was pulling one of those old-lady carts that people use to carry groceries or laundry. Hers was piled up with bundles of clothes and on top of that several bottles of alcohol. She was obviously a drunk. She talked to me a bit, said some encouraging words about leaving school. I decided though, a bit emotional as I did so, that leaving wasn't the answer, that I kept coming back to this idea of being in school again even though I have two college bachelor's degrees, and why did I need to be in high school again? Why did I need to keep coming back to this? There was a slight meta-awareness that this was a dream that I kept coming to, but not enough to go lucid. I just decided to head back into school and see what I could do to change this.
I went back into school, again still somewhat drunk and stoned, and tried to go see a guidance counselor to see if I really in fact needed to be in school for this one extra year, if I actually needed to complete the year or not. I found a line full of badly-behaving kids, and there was a sort of mean but smiling teacher watching over them, the kind of teacher that the dumber jocks in a school would like. I asked him if this was the right line to see a guidance counselor, and he told me it was and gave me a form to fill out.
As I filled out my form I struck up a conversation with the person in line in front of me. His name was Te, and he was some sort of South American Indian. We decided to wander away from the line, from the guidance counselor, and we chatted as we walked. I told him my story. We walked through a sort of field of cacti, except the cacti were really more composed of spider's web, and within the spider's web were wildly colored fish. As the web stuck to us, the fish would try to attach themselves to us. I was simultaneously repulsed by this and fascinated; it was really very beautiful. Te continued on, not entirely oblivious but faintly amused that I was paying attention to this at all; it was very commonplace to him, and marked me as naive or inexperienced. He told me that he there were only 25 of his people left alive on the planet. He was very beautiful and striking, looking somewhere between Latino and maybe Thai, with ear-length wavy black hair, and a single long fingernail, very long, obviously for ceremonial or religious reasons.
Eventually, we were found by a couple of people from the school. One of them was another person of Te's people; like him she was very beautiful, almost exactly like him, possibly his sister. He was very hostile to her, but in a way that I could tell that whatever their conflict was, he knew that she was right and he was just resisting. He showed his contempt for her by ripping off pieces of his long fingernail and flinging them at her, that was how little respect he had for her. For my part, I was found by a teacher from the school, a woman. I don't remember exactly how but we had had a conflict earlier in the dream. She told me that she was going to help me.
They prepared some sort of ceremony, something which was going to take place more in the mind than in physical reality. My teacher said that she was going to bring me inside of a woman, and that would heal me. I joked that that would be interesting because I hadn't been inside of a woman in over 11 years. They laughed but in a sort of that's-so-besides-the-point kind of way. It began, and she spoke words to me which I unfortunately don't remember. As I heard them I needed to lie down, and I started to weep uncontrollably. I felt like emotion that had been locked up for years was being released, and I couldn't stop crying. Te and his sister/partner stopped their ceremony to come and watch over me and take care of me.
There's an interval, and then I was on the roof of the school. My apartment was up there, sort of half-open to the sky. It was still raining, but my apartment was dry somehow. My cats were there, sleeping soundly. I wandered about the apartment, sort of in a haze, like the way you feel after a difficult test, or after a long project is complete, sort of at a loss for what to do. I began to notice a sound, a sort of harmonious high tone. The sound grew in intensity over several minutes, but was still quiet; when it had started it was so subtle that I barely noticed it, and even after a few minutes I assumed it was still just the sounds of the city.
I also noticed that there were M&M's scattered everywhere, all over the floor, an inch or two deep. The M&M's weren't normal colors but rather saffron and burgundy and crimson and burnt umber, and they all had characters printed on them which were maybe Sanskrit or Thai, something that I couldn't read. The sound continued to grow louder, and I noticed a speaker which I realized was where the sound was coming from. At that point I noticed a woman/girl, not one I'd seen before in the dream. She was either Latina or Indian, and seemed resilient and fun. I asked her if she had set up the loud speaker and she said yes, and said that the sound would heal me eventually, if I let it. I asked her if she had provided the M&M's and she said yes, and said that they collectively reprinted a book which would help me, if I let it.
We went downstairs, and descended back into the school. I wasn't drunk or stoned anymore, and I wanted to go back to the guidance counselors and ask them the question I had wanted to earlier. As we went further down the M&Ms became more sparse; maybe they had been eaten by people in the school. We passed a man who was of the same race as my new helper, and he was giving credit for the loudspeaker to another man of their race, saying it was a brilliant idea. When someone pointed out the M&Ms, which no one could deny were the work of my new female helper, this man scoffed at that, saying saying all she had to do was find that work on the internet and pipe it character by character to the M&M manufacturer.
We continued down and I made it to the guidance counselor's office. The same teacher, the mean and smiling one, was there; he was the counselor. As I entered the room, everyone fell silent, staring at me, sort of uncomfortably. I said, sort of loudly and jokingly, to break the ice, 'Yeah I'm the one the M&Ms are about! It's OK.' Sort of like, I had been through some difficult and scary ordeal, and they didn't know what to say around me, and really I wanted people to just react normally and go about their business.
And then, unfortunately, I woke up.
edit: Katie asked for more paragraph breaks, and what KT wants, KT gets.
