a warm place

Dream: Roundabout

I find myself in a hotel. The hotel consists of one large structure shaped like a ring and numerous small buildings running along side it that contain five hotel rooms each. Between the clusters of hotel rooms and the ring is a thirty foot long garden with a small, curvy foot path linking the two.

Curious about the ring, I go inside it and explore. There is nothing exciting about it. There is one large reception hall followed by another. In one room a band is setting up while people are putting up decorations, in another room people are mingling around tables of food, and in another room things weren't much different than the latter.

I manage to annoy one or two people while cutting through these rooms, so I decide to explore outside. It is a mild summer night. I hear people in a nearby pool but I can't see them; the pool is surrounded by trees, bushes, and a fence made of brick and wrought iron.

Then, I awake from this dream. Well, kinda.

I awake into sleep paralysis. I can open my blurry eyes enough to see my yellow painting ladder in the corner of my bedroom, but I cannot move. This happens every few months and lasts about thirty seconds; it's of no concern to me. One or two minutes pass... mild annoyance turns to mind concern.

I go back inside the hotel. While exploring I recall seeing some switches at the exit that leads to my hotel room. I walk around the ring and find the exit. Sure enough, there are switches and one of them is labeled 'slow time in room'. I turn it off and go to my hotel room.

Then, again, I awake from this dream. This time I can get out of bed.

Dream: Mischievous Art

I was standing at the bottom of a staircase in an art school. The stairs and floor were concrete, the walls had patches of graffiti, and the air breathed a bit differently. The room I was in had two doors perpendicular to one another; one door led elsewhere into the building while the other led outside. Sitting on the floor next to the first door were a couple cans of paint and some cloth that was covered in a sticky substance - supplies leftover from someone's art project. Near the outside door there was a cute girl tucked away in a corner, sitting behind a canvas and facing the sunlit room.

I walked over towards the abandoned art supplies to investigate and found that the cloth could stick to the wall. Feeling creative, I began applying the cloth and paint to the wall without any idea where it might lead. One thing led to another and soon my creation overflowed onto the door, making it impossible to open without fuss.

The female art student took silent interest in my mischievous project, though when she heard someone approaching the stairs she spoke up to urge me to finish. I hastily made my final touches and rushed over to her corner. I stood behind her and put my hand on her waist. Neither of us felt like confronting whoever may be coming down the stairs, and so with that as an excuse she turned to me and we started kissing.

Dream: Memories

I was in my childhood home in St. Louis, in the middle of typical spring-cleaning. In a trash bag I saw a beat up journal, a spiral-bound notebook with a red and blue cover, and the word 'Journal' carved into the cover with a blue ball-point pen.

I grabbed the journal and started flipping through it. Immediately I came across a series of entries I had written that detailed trips a girl and I made to a nature reserve.

Some of the entries had pictures attached. I focused on one particular picture of the girl and the memory of when it was taken surfaced.

We were at the edge of a gravel parking lot, atop a hill, either just starting or finishing up a day at the reserve. My back was to the gravel, facing her. She was a dozen feet away. Behind her were rolling hills of forest. The air was warm and accompanied with a cool breeze. We were laughing, smiling, taking pictures of each other.

In one of the pictures I took, she was holding a cassette tape up to her eyes, peering through the two holes as though they were glasses.

Dream: A Puzzle

I was walking down a wide hallway in a school from the late 19th to early 20th century.

There was a number of students in the hall going to / from class. As I was walking I noticed a girl ahead of me wearing a geeky t-shirt. Pleasantly surprised and impressed, I worked my way up so that I was walking beside her. We exchanged a few words, she got interested in something I said and went off on a mini-tangent.

When she was finished talking I went in front of her, walking backwards to face her for a few seconds so I could see her. This was the first time I got a good look at her. She was about 5' 9", slim, short brown hair (to her ears), glasses, and had an intelligent / geeky look to her. Very cute, very attractive.

We get to her classroom. There are other students congregating around the entrance. The door to the room is wooden with a glass panel in the center. It's partially open and she begins to enter. I want see / talk to her again, and so I catch up to her on the opposite side of the door and I ask her through the glass panel if I could have her email address. She says that she can't - a school policy forbids students to give out their addresses. I asked her "What about a private email address instead?".

After hesitating for a moment, debating with herself, she said she couldn't with teachers around. Then she got an idea. We walked several feet away from the classroom and she got out a pad of paper and a pen. On the paper she was scribbling characters that resembled Japanese.

Pointing to an intentional blank space in the middle of what she wrote, she turned to me and explained the puzzle she had devised. By solving the puzzle her email address would be revealed. I went over the rules of the puzzle with her, to make sure I understood. She smiled and then went to class.

Dream: Small Town Girl

I was dating a girl who lived in a small nearby town. We enjoyed exploring the surrounding countryside and taking day trips together, for we shared an interest in seeing and experiencing new things.

When I learnt that she had never been to St. Louis, I wanted to surprise her with a trip to U-City or Laclede's Landing - both areas I knew would delight her. If traveled by car, it would be a four to five hour drive through beautiful hilly, wooded areas.

Sometime later, we were together in her home town down on a nice, developed lakefront surrounded by woods. It was a summer night and we were accompanied by lots of people out enjoying themselves. There was a party or celebration taking place; people were lighting fireworks, so perhaps it was Independence Day.

My girlfriend was not pleased with me. I was saddened. I could sense her feelings - she was confused, uncertain, flirting with separation but not wanting anything to come between us. This was her first relationship, we had our first fight, and she was having difficulty with the emotions that surfaced in her. I felt anxious; I loved her.

Later that night, while lightening some fireworks, I remember feeling better. Her and I must have worked things out and afterwards went off to do our own things for awhile. However, I felt her presence close by - I think she was in a nearby crowd of people watching the fireworks.