Yup, time to describe a dream I had last night.

The first part of it that I remember clearly was Felicity telling me that she had gotten two tickets to something called Epix Arson, which was some kind of a big deal fetish dance party which might get pretty wild.

Or so I hoped.

She said that the bad news was that the tickets had turned out to be disappointingly expensive… to the tune of $300. I was, quite realistically, stunned by this. I live on nine hundred a month… that’s a sixth of a month’s income there.

So I got all stressed as to how I was going to pay her for my ticket. There was a vague someone in my dream who didn’t get why I was so upset, and I got all indignant and huffy and said “Because a hundred and fifty dollars is a lot of money to someone like me, OKAY?”. Clearly, they had struck a nerve.

Somehow, this segued into me wandering around a dream-fiction version of the high school I went to, Three Oaks Senior High. It wasn’t the real thing, more like a vague impression of it.

Just like my dream version of my home town of Summerside.

And the thing is, every room was completely empty. No desks, no chairs, nothing on the walls. And the rooms no longer had doors, just curtains that flapped in the breeze of the windows,which were always wide open.

Throw in the white walls of Three Oaks, and the effect was very summery and pleasant. I wandered the halls in a state of grand and expansive nostalgia, saying to myself “Ah yes, this room!” and feeling very good indeed.

Eventually, though, the emptiness of all the rooms started to bother me, and so I said to someone “I understand that it’s the middle of the summer and you are ‘between shows’, so to speak…. ”

I don’t remember the end of that question, nor do I remember its answer. I do remember saying to said person that I had graduated in 1991, and I was there just to look around and remember.

Eventually I deduced that the place had been heavily remodeled since I had been there last. Parts of this fictional version of my school (again, not the real place) had been merged via the removal of walls, other parts had been entirely renovated. All in all, the place felt fresh and new and full of new life.

That’s not the freaky part, though. The freaky part didn’t come till I sat down to write this blog entry, and was going over the dream in my mind, when I suddenly realized that this dream took placed in a cleared out version of the same fictionalized version of my high school that I had been to…. in another dream!

I had even remembered, within this recent dream, that a certain door used to lead (rather surprisingly) to a very chic restaurant/nightclub, with candles on each table and people dressed up to the nines in a way that was very attractive without being gaudy or showy.

Like a laid back jazz version of fancy dress.

It had been, in fact, the sort of place where a beautiful chanteuse who is also the romantic interest of the hero sings a slow, smoldering torch song that mesmerizes all the men in an old fashioned black and white movie.

Kind of an odd thing to have connected to a high school, but dreams don’t have to make sense.

And the thing is, I remembered all this during the recent dream. I was remembering a previous dream within a dream! My dreams have become excitingly meta.

As I wandered further, I ran into someone saying “You’ll never guess where I am going!” and I was just about to say “Epix Arson?” when someone else said it first.

Then all this somehow segued into me being in some kind of minimalist Skytrain station with Felicity, possibly on the way to getting to Epix Arson. It, like my fictional high school, was all bare white walls, but instead of being brick it was smooth white stone. There weren’t a lot of people around.

I remember that the way it worked was there was two levels, an upper level where you waited for trains for long trips, and a lower level which was reserved for shorter trips.

Or maybe the other way around. I guess the one level’s trains went further but the stops were further apart geographically.

And everything was okay at first, but the station kept getting weirder and weirder until it started to seem a lot more like Mos Eisley than my sleepy home town of Summerside. And I started getting more and more apprehensive.

And then I realized Felicity was no longer with me, and I was mad at her for abandoning me in this weird place.

I wandered around looking for something familiar, and finally I saw what seemed to be a small bar at the end of one corridor. I was so freaked out that I wasn’t making any assumptions, and so I asked the refreshingly human and normal looking bartender, rather tentatively, “Do you take… Canadian money?”.

Luckily, she said yes. Then I asked her if she knew how to make a Grasshopper, which is a lovely minty cocktail that I adore. She said yes, of course.

And there’s where I apparently ran out of tape, because I don’t remember any of what happened there.

Time for analysis. I feel like there is something very important about my high school being all open and fresh and empty and summery, and how good I felt there. It’s like I was leading a better version of my life, one in which I was secure in my self-worth and worried about a lot less things and felt joy, nostalgia, and truly free.

That is the version of me that I am striving towards, and I felt grateful and privileged that I got to visit it for a while.

I have no idea what Epix Arson means, although I think that in the dream, it represented my freeing myself up emotionally, sexually, and romantically. It is exactly the sort of thing that a freer and more joyful version of me would love to go to.

As for that strange last act, I am not sure what that means. Being mad at Felicity for abandoning me made sense. Not that she ever would do that in the real world, of course. But I have severe abandonment issues and part of me always expects that people I count on won’t be there when I need them,

So maybe the whole “things getting weirder” business was just a setup for that. But I dunno.

I have a lot of dreams where I end up lost. I think perhaps my mind is trying to free itself from my tendency to be afraid to explore because I want to know where the road goes before I set foot on it. In order to do this, it has to force me into situations where I have no choice to explore, and leaving me there.

So maybe all this time, I’ve really been abandoning myself. For my own good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.