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Where No One Knows Your Name

Have you ever had one of those dreams where it seems suddenly no one knows who you are even though you remember everyone? You’ll approach your best friend and she’ll look at you like you’re insane, pass you a quarter, and hurry away. Your own mother shows less sympathy for your apparent insane desire to get into her house; she simply calls the cops or has your father aim a shotgun at you.

I didn’t have a dream quite that dramatic, but I woke up shaken and I’m still shaken, even though I’ve rejoined the real world and have been watching television for 45 minutes. I can’t explain why I’m so shaken except that it was very similar to those dreams where no one knows your name, those dreams from which I usually wake up stunned and heartbroken. I usually recover within minutes, but today that feeling has stuck.

Richard had talked us into exploring some local folklore. By “us” I mean myself and a random assortment of people we apparently knew but whom right now I can’t seem to recall. They weren’t “good friends” by any means, just the sort of acquaintances in the background whom you’ve gotten to know through other people. Some of them may have just been movie extras. In any case, we were to spend the night in an open field upon which there were two structure. They looked like wire shelves to me, very uncomfortable and extremely unstable, but his idea was to sleep on these things. To the sides were several benches and I begged Richard to keep company with me on one of the benches but he refused and we slept separately. Or at least, we woke up separately. This is one of those shady parts that most dreams have: I remember clearly falling asleep on the shelf underneath his, holding his hand which was dangling down and seeing a tuft of his hair peeking out over the edge. When I woke up, however, I was on one of the surrounding benches.

The point, he said, was to disprove some legend that witches and other magical creatures visited that clearning at night and devoured whatever was there. I’m not superstitious and usually don’t believe in this sort of thing, and my dream self was no different. I wasn’t worried about mysteriously disappearing in the night or waking up to find a gnome knawing on my foot; I was only cold, and I wanted to be close to the boy I loved in whatever endeavor he chose to embark upon.

Everyone was very excited and very hungry, so I brought out the prepackaged turkey sandwiches which somehow just turned out to be packages of lettuce that tasted like turkey, and we munched for a while - myself and the token fat kid in particular. I don’t mean that to sound mean, but he was larger than everyone, and if you would imagine his movie character, he’d be the gentle-hearted big-boned individual of which everyone was afraid because he could, if he wanted, crush your skull. Like me, he didn’t sleep in the wobbly shelving units because he was afraid he’d cause them to topple over. He didn’t want to ruin the fun for everyone else, so we camped on our benches (except that I fell asleep on the shelf).

We slept soundly, or at least I don’t remember any disturbance at this point in the dream. It was cold, and thus slightly uncomfortable, but somehow that didn’t matter as soon as sleep drifted in. It was dreamless and deep and wonderful, and when I woke up I felt very refreshed and ready to laugh along with the others that we had disproved this local piece of folklore and could go about our lives.

Except when my token large man and I woke up, everyone else was gone.

At first the shelving units were just as they were when we arrived - not in the best shape, but still holding up - but after walking around peering inside, looking everywhere for signs of life, they toppled over and came crashing to the ground. The surrounding area was perfectly silent, no noise except that which the crash made, and no sign of life, not even a bird. We looked at each other and started running, panicked, back towards home. He went his way and I found mine to my parents’ house where I cannot remember my intent. Was I going to call the police? Was I going to start a search for the bodies? Was I just going to hole up in my bedroom and cry for days?

Contrary to what the first paragraph in this post implies, my parents knew who I was. I arrived and started to frantically tell them what had happened, how my boyfriend had disappeared into thin air, without a trace, just like that, until I noticed the clutter. My parents’ house was full of broken dishes, socks that were lost, and miscellaneous objects that were indeterminable against the objects next to them. It was clutter with no organization, and it was everywhere.

My mother informed me that they were robbed sometime in the night and they were trying to pick up the pieces. Some of the things in their living room weren’t even theirs, and they wanted to find out whose so they could return them, but they couldn’t figure out why they would have so many things that belonged to other people. They couldn’t figure out how the robber came in with foreign objects, trashed their entire house, and left again, without taking any of their most treasured valuables, without waking them up (the bedroom was in a similar state), without leaving any trace of who they were or how to catch up with them.

I was shocked and devastated. I didn’t know what to say. Immediately my thought was that this was somehow related to the field in which I slept last night, that our spending the night there was as if we handed someone the key to my parents house and let them in to do as they please. There’s no logic in that, of course, and I knew deep down it was just a coincidence; but at the moment, I wanted something that I could blame on Richard so I could be mad at him. I couldn’t very well be mad at him for randomly disappearing, though it was his idea to sleep there in the first place, so I decided to blame him for the burglary at my parents’ house.

I went to my room and cried. I took in a few meals so it must have been days, maybe even a week. Time dragged. I slept through most of it, but it seemed like I’d wake up only an hour later.

Around this time, in my bed in my apartment in “real” life, I woke up. I was half asleep and tears were streaming down my face. I sometimes cry during my sleep if I’m crying in my dreams; I haven’t researched this at all so I don’t know if it’s normal or if it’s likely, but it happens. I looked at the time and while I was trying to determine how many hours I had been asleep, I fell back to sleep, back into my depressed, lonesome self at my parents’ house, crying over a lost love and wondering why no one else seemed to care.

It was true, no one had come to me, not even my fat man, to ask what had happened to their children that night, their friends, their loved ones. It was as if I was the only person in the world who remembered any of them.

“There’s a visitor for you down stairs,” my mother came in one day to tell me as she was still carrying loads of indeterminable smuck from one end of the house to the other. As I found my strength and crawled down the steps, I saw that not much had changed in the house. It was still a clutter, still a complete mess, still unlivable. I wondered why there wasn’t any clutter in my bedroom.

The porch was empty but I could see through the screen door that Richard was standing on the driveway with a few of the other people who went missing that night. He was clean. His hair was long, down to his shoulders, but it was combed down and dyed. His beard had obviously been washed and shaped into a bunchy lion’s beard; he looked perfectly kingly. His clothing was clean and nice. The others had similar looks - very pristine, untattered, shiny and pressed. For a moment I was so shocked to see him and so shocked at his appearance that I couldn’t breathe. No movement came to my legs and my heart pounded through my universe.

I walked silently to him with tears in my eyes. I wanted nothing more than to embrace him, to hold him close and never let him go, but he gave me a foreign look which I didn’t immedately translate. I approached him and he backed away, again, then once more. He didn’t know me. Our friends remembered me, but only as a friend, not as Richard’s girlfriend. My mother didn’t seem to know him either when she came out to offer everyone drinks. Here I was standing in front of the one person I ever wanted to be with, and only I remembered that we were in love. A future I thought I had lost but which was now standing just a few feet in front of me… Only to find out that I really did lose it, it was gone. Either I had made it up entirely and had never met this person, or I was the only one to be truly affected by the magic that night in the field.

I woke up again in my apartment bed and the tears were gone. My heart felt empty and I didn’t want to get out of bed, so I just stared at my night stand and sighed.

Keyword: Skipping Classes

Recently, I’ve been having several dreams about skipping class. They aren’t always actively about skipping class, where I’m in the dream thinking “I really don’t feel like going to class today,” and then don’t. For the most part, it seems, either I forget to go to class all together, I don’t realize I’m in school and should be going to class until someone reminds me, or I’ve gotten to the point already that I’ve skipped so many classes, I should probably start going to school again.

I think these are recurring dreams since I got out of high school, during which I never skipped a class, but they were always past classes that I was skipping. I never dreamt during college that I was skipping a class that I was currently taking. When I graduated college, my dreams moved from classes I may have taken to classes which were completely out of the blue and weird - dream classes, like Mathematics classes which required you to draw clouds and Paleontology classes which weren’t offered at my college but I’m damn sure that would have been awesome.

Sometimes the focus isn’t even on school; I’ll just suddenly think about how many classes I’ve skipped while I’m saving the world or running for my life, or enacting in some other dream which seems wholly unrelated to school. Clearly this is an issue.

I am fascinated with dream dictionaries and the idea of a collective conscious, but I don’t actually believe dreams “tell the future” or any such nonsense. I think that recurring dreams can bring to light an anxiety or issue, or even a happiness in your life, but that this doesn’t always necessarily pan out. Honestly, I haven’t looked into it enough to make a real statement of what I believe as far as dreams go, but I have visited the New Age section several times, reading up on what fortune tellers and astrologers alike think dreams mean, and I know I don’t agree with that. I don’t think anyone’s mind can tell them the future, and certainly not through a series of random synapses.

I’d like, however, to know what this could possibly mean. I’m not going to seek experts; usually what I do is look up an online dream dictionary and take their interpretation of it and morph that into my own. It all makes sense, of course - dreaming about your lover cheating means you’re anxious about him cheating, or that you’re seeing signs of him cheating but you won’t admit it to yourself; dreaming of trains is symbolic of life’s journey and your interpretation of your journey based on what happens on the train.

I am curious, however. I want to know what it means to have a recurring dream about skipping class not only throughout school (that could be explained easily) but continually once you’re out of school, not always about the specific college you went to (sometimes it’s about being at another college in another stage of my life, about visiting someone else’s high school and skipping their classes too, or about having to go back to high school even though I’m my current age and then skipping classes then), and when you don’t have any plans to re-attend school. I can’t possibly be having a literal anxiety about skipping classes; I’m not in school, I don’t plan to go back unless it’s for an abruptly obtained associate’s degree which will probably consist mostly of online classes, and I’m not in any way holding on to any “regrets” I may have had throughout high school and college - I never skipped class in the former, and I skipped a healthy amount in the latter. My grades wouldn’t have been any higher.

Clear to me is that this is not about skipping classes. It’s some other anxiety, or perhaps the skipping classes is symbolic of something else. I’m usually pretty good at putting my finger on it and dealing with it, but this time I’ve reached out for help I can’t find. Even typing “school” as a keyword isn’t coming up, and when it does, it’s not about skipping classes. It’s gotten to the point where it’s actually starting to bug me - not that I can’t find answers, but that I just keep having these dreams. Sometimes I’m totally cool with it, others I get completely stressed out that I’ll fail.

I don’t associate school with life. I’m using my degree in an extremely peripheral way; I’m an English major who decided to make a career out of bookselling. I find it to suit me perfectly. But maybe sometimes I’m okay with the way things are going, and sometimes I feel like I’ll totally fail in life.

Or maybe it’s something else entirely.

If I Were Ever to Fictionalize My Life

It would probably sound something like this:

Last night I kept imagining that you would burst out through the hallway, half asleep and stumbling, and wrap your arms around me. You’d hold me, keeping me warm and safe, and only let go as you felt yourself falling asleep. Just that gesture would bring me to the world where I dream, but you didn’t. Instead, I sit here with an hour of sleep, curled up inside a blanket with holes, my hands in between my legs trying to find any warmth that may be left. My entire right arm is so cold, it could break with any sudden contact. And at that moment, I imagined myself dancing across my face in stop-motion animation fast forwarded, losing time at the same pace life passes. I was a tiny paper doll with my features and my clothing; I crawled out of my eye without any difficulty and lightly petted my cheeks with soft shoes. This little vision I had could almost be mistaken for truth; my eyes were closed, and the sound of water trickling through the walls could vaguely be mistaken for tiny dancing feet.

I kept imagining a man with no face. He wore a Greek tragedy mask; it was so sad and so angry that I couldn’t face it. I’d hear the shifting of weight on carpet, first the left foot, then the right, continue down the hallway. It never got too close, but the TV would crack and the window would creek and I’d turn from the wall and look over my shoulder to see a very brief vision of this man. He would disappear as soon as I laid eyes on him, but I feared every time I turned around that he would return. I considered facing the living room instead of the wall, but decided against it. I did not want to open my eyes for a peek and see this horrible face immediately in front of me. I was terrified, but more content with moving to see him behind my shoulder. I imagined he would have a gun. He’d tell me to open my eyes, and I’d feel it on my forehead, the cold, hard metal rim digging into my skin. I’d beg him to write down some final words, hoping that he would pity a poor, cold, lonely girl. I’d write “another leaf falls,” with reference to The Iliad, a small way of comforting those who might be saddened by my death. He would shoot not once, but twice, and then disappear. Of course, after this point I would have no consciousness, but as this is a daymare, my former shining knight would come running out of the bedroom, startled and bewildered to see me lying on the couch, dead with two gunshot wounds. No guns or foes in sight, and the door would still be locked.

At one point, around 4 am, I became terrified of fires. I started thinking about all the things I’d want to take with me, and how all these things were in completely opposite locations in the apartment. It became such an obsession of thought that I forced myself out into the cold to gather these things all in one place. My copy of Aeneid and Iliad and oh, what the heck, my small notebook in which I kept my notes on these books; my journal, which chronicles the first few months of this year; the cigar box where we keep all our smaller important things (the larger important things are in a fire-proof safe); a book of crossword puzzles, because what if we find we are bored sitting outside waiting for the firemen to extinguish our house? I included two pairs of socks, in case we were barefoot; there were two Beefaroni meals, a precaution to late-night or early-morning hunger. Most of my photographs are at my parent’s house, but I stuffed the Polaroids in there, as well as the Polaroid camera and my digital camera. The Olympus and the antique video camera I put in their own separate camera bag, but both of these are carryable in one trip, so long as I still have two arms. I don’t know why, but I saved the embroidered bird napkins I bought from an antique store, several pens and sharpie markers, and a book of stamps. And then I kept thinking of my paintings and art, and how I wish they’d fit in the bags, but perhaps by the time there’s a fire one of us will be able to swipe those off the walls on our way out. They are vanity and not quite so important as pens at four o’clock in the morning, I guess. My next thought was that he should be able to contribute his important things to the bag, but I didn’t want to wake him up. I didn’t know if I was allowed that luxury of showing him how completely insane I felt.

I found one hour of sleep and didn’t get there until after the sun had risen. I’m afraid of the dark, you know. I have awful visions and they aren’t of sugarplums. Sometimes I can’t get my mind off the triangle-headed character from the Silent Hill (I believe?) video game and though he isn’t enacting any sort of violence in my mind, I can’t close my eyes to that thought. I have to force myself to think of something less frightening; last night, I tried smoking for the first time. I went to my car and coughed up a storm with an old cigarette. I don’t even know where I got it, but it was just there, in my hand, waiting to be inhaled. I had to stop thinking of this when I imagined rabid wild animals jumping at my windows, sort of like Cujo; I’ve never seen the movie nor read the book. I’m not sure what eventually put me to sleep. All my thoughts were violent. I didn’t dream, thankfully, and woke up to a car alarm. It was 62 degrees on the thermostat, which means he must have gotten up sometime in the night and brought the temperature down. I don’t remember seeing him, but maybe that’s where the foot steps came from. Maybe I didn’t turn around quickly enough, frightened of what might not be there. When one hears footsteps all night and nothing materializes, one may think a number of things: Myself, that there was a ghost, or that I was losing something rational within myself. Frightening either way, especially as I do not believe in ghosts.

Though, I should note: this is all true.

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