I was a college student listening to an inept and inaudible guest lecturer on Buddhist meditation. It seemed like she was saying all students in the class had to devise a wooden flute. A shakuhachi, I told myself, pleased that I knew, but the job itself seemed well beyond my abilities. Alarmed by being stuck with it, I changed my seat several times as I worked my way to the front. The class’s regular teacher, a sour grad student with whom I'd clashed, thought I was a skeptic about meditation and that I wanted to disrupt the talk. No! A couple of brisk, burly fellows came in and removed some trouble-making young men, but they didn’t remove me. I held on to the awareness that I knew the flute was called a shakuhachi. In the end I figured I could show myself to be in the right if I cited a particular passage in a mystery novel that was set in ancient Rome. On Amazon I tried and failed to pin down the title and author, getting more agitated as they eluded me. (Now I’m awake and know the author: Lindsey Davis. I read a couple of her books many years ago.)
I had a classic anxiety dream, one involving college courses that I hadn’t studied for and had forgotten I was enrolled in. The setting was a SUNY college, one contained in a round tower that rose level by level, everything open to the air except the classrooms themselves. Sunshine everyplace, then the dimness of the lecture halls, which were round like donuts. More of a California setting, but I knew myself to be at SUNY and the place was thronging with students. I was the age I am now—old. I looked for my classroom because I wanted a place to be, I didn’t want to be rattling around on the outside. Then I realized I’d look odd coming in, since the semester was half-done and I’d never shown up before. I flared up at a student who was making trouble for me, and then another student lectured me on the cool one ought to maintain when speaking out. He took a call and from his end I recognized he was doing editorial work for my old company. Off the phone, he confirmed this. Not a classic anxiety dream by the end, though I did seem at loose ends, unable to find my slot.
I had a long, turbulent, and upsetting dream about a presentation by a pair of iconoclastic fantasy authors who seemed primarily to be practitioners of some sort of punked-up black magic. The event took place at my old elementary school but had been organized by one of my college professors. It sounds odd rather than disturbing, but I woke up with my heart beating hard. I don’t know which professor it was; just a professor, unspecified.
A brother and sister from a family of intellectuals were having a dispute about her treatment of him, he was 17 at this point and she was 23 or so. They were going to hash out the matter in a debate before an audience of more intellectuals, older men of sober demeanor. The setting was a gathering hall with wood paneling, wood screens, perhaps long wooden benches or perhaps folding chairs. As the audience gathered, boy and girl got into a harangue before the actual proceedings began. I, and perhaps I was there to cover events for a magazine, slipped upstairs to use the palatial bathroom. I congratulated myself that it was all my own while everybody else was distracted by events. A poor way to cover the event, of course.
I felt that the boy was reproaching the girl for behavior from years back, before she had learned better and changed. Also, it occurred to me that one shouldn’t use bathrooms in dreams and I woke up.
—C.T. May has written for Splice Today since 2010.