Dream:8

I had been sick or busy or something. It didn’t really matter what the excuse was. It was accepted. I was being escorted up and through a large building. In dreams people and places are painted in feelings and memories rather than in shape or in color. And this building was constructed around a single memory. Perhaps I was 9 or 10. And for a reason I have no hope of remembering I had to go to school but it was, as it is now, the end of June, and school was over. The windows were open. The curtains were open. There were no students of course and only a few teachers and the school was just so open and quiet and sunny. Desks were piled on top of each other in the halls and class rooms were empty. This is how the building was in my dream. Not in appearance so much but in feeling. My escort was a hulking quiet man perhaps modeled after Harry Potter’s Hagrid or Survivor’s Rupert. I was in the building to take my exam which I had missed. I didn’t know the building. And I had no knowledge of what the class had been or what the exam was going to be but it wasn’t one of those dreams where you’re back in school and you realize you have to take a test for a course you didn’t go to and you’re panicked because you’re quite convinced you don’t know anything about the spontaneous combustion engine or Australian rugby rules and strategies.

The journey through this building was odd and long but relaxed. It was as if I were in somebody else’s car for somebody else’s journey and I just watched. There was an elevator in this building. We moved from floor to floor in an instant. We found our destination but it occurred to me that if I were going to take an examination that I had better relieve myself so I excused myself to go to the washroom. My large escort was, just for a moment, surly that I would have waited until just now. Evidently it was critical that I be in the examination room in four minutes. I found a washroom that was poorly marked. It was clean, hyper-clean, sunny and ultra-modern. When I returned to my escort he turned me over to my proctor. I shook my escort’s hand to thank him for delivering me. I remember that I hadn’t washed my hands after going to the bathroom and wasn’t that deliciously dirty?

My escort left me with a wink and a smile and my proctor took me into the examination room. The room was cluttered and messy. I naturally spent most of my time cleaning up. I couldn’t take the exam in this squalor. Squalor is very distracting. I was beautifying my surroundings so I could concentrate on the exam. I still didn’t know what the exam was for. My proctor, a beautiful young spirited happy gypsy of a girl, also took to cleaning. She was completely unoffended that I was cleaning what must have been her space. She helped clean because it seemed like a good idea. It was TV’s Ellen. I was taking my time and was completely unhurried. I even remember that I knew that I would easily pass the exam and that, with some effort, could get an A. I still didn’t know what the exam was. I saw my own competency and it was nice. And I was thoroughly relaxed because I knew I was competent.

Ellen started telling me that she was a writer and I told her, in what I remember to be an eloquent sentence, that, while there were many others, it was my singular biggest aspiration. I knew I had passed the exam I hadn’t yet started right then.

Ellen the Proctor set up some sort of platform. The exam was something like building a puzzle. But not merely putting together a cardboard puzzle, something else. Ellen started flirting with me. I flirted back because I knew that I could. I had barely started the exam. I had entirely seduced her. What’s interesting, she had seduced me too even though that hadn’t been my plan.

When she thought I was concentrating on my work and that I wouldn’t notice she came out of an antechamber behind me. But I had turned around. And caught her. I hadn’t just turned around and happened to catch her. I was sitting the wrong way around waiting for her to return. When she returned she was bare-assed naked and flushed from what I knew immediately to be and from what I knew she knew I knew to be self-pleasure. It was a moment without any shame. We were both enchanted.

I returned to my exam. The examination ended in some climatic moment. I don’t remember the point of it much except that I was organizing pieces. The final moment involved me setting three separate pieces of the puzzle on fire which consumed each other prettily. I understood that there was no other combination of things than these three things that could produce fire and I also understood that this stroke of genius and luck would secure my A. Ellen, my proctor, my pixie, was suitably impressed. I went to the bathroom after to clean up. She was vacuuming. I knew she was looking to see if her advances would be accepted. It was that moment. That moment where a boy and a girl look to each other for approval. But I had decided to deny her advances and I wanted to ensure that I didn’t give her any signs by accident. Some twitch of the face, some awkward smile that might inexorably initiate the boarding sequence.

I can’t say why I denied Ellen. Perhaps I knew it was some bewitching illusion. Not because she was really TV’s Ellen. As if I had found out that the siren sisters, Scylla and Charybdis, were lip-synching. I remember that while vacuuming, Ellen kept looking at me somewhat woefully through the crack in the bathroom door to fetch my approving look which I continued devilishly to deny. And that was that.

Most curious.

SS