Mom and CHT and Tsang Po Po and perhaps one of Mom’s sisters and I all waiting in our house in Sunnyvale, early in the morning, for Mom’s bus. It was still dark outside. We heard it come and I saw them all walking out there and Mom getting on the bus. It was an AC Transit bus, and there was some air of either My Neighbor Totoro or Magritte’s The Empire of Light about it, all lit up in the darkness. I realized Mom was getting on in her long white nightgown and asked TSS and he said that it was normal, lots of people did that for their morning commute.

I was walking with them in a mall. We had a big, quiet, hound-like dog–though not a hound, because I kept hearing this weird rumble at one point and looked over and saw that it was coming from a pair of hounds gnawing on their rawhide bones, and thought how that was normal for hounds because they were noisy dogs, unlike ours. She was large, red, with floppy ears, basically just like Ladybird from King of the Hill. She was very fond of me and trotted alongside me as we walked through the mall, and I petted her peacefully. She was well-behaved. If she roamed away, she would always come back to me.

I was with someone, Ken maybe, and we were talking to Serena as she lay in bed. But this was odd, because she was a younger version of Serena–somehow we’d gone through a tiny time bubble, and I felt so grateful to be able to re-experience talking to her as a younger child, a time that I ordinarily never would have seen again. She seemed to be around 7 or 8 years old, although she was talking about trying to get into math classes at the junior high where she would be starting school next year. She had to test into them and she was worried about how she would do. She seemed very quiet, precocious, well-spoken, like a child in a movie.

It all left me with this weird feeling of nostalgia for high school, but high school in some idealized, alternate universe, really. Missing my family, wanting to make time stop passing and flow the other way.

Yet another school-related nightmare…

I was a hero. Then I was despised.

I don’t remember the first part very well; perhaps it was a fire or something and I just knew I had to save people, so I charged into the fray. Somehow I was the only one who did it and everyone thought I was wonderful. I remember sitting in a car, tired, looking out the window as people said how great it was that people like me were out there.

In the second part, I somehow wound up on the wrong side of the popular crowd, in another dingy, run-down school–a setting and theme very much like my prom dream of a few nights ago. My nemesis this time around had the same personality and mannerisms as Cordelia, but her hair was blonde. In one scene, I was in a basement bathroom, trying to blow my clogged nose (which was stuffy when I woke up as well). I was peeking through the crack in the door, trying to see if her minions were outside waiting for me. In another scene, again in a basement bathroom much like the ones in Dwinelle, I was walking down the hall and saw her waiting in a line stretching out the door of the bathroom. She was wearing a peculiar shiny forest green gown with a plunging V neckline that reached down to her navel, but with a tight, ruched, normal-v-necked dress underneath. She said something cutting to me, and I called her Vanna and said something about how the deep V-neck was for easy hand access if she wanted to be fucked over one of the bathroom sinks, then said, “Bye!” and walked off. Her minions laughed a little at this, which infuriated her. They began a loud conversation about how someone could fall from grace like that–from favored hero to social outcast. In yet another scene, I wound up sitting in some desks in an English class and I had no idea whether I was supposed to be there or not. They were watching a movie. The teacher stalked down the aisle and called out, “You, are you registered?” I didn’t know what to answer. I had no idea what my classes were, if I was registered for this, etc.

I was on my way to the prom. The way to get into the locker room was to ride this sort of cart that smashed right through the overgrown brick wall of the school. I was in the cart with Chris C. and Jamie M. and a very religious girl, among others. The locker room was sort of dark and damp and scary, like a Buffy set. Cordelia Chase was in the locker room and told me I couldn’t put my things into a big locker. I got into my nice clothes and walked out into the hall, where I got in a fight with a big sexist frat jerk. He ended up fighting with a ton of other people, including sumo wrestling with another big fat guy. Then it was almost night, and I was out in the parking lot and getting ready to go. I was with Rahul and Joseah. I looked down and realized I was wearing my brown sweater and a long skirt. “This isn’t nice enough!” I said and wanted to go back to the locker room. I headed back to my car, but then realized I didn’t have my purse or keys. Where could they be? The lot was empty–I didn’t know where anyone had gone, and knew I’d have problems getting to the prom once I was dressed. I decided to worry about that later. There was a baby carrier sitting next to my car, and I realized I had promised someone I would take care of the baby. I had completely forgotten, and I felt sick to my stomach with worry, but it seemed to be OK. I picked it up and went back to the locker room. It was an empty cinder block building with yellowed windows and walls overgrown with semi-tropical vines, looking like a set from Silent Hill or The Eye. Looking down at the baby carrier, I saw that the baby seemed horribly still, but then I shook the carrier a little and it waved its fists and gurgled at me. I went back inside the locker room and the virtuous evangelical Christian girl was inside and started making oblique, sinister references to prophecy and evil. My chest of drawers was there and I started opening all the drawers and trying to get into my clothes. I couldn’t find anything nice to wear, just T-shirts and scarves and jeans. At the same time, I started to feel an evil presence in the room and worry about it. The alarm clock went off, and I woke up.

Rahul and I were going to get married. We saw a church that looked really nice from the outside and invited a bunch of people to come check it out (for an engagement party or something–not the real event). We showed up, and to our horror, the church was a total dump inside, like a crack house. There were homeless guys in sleeping bags sleeping in the aisles, garbage scattered everywhere, broken windows. We didn’t know what to say to the 20 or 30 people milling around nearby. Darragh and Jen were there, but I forget who else. This dream was probably influenced by hearing This American Life twice yesterday–the theme was “terrible houses” and they told the story of an old man whose house got taken over by whores and crack addicts so that he hadn’t been upstairs in years.