I was in my ex-boyfriend Chris's dorm room, which looked like my younger sister's bedroom with Chris's dorm furniture in it. I wasn't sure how I had arrived there, but he and I weren't questioning that at the time. In the dream, it seemed somewhat natural that I should be there. He and I hadn't spoken since we broke up in November, and we agreed to talk about how we'd been since then.
He didn't mention the breakup at first. He acted as though we had never dated at all, as though we had been casual friends the whole time. I could tell that acting like this was putting a strain on him, though.
Finally, Chris said, "Look, of course I miss you, Laurie, and of course I've thought about getting back together with you. I know you're the best girlfriend I'll ever have."
He was interrupted by a knock at the door. A highly obese kid with a lot of acne was standing in the doorway, sucking on a popsicle. He looked about sixteen. The hall outside Chris's room looked like the hallway of my freshman dorm.
"Hey Chris!" the kid said. "Wanna go grab dinner?"
"Not now," Chris said, and shut the door.
"I guess you've made a whole bunch of great pals since dumping me," I said with a slight sneer. "Especially online. I still can't believe that you blocked me on IM."
"Let me show you something, Laurie," Chris said. He went to his computer and opened his buddy list. He had a new screen name, "Guinea Pig 1." The only person on his buddy list was "Mom."
"I bet you have a bunch of cheesy mp3s, then," I said. I sat down at his computer and opened a folder entitled "music." Inside were twelve mp3s by David Gray and Macy Gray. Out of nowhere, "Babylon" started playing in the background.
"I bet you didn't like this song until it was obvious that it was going to be really popular," I said.
Chris didn't understand that I was subtly mocking him. "Wow!" he said. "How did you know?"
He opened another file then. It was supposedly a video of our first kiss, though something was definitely wrong. In the video, I was much older: I had my hair professionally done, and I was wearing a business suit. Chris, however, was much younger: he was a scrawny kid of ten or eleven, wearing a grubby t-shirt. We kissed briefly across a breakfast table, looking like a mother kissing her son goodbye. I then picked up a briefcase and left, while the younger Chris stayed at the table and finished his sugary cereal. The video ended. I raised my eyebrows at what I had just seen, remembering what I had thought to be our *real* first kiss, but I didn't say anything.
Chris lay down on the bed, and I lay next to him. We stayed like that, side by side, not saying much of anything. I wouldn't look him in the eye. Instead, I mainly looked at his hair and his nose, the latter of which seemed very long. For a minute, I actually considered the possibility that I was dreaming, but quickly rejected it.
"Wait a minute," I said aloud to Chris. "I remember a dream I had last week where I confronted you about something. Let me make sure I use the same words this time."
Chris looked confused. "Okay."
"I know about the party," I said.
"What party?" he said.
"The party at school!" I said. "The one where you got trashed and then publicized your drunkeness on the Internet because you were so proud of yourself! The one that caused me to try to stick a steak knife through my hand when I found out about it!" I paused to see Chris's reaction. He seemed unfazed.
"I'm going to a psychiatrist in January to go on antidepressants," I went on. "This will be the third counselor I've seen because of you."
Chris just shrugged.
In the next part of the dream, we were outside, walking down a street by a building that looked like my old elementary school. Chris was holding a rubber baby doll. At one point, he dropped it in the street and an old car driven by a young woman nearly ran it over. I tried to allude to The Great Gatsby for a moment, but Chris didn't get it.
He picked up the baby doll, walked up the steps to the school, and tried to drop the doll into a trash can. "No!" I yelled at him. "Don't throw it away! It's not ruined yet!" So he went back to holding the doll, and he and I began walking inside.
As we headed into the elementary school, I said, "I bet you smoked cigarettes at that party."
He said, "I don't want to tell you if I did or not."
I said, "Come on. I want to know."
He said, "If I told you, it wouldn't be a very good acquisition of my character."
I started to say that he had used the word "acquisition" in a very George W. Bush-like way, but I didn't want to insult him too badly. Instead, I said, "So you DID start smoking. Well, that's great. You've done pretty much everything you swore to me and to yourself that you were never going to do. You've become the person you never wanted to be."
Soon, we were back in his dorm room, which was apparently in the elementary school. The other guys on his hall were making a lot of noise; some of the guys hadn't even developed deeper voices yet. Chris sat on the floor of his room, while I sat on the bed.
"Everyone I know thinks I'm so much better off without you," I said to him. "Even the people who *seemed* to like you before. Like Laura. Apparently she thought you were a loser all along."
Chris started laughing at this.
"And my mom thinks you're really immature," I went on. "She's been telling me that since the beginning. And even my sister said that you were a much bigger loser than her druggie ex-boyfriend."
