This entry and all others from 1996-97 are part of my dream project which extended from August 1996-97. I kept track of my dreams for an entire year by recording them to audiocassette and illustrating what parts I could in composition books. I ended up with over 70 ninety-minute cassettes and four composition books detailing my dreams.
The written transcription is from a much later date than 1996-97 but is almost word-for-word, with some slight corrections and omissions. This typed transcription is not 100% faithful to the original verbal account, as it allows for slight modifications, additions, omissions, and corrections. There are new separations between paragraphs and dreams are separated into different entries at approximately the right places. In addition, segments of dreams MAY be transposed/moved/added to other sections as I see fit. Aside from these modifications, these dreams are detailed exactly as I had them over six years ago.
If they were not the same dream, this may have then shifted out of "T-Bone & Big Judge."
This dream gets confusing. It was either in this part or in a later part--I went into a well-lit classroom which looked like a room at the high school, only it was nighttime because I remember as I sat down near a seat there was a window to my right, and it was dark outside. Out of the corner of my eye I saw this bright flash and I knew it was lightning. I turned to look out the window but there was nothing there. I was like, "Cool, that was really bright!"
The rest of us were having some kind of spelling bee, and the words were really simple. I had a list of them in front of me; I had written them out so I could look at them while I spelled them because I can't spell things out of my head very easily. Somehow, in my dream, this wasn't cheating, but it was the way we could do it, if we wanted to. I remember John Croft (a student I knew in high school) was in the room, and I think Adam Taylor (?--another student I knew) was in there. My old friend Mya might have been here also. I went to sit at the front of the room. The teacher was in front of us--it was either Mrs. Pletcher or Jan Morley (my high school writing teacher and college composition teacher, respectively). I was sitting down next to Dale Cater (another student) and he was kind of sitting there like a zombie. The word that he was given--not we, because we could answer any time we wanted to--was "build," and he wrote down "duilb," or he spelled out "duilb"--he switched around the B and the D. He said something like he'd been taught to do this, because he wasn't good at spelling; somebody had told him to write the consonants in backwards order and that way it would be spelled right, and this reasoning had something to do with God or religion for some reason. I don't know what that had to do with anything, but he got the word wrong, so I guess he was right in his head (that is, he originally spelled the word right mentally, "build"), but since he followed that rule, he spelled the word wrong (out loud).
It's like everybody in this dream was in some kind of trance, because they were all just kind of passive, just kind of sitting there; and even Dale, when he talked, did so all in monotone--"They told me to do this," he said, in this flat voice, all in monotone. It's like I was the only one who was really alive.
And at the beginning of this dream, I think, it seemed that I was pounding on the classroom door in different ways, though I'm not sure why I was doing that. Maybe it was to get somebody to open the door, or maybe it was to tell which way I should knock on it.
This dream may have been connected to "The Fuzzbuster & A Phone Call From Mya" and "Um, The Dog Ate My Homework."
