Maybe because I've been keeping this dream journal, everything in my life more and more resembles a dream. The gate between waking and sleeping, once opened, allows traffic in both directions. And as I think about school and how my life has been spent in classrooms, that too is becoming dreamlike.
But who is the dreamer?
I remember edges of conversations and blurred faces in the dream that is school. Never content. Never content. Other students loom against chalkboards, their tiny hands gripping pieces of chalk and writing mysterious symbols across the green fields. I remember walls covered with vapid images of totemic animals, white teeth bursting from demonic grins, who exhort me to behave in obscure and difficult ways.
And there is a secret current that flows through the rooms, alive as wind and thick as water, that jerks a drone from the mouths of teachers and shocks the other students to madness.
Do we dream each other?
Easy enough to say that America has dreamed us, that history has dreamed us, that we are the spectral doppelgangers of our grandparents desire for knowledge, that in the even light of classrooms we are sleepwalkers in the ideas of other people.
I remember a muscle in a neck, watching milk droplets parachute down through clear water in a cafeteria drinking glass in slow motion, running across half bare fields, runny noses, and dull crayons with their wrappers stripped off. I don't remember the name of the third president or the way to solve a quadratic equation.
I call all the people who ever shared a classroom with me to meet together in the open air, in bright light, so that we can look each other in the eyes and wonder.
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