I’ve been in one hell of a down mood today. I’m still exhausted from yesterday’s drumcorps rehearsal (90 minute drive to Clawson, another hour in a carpool up to Attica, six-hour rehearsal, then an hour of wrapping-up and eating of pizza, then an hour of riding back to my car and another hour and a half drive home).
But, on top of being severely tired, I had another fucked-up dream last night, which sent me for a tailspin all day. I’ll tell you what, I am getting mighty tired of these dreams where I end up romantically involved (or almost) with someone who isn’t Aaron, and then I wake up feeling guilty and wondering what it all means.
So, in last night’s dream, I was at some sort of percussion seminar/convention, with panels and discussions and performances and such. I remember sitting in on an informal discussion, curled up on a comfy seat in a room full of plushy furniture, leaning forward into the conversation, my hands wrapped around some steaming sweet coffee beverage of some sort. There were some very cool and hip drummers there, and some dorks, and a few hard-headed, closed-minded types that just refused to understand the points I tried to make. (I don’t recall what those points were, or what the discussion was about, only that it had something to do with music.)
At some point after that, we piled into a school bus that had been reserved to take us to various points of interest around the city—I believe the conference was somewhere in Iowa—and to continue our discussions in other venues, like people’s houses or studios or music libraries. We made one stop—I forget where—piled out, enjoyed ourselves, and piled back into the school bus afterward, giddily but intently discussing whatever we’d just seen.
Our next stop was outside an old-looking apartment complex downtown. Only the directors of our city tour knew where the stops were, and the significance of each, so each stop was a surprise to us. One of these directors was a member of the drumcorps I’m currently a member of in real life, and we all followed him up an antiquated and cramped staircase to our next destination. At some point, I’d purchased or been given three bottles of Sobe, and carted them up the stairs of this apartment complex with me, with the intention of presenting them to our next host(s).
When we reached the apartment and were invited in, our hosts were three young women—obviously colorguard types, rather than drummers—and a guy from NA, the first corps I marched back in the mid-90’s. I gave the bottles of Sobe to the guard girls, who thanked me and moved into the living room with the rest of the group—but the guy from NA stayed in the kitchen / entry area and gave me a giant hug, which I gladly returned. After all, I hadn’t seen him in years. We started chatting about how long it had been, and how great it was to see one another.
Then he surprised me with a quite gentle kiss on the lips and said, “I wish things could have worked out between us.” I nodded in understanding, while thinking that my life would have been completely different if I’d dated this guy instead of Aaron. I was also more than a little confused, because I knew that he hadn’t felt that way toward me while we were in corps together, or afterward, and there really was nothing there to have “worked out” in the first place.
The conversation was still going strong in the other room when he embraced me and kissed me again, obviously going for a more passionate kiss this time. I figured, WTF, it’s been years since I kissed someone besides Aaron—so I let him. I started to return the kiss like I would with Aaron, but this guy’s style was more… immature? Gung-ho? Kind of like the first guy I ever french kissed: flailing tongue, completely not getting the point. This guy, though, had a weird, rough tongue, like a cat’s. Then I got a dream-image of him picking up a pen with his cat-tongue and drawing a kitty-smiley-face on my tongue. (Hey, everything makes sense in a dream, right?) That just sealed it for me that he was still way too immature for me… but then the cat-tongue sensation went away and we kept kissing.
Meanwhile, the discussion in the living room was wrapping up, and people started to file out of the apartment and into the stairwell. But my friend and I couldn’t seem to break away from each other. We wanted to keep talking, and kissing, even while the guy in charge said it was time to go. We kept saying our goodbyes after the last person had left the apartment, and had left the door open for me. Finally, finally, we traded cellphone numbers and e-mails and goodbyes, and I ran down the stairs to the bus—
And the bus was gone.
I freaked out in that particularly dreamlike way, looking frantically up and down the city street, and saw a school bus rounding a corner a few blocks up. I started running toward it, turning the corner behind it, but couldn’t quite catch up before it made another turn and was gone. I didn’t know where I was—I was in a strange city in Iowa, way far away from home, my stuff was at a hotel a good half-hour’s drive away, and my only chance was to find that school bus before it got out of town.
Of course, it was shortly 2:30 or 3:00pm in my dream, and there were school buses everywhere, dropping kids off from school. I ran frantically after every bus I could find, but never caught up with a single one. I got lost—I couldn’t even have found my way back to the apartment complex where I’d been left behind. Evening came, and night, although I spent the whole time running. I thought that maybe if I got to the outskirts of town, that would accomplish something.
In the morning, I got a call on my cellphone (which, of course, was a sweet swanky cellphone in my dream) from the guy I’d kissed the day before—but, somehow, we couldn’t quite connect. He’d left me a voicemail or something, and I knew it was him from the caller ID. He said something about wondering where I was, and that someone called him and told him I’d never made it back to the hotel. Then I got another call from a different guy friend from my early corps days, telling me that I’d been gone all night (which was the first that I realized it, in my dream), and expressing his concern that I was lost in the city. He said he’d drive into town and help find me. The way I figured, the only way he could have known I was lost was because the guy in the apartment had called him and asked for his help. I kept getting e-mails and text messages on my phone from these two guys, trying to pinpoint where I was and how I got so damned lost, but I was tired and cold and hungry and kept falling asleep while staring at my cellphone display.
While I was dozing in my dream, my alarm clock woke me up in real life. So, I never found out if I ever got un-lost, or who found me, or if the bus left me on purpose.
I’m positive this shit means something. Sure, I can tie together the pieces from real life: my senior corps is going to perform at a winterguard / indoor drumline competition in Michigan in two weeks, hence the percussion symposium. But the guy in the apartment? I hadn’t even thought of his name for years. WTF?