I had dreams last night. And I don’t know whether it was the dreams or reality, but I swear there were a dozen tiny earthquakes. I’d turn over in my sleep and hear things rattling softly in my room. There’s a train that goes by about a quarter mile away, maybe that’s what did it. But I’ve never noticed it before….
In my dream, the one I remember specifically anyway, I was in a car, driving with someone somewhere through the Arizona
The driver and I looked up. Above us—and scarily, not that far above us, maybe a couple hundred feet—a man in one of those gliding parachutes was hanging from something—a plane or helicopter, I couldn’t quite see it—and looked as if he was caught. It also looked like he wasn’t even buckled in, just hanging by the arms from the straps. I somehow knew he was going to die.
We kept driving and he freed himself from the vehicle from which he was hanging and started gliding to and fro. But there were water cyclones, bunched in 3s (I tend to dream about tornadoes…I’m sure there’s some Freudian thing going on there), and he got sucked into the gravitational pull (gravitational is not the word I’m looking for—it’s like when you’re standing too close to a train when it goes by and instead of the air knocking you backwards, it pulls you in) and was whipped around it a few times.
He broke free only to be immediately sucked into another vortex, and this time his luck ran out. The water collapsed his parachute. He fell 200 feet to the desert floor and landed legs out. He just sat there for a long moment, like a crash test dummy, and I knew his organs must be turned to jelly, strained around his ribs and hip bones like jell-o through a fork. As we drove away, he slowly slumped over, and I never saw him again.
This was just a 5 minute section of what felt like a 10 hour dream. But it was so disturbing that it stuck with me, even a half hour after I’ve woken up. I think other things happened, more aligned with an adventure than the witnessing of a traumatic freak accident in the sky, but I can’t remember much of it, which is sad, because I felt like something fascinating happened that, in the dream, made me forget the death I’d witnessed.
Maybe it was the port. The very little I had last night at the Formal Dinner (which is quite possibly the most formal dinner I’ve ever been to—we were served and had nameplates and had to stand at certain times and eat with different forks and drink from different little tiny glasses) was enough to convince me that I never have any desire to try it again. I cannot tell if it was “bad” port or “good” port, but it was “nauseating” port, and every time we toasted and took a sip, I couldn’t keep the grimace off my face. Think “cough syrup meets maple syrup meets Everclear.”
Our Programme Instructor and one of our two academic advisers (who may well be my tutor this term), as well as one of the two JCR presidents, all wore tuxedoes. It was quite fun that they owned and regularly wore such things, and that they were wearing them last night strictly for our benefit.
I had been fully intending to take a cab home last night, not because I (or anyone) had gotten “smashed” off the toasting port (as I was told by Monday’s group of revelers that we would), but because I didn’t want to walk home with my heels after having already walked there in them. This would have been a fine idea, but because we had all gotten so chummy during dinner, we all—and by all, I mean 40 of us—decided to go out to a pub afterward to continue in our newfound camaraderie. We walked from St. Catherine’s to the King’s Arms (which was full) to Chequers (which was closed) to The Grapes (I can’t remember why we didn’t stop there) to The Four Candles, which was open, but hot and crowded. We were so close to the street that led to my house that I ended up just walking home instead of staying, and the funny thing is that if I had just decided to walk straight home from our dinner, I probably would have walked at least a half mile less. I was almost crying by the time I opened my front door my feet hurt so bad. But then I crawled into my incredibly comfy bed and skyped with Phil and all was right with the world again, until I saw someone die in a dream.
I have an idea for a book. I almost don’t want to say anything else because I can’t tell if the idea is brilliant or stupid, and I want to do more research with the Bodleian librarians before I can tell if there really is even a story. But I have an inkling that there is an entire novel hidden in this idea, and it excites me.
Also, I randomly outlined an entire movie idea a few days back. It’s a superhero story, but as I was writing it, I kept thinking of it as a graphic novel. I’ve never tried to draw a graphic novel before, and I’m afraid I draw rather slowly anyway, so I might not be the best person to illustrate it, but I think the story is visually stimulating enough that it would make a good comic. It would definitely work as a screenplay as well, but I’m sort of in love with the 2-dimensional plane being its birthplace.
Well, I am going to finish this delicious cup of coffee, and then continue to stay in bed and write. That sort of seems like the perfect way to spend today.
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