Dream a little dream tonight

This is why I don’t like sleep-inducing meds:

The dream started with me walking down a hallway in a skyscraper in downtown Houston apparently headed toward the audit room with two other people who I’ve never seen before.

Quickly following, it was lunchtime and I met a friend in the building (but she doesn’t work in downtown) to walk to Bryant Park (yeah, that’s in New York) which was new and near my old high school because apparently now I was a senior in high school and an elite group from my class had transferred to this newfangled school because we were the cream of the crop. No, I don’t know how I was chosen. I graduated in the top 35…percent of my class of 700.

My friend and I leave the building and start walking in downtown Houston towards the park which has restaurants (because it’s lunch again and I’m back to being an auditor) and we are just trudging at a snail’s pace. The sky is slowly darkening as night falls (apparently my sense of time is now warped) and I realize I’ve left my purse and shoes in the bathroom back at work. I tell my friend to continue on without me and I start jogging back.

Okay, firstly, I would never, and I do mean never, walk barefoot in downtown anywhere. Makes me want to go wash my feet at this point in my dream (seriously, that’s what I was thinking in the dream). And secondly, I was wearing shoes as pointed out to me by a former (truly former) classmate from my alma mater. As I was jogging back I bumped into her pushing a stroller with an obscure head-brace on that was red. She never wore a head-brace in high school. She was on the softball team. We didn’t run in the same crowds and I wasn’t a fan…so of course she’s the one that ends up in the dream.

She apparently didn’t make the cut for the new high school (sucker). She asked where I was headed and I told her, “Lunch at Bryant Park,” to which she replied, “Oh, the new class. I didn’t make it in.”

At that I look down at the stroller and see it’s a little girl so I ask how old she is. The mother, I presume now that this classmate of mine is the mother because there had been a second, faceless girl with her who I knew not to be it, doesn’t answer me but the little girl does and says, “Three!” with a toothless grin.

I pull a crazyface at her and just start running again. But here’s the thing with my running abilities…they worked oddly. For me to start moving at all required me to slowly lean forward while raising one foot to lead off and waiting until suddenly I took off with a slow jog that quickly escalated to a run. For those visual people out there, to start running, think Jim Carrey as The Mask when he’s in the Copa club and finishes dancing with Cameron Diaz and the bad guys come after him he drops her and then lifts his leg, pausing, before then jetting off to get away. Then, after I would start running, I behaved almost as the Juggernaut with my momentum and Flash Gordon with my speed. Strange.

I finally made it back to the office after some headphones appeared in my ears and I was happily running to the music. Uphill. Up…hill(s). Plural. But it was still Houston. For those who may not know this, Houston and the surrounding several hundred miles in all directions have zero hills except for the man-made concrete overpasses. And those don’t count.

Once I got back up to my floor, which was oval in shape and had several hundred desks and obscurely hidden doors to conference rooms and was filled with too many people I conjured up out of thin air, I found my purse (no harm done) and looked down at my feet. This is what I was wearing the entire time: my black Converse sneakers with black slippers tied over them.

Now here’s the breakdown, because dreams are just manifestations of the thoughts that run through your brain in a given day. It’s how we process all the additional (and excess) information that overloads our brains while we sleep so we are refreshed and renewed, and sometimes a little freaked out, in the morning.

1) The new high school as a Senior – directly from a book I finished reading yesterday where one of the main characters does this.

2) New York is due to the fact that I’ve watched nearly half of the first season of 30 Rock in the last two days. It’s a great show.

3) The maze of people, desks and conference rooms was from watching a few episodes of Dead Like Me. Which, if you have not seen that show, I highly recommend it. Bryan Fuller is a genius when it comes to obscure approaches to death. He also created Pushing Daisies which was another brilliant show cut short of its full potential. (Think Firefly and Arrested Development)

4) My black converse sneakers are because that’s the current shoe sitting on my bedroom floor, only the left one (of course, though I had both on in the dream), which I wore to my doctor’s appointment last week and will again tomorrow (I get the wraps and bandaging off, what!). And the black slippers over them? Well that is because when I am cleared to return to work, the doctor says sneakers only for the first few weeks. Apparently my dreamself was trying to be creative and disguise said sneakers beneath oversized black slippers to make it look like proper business casual shoes. Silly, silly me.

You’d think with all the crazy things happening in that dream that more would have come from my memories or any of the television I watched. But no, I didn’t watch The Mask to get my running technique. The high school classmate hasn’t been a blip on my radar in 7 years (and that’s just fine by me)…but I did have an e-mail exchange (of about 30 emails+, they were trying to get me a Rascal) with my high school friends the other day. But still…

This is why I despise taking sleep-inducing medication of any kind. This was only my final dream of the night. I know for a fact (though I can’t remember any details) that I had several before that. And I do mean several…I tend to wake up about 3 times during the night currently thanks to the oversized boot on my foot and the uncomfortable positions I sleep in that I try to pretend are perfectly fine and don’t make my back or hips hurt. Lies. All lies.

It’s impossible.