Old School Dream

Its hard to remember now how the dream actually started, it just faded into memory now. I remember arriving at my old high school in Long Island with a stack of three books I selected from mine and Lisa's library. I set them down in one corner of the art room and started planning another large painting commission. At that moment the pain of revisiting that place hit me all at once as I realized that Susan Hersh was no longer alive, a distant memory in my past. I thought of all the hassle of physically purchasing and assembling the same materials all over again on my own. The archival way of doing this only occurred to me just moments ago while awake. I was alone in the semi-dark room, with lights off and only the north light from the overcast day filtering into my surroundings enhancing the dream-like setting. Students started casually filing into the room, talking quietly amongst themselves pay no mind to me and my project. I remember a friend, Kerry as she looked in the past amongst them, I would identify Sean later. I was aware that I was older, as I am now, and slowly I began to see that the entire project was an unrealistic undertaking. I lived in NJ and had no place to stay, I was not about to even try my mother's house even if she took me in. I had 3 stacks of books because they were a way of bringing my home and my loved ones with me. The thought of Lisa made me want to drop everything and go home.

I looked at some of the student drawings and recognized poorly drawn versions of my own drawings from everyday life. Amongst them were a few drawings of Harmony, the black and white cat. I proceeded to interrupted their chatter about art and half-jokingly accuse them of stealing all my ideas, the room went silent and I walked away into the teacher's office next to the room. It occurred to me that I kept waiting to meet this other teacher that had replaced Sue there, but the teacher never arrived. It was like some unreal entity that everyone except myself knew, but never actually manifested itself in the dream. So there I was stuck in a teacher's role though it had nothing to do with what I was there for. At my best I observed student's behavior like a distant anthropologist, at my worse I felt the entire place was beneath me. When leaving I caught a conversation between Sean and a friend of his. It sounded like a critique of a art film his friend was working on about bi-sexual relationships, and I mused to myself on how progressive that was for a high school setting. That was the last passing observation as we all walked out of a school building that was by then structurally morphing into the school of my childhood in Brazil. The dream faded once again.