Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Closer to having caught up on sleep than on email, and have not yet begun to catch up on LiveJournal. Noticed a bunch of comments to my SMS posts from Pennsic, which I'll get to soon. In the meantime, here's what I remember of the curious dream I just woke up from:

In the dream, for some reason I had to return to my high school for some classes that I'd missed or that had been retroactively added to the state requirements two decades late, or something, but some of the buildings were missing, apparently having burned down recently. In particular, the buildings erected since I'd graduated (in real life or just in this dream) were replaced by large rectangles of dead grass like those dotting Cooper's Lake after all the tents of Pennsic are packed up, only building-sized. (At one point I commented to a high-school-aged student that it seemed I was destined to attend only when those buildings were not there, for they would not be replaced until after I was gone again. And then I looked to see whether the Grey House was still there (it looked like it had been replaced by a more modern building carefully designed to still look like "a grey house") and whether the MiniGym (which burned while I was a student in real life) had ever been replaced (it had not).) I remember looking in the direction of the Art Barn but not whether I noticed its presence or absence.

I was talking to one teacher (who looked much younger in my dream than he had when I was a student) about where to put a new library (since all the library books were in storage) and he said most of the available open patches of ground were taken, but between us we figured out that there might be room to put the library back into the main floor of the Barn once the new buildings were replaced. We spent a while looking for a) the stored books, and b) a meeting he was supposed to attend with someone from the Cancer Society about library funding issues or something, and found where a second-grade girl (I call it "my high school" because I attended from 7th grade through 12th grade, but the school is actually kindergarten through 12th grade) had, with the aid of tools and a strength and cunning beyond her years, broken into one of the rooms where the library books were boxed up, and was cheerfully reading. (The room was in a section of the Manse that doesn't exist in real life, and the Manse was farther away from the Old Kindergarten than I remember.) The teacher decided that the second-grader was a perfect example of why the library was important.

Returning from there, I had to cross amazing amounts of mud. It looked a lot like Pennsic did last week during the amazing amounts of rain. This seemed significant at the time. I cut through the Science Barn (there seemed to be some subplot about where to hide someone for the purposes of torturing them (IIRC I was on the side of the folks trying to stage a rescue if we could find them) and whether the classroom at the top of the Science Barn, so easily forgotten about, would do, or whether any thumping and thrashing by the prisoner would be heard downstairs ... but I can't figure out how that fits plot-wise or chronologically in the dream I'm describing, so it might be a memory from an unrelated earlier dream that I've mostly forgotten), edged past more mud, and got onto the path to the Barn, where I noticed that something bad had happened to that building as well -- apparently it had suffered a rather curious sort of fire, or a normal fire and an extremely curious rebuilding, for there were huge round pillars at the corners and spaced along the sides holding up the main and top floors, but the bottom floor (the ground floor if you enter from the back, or the basement if you enter from the front) was gone, replaced with a healthy lawn that a bunch of construction workers were about to excavate to replace the missing part of the building. The pillars were hollow and had ladders inside, going too far into the Earth for me to see. And approaching the front of the building, I could, by ducking a bit, walk under the front edge of the main floor (which had old-looking paint on it, suggesting only the lowest floor had burned (and been mysteriously replaced by solid ground and healthy grass)). I circled to the back where I found the entrance to the spiral staircase (built in what was once a silo (in real life, not just in my dream (why yes, I do realize the landscape is a bit diferent from what most people probably thought of when I said "my high school" above (and if y'all want to hear more about the school, ask and I'll tell (keith_m043 went there too) -- they've even got a web site now)))) and went up. I got to the main floor, and was staring at a doorway where the main floor started 5/6 of the way up. I shouted, "This is strange!" and the construction foreman came up the stairs behind me, looked at the doorway, looked panicked, and went back out.

(Someone asked how such a thing could be missed, and someone else commented that they didn't realize anything was wrong because people did seem to be getting up into the building to teach and attend classes somehow, and I thought, "Yeah, but these guys don't know how often we climbed in and out of windows when I was a student here even when we didn't have to, and I can imagine the teachers doing that as well.")

I continued up the spiral staircase past the top floor, which was also vertically mis-aligned, but less so, and on upward to a part of the building that only exists in my dream, where I saw a funky observation platform opposite a balcony for a building that I can only (in waking retrospect) imagine must have been floating in midair over the swingset. Again, things were not lined up right for just walking out, and I commented about wondering the best way to get up there. Several other students eating their lunch on the observation platform grinned, and I figured it out and started to eat my lunch with my legs dangling over the edge about four stories from the ground. And that's when I woke up.

A longer dream description than I usually post, but there was so much strange detail I wanted to remember that I couldn't decide which was "the important bit" to excerpt.