Perchance, to Dream

When I sleep reasonably well, I dream.

I enjoy the good dreams and appreciate the bad dreams. Good dreams let me know what's on my mind and are usually fun. Bad dreams remind me of my fears as they leave me rolling over and wanting very much to wake up and get away from where I was moments ago.

Often, I dream something and then can't remember the next day if the dream was a memory or just a dream. Sometimes, I dream music -- I hear it in my mind, and it usually seems to be fully-formed. Invariably, it slips away when I wake up, and when I remember that I dreamt, I wish I could remember the music.

I did dream once, in high school, that I was making a short speech from a stage, and I managed to wake up and write it all down. It was kind of funny -- it made sense, mostly, but it read like I was making inside jokes with myself, linking from sentence to sentence in bizarre ways that only I would understand.

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Last night, I had two short dreams.

In the first, I had just volunteered myself to be the student conductor of a high school full orchestra during class one day. I went into the band hall, and walked up to where they were rehearsing. They were playing a piece I really liked, though I can't remember what it was called or what it sounded like. As I entered the classroom, my phone rang, so I answered it. (Bad idea.) It was one of my friends, wanting to hang out. I told her, "No, I'm in rehearsal," and hung up. The head teacher saw me hang up my phone, and seemed to give me a slight glare. When I got to the podium, though, he handed me his baton, and I started the piece from the beginning. For some reason, I was wearing those shoes with rollers in the bottom (you know, the kind where you can kick back to pop the wheels out and coast for a short while), and as I conducted, I kept sliding all over the place, rolling uncontrollably, almost falling over backwards, and then almost falling into the students. No one seemed fazed, though, and we continued on. Everyone was sitting strangely close together, and the teacher and assistant teachers hovered around the edges of the ensemble, conducting in unison with me as we played the first few phrases of the piece. One of the woodwind parts was lagging behind a bit, so I turned around to ask the director if I could stop the ensemble to correct it. He nodded, so I turned again to face the orchestra.

The next dream was a fantastic, picaresque vision. I was sitting on a school bus -- the kind you ride in high school -- on the way home one day. I had the seat to myself as we stopped to pick up a few more students. (Picking up students on the way home? I guess so!) A few kids got on the bus, and most of them sat up front, but one girl walked past me and sat down in the empty seat behind me. I quickly gathered the necessary courage and turned around to ask her if I could sit next to her. She assented, so I swung around and plopped down next to her with my backpack. She had some kind of oddly-shaped pocket dictionary or thesaurus, and was holding it open in her beautiful hands. I looked over at it, and we spent the rest of the short dream taking turns picking out long words and making up silly phrases for which the words could be acronyms. She smiled brightly, and we laughed at each other's imaginative, meaningless creations in the calm afternoon sun that was streaming through the window. I had the time of my life.