I had returned to college though not as a student. It was some kind of alumni program where you and your class would dorm together and “relive” freshman year as well as there would be awards and recognition ceremonies for those who have achieved things since graduating. In my head dorm life as a college graduate was a summer camp style, 40 men to a room, environment (forget that dorm life has long ago transitioned from the concept of military barracks but for some reason that was what I was considering it to be).
There we were, moved into our dorm and walking the campus. I was there with friends though the friends have not revealed themselves yet. We were walking the lawn of the campus. An entirely made-up campus whose recreation in my head looks nothing like the college campus I have spent most of my time on. This campus was more like a very large yard -a flat lawn in front of some buildings. While walking there we heard that one friend that I am with is going to receive an accolade at one of these recognition events the school alumni association was holding. He had written a book and it’s been doing well and he was going to get an award for it. I immediately figured out who this friend was going to be. It was going to be Paul Boathand. Now, I never went to college with Paul Boathand but he is the only writer I know so I guess in my subconscious narrative if some writer was going to win an award and that writer needed to be my friend, Paul Boathand is the man to wins the award given to him by my head.
So, I was walking on the lawn with a different unidentified friend when we heard the news and went running back to the dorm. We behaved like school boys telling a friend about who has a crush on them or some other goosey jossip (juicy gossip but with a schoolboy nervous twist). We get to the dorm and Paul Boathand is brushing his teeth in his boxers remarkably nonchalant, middle-aged, dad body, slightly off-colored pale green boxers. He hasn’t yet heard the news. I ask Paul “have you heard?”. Paul, “heard what?”. Me “the news, you are getting an award!”, Paul “For what?”. Me, “For your book!” And with that Paul immediately changed for the rest of the dream into the little emo boy I knew in high school: hair, that made his head twice as big, covering his forehead, thick-rimmed glasses, and clothes too big for him, all with some Nirvana paraphernalia. He spits out the toothpaste foam, embarrassingly washes out his mouth in a rush, and disappears.
This is extremely standard behavior for Paul Boathand, he never enjoyed when people liked his best work for the reason that usually his best work was deeply tied with his life. A life he would express through writing so he would not think of it. But, because it was well written and engaging, everyone would really like it and think of it as beautiful. Every time someone would bring it up to him, it would remind him of what his life has been and he would ask internally why is it that the shit part of his life is the part the people love.
I go looking for him and, like a dream, I find him. In dream time a while has definitely passed in the process of looking but it all took an instant to play in my head. I speak to him, he looks down at his feet in his stupor not responding. What did I say to him? I don’t know, something about people is not fascinated by the fact that your life has been shit, instead, they are fascinated by the beauty of the storytelling. The way it is written triggers in them the very same feelings he has and they feel them for him. This seems to convince him to accept the award and the dream moves on.
I start getting ready for this event. I brought a suit to this whole thing and I’m putting it on. I notice that it is not the full set, it’s mismatched and covered in lint. For some reason, I’m late at this point. Frantically, I’m looking for a lint roller throughout the dorm. All the guys in this dorm are faceless meat sacks that seem to purposely be getting in the way of me finding this lint roller. Regardless, I ask every meat sack if they have a lint roller but I don’t even wait for the answer. Not that the answers would have helped. Their voices were coming through as garbled demonic Charlie brown’s what whats that the adults would make in the animated series. Dark, low, and gurgly responses that if I paid attention while finding this lint roller I would have surely been a bit stricken by what was around me. Nonetheless, that did not matter. I finally found the lint roller in the shower, wet and expanding as if made of both paper towels and marshmallows. After all, paper is absorbent but lint rollers are sticky. A wet lint roller, a papery marshmallow, same thing, right?
I’m rushing back to lint rolls my suit jacket but I don’t want to use the sheet that was touching everyone’s shower juice. So, I lint roll the next thing that needed lint rolling because I can’t bring myself to just throw away the surface sheet of the lint roller. Apparently, the only other available thing to lint roll was a nasty matted fuzzed woman’s pullover sweater. For some reason, this sweater was in a dorm full of middle-aged faceless men but that was not an issue for me nor was curious in any way. Instead, I started to lint roll this matted sweater over and over, panicking because it was taking forever to get clean. I don’t know why I decided to fully lint roll the whole sweater but I did even though I could have either thrown away the first sheet of the lint roller and moved on to my jacket or use just the first sheet of the lint roll on the nasty matted sweater.
I finally lint rolls my suit jacket, put it on, and leave the dorm for the event. At some point, I realize that I am early and have enough time to visit some friends at a nearby company. This is entirely contradictory to the frantic panic I had, lint rolling the nasty sweater in the dorm, trying to get to clean my suit jacket, and running out of the dorm to the event anguished because I was late. Turns out, I was early.
I go to this company where some friends I know work and I speak with them. Most of these people at this company have had no contact with me for a very long time but we were all good close coworkers when we all worked at a previous company. To clarify, I have never worked at that workplace I visited while waiting for the star of the award event but I had worked, at a previous company, with everyone that was in that moment at that workplace. And so, their reactions were “is that Fred?” or “dude, Fred is here” or “hey man, what, why are you here?”.
At the place, I was directed to hang out in a small corner office with a window. I took off my suit jacket and just started hanging out. The president of the company, who in real life is about 5’9″ and stocky, in the dream is about 6’3″ and lanky. He walks into the office and we start discussing where I am currently working and what kind of work I like to do. I vocalize that my current position is only partially what I want to do and that the footing of the company seems a bit unstable and everyone working there can be laid off at any moment. This guy now says “well hey why don’t you work here?” And just like that my dream becomes an interview. I don’t know what they ask me or how the interview went but once the conversation was over, the president said “Well the last thing to do is just a formality for you since you have worked with us before but I’m going to go print out our standard questionnaire if you can fill it out and hand it back to me on your way out, that would end the interview”. He leaves the room for a moment and I grab a pen and paper and get ready. He returns and tells me some more information about how this questionnaire is special for me which I don’t remember because my roommate walked out the door of my house and I woke up.
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