Last night…I had this long drawn out dream, where essentially I was a student at a school. It started off that I was following my friend Lauren to her new off-campus apartment. She took me inside. It was like a giant warehouse. Everything inside was seafoam green. Two other girls were living in the warehouse apartments with her. She took me into their commons, which was a huge studio. It turned out that this studio was where all of the art clubs met.
There was a meeting for the ceramics club going on. A bunch of students (primarily female), were sitting around talking, while showing off their darted vessels. The surfaces were all designed the same; horizontal color stripes with black outlines. Madeleine and Jennifer were in this ceramics club apparently. I spotted them sitting over in the corner. On the opposite side of the room was another group of students. I didn’t know who they were at first, but then I noticed my friend Jill was sitting among them. I concluded that this must be the painting club. Then I noticed that there was a female professor standing over against the windows. Lauren, who was standing next to me, was talking to me about the clubs.
Suddenly I had a large canvas in front of me, and I was freely painting lines and shapes with a thick brush. As I painted, the brushstrokes would curl up into beads and slide off the canvas. Only a few of them stayed put, and it looked like I had just painted large wet bubbles on the canvas. It looked interesting. However, I felt like no one else liked it. My dream self wanted to explain why I was suddenly painting, and why it looked the way it did. Madeleine and Jennifer looked at me sort of like I was crazy. Lauren didn’t say anything. In my mind, I kept organizing what I was going to say to them. I just kept repeating that I had some left over materials from when I took Painting I, so I just decided to do a quick painting. But I don’t know if I actually voiced this in the dream or not…because people kept looking at me accusingly. Then I realized that I hadn’t gesso’ed the canvas. I didn’t mention this as to not seem like an amateur or something. It isn’t necessary to gesso a canvas….but in the dream, I was certain that everyone knew that I hadn’t done it.
Following this, there was a lot of commotion among the students in the room. The professor standing near the windows unveiled a set of photos that were clothes-pinned to the chalkboard that everyone was facing. Lauren informed me that she was revealing to the class all of the grades from Painting I. But they were ordered by student height. The grades for the shortest girls were at the front, and the grades for the taller girls were at the end. Somehow this also correlated with performance. I was at the end, and I also had apparently gotten a D or an F in the class. I didn’t say much about this. We talked briefly about the girl who had gotten the highest marks in the class. Her name was Rosie or Rosalie or something.
The next part I remember is leaving my own room that was somewhere on or off campus. I kept jogging down this large hill. I eventually found my way to a parking lot that was on top of a building. I sat in a tiny car and began to do some math homework. There was this other black girl…I think it might have been my friend Lindsay. She was driving circles around my car in her car. She drove a red bug. She kept asking me through our cars, if I had ever been in a car wreck. I kept saying that I hadn’t really. She then told me that she planned to wreck her car before going to her next class. I told her this was a really bad idea. She said that she just wanted to break all of her toes. I was horrified by this, of course. So I stopped talking to her, and just tried not to look at or think about her. She kept trying to talk to me, asking me if I had ever gone to class with two broken limbs. I said no. I didn’t understand why she was doing this. I told her that I thought she was really misguided. The last I remember of her was watching her drive her red bug off the side of the building. I didn’t get out of my car to see if she was okay.
Then the entire location of the dream changed. I was still a student somewhere, but now I was living in another area. I worked at a hair salon that was run by me and a few of my friends. A friend of a friend named Al was living there, as was Bob Saget apparently. I think Colin Grace might have been there as well. At one point, I was eating lunch. I was fishing objects out of a well of dark liquid against the wall. I was eating from it. Apparently, I was fishing seafood out of a dark sauce. I kept pulling out star shaped pieces of fish. At one point I ate something that was squishy and black. I asked Bob if it had been a worm, and he said that it had been some other type of fish. Whatever it was I kept eating from the well tasted fairly good. Then Bob brought over a little blonde toddler, who I assumed was a young Mary-Kate or Ashley Olsen. He asked me to fish out something for her to eat. She wouldn’t eat any of the seafood at first. Then Bob held her while I stuffed various-shaped morsels of fish in her mouth. She seemed to enjoy it at this point.
After this, I got up to use the restroom at the back of the salon. When I got to the restroom, I noticed a dry-erase board that had all of the workers’ schedules listed. I noticed Al’s name, Colin’s name, the names of two girls I didn’t know, and Christian’s name. He apparently worked at this salon as well. According to the dry-erase board, he was in meetings until 3pm with people named “Renée”, “Stewart”, and “girl”. My schedule was also on the board, but it was so far off to the side, that it was too squished to be legible. I went into the restroom, and looked in the mirror. At first glance everything seemed normal. I looked away for a moment, but when I looked back, there were light splotches all over my face. I flipped out. I ran and told Al that I needed to go to the doctor, immediately. I don’t remember what his response was, but I kept telling him that what had happened to Michael Jackson was real. Apparently my dream self had developed Vitiligo.
I wanted to go to the doctor, but realized that I would have to miss my 1:30 ceramics class if I did. Professor Wilbur walked into the salon, almost as if on cue. I explained to her what was happening to my face. I told her that I had recently used some triamcinolone topical gel that I took from my mother. I had applied it to my face (which I have actually done in waking life this week). But apparently, it had caused me to begin losing pigment in my face. I told Wynne that it was imperative that I get to the hospital, and that I apologized for having to miss class. She sympathized, and offered to give me a ride to the hospital.
I told her that it was close enough that I could walk, but she insisted. We stepped outside into what was a bustling city. It looked like we stepped out of the salon (which was presumably in Kirksville), and into what looked an awful lot like Chicago. We turned the corner and she crouched down next to the sidewalk. There was a patch of dirt. She started digging through it. I kept asking her what she was doing. I knew the disease was rapidly spreading across my face. We had little time. She said that they had to keep the key to the university’s car buried in the dirt. She said that it took longer to find the key and drive the car, but that ultimately, this saved the university money.
Liberal Milk 