ErraticHopper

Winter Competition Night 4

Finally a full dream!

Fragment: I am living in some cheap area and know some weird fashion folk. I have a boyfriend and live in a small dark apartment. I talk to a friend about a manga and say slice of life seems to be fashionable lately - there are loads floating around with similar art style.

Then I am on a canal boat with my family. We're going along the canal and the boat is rocking a lot. The water is rough. I see a great blue wave splash up and hit the front window (which narrowboats don't have) with a lot of force. The boat rocks and all the passengers gasp and scream. Boat is a bit red and green on the inside. The water rises up again as we go under a bridge. There seem to be quite a lot of low bridges rather too close together.

We reach our destination and get off the boat onto the towpath. The canal seems much wider here and its layout makes less sense. It's more than twice as wide and on the far side only there are more bridges cutting off that area of the water - as if it is splitting into pipes. I see a man moving quickly through the water with only his head above the surface, grinning widely. This makes perfect sense to me. We are here to go kayaking - except that in this dream it's a bit different. The kayak along with most of the body (and the paddle) sinks under the surface of the water and you can paddle around at high speed with only your head and neck above the surface.

We get onto the water and I immediately set off, paddling fast and hurtling around in a spiral across the canal. I don't notice a thing until I open my eyes and see I am about to crash into the brick wall of one of the further tunnels, but I manage to pull myself back with my paddles and rush straight into the tunnel instead. Looking back I can see the instructor laughing at me. The way I'm steering the kayak doesn't feel realistic, looking back - I've kayaked before but this feels more like steering in a video game than paddling in real life

As I turn back and come out of the tunnel, I come almost face to face with a blonde seemingly middle-aged woman. Evidently I can see a bit more of her - seems her body above the waist is out of the water since she's wearing a lanyard and plastic name tag. It says "My name is Bridget B[can't remember]."
"I talk like this:"
Underneath that line is her name rewritten with an odd alphabet composed of smiley faces. They are squashed and warped in different directions to correspond to letters of the alphabet. I remember examining this a bit more closely, comparing these to the English letters of her name - I decided it made sense.

She might be an instructor too. I look back at her and see her name label shows even more information now, about her life. I'll paraphrase what I can remember:

"When I was...,..." I can barely remember any of the first column. Something about her mental state and how she ended up writing with smiley faces when she was younger. The second column says: "Now, I'm 63. I spent time at X hospital and got much better. Now I teach kayaking here and blah blah." There was also a third column but I don't remember a thing about it. But I do remember reading this whole label and I remember how it looked: perfect English and the lines were spaced evenly. That wouldn't have helped me become lucid...

Hand-drawn artwork:

I did a drawing but right now the drawing is at home and I'm not... And I want to publish this before it gets too late. I'll add the drawing later. For now please give me the benefit of the doubt and let me claim the points.

Excellent RCs 2pt
NLD 1 pt
WBTB (failed) 2pt
Hand-drawn artwork 2pt
Night 4 total: 7 pt
Competition total: 15 pt

Went to bed 9:56 PM
Attempt START 10:18 PM - FAILED

Bridget, by the way, did not look 63

School pool. We are having a swimming lesson, though the person teaching us is not a swimming or PE teacher. The pool is small, two metres deep perhaps, and raised off the ground, the water is blue-green. Beside it the surrounding floor is built in something like sandstone. The floor at the right side of the room is a step below the pool, but that at the back is raised by a big step and what seems like low bollards are spaced out along its length. I look closer and each one has a name on it in slightly raised stone letters. They are memorials. The nearest name looks like 'Marjorie'.

Below the raised pool is a very shallow one, the water is completely clear.

We begin swimming, but now we're not in the pool anymore. It's like we're swimming in the air over the city. Below me I can see skyscrapers and the biggest buildings of the financial district, and lots of houses with red tile roofs. I'm in a group and we float around, laughing, every now and then stopping to rest our feet on the roofs of the buildings. They seem much smaller than us at this distance. I place my feet on a group of houses and feel the roughness of the surface on my skin.

Now it does feel like we're in water again. But we're still above the city. I don't quite get how this works but I feel that the water's surface is far above these buildings. There doesn't seem to be any water down here. It's like two spaces overlapping one another.

I swim slowly, but I keep bumping into a girl in my group. I apologise to her and try to swim a bit further away. She's laughing a lot and with her friends seems to be communicating with someone else far away, I don't know how. While swimming away I turn around and realise she - and she only - is now naked. I'm shocked, and then, I bump into her again. It's much more embarrassing this time.

We are finally back in the murky school pool. I swim around a bit more, feeling good, I can hear my teacher talking. I look up and realise I am the only one left in the pool and everyone else is sitting on the side farthest away at the front of the room. That feels awkward and I quickly get out. The small pool is between me and the others, so I slide in, bracing my hands against the bottom to avoid hitting my head. This pool is really too shallow to swim in. I get over to the other side and get out.

The school bathroom. I'm washing my hands in front of the mirror. When I try to enter the only stall, the door is locked, but I can hear people talking inside. Annoyed, I go into another bathroom. There are two stalls in here, but one seems to have been replaced with a blank wall while the other is also occupied. I bang on the door and hear a surprised noise from inside, so, feeling guilty for disturbing them, I turn to leave the room. But this time the door feels extremely heavy and it takes me a long struggle to get it open. As I'm pulling at it my vision seems to black out and I reel back from the effort. When I finally stumble out, I feel so disoriented, it's as if my mind is trying to pull away from my body.
Finally I enter the third bathroom. By now I feel dizzy and can't see properly. Just as I get my bearings enough to register that there is a free stall I also see that someone else has come in after me and is about to enter it. I feel a sort of sinking despair and hopelessness at this. I stammer something out about how I was about to go in there. She takes a step back and offers to let me go first, but I, feeling sheepish, hurriedly refuse and resign myself to waiting.

At no time in this dream - nor when I woke up - did I feel I needed the toilet. It's not one of those dreams that I often hear about. Strangely, this is the third time I can remember dreaming about being in an eerie and somewhat surreal school bathroom. All looked different but all of them left me with a similar feeling of disorientation and unhappy confusion.