maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was with a big group of people. We were in an area that looked like the large reading room of the New York Public Library. But it was also something like a high school gymnasium. The group I was with was probably a church group, though it may have been part of a church-school.

I was up on a balcony level, crouched down or sitting down near the floor. There were a few other people up here with me, including a teacher, who sat behind me.

We looked down on the main area, where a lot of other people were. That area may have been floored with brownish gym mats. There may have been an occasional school desk. There were a decent amount of students down there. Everything felt kind of cluttered.

We had all been given a lesson by somebody who was probably speaking into a microphone from some pulpit at the other end of the room from those of us on the balcony. It was some lesson about Christian history.

We now had to do an in-class exercise based on the lesson. The exercise was some kind of role-playing game. I think we all had to imagine ourselves as some saint, who had been the subject of the lesson. We then had to imagine ourselves into the environment of the saint.

A classmate of mine, a boy maybe eleven or twelve years old, wanted me to come with him on the role-playing game. I was probably going to go along with him.

But my teacher, a pretty, blonde woman, yanked me back from the boy. She told me the boy was distracting me. The teacher told me I was going to come with her.

I looked behind the teacher to the area I knew we were going to: some kind of stage-like area on the left wall of the room, where there were other kids sat out on the floor with papers, studying or doing their lesson exercise.

I was now in some kind of hallway-like space with my teacher. The hallway was like an old, narrow, seldom-visited corridor in a natural history museum.

We sat on the floor -- actually, I think my teacher was laying on her stomach. My teacher had a book, some kind of history of poetry. She may have read some of it to me. She may then have asked me either to read some to her, or to give her a reaction to what she'd read. She handed me the book.

I could see that the text was about the seventeenth century British poet Abraham Cowley. But the pages looked like they were from some kind of illustrated Bible for kids. There was a drawing, almost coloring-book-style, of biblical mountains running across the top half of one set of pages.

I told my teacher a little bit of my own thoughts about Abraham Cowley. I liked him, and I thought it was unfair that he'd fallen into obscurity.

I then read the bottom lines of the left-hand page of the book. It mentioned how somebody in the eighteenth century had "single-handedly" rescued Cowley from oblivion. It took me a long time to read this. But I finally got the idea that the person referenced was Samuel Johnson.

My teacher was now slightly around the corner from me, and up on a very small platform, elevated about 20cm above the floor. I lay on my stomach and stared at a beautiful, Gothic-style, wood wall as I gave my teacher some of my own thoughts on Cowley.

It was hard for me to speak -- my brain was really groggy. But I said, "Well, you know, now that Cowley's rescued from oblivion, everybody thinks he's just great. But I don't think he's free from faults. I love his Mistress poem cycle. But his Odes are kind of flat, in my opinion."