Journal #86

12/13/19: I had one of the most colorful dreams I could remember, but I wasn't sure if it was either a WILD or an LD. I now seem to have a feeling this was probably an attempt to get me back writing again, as I believe it tried to show a possible scene from my young-adult fiction writing project that I've been working on for the past seven years (post-writing about cars) and revised three years later (FBI/CIA/Interpol, etc.) when I celebrated twenty years of going down the creative writing path (a path I've been going down since starting fourth grade and switching schools in the process).

This dream came right around the one-year anniversary of the two back-to-back dreams I had from December 15-16, 2018 with the girls I tried to say were female equivalents of Lucas and Nathan on One Tree Hill, and they almost made it to my writing project.

Like the dream on December 15th last year, I found myself in a setting eerily similar to Adams Elementary in Cary, North Carolina -- which was once a traditional school that has since converted to a year-round school -- but it was the back of the building of the classroom where Ms. Welch taught her first-grade class that I seemed to remember from the 1994-95 school year (the final year for me to attend) on a sunny and partly cloudy day when outside near the playground, I notice what appears to be a teenage girl who had dyed her hair some sort of a bluish color with pink or hot magenta streaks in possession of what appeared to be either a journal or a three-ring binder, stuffed with a lot of paper. I don't strike a conversation with her or speak to her, and the dream ends at around 4-ish (4 A.M.).

I go back to sleep, and the second act of the dream begins where I'm at a house in what appears to be Cary, and talk with some people about the girl I met, and the dream made no sense whatsoever. I also appear to be in possession of her three-ring binder and her journal and the dream ends when I look through the peephole of a door and find that the girl from the playground/back of the building is at the front door, knowing I took her stuff.

I think I may have gotten this dream after getting an idea for my writing project a few days ago, and it faded out when my daily morning routine started, and I believe I may have dreamed of her between 2003 to 2017. In the waking moments up to at least 10 AM on the 14th, I started to think the character was kind of a mix -- personality-wise -- between Canadian singer-songwriter Avril Lavigne and Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams, with a possible mix of the personalities of two students I used to know -- one at Adams Elementary in 1994-95 (same grade as me, but four months older than me); the other at Southeast Raleigh Magnet High in 2004-05 (that I may have first run into at a movie theater near the State Fairgrounds in 1996-97 when my dad and I went to see Space Jam -- and the student, who was about three or four years younger than me, decided to sit next to me near the front row, and the theater wasn't crowded at all).

Also, the Cary Towne Center -- which some North Carolinians are referring to as a "dead mall" (which I adamantly refuse to believe) -- is across the street from Adams, which, come to think of it, was probably not a good idea to place near a school. I wasn't sure what Town Hall employees and land developers were thinking when they did that -- probably because I wasn't even born yet. And even when I visit the town and have to make a stop at the mall, I seem to have adventures all over the place, thinking I would run into the former since 1997. I even remember taking a field trip to the mall in 2004, nervous about running into the former, when a teacher assured me that she was "still in school". That was also the day I walked into a Hot Topic store for the first time -- May 14th, to be exact. It's also the only mall in Wake County to have the store -- Crabtree Valley Mall and Triangle Town Center in Raleigh (you guessed it) don't.

Anyways, back to the dream -- like many others I received over the past few months -- about children and teenagers -- I believe was trying to tell me about how much I longed for the past, wishing to return to simpler times. I've been meaning to take a break from watching TV game shows and reality competitions for a while to nurture the inner child inside of me, but something inside is keeping me from doing that, also springing up unwanted stress and anxiety problems, including panic attacks. And there could be some things I may have failed to see such as talents I used to have. And I apologize in advance for neglecting my inner child, if that is the case.

And yes, I've had strange dreams about child and teen characters in the past, and this one is no different. I still need to get to work on that writing project -- I celebrate my 25th year on the creative writing path next year.

WM86/DFW signing off.