Upon Awakening (I want to crazy glue my eyes shut)

I realize that most of my dreams feel far livelier than anything going on in my actual life. So, I scrunch my eyes shut and try to suck the last of the entertainment value from my subconscious before reality invades my brain, wiping out all traces. When I wake up I feel compelled to write down what I can still recall, encapsulate it and try to keep my dreaming muscles active.

My next door neighbor’s daughter was a precocious little snot, but I liked her, in a kind of cool older brotherly way. This was not my real neighbor, nor his real daughter, and I was not my real self. We lived in a farm community, not too unlike my real neighborhood. I was in high school, however, and still had my ’79 black Datsun pickup from the Paradise days.

I was tasked with taking her to school. Her damn dad kept causing delay after delay, to the point where I knew that we’d never get there on time. I looked at my watch and asked him what time class started. 

 

“9 o’clock,” he said. 

 

“Well, that’s just not gonna cut it. It’s 8:48,” I told him as I loaded up the school gear and his daughter in the truck.

While her dad was wheeling and dealing with some prospective clients and causing general anxiety among the other family members and household staff, I was filling up an incredibly long, narrow canteen. It was probably five feet in length and the diameter of a standard Thermos. The water was spilling out, because I couldn’t carry it upright. I managed to get the lid on the canteen and the girl in the truck, and off we went.

Once underway, she and I both commenced to bitching about her dad and parents in general: 

 

“They don’t get it.”

“I know, right?”

 “Totally!”

 

It was just the usual teenage stuff. I could tell she thought I was the shit, me and my black truck and rebellious attitude. That I was so concerned with getting us to school on time was a bit incongruous, but she didn’t respect me less for it.

I guess we made it to class on time after all, due to the distortions of time/space in the dream realm.

Those are all the details afforded to my conscious mind at the moment, now that the cold grey light of reality is flooding my mind with the mundane details of my soon to be started boring day.