I had an odd dream last night that I was going to go back to school to become a botanist, but that was only after I dreamt of thinking about going to get my teaching certificate. That part of the dream was disturbing to me... I visited a school that was pretty much a series of motor homes. I went to the rv where my niece had kindergarten, and was greeted by the teacher, an early twenties-something woman, who coincidentally had no nostrils to speak of. After climbing aboard, I noticed the obvious flaw between the volume of the coach verses what appeared to be the volume when I had viewed it from outside-- it was much more massive than the width of a single lane. Further surprising was that inside of this massive mobile classroom was my grandfather. He's been dead for over three years now, which isn't really surprising at all; but, I don't commonly dream of dead people, or people in my family. He was smiling around all the children, but he was like he was just before he died. He had had a fever that damaged his brain a few years before he passed, and it left him in a state of mind where he always reminded me of a child. His entire memory of everything after 1982 had been almost entirely wiped clear. I always thought he pretended to know me because of the way he acted when he first had recovered from his fever. I think in truth, if he did remember me, he was probably embarrassed that in all the years I lived in his home and visited, that he honestly knew nothing about me, but rather only knew the idea of who he wanted me to be. When I was a senior in high school, he had to give me a ride home from his house. With traffic, it took nearly 45 minutes to traverse the five miles to my father's house. In that 45 minutes, my grandfather held me captive to his lecture on me going to college for computers. I responded to him that I wanted to do something with art, but computers kept flowing from his mouth like winged razor blades into my ears. Once we arrived in my father's driveway, it only continued for another 45 minutes. I sat there with my hand on the door handle, giving off every possible polite indication that I was ready to exit that tiny saturn and leave that one-sided conversation inside it, but it just kept going. Knowing freedom was a mere 15-20 feet from me, and being able to see it, was truly tormenting. My point is that he didn't have a single clue. Oddly enough, it wasn't until after his fever that he would randomly offer up compliments and support for my chosen career. the dream made me feel awkward for many reasons, but mainly because it made me remember that incident, and because of how many opposites there were. All of the children were sitting in a horse shoe formation in front of him, and he was smiling the way he did after the fever (a genuine, unforced smile). He was occasionally clapping his hands when he laughed and getting tested by the children. I had to wake up for work at this point, but I just remember walking around them and staring at him, because he's dead, but he was there. he was exactly how he looked pre-mortem, down to the curly side hair and every liver spot, like it wasn't a dream-- I felt like I could reach out and poke him. I'm not going to get into the semantics of our relationship, but having him show up in my dreams that vividly is enough to bother me for weeks. Even more so that it was in a dream where I was thinking about going back to school.
