I’m back at school and I’ve already had more excitement today than the past week at home. It snowed as we were driving to the airport and the flakes moved like sand on a windy day on the road. It was mesmerizing. They had to de-ice our plane before we left.

This is the latest I have stayed up since coming back to America. It is much easier when there are people around. I feel like I could almost stay up another few hours but I have a feeling I am still going to wake up really early so I’m not pushing it. Stuart, Patrick’s friend from home who lives in the suite next to ours, has a Wii but no television. He brought his over and I played Wii Sports bowling and baseball with Jessie and him, and then watched him and his friend do Wii boxing. Using the Wii Remote is cool but it seems like the sports games could get boring once the novelty of the new movements wears off, because like Jessie said, why not just go bowling? But I think for RPGs and fantasy games the Remote could be really effective, because you’d be moving around and thus more involved with your character and his actions in the game, and you’d be doing things in a world that doesn’t exist outside of your television.

tags: dreams, gaming

I saw this movie last night at the Avon with Henry and McComas. I enjoyed it very much. I’m a big fan of Gael Garcia Bernal, and of pan-European movies that are in multiple languages including English (like L’Auberge Espagnole). It

The movie is about a man who has very vivid, bizarre dreams, which he has trouble distinguishing from reality. Sometimes he sleepwalks and acts out his dreams in real life and sometimes it all just seems to be in his head. I think the movie did a very good job of illustrating the that you are sleepwalking through life and having recurring dreams about characters and situations in your current life. My dreams during high school were much more cloudy than Stephane’s, and none of them were as fantastic. But I did dream almost every night about the people in my high school.

When I went to swim meets every weekend to take photographs, I had multiple dreams at pools with the swim team. One time the team was short a girl for a relay and decided to enter me even though I had no bathing suit and I don’t know how to swim properly. Another time I fell from the edge of the pool where I crouch to take photos into the pool and then stayed there because the water felt so warm and comforting. Other times I was pushed into the pool for a swimming lesson. I was waking up before 6am every day in a fog, and by the time I finished my homework and dinner I was ready to pass out in my bed around 9pm. Everything blended together, especially towards the end of the semester when I was exhausted. I spent most of my waking moments at school and I spent my nights dreaming about it. It was a strange feeling, like I was totally immersed in my high school experience and my fairly strict day-to-day routine as a student.

I didn’t have any dreams about GWU, probably because I spent most of my time there in my room alone and did not have much of a routine or community at all. I have some dreams at Brown about class or my suitemates. In general my life varies much more from day to day now than in high school, and I think this is part of the reason that I don’t have the same kind of “dreamworld” that I did then, when I had banal dreams that so closely resembled real life that sometimes I was not sure if I had dreamed a scene or if it had really happened.

tags: dreams, happy, movies

I had a dream that I went to Vassar with McComas and Henry. Except, instead of being outside it was a wing on a high floor of a new version of my high school, that wasn’t in Maryland but Minnesota or some other state. The building was enormous and the stairs were so steep between floors that you pretty much had to take the elevator unless you wanted a real work out. One floor had buildings within buildings, and a kind of townsquare in the middle of it. For some reason I was looking for Ithaca College. I had to press a button marked “E” to get to it. But then once I got there it was Vassar. Katie and Henry were there and they knew their way around. We went to a concert in one of the classrooms with Pearl Jam except there was no Eddie Vedder. And then it turned out Mike went to Vassar, and Ben. The entire school was indoors and contained in this wing of the huge high school building. At this Vassar, there were all these smaller colleges within the school and you had to apply to one after your freshman year and then you spent the rest of your time within that sub-school. All the sub-schools had funny names that I could not pronounce. Mike was happy becaues he had gotten into one called “V-W” for short (Verney-Wooley?). I asked Henry which one he had gotten into before he had transfered out and he said something about the fine-arts college. I think McComas had gotten into one of the sub-schools with a name that sounded like gibberish. She mentioned something about losing her Vassar day pass, and I realized that I had never got one.

And that’s all I can remember, I think.

tags: b-cc, dreams, friends

I had a dream that we went to see a movie production shown on a huge IMAX machine, except that the characters also seemed to come out of the screen at points. It was being shown in a big building at school. Maybe Brown. There were at least four levels, balconies really. The screen was so big you could watch it from any of the levels, although the mood was different on each level and you saw slightly different things. On some levels people were hanging out and it was too loud to hear the dialogue or too crowded to see what was going on. I switched around levels, missing parts of the story at times. The plot was took the OC as a starting point and then put it in an alternate dimension where all the bad things happening in the rest of the world that Southern California is usually insulated from were creeping into life. There were lots of deformed babies and midgets and Seth’s (the only actual OC character in the dream) face had changed and his hair and he looked a bit evil. I was watching with people from high school, I think. I remember asking Greg to fill me in on parts I had missed and at another point sitting with Jake. I kept wanting to find a computer so I could look up the movie on IMDB.

Towards the end of the dream I started resting, was almost about to fall asleep, and then all of a sudden I felt fingers on my neck and then I realized that as part of the production there were real creepy people walking around the balconies. It scared me that the performance was coming off the stage(screen?) and into the audience. I panicked and ran. I wasn’t sure if maybe we hadn’t been watching an epic distopian scifi, and that the characters that had started walking around the people in the balconies were real evil people that we should be afraid of. I got the idea that if the characters got to you, they would freeze you, or capture you, or turn you into one of them. I weaved through students milling around and sitting on stools at counters. (These were not theatre type balconies, really just four levels of student lounge type area — some seats for watching the production, some desk, some counters, people sitting around…on one floor I think people were throwing around a football or something.) I saw someone who I knew was a friend and safe and told him to help me get out of there. He made room for me to get through the crowds and get out of the building. But some of the strange characters followed us, until the generic friend convinced them to come to our side and gave them yellow rings. I got back to my dorm room and felt safe and was convinced that since I had gotten away, the threat was no longer real, even outside my room.

It was very strange indeed, and possibly influenced by the play we saw last night by McComas’ playwriting teacher, called “Food Porn.”

Yesterday was beautiful. McComas and I walked to the mall and spent hours window shopping. Our last stop was H&M which always seems to have some gems that are cute and wacky and not too expensive. I got two knit skirts, both with pockets. (One has four pockets!) I am really getting into this skirt thing, although I don’t think I will ever like jean skirts or mini skirts. I even got a pair of tights.

tags: dreams, friends, purchase

I had a dream that I had gone to Amherst for some reason. I found Mike and his friends watching a football game. Then they all went to City Politics, apparently Professor Morone taught the same huge class at Amherst that he teaches at Brown. I was confused because they were a lecture or two ahead of us. The lecture hall it was held in was so huge that it seemed like almost the entire school was taking the class. I talked with a girl sitting next to me about how the professor must do a lecture at Brown one day, drive to Amherst, do another lecture, and then drive back to New Hampshire where he lives. We were very impressed.

The class ended and I lost Mike and anyone that I recognized. I wandered around the campus for awhile. It looked like different. There was a small lake in the middle. After a couple hours of wandering around I realized I had better find Mike. I called him but he wouldn’t pick up. Then a little bit later I had gotten a voice message from him saying that I was acting too normal and he didn’t get why I wasn’t nervous around him, and it disturbed him. He said come back to his dorm and then he would send me back to Brown.

But it was at least 5pm, and I knew the last bus back to Providence had already left. I panicked. I went back to his dorm which looked an awful lot like my house. In fact his room looked an awful lot like my mom’s room, My mom was even sitting at a desk outside of it. She said he was inside and I should go in. I was scared to tell him that there weren’t any more buses that day, scared he might make me sleep at the bus station.

And that’s when I woke up in a cold sweat, heart beating really fast. It took me about 10 minutes to calm down and remind myself that I wasn’t in Amherst and the dream wasn’t real and that it was the weekend and I was at Brown and have things to do and stuff to look forward to today.

tags: dreams

Between the snow, my bike, rearranging Patrick’s room and McComas’ room incident, my weekend was pretty “happening.” I did not get as much reading done as I could have, but I’ve realized that’s perfectly okay. I don’t always need to spend every spare moment on the weekends working. I can’t wait for the snow to melt now so I can bike around again. Also, I’m looking forward to finally receiving the yarn and needles and markers that I ordered ages ago. Knitting is so soothing, I want to be knitting a sweater again. And after a few more paychecks I am definitely going to buy a flash for my camera, and it will be amazing.

Most of all I am looking forward to this week! My very first week with a a definite schedule, no more than four classes, and no late night or repeat sections. No flaky modern culture and media.

I’ve been thinking about Ross a lot this lately, since he has been posting recently on his livejournal. It’s so hard for me to imagine what he is going through now. The Ross I talked to everyday online in middle school, who I hung out with at Otakon, who had a Spanish speaking abuela just like me. I didn’t think we were so different, but now he has substance abuse problems while I barely go to parties let alone drink or smoke. What happened? How did I not see that coming at all? I really want to see him and give him a hug. I don’t know what else I could do to help, besides be a friend who happens not to use anything. It’s so out of my depth. I guess right now he is at his 28 program, and won’t be online for awhile. Maybe I’ll try to look up his home address and write him a letter or something. Lame old me.

tags: dreams, friends, pensieve, web