Pop the Bubblewhap

I've been having... odd dreams these days. Not all on consecutive nights, of course, and they're not all similarly weird; but for me to remember any dream at all is odd. (As an aside, I notice that the dreams I remember tend to involve me in some sort of uncomfortable situation. Possibly that is what kicks in the remembering.) I had two earlier, which I already wrote about on Facebook; and I just woke from the third. I never quite see these dreams through to the end, though; I always wake up and that's how the dream ends.

The earliest of my last remembered dreams was set in Cambodia; it was afternoon, I remember, and we were walking down a generically Cambodian street--hot, dry, a sparse crowd of people, traffic running the wrong way--and somehow I was walking behind the staff leader and Sir Bob, listening to them talk; and then the discussion turned and became a discussion of the likelihood of us returning to Cambodia for a second visit. Eventually the two of them turned to me and asked what I thought of it; and I replied that I was unlikely to organise such a thing, but if it were organised by somebody else and I were able to, I would follow along. Upon which either the staff leader or Sir Bob--I can't remember which--had an expression somewhere between a smirk and a sneer and muttered, "Yeah, always a follower, never a leader".

The second dream was--I think it was last night--it almost certainly was. I dreamt I woke up in an unfamiliar bed. But I should provide background context... The layout of rooms in my part of the hostels is that two neighbouring rooms are connected by one common toilet/shower area (each room has a door into the area); each of the neighbouring rooms is, as a consequence, a mirror image of the other's layout. The bed I sleep in is the one closest to the door; entering the room, my bed is on the right-side and I sleep with my feet to the door. In my dream I woke, still with my head to the wall and my feet to the door, but reversed: the bed was on the left of the door, if you were entering. I got out of bed and the toilet/shower doors were open. By looking through I found that I was in my neighbours' room. And then instead of returning to my room, I went looking through drawers; and inside the drawers I found relics of my childhood: blankets and towels, horrendously ugly, that someone a long time ago thought fit as a gift for young children; toys that I'd forgotten I'd owned--one of them was a monkey-doll with velcro on its palms and feet that I and the siblings always called Long-Man because it had long limbs and we had no imagination--ah, so much. Every drawer was a different thing, and I woke.

Last night I dreamt again; I and the Gobbler were going for a shower after swimming, and we found a pair of shower cubicles, ridiculously large and with very high walls, blue and shiny and for some reason it looked very very swank. And so we went in and showered. And in my cubicle the water didn't drain out, for some reason, and the cubicle became a little swimming-pool from all the water--I eventually was paddling around and was able to look over the cubicle's walls to the outside. And then I woke; but that's not the full dream, because it contained elements I don't want to remember. It was a very... disturbing dream. Disturbing because during the dream I saw nothing wrong with what was going on, but on waking and remembering--

--so yeah.

School's been very odd; for some reason all the lecturers have hit on some sort of coordinated and unspoken (to us anyway) agreement that the usual midterms and quizzes aren't quite cutting it as far as assessment goes, and so what we have instead are group projects; I've got a group for every module, it seems, and my final-year project is a group project too, which brings me to a total of 6 groups of varying sizes and deadlines and projects. I seem to find myself doing nothing but catching up to all my duties; and I haven't even begun the discipleship group that I should have started two weeks ago because of various schedule snarl-ups. Life is time and time just keeps going and going, and one never seems to get anywhere...

Last night I went for a run with three friends; maybe it was a mistake to go with the friend who's been a track-and-field trainer. I haven't been pushed in the back to keep me running since many years ago, almost a decade, when it was my father doing it; except of course he used prodding fingers instead of the whole palm and it was painful then. But either way it was still pushing; half the time I think I was trying to stagger away from the pushing hand instead of just going on. But my will-power is very limited, and my physical strength even more so; I was pushed for at least 300m of jogging-staggering-running, and when we finally finished I thought I was going to throw up because I didn't just have a stitch in my right, where the stitch usually is; the stitch felt like it had decided to spread to the left, too, and then inwards to my innards. But I really did think I would throw up, though I didn't... And of course we then played Monopoly Deal--that trainer friend is very hard to say no to--and the upshot was that I walked back to the room at 2am, having left it at around 11.30pm or so; I always walk back barefoot after jogging with them; I'm just too tired by then to put the socks and shoes on and tie the laces.

The strange thing is that this morning I woke up... painless in the legs. At least, there wasn't the sore stiffness that I usually have, that makes me absolutely detest staircases for the next few days. Not that I'd agree to going for a run again tonight, but I don't think stairs will be a problem today. It's very odd; perhaps it was the stretches, perhaps it was the unusual exertion--too tired to stiffen, how about that?--and perhaps it was just me being so sure of pain that God decided to have a bit of a giggle and took that away. After all it's when I'm the most sure of a pronouncement I predict that the universe seems to conspire and prove me immediately and utterly wrong.