Dream: Trying to Leave the Spiral University

Dream December 16, 2010


I was walking along the inner radius of a spirally designed university at the center of which was an airport and space launching pad. The school was situated in the heart of a vast forest, and as I walked, I stared out at the trees. I was a few years younger and knew it, and the limp with which I had grown up was heavy on my heart and subtracted from my joy at being at the University.

Reaching into my pocket, I worried at the boarding passes there, then switched them to another pocket.

Elderly professors walked all along the cobbled path of the spiral, nodding and smiling at me. However, once I reached escalators that rose to the airport, the smiling faces were replaced by a clusterfuck of anxiety and confusion. Screams of children and sobs of forlorn women and growls of impatient men.

I rose on the escalator. Above was the airport, and above that was the interstellar launching pad. The airport gates were below a transparent dome of blue glass. I could see ships up there, amorphous forms taking solid shape at the hands of scientists.

A stranger whispered in my ear: “There she is, Todd. She won’t take her eyes off you. She’s lovely.” I turned on the rising stairway and saw a gorgeous young woman with blonde hair staring seductively at me. She reached for me, and I hesitated, then was forced onto the ticket platform. I fell down, and my boarding passes whistled out of my pocket and ripped and multiplied and ripped. A forceful wind tore through the platform, scattering the thousands of torn tickets around the gates. I scrambled to grab them, unsuccessful, while people pushed past me toward their gates, trampling on the passes, shredding them.

I looked up at the interstellar platform and saw a ship forming through the blue glass that I had not seen when at first entering the platform. Its hull bubbled out like an aluminum balloon, revealing portals and structures wonderful. A vessel meant for journey beyond this galaxy.

I had to get on that ship, and I realized that my multiplying tickets were akin to the loaves and fishes. It was a miracle for me to reach the heavens! I scurried around the platform, which was constructed like an M. C. Escher drawing, each corner an ouroboros. The stack of tickets in my hands became thick and heavy as I watched the vessel above me grow larger and closer to launching.

Through the knots of passengers I saw a man who talked to others as if he were in charge. He stared up at the vessel, then routinely checked a piece of paper he held in his hands.

With my collected tickets, I ran to him. “Captain,” I said. “Captain! Here are my tickets. I have to get on that ship. You have no idea where it can be going if only I am allowed to board!”

He looked up from his paper for a moment, looking at me and my bundle of tickets with derision.

“I’m not going to let you distract me,” he said, returning his attention to his document.

Frantic, I rushed over to a long queue in front of gate counter. An unknown amount of time passed, but I felt my hair grow and the skin of my face loosen and sag. An explosion above startled me, caused me to drop my tickets on floor. Looking up, I watched the wondrous vessel disconnect itself from the launching pad and rise into an oblivion. Gone.

A young woman in front of me turned around. I recognized that she was the same one from the escalator, but strange and different. Her face was not real, but rather an imagined idea of a beautiful woman separate from any chain of DNA we knew.

“It’s you,” she said. “You look old and tired, you know? Everything within you is used up. Have a safe trip.”

I thought to say that she looked different, too, but did not say.

She grabbed somebody’s hand and walked through the gate door.