blue trane's Journal: University Dream

2011-04-16

I was taking a class at some university. My high school buddy Paul Manning (he was in the "piano dream", too) was at the school. I signed up for a class with him. I met him on a luscious green quad and we went to an old brownstone building. The class was on the top floor.

It appeared we were the only two in the class. The teacher was seated at a counter facing the window. There were many computers and terminals on the (long) counter; there were also many other people in the room, working at terminals, not part of the class. The teacher was involved in interacting with one terminal as we came up to him. He had a look of being well-cared-for all his life. He wore glasses and had slightly curly, wavy brown hair. He might have had a mustache. I think his name was Joel.

It became clear that Paul knew him pretty well. They bantered familiarly. Paul seemed to know a lot more about the class than I did. I seemed to be tagging along with Paul, happy to be being given attention by him.

At some point, Joel started putting on different hats, some covered his entire head as if for protection against storms, etc. One seemed made of a space-age flexible metal with padding. Paul threw out off-handedly that it was lead-lined. The implication that popped into my head was that it was protection against fallout. I made some comment about Fukushima.

I became aware that the class was more than just a simple, regular class as I had assumed. These were Feds, investigators of some kind, and I was in some kind of Intelligence Agency building, like the CIA. Paul had known this all along.

Joel casually mentioned he could look me up, and started punching keys at the terminal in front of him. He mentioned some things about me. They seemed pretty innocuous. Some were correct, some weren't.

We moved to another section, away from the windows, more towards the interior of the room. Someone else, a woman I believe, or maybe Paul, searched for auto loans by me, and came up with a Ferrari. I almost laughed; I had never even thought of buying a Ferrari. Their data was way off on that one!

We moved to yet another section. It became clear to me that I was now the subject of a pretty rigorous investigation. They were pulling up all sorts of information. Some of it was accurate, most was way off ...

At one point, after some wrong information turned up that they asked me about, I asked a woman investigator, "do you research blogs?" I said I had voluntarily provided a lot of personal information of the sort they seemed to be looking for on internet blogs. And I was proud of these posts, I made them to try to publicize some things about myself. Yet their efforts hadn't come across my postings. The woman asked me what sort of things I had posted. I said personal things, about mental health issues, finances, politics ... I was becoming guarded with her, suddenly playing their game in which I was supposed to hide information and they were supposed to work hard to uncover it.

Then I was at a picnic, with Paul; and the professor of the class, Joel, was at another part of the picnic, which had many attendees. It had become clear to me by this time that I was being evaluated to see if I was good enough to take the class. Just the mere fact that they were evaluating me seemed to create a desire in me to want to succeed, whereas I didn't really care about the class before I'd found that out. They had succeeded in creating a desire to be accepted by them in me. I wanted to be in that room with access to all those machines! Even if they had missed the most important information about me, which I had voluntarily posted all over the internet.

There was something to do with guns at the picnic. My memory of the dream has faded ... Some interactions with Joel ... something about papers ... the sense of them deciding whether I was acceptable to take their class, hoping I was, thinking I had a decent chance ...

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Day residue: I had been looking up the Evergreen State College yesterday, thinking possibly about taking a class there, looking at the library information because it had a book I'm interested in.

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I think the dream represents tension between wanting to be accepted, wanting to be part of something, and another desire to pursue the truth at any cost. The ppl in the dream, the class, had lots of nice equipment, and represents a social group that could provide acceptance; yet at the same time they were inaccurate in the information they gathered about me, ignoring the most obvious sources that I had deliberately left around the internet.