Dream III

I’m lying in my bed, restless. Every time I look over, someone new is lying there next to me sound asleep, including my sister, Eliot, my deceased cousin Nancy, and Aimee, to name a few. My attention is called to my computer when I get an IM from my former political science teacher, Nancy Wadsworth. The message simply reads, “This is Professor Nancy Wadsworth.” I respond saying, “I know who you are. This is Arielle… Arielle Finkelstein.” There is no response.

Suddenly I am in a strange place that is apparently my parents’ house, though it looks like the house Natalie Hutchison used to live in; however the space between the dining room and the front door is a church chapel with rows and rows of pews, filled with random people. Michael is standing in the kitchen with me and tells me he has to leave because Nancy Wadsworth has taken a new ‘service industry’ position at DU and has hired him as a personal stylist and shopper to revamp her wardrobe for her new job. After he leaves, I go outside for fresh air. Outside the landscape is intensely mountainous with pristine, powdery snow covering every bit of foliage in sight. Using nothing but my mind, I turn the winter around me into spring.

I go back inside and take a line with Mikki and Evan. Evan is laying out lines all over my house and I start to get angry because I feel like he’s pushing Mikki and I to do too much coke. Then I discover a lint-gray colored line of meth in the bathroom. I become furious and accuse Evan of being a meth addict to which he admits. I go around the house and collect the lines of coke, wanting to remove them without wasting them so I put them in different small bags I happen to find here and there. Most of the bags are already occupied by other items—mainly food products. I discover the largest line on the kitchen counter next to the stove and scoop it into a bag that also has two blueberries in it. One of the blueberries is a normal blueberry, but the other is the size of a golf ball and made out of compacted powder, like chalk.

Suddenly I am Nate Archibald, sitting in the back pew of the chapel behind my parents. I am feeling overwhelmingly stressed and under pressure because of something my dad has said or done; I don’t know what. He turns around and tries to calm me down and make me feel better but I take this action as patronizing and become more upset. In an attempt to escape, I return outside where I am once again myself. Outside, it is winter again. I try to turn the winter into spring again, but fail with frustration. I sit in the snow for a long time and all my limbs grow numb. My legs start to tingle and burn, the sky turns an intensely bright whitish-blue, and I then wake up.