High School Reformulated

...an intense, bitter-sweet dream/nightmare

I had a strange dream/nightmare in which the Northwest High School Class of '84 was called back to redesign and relive our High School experience. It was a project in which we would design a "13th Grade," and those participating would become the same age we were 20 years earlier to test out the new design live.

We were all kids again, but we had new freedoms to audit the classes of our choosing, and apply our expertise more freely.

This dream was very "sweet and sour" because it was school more open to my feelings, making a lot of administrative advances in cultivating my gifts, but making hundreds of social ties more painfully intimate. There was a lot of affection and admiration expressed in the dream that would have been too painful then--so it exposed that hurt tonight.

In the classrooms and hallways

were stopped up with people sharing more matured admiration for each other... pals and would-be sweethearts shared their appreciation with me until I was overcrowded and suffocating.

Meanwhile, there was also the sorrow of the familiar friendships which could not participate... Tom Thomas had died our Senior year, so obviously their rejuvenating powers could not revive the dead. And others who moved away, like Derron Monroe, were missing as well... So these friendships which came so hard-won were lost, and now I'm back to square one with the painful disadvantage of an escalated Social Anxiety Disorder.

The bus trip home was just as painful as the school... Feeling the compulsion to express my affections and admirations, but terrified at the intimate consequences that would like ensue.

In an odd turn, the bus arrived at a construction site, and got blocked in by heavy construction equipment. There was a crane nearby hauling heavy steel girders overhead. Its pulley had jammed and began breaking apart, certain to unleash the girders onto the school bus below.

I got out to parry the girders away by myself, in order to save the bus and be killed in the process, No one would understand how I was preserving the ones I loved so dearly, while at the same time I found them more painful to live with than the falling girders.