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I had a couple of strange dreams last night. Actually, the strangest part of it all is I’m awake and can still remember bits and pieces of them. Usually, if I do dream (and I can only assume I do), I’ve no recollection of them by the time I’m awake.

In the first, I walked into my composition classroom a few minutes before class began and turned on the overhead projector to show some assignment information or something. One of the students (we’ll call her Veronica) warned me that class hadn’t started yet, and I told her I was just giving the early people a little extra time to learn. Most of them started taking notes (remember, this is a dream). Things got really weird when class started. Eight or nine of my students walked to the front of the classroom, placed a gift on the desk, and went back to their seats. I was confused, and asked the occasion. One of them, Bob, gave me a funny look and said, “They’re for Thursday.” I had no idea what that meant, though my best guess was it was something Homecoming-week related, so I smiled and acted like I knew what he was talking about. I started to put the gifts aside so I could begin class, but they wanted me to open them before we started, and I complied. I opened the first gift, which I think was from Bob, and it was five half-used rolls of toilet paper. The rolls had a different embarrassing statement about my past printed on each sheet (in a bold, sans-serif font of different colors, justified text, and a corresponding visual aid in the lower-right of each sheet). At that point, an authoritative-looking woman of about fifty walked through the door and came towards the desk. I hid a mostly-empty bottle of Bud Ice (which, by the by, I’m pretty sure was another “gift”) on the floor and asked if I could help her. She asked if I was the instructor, and I said yes. She asked if I knew where the kissing competition was. And then I woke up.

In the second dream I was a teenager and an amateur wizard of some sort. I had just climbed an enormous tree because I’d heard there was a demon in the tree house at the top. When I opened the door, I saw a boy about my age playing with something on the floor, an old man sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair staring into space, and an identical chair in which sat the dusty skeleton of something that looked demonesque. I asked the boy where the demon was. The boy got up and skipped to the kitchen (big tree house), looked in the cupboard, and said, “Sometimes he’s in here.” He then skipped to the closet near the front door, pulled aside the curtain divider, and said, “And sometimes he’s in here.” Then he pointed at the skeleton in the chair and said, “And sometimes, he’s RIGHT THERE!” His voice had gone from childlike sing-songy to booming and menacing, and as he pointed, the skeleton took the form of something black and vicious which came straight at me, knocking me back out the door to the ground. On the way back up, I realized that the demon and the boy were working together, and that the old man was comatose and helpless. When I got back to the top, I tried to drive them both out of the tree house and into the sunlight, which I knew would destroy the demon and save the boy. Unfortunately, the only spell I seemed to know very well was how to increase the brightness of the available sunlight, and there was only one window in the tree house, directly opposite the door. Eventually, after being knocked out of the tree several more times and (I’m guessing) using some wizardry I don’t remember, I got them both out the door. I walked the boy back to the village where he would be safe. He asked how old I was, and I told him I was fourteen. He seemed pretty impressed, and said he was thirteen but would be fourteen soon.

I also had a third dream which I don’t remember well at all. It had something to do with the tuna in our fridge downstairs, and it was fairly bloody-looking tuna in my dream, so I think I’ll stay away from that stuff.