I am in the open common area on the ground floor of a modern brick and glass school building and I
need to get up to the second floor wing where the classrooms are located. That seems to involve
running up a vertical brick wall at the back of the room, so I give it a shot but turn the wrong way
into an adjoining wall. When I try again I am on my knees pushing a toy car so I cannot get up
enough speed to make it up the wall. Then I notice a flight of oversized stairs in a pearly white
and blue color and I follow them up to the classroom wing.
I search through a wad of papers and cardboard in my hand until I find my class schedule. My first
class is in room 5. When I open the door I find the classroom is very small, just a few feet wide
and deep. I sit down by the door but as I do so, the round portable speaker pinned to my chest
bumps the student in front of me in her forehead. She is small and old and frail, her once dark
hair now almost entirely white. My little speaker has left a raised purpleish bruise on her
forehand and she is upset. The teacher does not seem to mind but another student observes the
bruise and agrees that it is a problem. Although I sympathize with the woman's pain I also feel
that I have to some extent been set up, and that it is not entirely my fault.
I cannot find my class schedule so I go to the office and the administrator, a woman nicely dressed
in light blue, is just leaving. She is carrying my bookbag and I persuade her to pause and look
through it. She finds my schedule and hands it to me.
I am in the kitchen/break room next to the office. Another student with very long wavy blonde hair
is in the room but I don't speak with her. Instead I sit down near a vivacious black woman who
greets me with pleasure and points out that both she and I have soft fingers. She has very dark
skin, even on the palm of her hand, but her fingers are pink. I do not know what she means by
"soft fingers" but because she is friendly I agree with her. Then I remember that Violet is with me
so I introduce her saying that "She is with me", but I immediately regret putting it that way because
the woman might think that I am married to Violet.
The student with the long blonde hair leaves the room and checking the time, I realize that she is
going to class because the time is "to 5". I look for my schedule to see where my next class is but
once again I have misplaced it. I regret that I did not take a photo of it with my cell phone when
I had it in hand.
Despite not knowing where to go next at the end of the dream, I wake up with a happy memory of
friendly and interesting people - a surprisingly rosy view of what was in the actual dream a fairly
difficult experience. At first I couldn't get to the classroom wing, then I had persistent trouble
finding my class schedule and my encounters with other characters in the dream were generally
plagued by misunderstandings and mishaps. Darchelle helped me make sense of it all.
In the dream I am in school. The building reminds me of the boys' high school and the student with
long blonde hair reminds me of a college girlfriend of Daniel's. The light blue color of the steps
and the administrator's suit remind me of Susan. Violet became a friend of ours early in our
marriage when we were involved with project Restore. Together those symbols establish that the
timeframe of the dream extends from my high school years to the beginning of my marriage and career
- the period of my life when I "grew up" and found my way into adulthood, with Susan's help.
I had a difficult five years after college. I felt like a child who had no idea how to become an
adult, a feeling symbolized in the dream by my trying to ascend the brick wall while pushing a toy
car, by the brick wall itself and the oversized stairs and by my continual misplacing my class
schedule. With Susan's help (the administrator who was in possession of my bookbag and my
schedule), I made it though perhaps later than some of my peers. The "to 5" time at the end of the
dream is a reference to the end of a 9 to 5 workday. In becoming an adult though, I resorted to
Adventist fundamentalism to define my worldview and reduce my responsibility for how my life might
turn out. Violet symbolizes that Christianity which I adopted but never fully married. The other
black woman may represent the appeal, at least in my retrospective imaginings, of the road not
taken, the self-directed life which I lacked the confidence to pursue.