Last night (or this morning) I had a strange dream.
It was a dream where I was drawing pictures – which makes some sense, as I’ve been doing a lot of drawing, lately. I so vividly remember this dream that I made an effort to reproduce, after waking up, one of the pictures I was drawing inside the dream. Of course, pictures and images that seem profound or amazing inside a dream rarely seem that way on the outside, and my artistic talent seemed higher inside the dream, too. But at right is a sketch of the image I was drawing – a sort of “world tree” where there were many things in a large, top-heavy tree, including houses and smaller trees growing out of the top of it.
The dream got weird (don’t dreams always get weird?). A child came into the room. Well, maybe a young adolescent, about 12 years old. He wasn’t Korean (that’s odd, remember, because all my students are Koreans). I looked at him carefully, and my heart jumped – this child was me. Me, at age 12. Me said, “You’re late for class.” His tone was judgmental.
I rushed, following the me doppelganger down the halls of KarmaPlus to the appropriate class room. It was my beloved advanced debate students, mostly 13 or 14 or 15 (in Western counting). And the me doppelganger sat down among them, apparently a welcome member of the class. One of the Korean students said to me (the teacher, not the doppelganger), “Oh, we’ve missed you so much.”
“Was I gone a long time?” I asked. There was an odd, long silence.
The me doppelganger nodded, sagely.
Ellen (who has graduated from middle school and is no longer, in fact, a student in the debate class) stood up and made a little speech, in a mix of Korean and German (huh, German? where’d that come from?), on behalf of the other students. I understood most of it, much to my own surprise – of course, it was dream-Korean and dream-German, so that really means nothing. Then she sat back down and held out a small, neatly wrapped present. The me doppelganger jumped up and grabbed the gift, and ran from the room, laughing.
I looked down at my notes for the class, feeling crestfallen… robbed. My notes were nothing but the world-tree picture I’d been drawing earlier.
That’s the dream. I awoke to a square of very deeply blue morning sky outside my window, which was rimmed by hard rime on the inside.
