Dream of a Dark Room

I had a dream the other night. Sleeping in my bed, eyes shut tight, minding my own business, I was thrown into a room. I don't remember many specifics about the room, only that it was definitely a classroom and incredibly dark. The whole room - walls, floor, ceiling - was a murky brown. Even the desks, the chalk board on the wall, and the teacher's desk were dark and difficult to make out. The only light in the room came from the open doorway, which appeared blindingly bright.

The classroom was also unusual because of a dark brown cloud that hovered just below the ceiling. It looked like a swirling mass of dirt, infinitely dark and dreary looking. I knew - as sometimes you can know in dreams - that this room was haunted.

Now, I'm not sure of the order of all the things that occurred in this dream, as dreams tend to be unclear in my memory, but I do recall most of what happened.

Out of that evil brown cloud, I saw a glowing object emerge (whether it was created in the cloud or had simply been caught in the current I do not know). It was an American flag, the small kind you can find in school classrooms. It floated and bobbed in the cloud like a ship on the ocean until it came to rest above the open doorway.

Before or after or around the same time that this happened, a boy came to stand in the open doorway. He was short, dark-haired, and bespectacled, and reminded me somewhat of Harry Potter, only without any scars or magical influences. I remember knowing that, while I could not see them, there were other students in the classroom; I was viewing the room and the boy through their perspective.

In at least this one moment in the dream - the boy was standing in the shining doorway and the glowing flag was above him.

Then he was in the classroom among the students, although I don't remember watching how he got there. This is where it gets a little fuzzy. Whatever happened in that classroom, the students unanimously decided (along with me, the viewer) that this boy was the "chosen" one, the one that was going to save them. The room itself appeared to recognise he was different. When he tried to leave, the haunted room seemed to become darker. The doorway that had been bright grew dimmer, contorting and shrinking around him, trying to keep him inside.

He did manage to leave, however.

Then, "bing!" I was instantly transported outside of the classroom. The sky was endless, the grass was green, and the day was still intensely bright though infinitely more cheery. I looked at the room that had seemed so terrifying and evil before and realized with astonishment that it was only a small, shabby one-room school house, much like the kinds in old western movies. I was viewing it from the outside while the young boy was walking back inside. Following him, I found the classroom had been emptied of its students (perhaps they had magically appeared outside as well) and only the teacher, who I hadn't noticed before, remained.

He had a half-crazed look and blood-shot eyes, truly miserable in all appearances. He was bent over what looked like tiny shards of broken glass, sweeping them up with a short broom and dustpan. As the boy entered, the teacher looked up with a wild look in his eye, still sweeping and hobbling farther into the room. The boy made a gesture towards the flag that hung above the doorway, saying something to the effect that he wanted to take the flag down and remove it from the room. He said this, of course, with the idea that doing so would remove the haunting.

The teacher spit with anger and fear (and a hint of madness) that the boy was a fool to mess with such things. He turned around and continued his sweeping.

Then the dream ended.

So, is the boy really a savior - a young person who wants to save the flag from the darkness? And the older man the real fool, busying himself with trivial matters and missing the whole point?

Or, is the child stealing the last point of light in an already dark room, only to leave it hopeless? And the teacher simply trying to clean up the mess he's made?

If I Died Tomorrow

This is, in fact, the first post of 2010 in my blog, though I don't know if that's a big deal or not.

If I were to die tomorrow, I don't think it would be that big of a deal. It might mean something that I actually had a blog, that I put time into writing my thoughts on a wall for all to see, that I cared. If I'm not alive tomorrow, people won't cry because I failed that one math test a few years ago, but the friends I made in school might remember me.

If I lived just one more day, would people care whether or not my underwear matched? Would they be grossed out to read my diary and find out that I picked my nose in private? Would they care that I had said hi to them every morning and gave them hugs when they looked blue?

If I fell off a bridge, was hit by a meteor, or was killed in some other wholly unpredictable and unexpected yet catastrophic event, would it matter whether or not my dreams were big or small, whether or not I wore makeup or left my face naked, whether or not I took the time to watch the ripples in the lake and imagine they were telling me something?

What would matter?