I dreamed I was back at Rice for a big Homecoming reunion. I had agreed to go as my ex-husband's date, but we were driving up separately from San Antonio to meet in Austin and drive over. And maybe we'd want to see a movie in Austin first with my mom and my friend Ruthie. So Ruthie was going to drive, but there was construction on I-35, so we had to go through all these restaurant parking lots to get to a clear section of highway. I was worried we were going to be late, but then I realized I had no idea which movie we were seeing, or what time it would be. So instead I just got dropped off at the hotel where I would spend the night, and then the ex and I would head to the reunion the next day.
When we got to Rice, we immediately separated. He went to go check out the new construction on the football stadium, and I was supposed to meet my college ex-boyfriend in the CAAM building. What I quickly learned about the CAAM building was that it was mostly designed for people who could teleport, which most CAAM students could. It was a huge, multi-level library looking building with staircases that looked like they'd been designed by Escher and Dali that night they got drunk together on mezcal in Juarez. There were twisty spirals that drifted sideways, leaving gaps in the middle without any railing, and the banisters undulated such that sometimes it was too high to reach, and sometimes too low, and to stay balanced as the steps went up on one end, I had to grasp the steps above me.
And then, some times you were supposed to jump down three feet to get to the floor, because if you stayed on the stairs, they took you off over a yawning gulf above the next floor down, instead of having a landing right on the floor you wanted. And some of the landings were broad catwalks over large halls, with no railings and floors that were rounded down at the edges. And of course, I couldn't teleport, so I had to take all these stairs. My friend that I was meeting knew most of the secrets, so I followed him.
We sat in on an intro level class, and there was a video with random shots of hummingbirds flying and calculus formulae and chimps using sticks to fish for termites, and all of this said something profound about computer architecture, but I definitely didn't get it. Then my friend met up with his wife and I couldn't keep up with them, so I went to the lake where a rock concert was going on, and found some of my band friends to hang out with, but they weren't feeling well.
So finally I got on the school bus to go home, and that's when I realized I was no longer wearing clothes. So I was glad that the bus would let me off at my driveway so I could dash up to the house quickly and not many people would see me. Except the bus driver went right past my driveway and came to a stop a half a block down, in front of a Dairy Queen. So I had to get out there, and I figured I'd just run as fast as I could, but as I got down off the bus, I felt horribly achy all over. I could barely stand upright, and couldn't walk faster than a slow shuffle that sometimes turned into a crawl when I fell. I was still stumbling painfully up the block to my driveway when I woke up.
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