Dream, featuring Sue Sylvester and Jesus

Dreams have always interested me since the beginning of college when I skimmed over that topic in my psychology textbook for my PSY103 class. Every night, after succumbing myself to a restful state, I close my eyes and say the Our Father. Most nights, I don’t even get to finish it because I fall asleep, or I get distracted in my imagination and fall asleep then. But every night, I have a dream and the next morning, whether I want to or not, I actually remember it for a good thirty minutes or so. Some say they don’t dream, but I learned that we all do. It’s just a case of whether or not you remember your dream. Is it a case of whether you chose to remember it or not? I don’t know. Now we’re really hitting Freudian stuff. I surprise myself whenever I remember mine because in my waking state, I always forget things and past events. That family vacation to Florida in ’98 is out the window. I don’t even remember going there at all, not even with the pictures in front of me.

The dream I had just recently had me looking back in that psychology textbook to catch up on my knowledge of dreams besides the classic Freudian theory where dreams represent what you are unconsciously repressing, sexual or not. Part of what I re-read includes contemporary theories of dream content. According to contemporary theories:

"One of the functions of sleep is to draw together ‘an individual’s recent experiences of the past few days along with their goals, desires, and problems.’ According to this view, the story of the dream reflects the brain’s attempt to weave a narrative around the recent fragments of a person’s life that become most prominent during REM sleep. Studies of dream content confirm that content of dreams shows a good deal of continuity with dreamers’ waking concerns."

I couldn’t agree more with this theory as I retrospect back to a plethora of dreams.

However, a few nights ago I had a dream that, if I were to totally put myself in the hands of contemporary theories of dream content, I’d be very confused because I don’t see how it has to do with recent events in my life, other than the fact that my future will involve the field of education and my dream took place in a school. It was a very odd dream. The weirdest by far that I’ve ever had and it had the most celebs that I’ve ever had in a dream; well not celebs per se, at least I wouldn’t call one of them a celeb; instead he’s a pretty important figure in the biblical sense.

As I said, the scene of the dream was a high school. It was summer time, so there were no classes going on. However a movie was being shown in the auditorium and food and refreshments were in the gymnasium, meaning that one would have to walk from the gym to the auditorium to bring food back to their seat. So that’s exactly what I did before the movie started. During the movie, I had to get up to use the bathroom. I walked out into the hallway and was about to go down the stairs. Blocking the steps was none other than Sue Sylvester from Glee. She was the gym teacher at the school with all the attributes she harbors as her character in the show. Who else could she be? She fits that role so perfectly. So anyway, I was intimidated to go past her because she’s kind of scary to cross, that meanie of a coach. But I had to go to the bathroom, so I thought I’d silently pass her. However, that wasn’t likely to happen. She stopped me. That’s when I noticed that I was wearing some type of mascot two-piece suit of an indistinguishable animal. She took hold of my shoulders and said, “Let me help you; we don’t want you to trip down these steps now do we?”

“Ok,” I said.

So she stood behind me and I thought she was just going to guide me down the steps, holding my shoulders, but instead she gave me the roughest wedgie in the world. Once a fox, always a fox. At the bottom of the steps, she gave me a pat on the butt and said, “Now get to class.”

“But we don’t have class,” I mumbled as I uncomfortably walked away from her as fast as I could.

As I continued down the hallway, I had a run-in with another teacher. Only, something was peculiar about him. It was as if he were a lenticular print revealing a teacher who looked like Hans Landa from Inglorious Basterds and, if you angle your head a little, Jesus. Just like a super special basketball card or pokemon card that has a picture that morphs into another picture if you look at it from a different angle. I saw a Hans Landa teacher who morphed into Jesus.

He asked me to do him a favor. “I need you to go to the cafeteria and get me a fork.” I think he said fork. It was either that or a spoon. In any case, he wanted an eating utensil. I looked toward the cafeteria and saw that I would have to cross the tracks in a subway to get to it, and there were no stairs to go around and over the tracks. The only way to get to the cafeteria was to jump down onto the tracks, climb out, get the fork, jump back down and then climb out again to get back to Jesus. Easier said than done. I was scared to hell that I wasn’t going to climb back out in time before a train comes and kills me. The teacher/Jesus, sensed my fear in hesitation, partly because I told him how I was scared. He looked at me, straight in the eye and held both of my shoulders and said, “Bern, I’m Jesus, of course you’re going to make it across. Please get me a fork.” I looked back at the tracks and saw how deeply below my floor level they were.

“Ummmm . . . fine, ok.” He was, after all, Jesus. I hope he wasn’t Satan in disguise.

No longer wearing a mascot suit, I looked down at the tracks and jumped. Just as I jumped, I heard a train and looked to my left. The light of the train was shining in the tunnel and I was so panicked and short of breath. “Oh God!” I thought. The train was so loud.

I woke up sweating with my cell phone ringing and that was that. Incorporated dream (when something in real life is incorporated in your dream) in the end.

What could this dream mean? When I woke up, I couldn’t help thinking about how Harry Potter was the “chosen one.” Why did Jesus pick me to do him a favor? Does he expect me to become a saint? What qualifies someone to be a saint anyway? I don’t even know that! I’m guessing you have to be pure to be a saint, like nuns. I don’t think I’m pure, trust me. And who says I’m trying to be a saint? There’s already a Saint Bernadette anyway. Or do you have to be really religious to be a saint? I’m not religiously religious, but I do believe in the man upstairs and if there’s one person to thank for all the goodness in the world and for fate, I’d think it’s him. Why me? – Besides the fact that it was my dream. This was the first time Jesus was in any of my nightly unconscious flights.