Dream Log: Huge Campus

I dreamed I was on the campus of a large university; indeed, it may have been somewhat larger than the largest real university campus in the world. I was supposed to meet some friends of mine, but I was lost, and the people I asked for directions weren't very helpful.

At one point I was inside a library. I saw a sign over the doorway to a room which said "THEOLOGY," and I went in, because oftentimes, items shelved under the heading of theology 1) aren't actually theology and 2) are written in Latin. I saw some volumes whose covers looked promisingly old -- but then I remembered that I was already late: my friends and I had agreed to meet for lunch at 1:00 PM, and my Seiko 5 read 1:06.

(This is my Seiko 5. There are many others like it, but this one is mine. Squeeee!)

Reluctantly, I abandoned my search for interesting things written in Latin, noting the location of the library and the room labeled "THEOLOGY" for a possible future search, and continued to look for my friends.

This search for my friends was particularly difficult because I had forgotten where we had agreed to meet.

Most of the people I saw were young adults -- students, most of them, I supposed -- who seemed to be in significantly better physical shape than I. For example, there was a large store, several stories high, which seemed to sell mostly sporting goods, and the staircase which descended from the 2nd floor to the ground floor had hand rails which stopped 8 feet or more above the ground floor, and students (probably students), instead of climbing down the stairs, were standing upright on these handrails and sliding down and jumping 8 feet or more down to the floor and landing without injuring themselves. Sometimes they absorbed the shock of landing by letting their legs bend very deeply; other times they rolled as they landed, like expert parachuters. And I wasn't about to try that.

It's not that I'm in bad shape for my age: I do pushups and crunches and cardio every day. But these young people all seemed somewhat athletic even compared to average young people. It was unusual that they all seemed that way, that I couldn't spot an exception.

I went into another very large store which seemed to sell mostly appliances. These stores weren't across the street from the campus, as I've seen in some college towns: they were in the middle of the campus, they were university operations. People continued to be not much help in finding my friends, not that I gave them much to work with.

Gradually I started to get the impression, from the expressions on their faces, sometimes pleasantly dreamy, sometimes very unpleasantly fanatical, that these fit young people were in some sort of religious order, and that all of the vigorous and sometimes dangerous physical exercise was a part of their religious practice.