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.

Dream Log: Big Honkin' Library, Long Hair On Me

Very often I dream about walking around on university campuses, often within buildings on those campuses which are unrealistically large, often getting lost in those huge buildings, walking past row after row after row of offices and laboratories and archives and lounges and so forth, unable to find an exit, with an ambivalent feeling: on the one hand, I feel very comfortable in such surroundings, and I'm very appreciative of the work which is done there, but on the other hand, I'm lost and I can't find an exit.

And on the 3rd hand, I don't belong there, and if I asked directions it might become clear that I didn't belong there, and that might be awkward. In real life, I haven't been a paid, official member of academia since 1992, and I'm not officially an academic in these dreams either, which, when I pause and consider it, is somewhat strange inasmuch as I was an actual academic once, and I quite frequently dream about having all sorts of jobs I've never had in real life.

In real life, I have browsed the stacks in many a university library. In many of those libraries, it was against the rules for me to be there. I know of one university library in which anyone can come and browse, and one more where the general public can not only come in and look around, but also anyone with a library card from the city's public library can check out books from the university library as well.

Otherwise, as far as I know, if you're not a student or a member of the faculty or staff of the university, you're not supposed to be in their library. In some cases, this is effectively enforced by security checkpoints at all library entrances, where university ID's are scanned. Other libraries do not have such checkpoints, and although de jure only those officially associated with the university may enter, in practice, anyone who doesn't cause a disturbance is generally tolerated.

Last night's dream's unrealistically large academic building in which I got lost was the main library of an unspecified university. The lobby of the library was quite particularly unrealistically huge. In particular, the lobby's ceiling was unrealistically high, well over 50 feet high.

At the back of the lobby were huge staircases leading to the stacks and offices and special collections and archives and so forth, and all of these looked like their real-life counterparts in university libraries, except that, as often happens in my dreams, there were very, very many of them, and soon I was lost. Many of the doors of the offices etc which I passed were wooden with glass in their top halves, and after a while I noticed my reflection, and that my hair was very long. I had tied it up to some extent in one big braid, but some locks had come loose and were hanging as low as the middle of my back, while others stood out at odd angles. After a while I just gave up on trying to get my hair tied back up again, and shook it all loose, and it was very unruly and pointing it all sorts of directions. And in the dream I liked the way my hair looked and felt. (In real life my hair is very unruly except when it is very short, and at the moment, as it happens, it's less than a quarter-inch long. I've had a very great variety of hairstyles, from very short to very long, from very conventional to downright Cubist.)

That's pretty much the whole dream: being in a huge university library, finding the surroundings pleasant except that I was lost, and having very long hair. (And enjoying having my hair so long.)