The Boy For Whom Everything Works Out Perfectly

From Telkoth.net

I had a very long and detailed dream last night. I really wish I could draw sometimes, because I can visualize some of the things in this dream so perfectly... [sigh] I'll have to explain things as best I can, so here I go:

It started off with this kid who was in a classroom at school, but the school was very, very low-tech... made of bamboo reeds spaced some distance apart with a thick tarp or something strapped between each. Mostly there weren't windows, since light filtered in through the walls anyway, so the room was not well lit, but there was one window. The kids are arranged of in this somewhat quarter-circle shape around two of the walls... I'll draw the layout:

Anyway, the camera/point-of-view/whatever focuses on the one window, where some bamboo stalks meet at odd angles, and this purple ball somehow falls, I'm not sure if from inside or outside, and it hits one of these bamboo stalks, and does this perfect bouncing and rolling off of them, and lands... I don't know, somewhere. Anyway, whatever the teacher was doing she now stops, and looks intently at the window. Then she wets her finger and holds it up, testing for a breeze. After an uncomfortably long time of testing the wind, she walks over to this one kid on the end of the quarter-circle of kids, and leans in, and... I don't remember exactly what she says, but it's something like "Everything works out perfectly around you, doesn't it?" and "I suppose you think everyone will just sit back and do everything for you," or something... and this kid doesn't know what to say, so he just smiles and nods, and she smiles and nods back, and then we cut to the next scene, where this kid is picking up some of those purple balls from the hallway of the school (still built of bamboo and dark brown tarp). He has some kind of long ladle for scooping them up, and one of the school janitors come and gives him a basket to carry them around in.

Then we're on to the next scene, were we see this ladle, with three of these purply balls in them, swinging back and forth, and for a moment it looks like they're going to all fall out, but as it swings, they catch themselves, and only one falls out, perfectly into the waste basket which has been set up to catch them... and the view kind of pulls out to let you see that the ladle is attached (somehow) to a tree branch, where the kid is on top, dripping some kind of red sauce on the V-shaped handle of the ladle, and while the ladle rocks, depositing the balls one-by-one into the basket, the sauce drips out of the other side, and rolls along something else, into a large metal pot over a fire, which has some kind of soup cooking inside.

Okay, now things go crazy, and somehow this kid is in a very modern-looking airport, and he's by himself – must be about 12 years old, I should point out – and he's running late for this flight, but he always manages to get in the shortest lines to exactly the right person so that you know he's gonna make it. Meanwhile, we cut to the other people already at the gate waiting to get on this flight... um, I'll try to describe what it looks like, only because this is another thing which I can picture so easily... it's kind of split into two levels, and we, the viewers, the dreamer, whatever, are viewing from the second level down to the first... it's like a giant stair step in shape, you might say, and we're looking from the top of the step down to the floor below, but now contain this stair step in a box, and the step we're on is much shorter... and there's a railing at the edge of our step, with glass panels from the floor to the top of the railing, and if you go to right, there's a stair case that leads down, next to one of those ramps that has to go forth-and-back-and-forth just to get down there. And from our view, on the right wall at the bottom, kind of in the space between the back wall and the ramp, there's the door that goes out to the open airport.

Anyway, the people are waiting for their flight, and the captain is at the gate desk, explaining that there are not enough people for the flight, only 19, and they really need a lot more (I dunno, however many they usually fit on airplanes, um... about 100?), and it would be such a waste, so the airline would rather refund everyone their tickets and bus them to their destination. The way the captain is phrasing it, you somehow get the idea that this will be the plane's first flight, and he wants it to be a good and full one, but only 20 people won't be. Anyway, at this point the kid shows up, and somehow indicates, from the second floor, that he is also on the flight, and the captain is like "it's still only 20" and goes on to reassure everyone that if they had a connecting flight that they're now going to miss because of the extra time it takes the bus, that you'll be refunded for that, etc, etc.

So everyone gets on this bus. And the destination is somewhere very cold – I keep wanting to say Alaska, but maybe only because my mom now lives there, so it's the only really cold place that can come easily to mind. There's a dense fog out, and the kid, or maybe everyone, sees these very-alien-looking planes flying by... they don't look like anything that should fly, but they're not exactly saucers, either... more like triangles that have been given height. And this is a little surprising to a lot of people.

I don't remember the transition here, but this kid is now in the center of a square room, much like the school he was in to begin with, except made of ice instead, or at least very cold, and from our point of view there's a door to the outside on the left wall, near the back (um, where the view is from the back wall, so it's near the viewpoint, on the left wall), and somehow we know that everyone is dead, and the kid is the only one left alive, and the whole earth is covered in ice and snow... and the kid is somehow communicating with the aliens that did this, but it's not really clear how. Like, he speaks, and we (I keep saying "we", because in a lot of ways this feels like a movie that's being watched, which is reinforced later in the dream as I'll explain) hear the alien's response... I don't remember the exact dialog, but basically the kid wants to know why the aliens killed everyone, and why he's the only person left, and basically the aliens say that they created the earth in order to produce him, this kid, whom for everything works out. He's the reason the earth was created, and populated, and everything else, and now that he's finally emerged, there's no reason for them, and... I guess they just want him to mill around and let things happen correctly around him? It's not entirely clear, because they don't take him anywhere. Oh, but there is this bizarre scene where they demonstrate that they have complete control over the planet, just to assure him that they created the whole thing. Like, he stands in the doorway, and looks out, and it's icy everywhere, and then all the snow melts and it starts to pour rain and flowers and plants grow, but it keeps raining, and floods, and we have this zoom-in shot of these leafy plants getting drowned, and then everything freezes up again, and we're left with this crackly-looking plain of ice as far as can be seen, but the kid is perfectly safe inside this room, where I suppose he's meant to stay.

But he doesn't – he sees, and this might be days or weeks later... actually, it might be years, 'cause I get the feeling that the kid is a little older now, and he keeps a journal – I don't know where he got the pen and paper – maybe from the aliens... but he's looking over the same crackly-icy plain, and sees this large, artificial-snake-like thing break up from under the ice, then bend back down, and submerge again... so you have, like, a sea-monster loop... thing... and anyway, somehow the kid – maybe he's 15ish by now, or something – anyway, he knows that inside these snake things, which are obviously made of metal plates and leather, or something, contain people who are steering it, so he runs up to it as it surfaces and sinks again, and as he does so, the snake slows, and a door opens in its side, and a crazy-short dude that looks something like a Jawa from star wars waves the kid in. And really, these things must only be a couple feet tall, and can barely stand up in this snake thing, and so the kid has to essentially lay down on his stomach, and bend with the snake thing as it moves. Somehow there's light in there for him to write in his journal by, and, like a movie, you hear his voice reading what he's writing, and it's something like how "they" (the aliens) will probably not approve of him running off with these things and learning about them and their culture, but he knows they'll put up with it, and he really wants to learn about them.

I don't know what happens after that, but now the dream is randomly about me instead of this weird kid, and I'm at work – at Barnes and Noble – and lots of stuff is being rearranged. I think I had volunteered to work some random evening, 'cause they needed someone in, and they were moving a lot of stuff around that day. Like, there was some extra guy at work who only came in to measure the distance between the magazine stands so that we'd know if we had to move them around, and it turned out we did, and so Tim, this older, smallish guy from work, was on one side of this massive magazine rack, trying to push it back, and Della, an older woman, was on the other side with some other girl, trying to help, and they weren't getting far, and it was clear they shouldn't be the ones doing it anyway, and at one point Tim pushed the rack from the top, and it started to fall, and somehow he managed to catch it, to stop it from quickly falling, and so Della quickly caught it, and pushed it back up, but Tim had hurt his arm doing it. Like, not permanently, or anything, but he definitely went "ah! ow!" and held his arm. I think Roy, the store manager was somewhere around, too, but anyway, I helped them line up the magazine shelf, as I was heading out that way with a "V-cart" full of magazines (they're like a really tall box with two sides missing, made of metal, on wheels).

Outside it was pouring, and I remember thinking "god, I have to walk home in this," but I was also distracted shelving. Heather was also there – a girl who for a short time shelved at Barnes and Noble as some weird internship thing... basically, they didn't pay her to work, because she has a weak heart, which has generally impeded her physically. Anyway, she was there, just hanging out, and talking to me about I-don't-know-what, distracting me from shelving. At one point I remember Kurt (another manager) calling me on one of those walky-talky-phone things, and trying to tell me something about Heather, like that her dad had called, and just told him about something, and for whatever reason he felt he should tell me but obviously felt embarrassed to say it. When he finally did say, I couldn't understand what he said, so I asked him to repeat it, and then there was long, long pause – I'd thought he hung up – but then he said it again, and I still didn't understand what he said, but I didn't want to make him say it again, so I said "ohh, oh" and hung up.

Um... skip ahead, though not too much time, to the work day being over due to the heavy rain. A guy from work, John (not café-John – there are two Johns) asked to give me a ride home, which I accepted, but then Heather came to tell me that her friend was offering her a ride, and I noticed that her friend was a cute girl, so I told John that I was actually getting a ride from Heather's friend, since Heather lived so close to me anyway, it be more convenient (in real life, Heather does live... somewhat close? Maybe a couple miles – I don't know if I was lying in-dream, or if in the dream Heather did live that much closer).

When I went to get my jacket and put my badge in the locker in the break room, I discovered that even that had been rearranged. The lockers had somehow been moved against the wall where the sink and hangers used to be, and I dunno where the other stuff was, but there was also a couch against the lockers, so I had to get on this couch to get to my locker, and wondered how the people with lockers further down ever got to them, what with the couch there and all.

Anyway, then Heather and her friend (and I can't remember at all what her friend looked like, but I know I saw her in the dream, because she was apparently attractive) and I left B&N to head for the friends' car, which was apparently parked on the furthest part of the parking lot possible.

As we walked, I was telling Heather about this movie I saw... this movie about a kid who has everything around him work out perfectly. I believe I somehow likened it to Dark City, or maybe Dark Crystal... in that it was made in that time-period, I guess? (there weren't puppets, nor was it quite like Dark City...) At some point we passed a store that does not exist in real life as I know it... it was on the left (whereas we left Barnes & Noble behind and on our right), and had some large, plastic panda-man statue outside the door. Presumably this was some kind of asian store or restaurant or something (now that I think of it, pandas eat bamboo, and that school in the "movie" was made of bamboo [shrugs]).

At one point, for some reason, I leaned forward just to be silly, and then realized that there was a lot of extra weight on my back, and almost fell forward, but barely recovered myself, and to my surprise, I'd been giving Heather a piggy-back ride... I don't know for how long, nor did I in the dream, and I called out to Heather's friend, who was ahead, "how long has she been there?!" or something... somehow I completely failed to notice.

Then somehow I was watching the first part of my dream over again, I think showing Heather, with the kid in the school, up to the perfectly-deposited balls and the soup-making, and then I woke up.

[edit] Final Notes

I kind of suspect that the first time through the dream about the boy, I didn't think about it as a movie, but then in the second part, with Heather and Barnes & Noble, it became a movie as I showed it to her. So I wonder if my memory of the first half has become distorted slightly, but anyway, there it is. Very long and very detailed - very strange.