Nightmare

Last night: I had just started a new internship at the newspaper, but it was also midyear conference in Thailand (from when I worked/lived in China). It was night. I drove into the building I was to work in, but the garage entrance brought me to the basement of the building instead.

I came up through the basement, where I had parked amid exposed pipes and cement pillars, and into a cubicled office space. Two women I recognized worked there; I hadn't seen them since college, or before. We greeted each other and talked about what they'd been doing since then, developing an instant rapport. They looked professional, in charcoal-gray pantsuits, their hair tied back -- but they acted casually, like friends.

There was going to be an assembly, so we all gathered in a darkened auditorium. It also seemed to be underground, as the basement had been, and the slant of the bleachers was severe, to the point where they seemed dangerous. The stage, at the bottom of the bleachers as though in a pit, lacked a proscenium, and the ceiling was exposed pipe and darkness. We filed in from the top of the auditorium, and I sat near the top.

As we chatted before the main speaker came, someone climbed up the bleachers and took my purse -- the blue suede-ish one I carry in real life -- but I didn't object. I figured there was a rule about bringing bags into assemblies that, since I was new, I didn't know about. I trusted that I would get the purse back afterwards. [This is the only time I remember this kind of foreshadowing showing up in any of my dreams -- certainly the only time the plot has been this complicated and yet made a kind of narrative sense. You'll see what I mean.]

The speaker came on and began to talk. He was young and clean-cut with light brown hair and a dark suit* -- he was the one who had taken my purse. I have no recollection of what he said. The atmosphere was still friendly and social.

About forty-five minutes into the lecture, a woman came onto the stage, holding my purse. I looked down curiously as she seemed to drop it, spilling the contents partly onto the stage. Several other people had come in from the sides of the stage, holding bunches of papers in their arms, which they began handing out.

The speaker was saying something, but as had been true through the dream, I didn't listen and could not understand what he was saying. His aspect indicated that this had been the real purpose of the assembly, that the preceding speech had just been a way to kill time -- a filler.

One of the papers reached me. It looked like it had been printed on an old machine requiring hand-setting the type -- there were tiny, random flecks of ink all over it. The top said "Alia" -- but I understood that this was a misspelling of my name.

There were several paragraphs formatted onto the page, underlined subheads over each one. The first subhead read "boys Alicia finds most captivating" [The use of the word "boys" indicated to me that the list went back to high school or middle school -- it was in order from most to least "captivating" of all the boys I'd ever been interested in. I didn't read it, so I didn't know how thorough or current it was.]

I understood with a shock what was going on. They had stolen my purse, sorted through its contents -- including my journal -- and written up the most embarassing things they could find. This had probably happened to everyone in the auditorium, as a sort of initiation. The shared shame of our secrets being exposed was meant to bind us together [like we were in Skull and Bones, I thought].

My mind raced through the options -- play it off as funny, act normally and pretend I wasn't mortally embarassed by the revelation of what were essentially such common secrets that they were barely secrets at all, throw up, give a desperate lecture, or leave, in either humilation or righteous indignation -- and I stood up automatically.

Some people turned to look at me, but others were busy reading the sheet. After a few seconds, I asked, my voice cold, "So who's going to get the purse?"

My purse had been moved to the center of the bleachers but was still several tiers of steep steps away, and I didn't want to risk the attempt to retrieve it.

Several women -- girls, really -- raised their hands hopefully. [They had misunderstood my question, thinking I wanted to give the purse away.]

"No," I said. "I was asking who was going to bring it up here and return it to me." I regained a bit of my balance and sense of humor: "It is a nice purse, though, from Saks. I got it for $1."

Before I could dissolve into tears or meaningless demands (meaningless because I was powerless), I left, without the purse, through a side door that let me out into the basement where my car was.

I knew that I would never go back, whether they eventually returned the purse and its contents or not.


*I mention this because it's not what you'd expect someone who turns out to be SATAN to look like.