ghosts of the past and future

This post is inspired by Jackie, who helped me remember something I had tucked away in some safe corner of my memory. A dream, from which I awoke, disoriented and shaking and unable to function for days, how could I have ever forgotten?

Love is a word that is so easily flipped around these days that it has rather lost all meaning for me. I think that I can recognise it when I "see" it. In quotation marks because it isn't something that you can see. It's not anything really. It's an electric shock that stimulates all and none of the senses simultaneously and is almost more of an intuition than anything. For instance, I can say with certainty that the professor loves his wife, J. And that I love my dog, my beautiful German Shepherd. I'm sure that if our eyes could see UV or infrared, we would be able to see some sort of mist surrounding us in times of love, as if some little love elf was following us with a big fan and a box of dry ice.

I'm just shy of 22, and thus far I have never had a boyfriend, never been on a date. That side of life has eluded me, and I have happily stayed well away from it. The emotional and social complexities of such a pass time are far too odious for my short temper but on the other side of that same coin, I do want to be part of a couple at some point.

In the past I have dreamed of things that then came to pass. I don't think I'm psychic or anything, but it's happened rather too many times for coincidence and it never ceases to creep me out and I wish it would stop. I dreamed my English teacher was present a week before she announced it to us, I dreamed of a shooting at a military camp in the US and woke up to see it as breaking news, I dreamed of seeing a cute guy by my locker and saw him there a few days later. I hate these things. And most recently, I dreamed that TS and J and the professor were trying to reverse my tag, and when I went to tell TS and J that I was tagged, they told me they were already trying to reverse it.

I am a total skeptic and I don't believe in anything divine, no religion has ever set foot in my life, and it's just not how I was brought up and it's not naturally part of my constitution. But with all this, even I am taking these dreams without the usual grain of salt. And it is with this lengthy foreword that I begin to retell my dream.

I can't tell if this dream is of something that has passed or of something that has yet to pass. But in this dream I am at a party. Already, this is very unlike me, I don't really do parties. I am wearing a dress, it is pink, sparkly and paired with high heeled shoes that are gold. The entire outfit stinks to the high heaven of something retro and I know that these are borrowed clothes, they don't quite fit me. It's not my style at all, which partly explains the unease that I am sensing.

I am also alone, and (here is the part that gives me hope!) I did not have a jacket and so I'm holding my arms, my very thin, very, very thin, bony arms to try to keep some warmth in. I'm quite nervous, I don't recognise anyone there and I'm quite scared. I pick up a glass of champagne, just for the sake of doing something and then I stand at the table, with my back to the room for a while, collecting my skittish nerves, telling myself to turn around and smile and socialise and make some friends. Just leap in!

Turning around abruptly, I make contact with a pair of eyes around the room and I'm thunderstruck. Of his face, all I can make out are the eyes, but I have a distinct feeling that he's brown haired. He's in trousers, a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, tie and (this is what takes the cake) a waistcoat. I look at the ground as he walks over to me, I dare not look him in the eye again. I'm too scared to, because I can feel it, I can feel love, and it scares me to the bone. But somewhere deep inside, I know that he is someone very special and I know that no matter how scared I may be, I will not let him go, because we were meant to meet.

I hope you can tell that I have tried to present the dream in the most unromantic way possible. I just don't hold with such romance at all. I don't believe in love at first sight, I don't believe in soul mates. And yet this dream affected me so greatly that for a few days afterwards, I firmly believed that this mystery man was out there waiting for me. Then I snapped out of that particular stupor and tucked the dream away.

Yet this feeling of love in this dream, that is something that I can't deny no matter how much I want to tell myself it wasn't there. And I know it must have been, because in my dream I couldn't look at him. I have a habit of not being able to look at people who look at me "lovingly". It's why sometimes I can't look at the professor, no matter how rude I think I'm being. And no matter how much I don't want to admit that that is the reason why I can't look at him, if I'm brutally honest, that is the truth behind it. If I do look at him, I blush madly and he immediately says "you're blushing!" and teases me for it.

Still, I hope this quite literal dream man is real and that our paths will come to cross one day. I want to see how accurate this dream is, even if it means wearing an ugly dress and shoes.