Lyle Hopwood's 115th dream (at least)

I dreamed I was back at college, surrounded by the usual cadre of odd friends and hangers on. There were a few instances of my normal dream tropes – for example, at one point we had to avoid zany Japanese killers who could apparently hide in tiny boxes which were cunningly set into the floor – but a lot of it was normal college.

I really wanted to go an hour long lecture on artificial life starting at 11 am, but to get in, you needed to show a commemorative coin issued by the university. I didn't have mine with me and had to go back to my rooms (while my friend went into the lecture, with my coffee) to search for it. For some reason I had all of my valuable coin collection outside my rooms in the cupboard in the corridor. I had my friends search the rooms while I looked through the cupboard. Eventually I found a coin (though I wasn't sure it was the right one) and went back to the lecture. It was ten to twelve, the talk was over and no-one even looked at my coin as I walked in. My coffee had gone cold and my friend said I could have another cup from the buffet table, if no one had seen me come in. But they had seen me come in.

So I went to the bar instead. My friends were there. I had that odd dream feeling that I didn't really know them well and they would leave me if I wasn't entertaining. I proposed we should all go to the local good restaurant, Jan, and I'd pay. We got to Jan. They had big red-cover menus with a pasted-on front plate. The place had used to be called Japan but they'd shortened the name because that's modern. We ordered, but it turned out there was a Yakuza hit on the place. The servers disappeared and the fight didn't end until one of the gangsters saw me and collapsed in fright. Apparently I'm a big cheese in Dream Yakuza-land.

There was something I'd recently found out that I wanted to tell my friends. I remember telling two separate groups of them during the dream, but only remember one time clearly. It was some sort of prank day, like April the 1st, except I remember clearly it was August, and we watched people fill a Camaro with pies, and other people order ten courses of a gourmet meal to be delivered to a public telephone. I told my friends that I'd completed my first year at college, but had never taken any of the exams. This didn't upset them much; I suppose it happens to a lot of people. Then I said I'd been going to classes all this (second) year, and had just realized that I'd never been sent a course brochure. I wasn't enrolled in any classes! It hadn't made any difference to my attendance, as I suppose they were used to people auditing classes, and anyway I had my commemorative coin, when I could find it. So I'd been going to lectures for months, having completely forgotten I hadn't received any communication from the college and was almost certainly not a student. We were walking back past the Camaro at this time and everyone agreed the pie joke was funny. The public call box and the gourmet meal, not so funny, they said. A lot of people had found the food and were eating it, though, which wasn't true of the pie-filled Camaro.

When I woke up, as I became aware again, I remembered I'm retired, so in a way I'm really auditing a course I'm not enrolled in. Spooky.