Dream me a Dream
So I had a weird dream last night. It was a dream of a magical school. No, not like Harry Potter. This was both more mundane and more magical at the same time.
It started off with a scene next to an abandoned minibus. The really small kind from the 60s. Opening the door at the rear revealed a portal to some strange primary (that’s elementary, my dear Watson) school, where all the kids seemed to be having fun. Significantly, the minibus had a space for a bus number, which was blanked over with white paper inside. Normally, this make of minibus has no such space in the waking world. Cue scene two.
I’m a child again, waiting at the bus stop for my bus. Never mind that the street is not one from my childhood, or even any of my memories. If anything, it reminded me of bits of Nerima. So the bus approaches, and I see its number. And I wave out my hand to make the bus stop. It slows down, and as it slows down, the bus number changes. To a blank of white space. It’s that bus! But the door is on the top deck. No way can I reach it, despite jumping. Someone sticks out their hand from an upper window. I jump up to grab it, and some magical force propels me upwards to catch it, and then drives me onwards and inwards.
The bus seemed to warp in and out of lots of strange cities on the way. This being the first day of school, on the way, I ask if it’s a day school or a boarding school, and am told it’s a day school. Then it arrives at the school, set in a huge lightly wooded area miles from anywhere. I am of course, the stereotypical new kid who doesn’t know where anything is and is too shy to ask. Somehow I bluff my way through the day, and take the same bus home.
Things are getting hard to recall at this point. It was a really detailed dream after all, and as I’m typing this, it’s falling out of my conscious memory.
But one story arc had of the science teachers (yes, science at a primary school. It always weirded me out that schools don’t teach chemistry and stuff to five-year-olds.) had invented a time travel machine, or possibly the time travel was just one of those so-mundane-no-one-mentions-it powers of the school bus. He kidnapped some people, went back in time, and abandoned them there in order to kick-start the birth of the human race. Cue endless debates about the ethics of rescuing the kidnapees.
Another scene was of the school bus race. No action scenes, just a field full of old, dilapidated buses, all with whitespace blanks in the space where a bus number would be.
Gentle Readers, go wild in the comment boxes. You know you want to.