In this dream I'm the same age I am now (23) but I'm back in school, specifically in some sort of English Literature class. I believe it's the first day or at least very early in the semester because I don't seem to know the other students or the teacher. Someone spilled coffee and the floor before we got there and one of the other students tries to mop it up while we wait for the teacher even though the floor is carpeted. There's a worksheet about some Jane Eyre type heroine in front of me, but as was often the case when I really was in school, I didn't read the book and I'm a bit stressed over how few of the answers I know.
The teacher of the class finally shows up and he's a man I would guess to be in his 40s. He tells us that we don't need to know his name and we should simply refer to him as Professor. In response to this caginess the students reach an unspoken agreement to try to find out as many personal details about him as possible by any means necessary. As he lectures not only do we psychoanalyze him and deduce things about his life based on what he says about the story, we also share these hypotheses with him as they arise. After one particularly accurate deduction he asks if he can sit down with us for a moment and gestures to my seat. It's a small class, only about 7 students, with only exactly enough desks for each of us. Since he singled me out I get up and offer the professor my seat, which he takes, presumably to talk to us "mano a mano" about our behavior.
I only stand there feeling awkward for the briefest of seconds before there's a tug at my sleeve from a classmate offering for me to sit on his lap. Now in real life there's basically no way I would agree to this as I'm very awkward when it comes to physical contact of any kind and sitting on someone's lap would no doubt make me incredibly self conscious about my size, but in the dream this feels like the obvious solution to the room's lack of chairs. So I sit on his lap, sideways so that I can look directly at the Professor as he speaks.
The Professor puts his head in his hands and tells us "It doesn't matter whether your guesses about me are right or wrong, I'm not the thing you're supposed to be learning about!" And sighs heavily. "This definitely means we were right" I whisper into my seat-mate's ear and he laughs softly. When the Professor gets up he is no longer a middle aged man but a young woman who I know, despite not reading the book, resembles the protagonist. "Maybe this will help you focus on the assignment," she says. Our worksheets are different now too, instead of questions we must answer there's a list of "Common Assumptions about Gothic Heroines" and we need to mark which ones are true for the heroine of this book.
I turn to my seat-mate with a look of shock. The type of "did you just see that?" Look human beings everywhere are prone to share when something unbelievable happens. After we make eye contact I do a double take. This is the first time I've really looked at his face and unlike most of my dreams where I just conveniently never see people's faces I really see and remember it. He has dark skin, a wide jaw, and a broad smile that feels like coming in out of the cold on a winter day. "I'm going to love him" I find myself thinking and the thought is so startling that I almost fall off his lap. He puts his arm around my waist to stop me falling and it feels like home. I look at the worksheet once more and realize that maybe I do know the answers.
