#lips cw

[inbeautiful-trauma]

River Song/Melody Pond Aesthetic (Pt 6 Companions Se t)

Phot credits (x,x,x,x,x,x,x,x,x,x,x,x,x,x)

[untiltheseashallfreethem]

Last night I dreamed I was back at high school -- though not as a student, at first, but as a teacher.  (Apparently I’d decided to switch careers, and was training to be an elementary school teacher.  Don’t ask me why this dream took place in my high school.)

In the first part that I remember, another teacher and I were walking around talking, when we noticed some weird metal numbers sitting in a flowerbed outside the school.  It was something like “Q142 37 94″.  (That’s not exactly it; I don’t remember the real numbers.  But it was something that gave us the distinct impression that a student had written down the correct answer to a homework question, so other students could cheat off of it.)

We started going through all the math textbooks, looking for Q142 or whatever it was, to see if we could decipher the numbers.  Slowly, I realized how strange it was that someone had carved or formed these numbers out of metal and placed them in the flower bed.  Also, we came to realize that the numbers had been there for years.  We also started to find a bunch of other metal in the flowerbed, including a long, decaying metal pipe that may have had something strange inside of it.

Eventually, it became apparent (not sure how) that the numbers had been placed there by a former student known as Qiao Chu Min, who had been a remarkable math genius.  We started to suspect that actually, the numbers were a puzzle for us teachers, and we had to figure out what they meant.

I was talking to another teacher, this slightly heavy-set Irish-looking guy with a reddish brown beard, and he was telling me about Qiao Chu Min.  “This guy’s crazy,” he was saying.  “He got really obsessed with immortality a while back, and signed up for some company that would freeze his body after he died.  He confided in me a while back, and asked me to make sure his body got to them.”  We looked up the cryonics company he had signed up for, and discovered it had gone bankrupt and closed.  Then I was like “Well I’m sure he knows, and has signed up for a new one.”, and the teacher was like “Yeah, I think he has.  He told me he was looking for places on a site called... Less... uh... LessWrong?  It sounded interesting.”  Then I spent a good length of time telling this teacher about LessWrong, and warning him to stay away from it.

At some point, I asked what Qiao Chu Min had been doing at our school, if he was such a math genius.  And the teacher explained that our school had held a program, where a bunch of mathematically brilliant middle or high schoolers were put together to learn social interaction.  There were an equal number of boys and girls, and the hope was that some of these kids would learn some romantic-interaction skills.

Then we talked about whether this was a good idea.  Some SJ-style concerns came up: would these young, nerdy, socially-incompetent boys end up harassing the girls?  Someone (I think there were more people in the discussion now) started talking about the plight these boys faced, since they were so young and inexperienced and hadn’t really learned muscle control yet.  At this point, I realized they were talking about unintentional erections.

(ETA: once we realized why Qiao Chu Min had come to our school, we started speculating that maybe the numbers were a love letter for a girl he had a crush on, and the puzzle wasn’t intended for us at all.)

At some other point in the dream, I had participated in some activity where we all brought these little dolls with giant wax lips to a room, and had the dolls interact with each other.  At the event, we were discussing some guy named Steven Cabernac (or something like that); I got the sense that he was kind of a douche.  Then some girl asked for a trigger warning on events like these, and she asked me to tag them “lips” and “Steven Cabernac” on Tumblr.  I said I was happy to tag lips for her, but I didn’t even know who Steven Cabernac was, and didn’t think he was relevant to the discussion.  So I wasn’t going to tag him in posts about the dolls with giant lips.  I apologized profusely for being so rigid with my tagging system, but she said it was ok, and didn’t seem to be very upset.

Then, I think I was an actual high school student again, and I was doing poorly in all my classes because I never showed up to school and rarely paid attention when I did.  One day, when I was actually in class, I left the room for a minute, and there was this big festival going on outside in the hall.  They encouraged me to stay; some teachers were even letting their students out of class to attend the festival.  But I thought I probably shouldn’t.  I asked what kind of festival it was, and they said “a goth festival”, put on by the high school’s Goth Club.

Then I was part of this group of girls who were all hanging out together, and I was one of their friends, but I felt awkward because I was never part of a big group of female friends, so I didn’t know how to act.  I think some other stuff happened that I’m forgetting, but at one point, we all went down to the ocean (which was right outside my school).  It was very windy, and seemed like it was about to storm, and the waves were extremely choppy.  But the girls all got into those plastic inflatable tubes and swam right out into the water.  I cautiously joined them, but I kept almost going under.  They didn’t seem to realize I was falling behind.  Against my better judgment, I swam out to where they were.  The waves were really choppy and kept splashing over our heads.  Then two girls disappeared underwater, having seemingly pulled each other under.  I got really worried, and pulled them back up, but they kept their eyes close and kept holding their breaths even once I pulled them out of the water.  Apparently they were having a breath-holding contest, and that was why they’d stayed under so long.  I felt like an idiot for interfering.

Then a big wave came by, and we all got pulled underwater.  And suddenly we were standing in a hallway in my high school, and I thought “yay, we’re out of the water now and won’t drown”.  But then someone said “No, this isn’t real; it’s just an illusion put on by the goth club.  We have to climb back to the surface as soon as possible before our bodies drown!”  This amounted to climbing up (or maybe actually down(?)) the stairs in my high school.  We did this, and finally saw our “real bodies” sitting in a circle on the hallway floor.  They were sitting crosslegged with their eyes closed, breathing softly as if asleep.  In order to wake them, we had to put a shirt on the girl we were paired up with.  (The “real bodies” were all wearing shirts already, but somehow these were our “real shirts” that we had to put on them.)  I went to the girl I was paired with, and tried putting on her shirt, but it was difficult and I struggled with it.  It went on, but was very askew, and I was embarrassed with my work.  Then I realized the girl looked like lia aprilwitching, and she was actually really nice and probably wouldn’t mind that I screwed up the shirt a little bit.

Then we all suddenly woke up, and found ourselves rising to the surface of the water.  We’d survived!  Then, much to my relief, we all swam back to shore.

I think this was the end of the dream.