I had this dream two nights ago and woke up at 4:23 am to write it down. Below is a direct transcription of what I wrote.
I had the opportunity to go to North Africa and tutor the 7-year-old prince of some country. Found this job online on some job listing board. Left very soon after finding said job, like maybe a day and a half later, and flew to a village in the desert but surrounded by mountains so sometimes the air was suddenly flooded with snow flurries and chill. There were lions in the town square, easily a hundred lions, and there was no fence or anything like that, they were just all perched on this raised habitat-type thing that had a cave as party of it, where I could see tigers waiting in the dark. I looked at the lions and slowly realized that all the lions had locked eyes with me - which was terrifying. A sign at the front of the square said that it was expected that the tigers would eventually kill and eat all of the lions. It was a strange and harsh little village.
I was staying in a hostel-type place and there happened to be a number of people I knew there - like Henry and Leland, and also some guy named Matthew Wilson who started talking to me on Gchat about "Bottle Rocket," and some Dutch girl who was very pretty and had a lot of freckles, and Ben Warren from Groupon. I explained to many of these people in turn what I was doing here in this strange place and that my tutoring tenure was only supposed to last a week or so.
At some point in all this, there were cinematic sequences depicting this story that seemed to be from the past but also seemed to be about the prince I was going to tutor, who was called The Blue Prince inn legend. The prince had fallen in love with a girl, and she with him, but their love had to remain secret for whatever reason. They would write seemingly mundane and non-romantic notes to each other but they each had secret flourishes in their signatures that would let the other know they loved them. For the boy prince, whose name was Léon (French pronunciation) it had something to do with how he connected one letter to the next. Watching these scenes (although I don't think "watch" is the right verb, because these scenes were truly intercut in a cinematic way, with camera angles and montage and dissolved images and voice-over from The Blue Prince [which was maybe in French? I doubt it], as opposed to the more "real life" segments of me in this North African village) - anyway, watching these scenes I somehow already knew that the prince and his love had committed suicide, like Romeo and Juliet but even younger, a childhood crush made tragedy. These scenes seemed to be taking place in the 1700s or 1800s, but somehow this was the same Prince I was to tutor.
Anyway, back to the village and me. I had started to make inquiries among the other people there as to where exactly we were, what country we were in. It seemed I had forgotten, and the name of the country was always on the tip of my tongue, but no one would give me a straight answer. Instead they all diverted their time in the hostel, talking about movies or watching clips from "Purple Rain" (this was Henry.) I couldn't even remember where exactly I flown into to get here, which city's airport or anything. Finally, Henry told me, begrudgingly and with the same kind of I-wish-I-didn't-have-to-tell-you-this vibe as if informing someone their dad has cancer or something, that we were in Libya. Libya. I was suddenly terrified. I had visions of the prince's father (I guess he'd be the King of Libya) being unsatisfied with me for some capricious reason and locking me away or killing me before I had a chance to do anything. I realized that I didn't have a phone, only my computer, so no way to communicate immediately with America - time difference. I realized that I wasn't sure I had even told my parents I was leaving the country - it had been that sudden. I was very scared and then I woke up.
This took me 30 minutes to write down and already didn't seem real by the end of the writing, so I'm glad I bothered to record it.
