Back to high school. It was quite some time that I didn’t have that dream.
We had a new Italian literature teacher, as our usual teacher retired. Male, around 45, slim. He didn’t seem to like me. Probably because I’m a 33 y.o. man bored by high school lessons. Suddenly, a teacher from another class comes by and asks if I can exit the classroom. Our teacher is suspicious and asks why, the lady says “Emilia”, but he’s not convinced, so she makes a gesture imitating pointy glasses. I understand she’s referring to my English teacher (despite the fact that her name’s Paola, not Emilia) because no one else had similar glasses. He concedes that I exit, so I do.
The teacher says that “Emilia” wanted me to have a book, so she escorts me to the library. The library is on the lowest floor, which is all tiled with tiles that make it look more like a spa than a library. In fact, there’s even people with flip-flops inside, and the floor is wet. And a turnstile. The teacher passes her badge and I can enter. I look around, there’s a fountain with water lilies and other plants, and I can see a swimming pool behind a glass. The teacher gives me an enormous book, it’s a book on painting techniques and art history. I’m puzzled. The teacher explains that they knew my marks in art history were awful, so they wanted me to study a bit and also become a better artist. I’m offended, I say that art has never been my thing, that I spent years studying computer science and I became good in what I wanted to do, I don’t see why I should start anew in a completely different field only because others couldn’t accept that I had other interests*.
Then, I don’t remember the exact order of events, but I remember clearly that I was in our gym, outside it was raining heavily, and I had to go to the dressing room because I had to pee. The dressing room looked exactly like the “library”. However, there was no bathroom. There was only a small metal drawer in the wall, like those retractable ashtrays you find in trains. And… well, I take out my best friend, put it there and tried to pee. Suddenly, an alarm rings. I begin to panic. I put it back and exit the changing room. I see a girl, who actually went to high school with me but one grade less, she runs away. I run too, the alarm rings again. I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m anxious and I run as fast as I can, I try to follow that girl because she seems to know how to escape, there are a lot of corridors. She exits from a door that luckily has a crash bar (new term learned today) because I’m too panicked to stop and try to open it. I push the bar and keep on running. The girl is there again, but this time she stops and watches me. She looks scared. She just says “behind you!”, then runs again. I turn around, I see nothing, and this scares me even more. Another alarm ringing. I run again. I see her in the distance, I follow her again. Another crash bar door. Another alarm. I scream.
A punch wakes me up. I was screaming in real life, and my wife wanted me to stop.
*This is something that actually happened. I’ve never liked art history, while I liked art, I never liked the way art history was taught us, so I just refused to study it. I always did the bare minimum not to fail the year, and that might have given me a bad name to my art teacher. When, three years after my diploma, I went back to high school one day to greet my old teachers, as I was chatting with my Italian literature teacher, telling her that I was about to take my bachelor degree with expected maximum grade cum laude, the art teacher entered the discussion with a sentence that… well, I don’t even know if it wanted to be a compliment. She literally said “who would have thought that a person like you would have nailed it at the university”. I was baffled.