Last night I dreamt I went to my high school reunion. This is complicated because I went to four different schools for high school, and this is actually a reunion year for me. The one I feel most connected to is not the one from which I graduated. Anyway, in the dream it was not entirely clear which school was reuning. The school was huge � it looked most like the high school from which I graduated, but also a little bit like one I drive by frequently. It was near the ocean (like my first high school) but it wasn�t the town beach. Instead the beach was large and crowded and looked more like the west coast, with tall rocky cliffs. But people were actually swimming�not just surfing or wading � in the water. Swimming at the local beach was the social hub of the summer in the Connecticut town where I used to live.

There were a number of parts to this dream and I don�t remember them all, but I do remember walking down the beach in a bathing suit and being amazed that I was not uncomfortable despite the fact that I wasn�t wrapped in a towel or hiding behind a baggy sweatshirt.

In another scene, I was in a huge gym at a party when C., a (real life) friend from my Connecticut high school, found me and told me I had been a �very important person in his life.� C. was part of a group of us that were good friends in junior high. Most of us had been in the �gifted and talented� program together for years. Of the group, he was the one I probably knew the least well. He was a sci-fi nut, which I was not, and he spent a lot of time writing Trekkie fan fiction and playing D&D (that�s Dungeons and Dragons, to all you youngsters). After graduation, he went to MIT, got involved in info tech and ended up moving back to the area where we went to school where, as far as I know, he still lives.

I wasn�t at all close to him, but in 8th grade, when we had our first formal date-required dance, I went with him. I was 13. Our group pretty much planned to go en masse, but everyone else had paired off already and we were the two without obvious cross-gender alliances, so we went together. I wore a de rigeur blue Gunnie Sax dress. He wore a new suit. He was a total gentleman. I was, however, not very kind. He was really geeky and I didn�t want him to think I was interested in him, because I wasn�t. I ended up spending most of the evening dancing with the date of a friend of mine. He was someone I�d never met. He went to another school and she had met him somewhere else. He was cute and he was totally hitting on me all night. He tried to feel me up on the dance floor and I was flattered. After all, I was an incredibly late bloomer and there was nothing to feel. It was probably a mercy grope. But in any case, I was not very considerate to the boy who had been kind enough to show up at my door with a wrist corsage. But he didn�t seem to hold it against me. After the dance we returned to our respective corners on opposite sides of our social collective. But I still feel bad about behaving like, well, a clueless 13-year-old.

Anyway, at the end of the dream, as the reunion was ending, he handed me an envelope. I was worried it was going to be some kind of long and emotional letter. And I hadn�t (either in the dream or real life) given him any thought since I moved away from our town. But it was an envelope of things about me. In the dream I had the distinct impression that he had not, as I had feared, been harboring romantic feelings, but that he simply felt that I had done something to make his life better for some reason. But I felt completely unworthy, a fraud. I was standing in line waiting to visit a series of booths on the way out of the reunion � a box lunch for the road, a place to order a CD of the event that was to be shipped 3-day air. I ran into another real life friend K. in line. K. was another fringe friend from my final high school. I got to know her my senior year, when we spent a lot of time partying at her house, due to the fact that her parents seemed to be out of town almost every weekend. I wasn�t much of a party girl, but K. and I connected in some way. She seemed to envy my self-discipline and I her lack of inhibition. K. was excited about the romance of the envelope and urged me to look at the contents. I reached into the envelope and pulled out a copy of a newspaper from the school I moved to after I left the town where I had met him. An attached note told me that a friend of C.�s had found it and given him a copy. In the center of the publication, there was a two-page spread about the school orchestra with a picture. C�s friend had circled a violinist in this picture, �Is this her?� I was known for playing the violin when I knew C. But it wasn�t me. I wasn�t in the violin section. In the picture I was dressed somewhat mannishly (although I was a lot better looking than I was in real life at that time) and playing the trumpet. As I looked at the picture with another friend (I was with K., a friend from my final H.S. as I opened it) I said, �Wow, I�d forgotten that I used to play the trumpet.�

I woke up shortly after that.

The trumpet thing is odd. I never played the trumpet. But in my second year of graduate school, a new professor had come to teach and had arrived a week or so before I did. She was trumpet-player before moving into the academic side of the business. When I got to campus, people started calling me by her name. We were thought to look so alike that people who knew us both occasionally mixed us up. There is a passing resemblance, but I think it was mainly that we shared a height, build and hair-style. I was assigned to be her T.A. and our students would mix us up. A few months after that class, I cut off all my hair and bleached the remaining fuzz white. No more confusion. I didn�t grow my hair out again until after she�d left the university.

But since then, I have often had alter ego dreams with this professor in them. I don�t think the dream character is really supposed to have any relation to the real-life twin. I think it�s been a convenient metaphor for my other self or the road not taken. Still, it was kind of funny to see it showing up in that particular location.

I am off to the library. But first I would like to urge you to head over to rs536-2000�s page and wish her a happy birthday. And while you�re at it, click over to supermom�s page and wish her a happy birthday too.

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