I had the following dream a couple nights ago, but neglected to talk about it then. It’s a pretty interesting dream, though, so I’ll record it here for posterity in case I ever forget about it in the future.
Basically, the dream started off with me going back to my old high school to finish off my high school education. This is a recurring dream theme of mine – going back to my old school, where I was expelled back in 2004, the only student there in his twenties, with all the classmates I knew from way back when long gone, leaving me peerless and lonely.
Anyway, in these dreams, I usually just go through the motions – I may be searching for someone or a photograph of someone I knew from the past, but otherwise I handle myself well under the circumstances in those surroundings. This time, though, I had a nervous breakdown; I started screaming that I shouldn’t be there, that if it weren’t for all the bullshit I had gone through, I would’ve graduated years ago.
That’s when the dream got really bizarre. Suddenly, it was revealed that I wasn’t really myself and that none of this was really happening. I was really a teenaged kid – fourteen or fifteen – who kinda resembled a young Rod Taylor, the adopted son of a lesbian couple, who had suffered a psychotic break, leading me to believe I was a completely different, older person.
Oh, but the weirdness really jacked up from there. I then slipped on a red visor, and in doing so I was able to perceive another person in another world; this person was me – not the teenaged Rod Taylor me, but the me-me – only I was dressed like a man from the '50s – with short, slicked-back hair, attired in a neat black suit – and I was sitting in a chair, hooked up to a virtual reality machine.
So, to make it clear, the dream was about this: a 1950s version of myself was hooked up to a virtual reality machine, causing me to experience a VR simulation where I was a teenaged Rod Taylor, who was suffering delusions of being a far older man who was suffering a mental breakdown as a result of having to go back to his old high school.
I think Philip K. Dick would’ve been proud of this dream.