I almost got up at 5, but then I decided I wanted to sleep in for an hour. Guess that was a bad idea :P
I dreamed that I was in Japan and there were all sorts of people from my past there, and we were attending school. At one point I opened my notebook and a little folded note was there. Melissa Christopher, my old best friend from fourth and fifth grade, happened to be standing near my desk, and she said, “Yeah, there’s a note in there, but…”
“Read it after I’ve gone home?” I asked.
“No,” Melissa said. “It’s just that you’ve been nothing to me.” As she said the last few words, she started crying and having difficulty speaking. Then she strode swiftly away.
It’s true that Melissa and I haven’t seen each other more than a handful of times since elementary school. I occasionally bump into her at the Nicholasville Wal-Mart. And I do feel regret for how I treated her in middle school, back when I basically dumped her in favor of Noelle. But in the dream all I felt was annoyance.
After that school day, I went by an optometrist’s place because I had read in Michael Jennings’ blog that he was going to be there, and I wanted to say hi. I saw a guy who looked like him sitting in the office with a girl who I believed was his girlfriend, so I waved and smiled and said hi. The guy sort of blinked at me, and then I looked past him and saw the real Michael and his girlfriend behind them. I was really embarrassed.
After awhile, Michael’s girlfriend (who I have never met in real life, by the way, and I have no idea what she looks like, so this is just a pretend person I guess) and I went back to my host family’s house, where we were apparently staying. My host family conveniently spoke English, and Otou-san drove an SUV. The girl and I spent a long time lying around and talking. It didn’t really occur to me in the dream, but now that I think about it, the girl was kind of clingy, and it might have been sexual. But nothing happened, and the evening passed and then it was the next day.
I turned on an episode of Sailor Moon in the living room (it didn’t seem to be my host family’s real house; there was a separate den and eating area), but then it was time for breakfast before school so I turned it off and we went to eat. While we were sitting there, the girl suddenly started saying things to my host family about how mean and stupid I was. This was, of course, a shock, because I’d thought we were getting along fine. She started bringing up all sorts of things that I had apparently done back in elementary school–somehow the girl had become a childhood friend rather than Michael’s girlfriend. (Dream logic…) And she said that I had turned on the wrong TV in the den because I was so stupid. I could tell that she was mad at me for something else, and I assumed it was because I had kept out of touch–the same reason Melissa was upset in the dream. But she wouldn’t stop insulting me, so I was wrestling with her trying to make her stop, and we were both yelling “I hate you!” at each other.
Then my alarm went off, so I have no idea how it would have ended.
I don’t know if this dream is a product of me not needing to sleep anymore plus reading Hyper’s blog post yesterday about losing old classmates as friends–maybe that affected me subconsciously, while consciously all I thought was “Yeah, that happens, and it’s sad”. Maybe I still have some guilt left over from school, from not keeping in touch with classmates. (Even Noelle, who I do keep in regular contact with, went to Hawaii and I didn’t even know until she sent me a link to her pictures from the trip yesterday.)
I do think that I’m afraid that I don’t know how to be a proper friend. I seem to have two attitude “poles”: “oh well, screw ’em” for people who I don’t see much for whatever reason–i.e., I don’t think about the fact that I’m not seeing them, nor do I try to come up with ways to keep in touch; and “way too clingy”, for friends who I see every day and who I spend time with frequently. The thing is, people can easily drop from the clingy category into the screw ’em category, just by not being around enough. I’m not happy with that.
I want a better way of keeping track of people and staying in contact with them, I guess…and I want to be a better friend to the people who care about me, and who I realize I care about when I actually bother to think about it.