Assorted Nightmares from the Past Week

My best friend is directing Phantom of the Opera. She casts me as Christine despite the fact that I can't sing or dance, and I never show up to rehearsals. My parents come to see me opening night and it is a nightmare, dancing girls and elephants all over the place, and I'm pulling from my eighth grade memory of Phantom, here, I hate this show. I am wearing a tutu and hiding in the wings when I notice that R is the Phantom, and just then the show is over and my best friend comes towards me, lying through her teeth about how good I was.

I am driving away from Charlottesville. I crash my car into a tree, and then lose it in a lake. I escape from the car by doing exactly what the internet and the nightly news tell me to do--open the door a bit to relieve the pressure, then open it further and get out. I think, "good thing I have my parents' van." I back the van into the lake as well and then cannot get out. I drown.

My roommate and I are standing on a rocky beach. A man approaches us, and I recognize him as a wanted serial killer. (This is what I get for watching all of Dexter in two or three days) He follows us back to the library, where he whips out some powerpoints, telling us that he studies biology too. His slides are wrong, full of grandiose and misspelled statements like "miosen gives rise to not only contraction but also consciousness" and when my friend sees him, she cannot help but try to instruct him in the correct pathways for muscle contraction. I steal away to alert the fat, apathetic security guard about the serial killer--with the slicing, and the dicing, and the bodies--in the library. He, of course, does not believe me, and I race back down the stairs, thinking to stall him here while my roommate calls 911, only to find that he, my friend, and my roommate are all gone. I stand on the bottom step and hope that they are teaching him, but I know they are dead.

I am in Cleveland. No one I know is there, in fact there are not many people anywhere, and the Algebra is gone. My apartment is gone. All of Case, in fact, is gone. I see someone who looks like Ellis on the street, walking in the snow with his hands in his pockets. He looks me full in the face and then walks away. There are no cars on the streets, just snow, calmly catching the sodium lamps in the way I have admired so many times. I sit in the snow, on the corner of Euclid and Cornell, and wonder what to do next.