Alex Peak

2008/05/31:  School, Liberty, and the Future

Also available in .txt.

I am living at college with a roommate.  We find ourselves occupying an oddly-shaped, very long room, with a door on either side leading to the outside.

I explore around the community of dorms, all as oddly elongated as ours.  I use my keys to go into the room through the back door.

There, my roommate is entertaining a group of his friends.  These friends of his find it worth their time to make fun of me for the music I have with me.  I only have a limited amount of music with me, and have tons of music on my computer, to which I did not at that time have access.  I have music ranging from classical to punk to death metal to folk on my computer, and am sure that my roommate’s asshole-esque friends would be pleased with something I have.  But, alas, they wanted to laugh at me for what they presume is a limited understanding of and taste for music on my part based on the very limited selection I had with me at that time.  Whatever, I figured.  Whatever.

Later in my dream, taking a set of finals.  For one reason or another, I am unable to complete the final on which I was at that moment working, and had to try to make some sort of agreement with my professor to either finish the final later or turn in something in place of the part of the final I had yet to complete.

I don’t recall what class this was, or even in which field of study it was.  The professor is one I’ve never seen in real life, i.e. a fictional professor.  I don’t know what conclusion we reached, if any.

So, I’m off to do other things.  I now find myself in the elevator of the Enrollment Services building.  Perhaps I’m delivering mail, although perhaps not.  Oddly, there’s a gentleman in the elevator asking me which floor I’d like.  We don’t have one of those in the Enrollment Services building, or any building on campus.  Something about this character was alarming.

I tell him the top floor.  He takes me to floor six.  When the doors open, I see what looks like a hotel hallway, with windows before me on the wall.  I immediately realise that there is something off about this, since the Enrollment Building has only three floors.

I ask the creepy elevator guy to take me down to the first floor, as I explain to him that I’m dreaming.  “They couldn’t have built three floors over night,” I explain to him.

As the first floor opens, I see that much has changed since getting on the elevator.  Damn, those construction crews work fast!  Too bad they work so slow everywhere else on campus.

The place looks somewhat like a warehouse-type store.  I figure that since this is a dream, it’s not really possible for me to violate the non-aggression axiom.  Therefore, stealing is not a crime when you’re only dream-stealing.

Having no qualms with dream-stealing, the first thing I snag is some candy.  The isles in this section of the warehouse, I quickly realise, are a maze.  However, this maze is amazingly easy to navigate.  I look at all the merchandise in the maze section.

One piece of merchandise is a strange-looking microwave oven.  The outside looks kind of horror-esque.  When I look inside, I see what looks like a landscape.  Clearly, this was not designed with the intent that its user would be heating anything too large.

For whatever reason, I was partially myself and partially Al Bundy from Married…With Children.  Looking back at the dream, I think I was seeing things through Al Bundy’s eyes while serving as his subconscious.  Bundy hated the microwave.  But, I being his subconscious, get him to check it out again on his way out.  When we open it this time, we notice that the little mountain thing on the left of centre has its own door.  When it opens, I see a little laser beam inside of it, sort of like a lightsaber.  It’s so cool, I just have to have it; and so I make Bundy steal it as well.

Later in the dream, I forget that this is a dream.  For whatever reason, I have to go back in time and interact with important libertarian figures (Mary Ruwart and some other guy) before they have become libertarian, or just as they were beginning to become libertarian.

I find myself standing in what looks like Steven’s Hall, talking to these two.  This is either their high school or their college, probably the former.  In our conversation, I make a point about the higher efficiency of the free market relative to the worrisome deficiency of government-enforced monopolies.

I don’t know what my mission was, but it was meant to in some way benefit the future.  It doesn’t take long before I am awake.