Boyoboyoboy, did I ever have the dream last night! It was the longest, sustained dream I've had in a very long time! I can remember a lot of it, too, though perhaps in disjointed pieces.
I was visiting the college where I earned my B.A, and where I haven't been back in, oh, 30 years. I was supposed to visit with some administrator about something--I don't know or don't remember what--but I was dressed very casually in a t-shirt and shorts. He was very busy, and so people whose business was more important than mine kept getting sent into his office ahead of me. While I was waiting, I had a short conversation with a young woman whom I recognized from my days in the SCA medieval reenactment organization; our talk concerned me participating in some sort of demonstration that was to take place on campus.
Finally I got into the administrator's office, and we chatted a bit about how much construction had taken place on the campus in the three decades since I graduated, so that I hardly recognized the place. Meanwhile, the weather was turning bad very quickly, and in the distance I could see a tornado forming, one of those horrible, mile-wide ones that you occasionally see news film of that are so destructive. You're not supposed to try to outrun one of those things, yet that's exactly what we tried to do. The administrator and I, and a number of other people, squeezed into a very small automobile and drove away from campus. The administrator was driving; somehow his clothing had changed from a dark gray suit to a polo shirt and Dockers.
We did outrun the storm, and finally we stopped. Other tornadoes were still forming in the distance. Looking to the east--I don't know why I know it was the east, it just was--I saw one pass behind an old farmhouse, and the house somehow immediately burst into flames! At about that time, I also used my cell phone to call my mother (who has been dead since 1995) to tell her that I was all right; the connection was bad but I did speak to her. Then we all got back into the car to drive back to campus. On the way, the driver missed a sharp curve in the road and drove through a fence and into the farmyard of an Amish farm. Some Amish chidren came and spoke to us; I rolled down the car window and spoke to a little boy, and I remember thinking that someone in the family must have "married out" of the Amish faith, because this little boy looked Hispanic in features and skin tone. The children told us that we would be in trouble for damaging the fence, but then a young woman came out of the farmhouse and told us that everything would be all right.
I remember that we then continued our drive back to campus. When we arrived, I could still see storms in the distance, but that's all I can now remember.
What a night!
