"So the whole point of this character is he's just so quiet that nobody notices him, so he can use misdirection," I explained to my sister. She seemed less than enthused about the intricacies of Kuroko's Basketball. "It gets better. See, instead of making him play basketball, you should turn him into a wizard, and then-"
The image froze, an annoyed looking me pushed it "off screen", muttered "You can do better than that," and reset the dream to focus instead on 10 year old versions of myself and one of my friends in a 1960s elementary school. As we entered the classroom, an adult version of myself started narrating.
"Jake and I had spent so much of our childhood together, I had always viewed him as an unshakable constant. That was before Shirley joined the class." On cue, this adorable little girl, complete with pigtails and pleated skirt shuffled into the room. She had a scared puppy look to her. Jake was smitten. He and I had stapler duty that day, but he kept getting distracted and stapling the paper in the wrong direction. Eventually, Mrs. Maple, the teacher, noticed this and shooed both of us back to our seats. My tiny fists were clenched jealously.
"Footballer, eyes front!" Mrs. Maple declared when his eyes had wandered to his crush again.
"Mrs. Maple had called Jake the footballer from the day she learned that he played," clarified the narrator, "I had taken it as a term of respect. He wasn't just a plain old student to her. He was someone with a skill. One year, he twisted his ankle and was out a whole season. She never called him footballer again."
While we scribbled our attempts at cursive in our notebooks, I noticed a student I had never paid much attention to before. He wasn't writing. He was twisted around in his seat and smiling directly at me. I glanced around me, but none of the other students or even Mrs. Maple noticed a thing. When I turned back to the boy, it seemed as though I could see him more vividly than the other students, as though the brightness had been turned down on the rest of the room.
"He's going to leave you," stated the boy.
"What?"
"Your friend doesn't care about you anymore. There's someone more interesting. You'll become a lonely little worm with nothing more than memories to keep you warm."
"I-"
"At least, that's what would happen if this were reality, but it isn't. You could change it, and you should."
The next thing I know, I'm sitting in my kitchen with a dream quickly fading away. I scurried off to find my sister and tell her about it.
"Hey! I had a weird dream....it was...Cassandra Nova was in prison."
"Pff, locking her up? She can just manipulate you into letting her out," my sister responded.
"Yeah, I know but it was great because she made the guard think-" it then occurred to me that I was dreaming of describing a dream. "Actually, I'm going to go for a walk."
While outside, I wandered past a group of cheerleaders having a party involving a trampoline. I stopped to watch. One girl was attempting to do a back flip into middle splits, but could not bring herself to actually land with her legs split for fear of, well, pain. Her friends cheered her on, and she came reasonably close. Then, they suggested that the new girl take a crack at it.
This new girl wore a leotard and the hand braces gymnasts use on the uneven bars. She chalked her hands, stepped onto the trampoline, shook herself out, took a deep breath, and jumped. She managed a double front pike into a tuck where she spun three times on the surface of the trampoline itself to finish sitting cool and cross-legged in the exact center. The other girls fell silent and stared. One of them crept up next to her and asked, "So, uh, Malory. That was weird. Where did you learn that?" Malory squirmed, face turning red.
"It was a technique I used in the trampoline event of...well it was called the Olympics. It's a relatively difficult competition." With that, she leaped off the trampoline to find some privacy.
I woke up...again and rushed off to tell my mother this time about the trampoline affair, which I found inexplicably hilarious.
"Mom! Oh man, understatement of the century!" I realized, yet again that I was getting meta and at last succeeded in waking myself up for real.
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