Dream - I am at a school, but can't find my class again, and I had left my backpack and briefcase there, I go outside, but they have a new tardy policy and I am too late getting back

On Monday, February 21, 2011, around 11:00 AM-12:20 PM, I dreamed I was in school. Though I think initially the place may have been something else, it was school now. It was apparently something like DeVry, though it was laid out more like my high school, but was still different from either one. It had some landscaping out front, with a short slope down to the parking lot. The buildings were long, and set up in two rows. I was in the building on the far left, around the middle, but not quite that far. My sister was there for a while, and we talked for a bit, but she then left, having to go somewhere. There were very few people around when she was there.

We were initially in one of the empty classrooms, and then wandered across the hall, more to an administrative area, which was also pretty empty, and maybe to a restroom there briefly. As she left, more people were showing up, students. It was almost time for classes to start. The place became busier and busier. I wanted to find a restroom, looking for one on the original side of the hall, where I knew a couple were. I had trouble finding them, but I think I did eventually find one somewhere, maybe back on the right side of the hall, though it seems I did find something on the left. I had trouble then finding the class I was in before. The rooms seemed different, some of them bigger even, with unfamiliar students and teachers. The students, sitting in their seats, turned and stared at me as I peered in the rooms, or glanced in the windows as I went by. I had left my backpack and books in there too, maybe even a pale brown briefcase.

I kept going back and forth, sometimes over in the administration area too, and classrooms past and behind it, and also way back toward the front. The rooms in the front half on the administrative side were mostly offices, with a few at the very front on the other side also offices, but I glanced in them too, just to be sure. Sometimes a woman, generally wearing glasses, looked up at me from behind a large desk, at the back of the room. The rooms on the classroom side tended to be much larger than those on the other side of the hall, with some of those on the other side being very small indeed. Though the administrative area in the middle had large open areas with the offices, they were small themselves, and had only partial walls, perhaps only four feet high sometimes, and were largely open to the very large carpeted highway in that area. As I went back and forth in the hall, some of the offices did seem to change to classrooms, but at the same time some of the classrooms enlarged to be partly offices, sometimes with rooms joining together with big open areas between them, though closed off with doors to the hallway, except for the middle of the building, where a very broad hallway went through, and they became open rooms with short four or five foot walls.

Classes ended and there was a little break until the next ones. I went back in the rooms around where I had been. Most of the students were gone now. I looked among the chairs but didn't see my backpack or anything else I had left. I hoped that it was given to the teacher, that someone had noticed it and said that someone had left them, or the teacher had noticed them, and perhaps the teacher had put them behind his long desk, or maybe had them put in a lost and found somewhere, though that would mean they would be more trouble to get. A teacher was still there, but though he looked at me like he wondered why I was there and what I was doing, he continued talking to the student in front of him, from perhaps ten feet away from me.

I started to wonder if I should leave. It seemed late in the school year, and I only had a few days left. Did I even have any more classes today? I wasn't sure. It seemed I might have missed a couple trying to find my stuff. Were they important, was there anything in them that I had to know, or to do? It seemed there might be an economics class. I thought they were sometimes in the afternoon. They didn't happen every day, just two or three times a week. Thinking on it, I realized that I hadn't attended one for a long time, maybe missed most of the classes. There was still supposed to be a final I thought, maybe today, if I hadn't missed it already. It might have been on a previous day, or maybe was going to happen today or tomorrow. I didn't know just when the class was going to be. It was possible I had already missed today's. I couldn't even remember where it was supposed to be, or what room it was in. I thought it was more to the back, maybe on the other side of the building, or on the hallways leading there.

I walked through that area, back and forth. It seemed to be late in the afternoon now, and there weren't many students in this area. Sometimes I saw teachers looking back at me, from their classrooms, looking concerned, and sometimes they looked something like what I thought my teacher looked like, but not quite. I wasn't sure what good it would do me to take the test right now anyway. I had missed most of the lessons and hadn't read most of the book. I really needed to study some before I took it, as much as I could in the day or two before the test, if I could put it off that long, if I could convince the teacher to do so, or to give me the test if I had already missed it. I went back toward the other side of the building, still looking, still hoping to find my stuff. The hallway through the middle was carpeted and very large.

At the corner, on the far side and the left from where I currently was, was a four or five foot wall partially enclosing what looked like a bar, and in some sense was, with a long counter and stools, but though it served refreshments, and liquor I believe, it also acted as a lab bench, where advanced genius students worked on special projects with, I think, military significance. I wondered if my stuff might be behind the counter/lab bench. A couple of teacher's assistants were behind the counter, and they and the students were talking in low voices. The teacher's assistants had small smiles. I wandered through the area and looked at the bookshelves against the wall on the other side, and wandered back toward and into the classrooms, through the large open connecting areas. Classes were still being held, but there were fewer students than before. I eventually went toward the back, toward the exit. It seemed now to be between classes again.

Outside, I looked around. It seemed to be early afternoon now, and there was bright sunshine. The building had wide concrete steps leading down to a broad plaza that ran between the buildings. Though earlier in the dream I was in the building at the far left, now it was the second over from the left. I started wondering if I was in the right building, and should check the one at the left, though I thought it was just used by non-seniors. They had recently started a crackdown on people who were late to class, and had put monitors at the outside doors, and if you were caught you had to go to an office somewhere and get a special pass. It was mostly about humiliation and inconvenience, and it seemed to me that it would inconvenience the teacher to have the students, with their special pass, come in really late after having to go through all that, and the teacher then having to stop what he was doing and take the pass. I started heading off toward the other building, while some of the students looked worried at me, like they were wondering what I could be thinking, to do something like that, go away from the building, when there was so little time left.

I went inside the other building and down the hall a ways. It was as I thought, something used by younger students. I turned around and headed quickly back toward the exit, and then out into the broad plaza, and started making my way quickly back toward the other building. There were still quite a few students heading for the entrance there, clustering around it, trying to get through. Some teachers or other representatives were slowly going up the steps, sometimes looking a little amused, and some came from the inside too. The people doing this were in a rotation, with different ones assigned at different times. The ones going to the building went through the glass doors. One of them looked something like a younger version of Mr. Gatti, an artist who had been the art teacher at my high school.

I tried to hurry, but I was getting tired, and my legs were too tired to move fast enough, unable to go up the long steps fast enough. The Mr. Gatti lookalike came slowly back out, talking a bit, holding a short skinny dark pole in each hand with a triangular white flag on each one. He carried them to places in the concrete marked with pale X's and placed them in holes there. If you hadn't made it past that spot by now, then it was too late. I was almost there but not quite, coming in from the far side. I hoped I might be able to convince them to just let me in. Several other students were trapped there, too. It seemed silly to have to go through all this, especially for me and because of who I was.

They finally got to me, but there some trouble for some reason. I was finally given a paper, that was wider than it was tall, a form with things jotted on it, and told to take it somewhere to my left, into a side entrance from where the part of the building there formed a slight arc here, but the people I saw didn't seem able to have anything to do with this, and the few who did know something about it weren't able to help me, and in any case the thing I was given was incomplete and actually had some wrong information, a bad case number I think.

I went back to the big desk there outside, on the concrete, and waited again and then tried to get it straightened out. I started to irritatedly wonder/worry if they were going to bring up something that had happened quite a while back, maybe over a year, a mistake people had made that had quickly mushroomed into outrageous accusations with people looking suspiciously at me, even after I had explained it all and hopefully straightened it out. Someone did start to bring the earlier paper in though, coming from the right, from back behind things, and another person frowned and started saying, "Hey, aren't you the one?" I started irritatingly explaining it again, how I had met with someone who came on school grounds, who had been a speaker I think, and some people had seen me, and misunderstood who he was, and thought he was a radical communist, terrorist even, and it grew to where I was a member of a radical communist organization, and trying to get a situation where an atomic bomb could be set off, near the school, and it was all garbage, or something to that effect. I looked at their faces now, still with frowning suspicion on them, though that was lessening into an unhappy acceptance, like they still weren't quite sure about me. The Mr. Gatti character looked calmer and not quite as suspicious, though he still looked like he wasn't sure he believed me, but was willing to let it be someone else's problem, if it turned out to be one. He was looking different now, heavier, changing even as I watched, then becoming less overweight again. He looked less like Mr. Gatti though, and I wondered if he might be a relative, perhaps a son or nephew.

I got the pass, or rather the precursor to the pass, a paper that I had to take inside somewhere and get the real pass from. It seemed kind of a waste of time now, and I wondered if I should even bother or just go home, and come back again tomorrow. Still, as I went toward the middle of the building, and the administrative area, I kept my eyes open for someone who might help me. Looking up at times, with my head still down looking at the paper in my hands, I saw a woman standing up behind a desk, in the middle area, behind a low wall. She was looking my way, and looked a little like someone I knew, from the time I worked in Nevada, the red-haired woman in the Supply department, in the Purchasing section. I wondered if she could help me.