Dinosaur Dreams

Dreams are kinda crazy. Not dreams like what you hope to be in the future, but dreams, the kind that you have when you go to sleep. My dreams generally have nothing to do with anything that I have thought about or encountered during the twenty-four hours leading up to my sleep. Sometimes I’ll just dream about something I haven’t thought about for years.

My dreams bring up stuff buried in the back of my subconscious maybe? Last week, I was making lesson plans for my 8th grade writing class at Breakthrough, and I couldn’t think of a good short story that I wanted to read for my students. I wanted to cover themes that dealt with the loss of childhood innocence. I slouched in front of my laptop browsing through the Internet, reading crappy short story after crappy short story. Nothing. I eventually got really bored and fell asleep briefly. And somewhere during that brief five-minute nap, the cover of Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye flashed in my mind. I woke up and, trying not to forget my dream, I made sure that the first word out of my mouth was, “Toni Morrison.” The Bluest Eye. It was perfect. I was so focused on finding a short story that I didn’t think of pulling excerpts from a novel instead. Tomorrow we are reading Toni Morrison in class.

That dream made me wonder, would I have eventually thought up of Toni Morrison if I didn’t dream about it? Maybe I was slowly pulling it out from my subconscious, but my dream rushed the process and threw it out into the open. Or maybe, if I had never napped, I would not have ever thought to use Toni Morrison. Weird.



But what’s weirder is that I’ve had some dreams this past year that actually kinda told the future. The future as in what would happen the following day after waking up.

A month or so ago, when I was six hours down south in college at UC Irvine, I had this dream that I found like five hundred dollars somewhere in Middle Earth (one of UCI’s freshmen residential communities). Most of the bills were counterfeit (I never have good luck in dreams), but some were real. I had around fifty real dollars.

The following day, Trung and I, sorta out of whim, decided to drive twenty minutes south down to a mall in Mission Viejo because I couldn’t find some shoes that I wanted around Irvine. Trung and I were walking around outside when I looked down and saw some green a few yards away. Is that money? I totally ceased my conversation with Trung and ran to it. I bent down and picked it up. It wasn’t five hundred dollars in counterfeit money, but it was actually a legit twenty dollar bill. I was over ecstatic. And I was also equally tripped out. My dream totally called it. I had told Trung about the dream too, and he flipped out also.



And there was one more incident. One week later, still down south for college, I had a dream that I was relocated to a new SCORE! location. (During my senior year in high school, I worked at tutoring center called SCORE! Educational Centers in my home town San Jose.) And for some reason, we were selling belts outside the store. And then I realized I missed some dance class. Whatever.

The following day, Trung and I drove twenty minutes north to Long Beach to go to a mall there, and during my car ride, I told him about the weird dream. We were still on a mission to buy me a new pair of shoes. However, before getting to the mall, I got super lost. I decided that I had to go get some money out of my ATM, so we were hoping to find my bank. We found it, and as I was pulling into it, Trung freaked out and started tugging at my shirt. He was pointing across the street at—guess what—a SCORE! center. Normally, I’d just be like, “Cool,” but no, I dreamt about this. I freaked out too. After getting money, Trung and I drove across and took pictures with the SCORE! center to document this strange occasion.

And we eventually found the mall thirty minutes later. We were that lost. And by chance, we ran into a SCORE! center that I didn’t know existed.

Isn’t that some CRAZY SHIT? I don’t know why I decided to write about this. Maybe I just want you all to think that I’m psychic? Well, one reason is that I’m starting a separate blog for my class. Writing about dreams isn’t any of their journal assignments, but I just want to throw this entry in there to show them that spare time writing can be fun! Obviously, I’m editing it for language. And I DO want my kids to think that I’m psychic so that they worry that I know whenever they’re not paying attention. PSYCHIC TEACHER!