A dream

Last Sunday morning, at around 7am, I was still in bed asleep and I had the following dream. It isn't anything special, it's just that I rarely remember dreams and this one was quite vivid.

The dream
I was leaving a college, or some such place, with single room accommodation, where I had been staying temporarily. I needed to get my bags on to a dark, grey-blue, quite large, rectangular van to take me and others to the station. The van was parked in a large square, like a parade ground in front of two coaches that were lined up one behind the other. I managed to place two of my bags, one on top of the other, at the rear edge of the van on the right side. I think I did this because I wanted to leave room for others' bags, but there was only one other bag in the van, also at the rear but at the left.

I needed to go back to my room to pick up one more bag. When I got there a man was giving some sort of farewell message to us, that is me and some shadowy, indeterminate figures who were hanging about in an ante room in one wall of which the door to my room was situated. I don’t know what he was saying but I think he thought he was being very clever even funny. He had a light ginger moustache and beard and was in his fifties.

The door to my room was just slightly open and I pushed to go in. Then I was in a courtyard, still outside my room. It had been raining and the concrete floor of the yard was quite wet and littered with leaves and a few sodden socks. I decided that it was not worth picking these socks up and then I saw the bag it was against the wall at the far side of the yard I looked down into it and it was two thirds full of my possessions, also very wet but I couldn’t make out what they were. Except it was clear that little black insects, roundish with lots of legs and about 20mm across where scuttling about inside and then one big one appeared and leaped out of the bag onto the floor and stopped briefly, long enough for me to get an idea what it looked like.

It was big, about 75mm across, also roundish but not perfectly so and was covered with triangular shaped scales. These scales were metallic in appearance with many colours, iridescent greens, blues and purples. It had two ‘dead’ matt black eyes, set deep within the body towards the front and many short legs round the circumference. The scales had points at the front and when it moved towards me I poked at it with the tip of my finger and the sharp tip of one of the scales penetrated my skin. This was quite painful and I felt concerned that it might have poisoned me.

Next I am running back to the large van because I knew that if I was not quick I would miss it - and I did. When I got back to the square, although the two large coaches, in front of where the van had been, were still there – the van had gone. I knew now that I would miss my train, I just knew it as if it had all happened before. I started to look round for someone who might be going to the station and who would give me a lift. Then I woke.

I suppose afterwards, when I thought about it - and I was quite surprised that I was able to, the aspect of the dream that struck me as most strange was the distinction between the mundane activity of placing bags in a van and the appearance of the, quite exotic, possibly dangerous, insects.