Please don’t shoot me
Last night, I dreamt I was wandering aroud the basement level of the art institute – but like most dreams, it was a sort of amalgamation of all the things I associate with the non-school-areas of AIPD: industrial decor, twisting pipes and hanging wires, valves with little luggage tags on them, scuffed poured concrete floors.
I was taking a shortcut to get outside after class, when this security guard found me. He told me I wasn’t supposed to be there – then immediatly started shouting at me to get down on the ground or he would shoot me. He was holding a gun on me, and I really thought he was going to shoot me no matter what – I was crying, I was so scared. He took my cellphone and my camera, and I tried to protetest, but he had that gun. Finally he asked for my wallet, and I tried to really slowly pull it out of my pocket in a completely non-theatening way. He pulled out my ID and looked at it.
Meanwhile, class had let out, and there were at least a couple dozen students walking past – but they weren’t doing anything to help me. Most people pretended to ignore me, like nothing was happening.
Finally, the guard accepted the fact that I was a student, and let me go, but refused to apologize or admit that he’d done anything wrong.
I guess the dream touched on a few key elements – my school, the cool industrial decor, my aversion to authority, fear of guns, and recent upswing in reports of abuse of power by people in positions of authority.