Midterms and Mishaps

Apologies for the long pause in entries! As a university student, I am prone to fall into bouts of examination, during which the rest of my life routinely goes on hold, until the fever dies and the exams pass (or, rather, I pass the exams! :D)

Meanwhile, along with the stress of studying and sleep-depriving come some very interesting dreams... :D

I have two for you from this time! In hopes of making up for the time lapse...

First, earlier last week, around Tuesday or Wednesday night, I ventured very briefly into the elusive land of kinky dreams, armed with my exam-anxiety... I dreamt that I was taking a test -- one of those mostly multiple choice/some short answer/one or two essays tests... (not that I have those anymore... at this stage I'm either writing extensive papers or giving 30-minute in-class presentations instead...)... For some odd reason, I couldn't concentrate on the test -- perhaps it was because I was so very acutely aware of the consequences of wrong answers...

Every point off, our professor had explained, would be dealt with after-the-fact by means of cane strokes. *blush* You can imagine my distress...

I even knew the counting system: the multiple choice questions, worth less than the short answer and essay, would only merit one stroke per wrong answer. For every point off on the short answer, however, it was another two strokes, and for the essay/s, three. That's three strokes of the cane for every single missing point on the essays!!

Desperately, I sat there staring at the exam paper, stuck somewhere in the middle of the multiple choice questions, already starting to feel the heat build...

Thus ended that lovely dream (I told you it was brief!)... and promptly the next morning off I went to tackle the first of my midterms!

Later (earlier this week), as exams were winding down, I was graced with another intriguing nightly journey, this time to "The Land of Mishaps"...

Terribly odd, I know.

I felt like I was in that book... *thinks very deeply for a moment to fish around for the title* ...the crossroad to..?, the bus stop..., the station of... Ah! The Phantom Tollbooth. A very interesting book -- I'd recommend it -- a quick read, full of lovely metaphors for life lessons and whatnot... Anyway, "The Land of Mishaps" felt very much like the world of The Phantom Tollbooth, with rather bizarre concepts and plays-on-words floating around everywhere, and colored (as is the book) with a kind of British-y tint :D

(I swear, my kink will probably always harbor a connection with British concepts and ideas, I think because my first exposure to kink was through Roald Dahl's children's (and other) books, and my first fantasies thus followed the pattern of old English school children, etc...)

"The Land of Mishaps" was quite full of all these lovely, quirky people, who had come to accept and even to relish the fact that their daily lives were to be ridden with mishaps and mistakes and misunderstandings and misdirections and mis-speaks and mis-thrown objects and misfires and missing items... Things went wrong everywhere all the time and all of Mishaps's inhabitants simply thought of it as everyday life...

I don't know by what means I'd come to find myself there, or what I was supposed to be doing there, but I do know that in the dream, I wasn't a regular resident of Mishaps. I was still very much of the mind that I should avoid mishaps when possible, and thus stuck out like a purple-polka-dotted hippopotamus trying to fit into a puddle.

People stared at me when I didn't trip and fall on my face when I stepped up or down from a roadside curb, or when the door didn't swing back and hit me on the way out of a building (as if I could control the *door's* decisions!) :P

Ladies in the coffee-shop would mutter behind their hands and point at me when I finished a drink without spilling a single drop on myself... Strapping young lads would turn away as if uninterested when I pronounced a difficult word correctly or could always find my keys in my purse when I got to my unchipped, undented, pristine little car.

The discomfort of such social estrangement got to the point (days in dreamland, probably something like minutes in real-time) where I started seriously considering making mistakes on purpose, just to fit in. Small ones, you know, not like misplacing my car or mistaking someone's intentions, but perhaps I could mearn to lis-speak every thow and nen, or "mis-step" and stumble into some handsome man's arms...

But it wasn't until a few days (minutes) later, while sitting in a coffee shop, presumably reading or writing or studying or somesuch, that I happened to overhear a conversation which convinced me, once and for all, that I had to learn to pretend-mishap.

A young woman, perhaps a few years older than me but not many, was sitting across the way at a table with an older, smart-looking gentleman (in a grey suit-jacket and hat), whom I assumed, from their conversation, to be a romantic partner of hers. Perhaps, as I suspected in the dream, her husband.

The couple were quirky and lovely to begin with, stumbling over each other on their way into the cafe and then misdirecting each other to sit in the seat that each was in fact intending as their own... Once they were finally settled and had already mis-ordered twice before correcting themselves, the gentleman flipped out (on the second try) a tiny little black notebook, fitted an over-large monocle to one eye, and began to address the woman (probably his wife).

"Now, Dear, I believe that's" (and scribbling down in his notebook as he continues) "one stumble on the way in, one attempt at the wrong tide of the sable, and *two* mistakes in ordering! Add that to--" At this point his monocle popped out and it took him two tries to get it back in the right way, meanwhile his wife was turning redder by the second and fidgeting in her seat. "--Add that to shutting your cress in the dar door, excuse me, your *dress* in the *dar* coor, oh, hang-it-all, you know what I mean -- along with mis-matching your shoes, and mistaking the mailman for the milkman, or, that is, the milkman for the mailman..., and we've got..." he moved his pen down his notebook along what seemed to be the meticulous list he'd been referencing, counting under his breath as he went... "Six mishaps you've got to pay for so far!" The astonishment and gleefulness in his voice seemed misplaced next to his wife's wide eyes and wringing hands.

Quietly, letting her eyes roam down his list and then fix back upon his smiling face, she said, "Oh, you've mis-calculated, Dearest, it's seven."

"Seven! You are rite quight! Er, quite, quite right, rather... Now, how should you like to receive your comeuppance? By --" she seemed to become suddenly aware of the publicity of their surroundings, and made a move to try to quiet him, but instead managed only to knock his pen off the table, which could not make enough noise to cover the rest of his question, "-- the tawse, strap, or cane?"

Burying her face in his shoulder, she only groaned softly as he realized his mistake, and chuckled, comforting her. "Oh don't worry my sweet, it's only this young lady nearby who can hear us, and you know how she is -- can't get a mistake out of her! Can we, Mister? Excuse me, I mean, Miss?"

To my amazement, as I was still rather in delightful shock, the grey-hatted gentleman was appealing to me, and I could only stare hungrily with my mouth slightly agape and shake my head weakly...

"See there? She won't tell a soul -- have a heart darling -- come, let's get home and take bare of cusiness. Er..." Patting her shoulder and guiding her up and toward the door, he smiled and winked at me as they passed.

Just before waking up, I remember conceiving of a solid dream-resolution to begin making as many mistakes as I could, and to enter into more relations with that intriguing couple... :P

Great to be back! Hope everyone has had a marvelous two weeks :D