The Speedy School Shopping Cart

MORNING OF APRIL 19, 2009

I was online looking at a strange web comic strip. The characters (a dog and some other animal, I think) were huddled near each other, cold and wet. One of them had comically large chattering teeth. The strip was actually funny, but I don't remember why. It made me want to do web comic of my own--but then, many things in real life do, too, and I've yet to seriously make one.

Next I was in school again. Physically it looked like my old high school campus, though otherwise it seemed like being in college. I had four classes on my schedule, but somehow I only attended three of them during the course of the week, always inadvertently skipping one of them (I think it was the math class) . I knew I had signed up for it, but it didn't show up on my actual schedule, and rather than looking into the matter, I just didn't go to that class.

I knew my mom was coming to pick me up after school one day. The building was almost empty at this point. For some reason I was pushing a grocery store shopping cart down the hallways as I made may way to leave. Occasionally I would run as fast as I could and then stand on the edge of the cart as it coasted along, repeating the motions each time it slowed down.

Whenever I'd coast with the cart it would be moving at unlikely speeds. Sometimes I could even lift my body and let it trail horizontally behind the speeding buggy. It felt like flying, and was rather wonderful. Once, when zipping along, I noticed I was approaching the heavy double doors at the end of the hallway at great speed. In some move that only makes sense in dream logic, I was able to reach out from my position behind the cart and push open the doors so that the cart continued to fly through them without ever colliding with them. I do remember feeling a pain in my shoulder as I did so, and hoping I hadn't seriously damaged it.

After coming through those doors I was finally out in the parking lot. It was very dark outside, like the middle of the night. My mom was waiting for me in her car (despite all this flashback-to-school stuff, everyone and everything looked as it does today). As I approached the car I began to ponder that mysterious class I had been avoiding, and I worried that I had truly been missing assignments and might already be too far behind to make up.