Shanghai Yummy

Had a couple of dreams last night, including the first school-related dream I've had since, well, the last time I was in school. Ugh.

It's the first day of class, and of course I'm late already. Get on the bus, expecting to be about half an hour late (to a one hour class). It's the wrong bus, but somehow I get to class on time anyway. I go into the classroom, which is in the basement of some dank, nasty looking building which I can only describe as Everitt Lab, the home of the ECE department. Outside, vans promoting Pepsi and Coke are doing some back to school nonsense. Yes, the fricking advertisements have leapt off the TV, off the web pages, off the billboards and INTO MY DREAMS. Bloody Cripes!!!! Anyway, the professor is 15 minutes late, and all he does is come in and tell us that there's an exam next week. Doesn't give us a syllabus, or even tell us what class we're in, or what to study for. I leave, only the bulding has turned into the back hallways of a stadium, and of course I'm lost. I wander around for a while, and finally come upon... an airport. Yes, there is an airport in the basement of Everitt Lab. I always knew something was fishy about that microelectronics lab down there. Now this is where the dream gets really disturbing. I see a United 767 (only it's not really a 767 because the tail was wrong, but whatever) taxi past me, and while it's taxiing, a bunch of maintenance guys are working on it. Yes, they're working on the plane while it's moving. After a few seconds, they finish whatever it is they were doing, and button up the doors and cargo doors hastily. The plane taxis around, under an interstate highway overpass. Suddenly, a bug zapper on top of the plane explodes and bursts into flames. Don't ask me what a bug zapper is doing on top of an airplane. The crew get out as the fire spreads, and I walk over, where the female captain of the plane is just getting out of the cockpit window. She explains that it's a cargo plane, and no one else is on board, and that she's glad the fire broke out on the ground and not a few minutes later. Yes, I know United has no more cargo-only planes, and that 767's were never cargo-only plane even when they did have them, and that climbing out the cockpit and onto the ground is not really possible. That and her uniform didn't look like the standard United uniform. But whatever. I woke up.

This dream tells me that:

• I am deathly afraid of going back to school
• Everitt Lab will haunt me for all Eternity
• The Man is invading my dreams, and my mind
• I'm afraid for United (the maintenance symbolized the company's ongoing efforts to recover while the airline operates, the fact that the plane was a 767 is probably because that was the model involved in an incident last September in which idiotic, psychotic zealots* used my friend to kill thousands of people, the interstate highway symbolizes the fact that people are too wussy right now to fly and are instead using other transportation, which is the same reason why it's a cargo plane...)
• Pepsi and Coke are in some Unholy Alliance