The Scarvelis Dump

Within a year or so after graduating from college, I started to have this horrible recurring nightmare. The nightmare wasn’t always the same, the recurring part had to do with the overall theme. In the nightmare, I was back at Kent State University and would find out that I wasn’t going to graduate. These nightmares usually took place on campus during the last week of my final semester of college. Somebody would walk up to me and say something like, “So, are you ready for the big applied quantum mechanics final today?” I would typically have no idea that the final was taking place, and would usually answer, “Of course. What time is the final?” The response would go something like, “It’s in 15 minutes—did you memorize Schrödinger’s equation, eigenfunctions and eigenvalues?”

Terror. I hadn’t been to the class all semester, didn’t know who the professor was, didn’t know where the class was held and didn’t know an eigenfunction from a farfegnugen. Worst of all, I needed those three credit hours in order to graduate after five years (yes, I did do the five year plan at Kent, and graduated with exactly the number of required hours to acquire a bachelor of science degree in journalism—not an hour more, not an hour less). Typically, I would force myself to wake up before slitting my wrists or drinking Draino and it would always take me a few seconds awake to convince myself that I did indeed graduate in May of 1990. This process became so disturbing that I even resorted to putting my college diploma on the night table next to me just to be sure.

As I mentioned, the specific details of this dream varied a lot. One time I was wearing a diaper. Another time Wayne Newton gave me the bad news. For a while, every time I had the dream, my book bag would morph into a chocolate ukulele stuffed with toilet paper. (The list goes on: Angry nuns; sinister clowns; dead relatives; Ewoks; strolling violinists; cotton gins; Mason Reese; laughing monkeys; Fred and Ethel Mertz; The Hamburgler; talking cats; dancing cookies; cigar-smoking babies; those girls from The Shining…you name it). Regardless of casting and props, the theme was always the same: I was going to fail. I had wasted five years and I wasn’t going to finish and for some reason (I just knew this intuitively in the dream) wouldn’t have another chance.

After suffering through this dream at least weekly for a couple of years, I finally mustered up the courage to discuss it with Dr. Jack, my primary care physician (during a routine visit for a little facial skin issue that had come up). I explained the nature of my recurring nightmare to Jack. His response both put me at ease and made me worry even more. He said, “I’ve been out of medical school for over 30 years and I still have that dream. It’s very common, nothing to worry about.” Sure, I was glad that I wasn’t a freak for having the dream in the first place, but I found it disturbing that I might be haunted by it for the rest of my life.

Over the years, I came to accept the recurring nightmare for what it was, and noted that the frequency and intensity of the dreams seemed to correlate directly with my current waking state of mind. That is to say that when I was feeling especially stressed out or challenged, I had more of these terrifying nightmares more often than when I was feeling peaceful in life. Eventually this nightmare became a mere nuisance, even a novelty, as I settled into a good long stretch of life where I’d experience it no more than once every couple of months. I was nearly cured.

Well, over the past couple of years, the nightmares have come roaring back, and with a vengeance. The most daunting aspect “Recurring College Nightmare: The Return” is that it has cunningly evolved its nefarious theme to suit my current demographic status. In the sequel, somebody at work (usually an authority figure or a forest creature) comes up to me and tells me they found out that I didn’t graduate from college. The big, initial threat involves this ultimatum: If I don’t go back to college and finish, I’ll get fired. There are lots of new characters too (few weeks ago my boss was Rip Taylor, but instead of hair he had globs of cake batter smeared all over his head and no eyes). So, knowing I have to go back to keep my job, I pack-up my things and return to college. I don’t know why it never occurs to me in the nightmare to take night courses or something. In the new nightmare, I always liquidate everything I own (sometimes liquefy too—one time my car melted and washed down a pink tapestry sewer drain) and move back into a dorm on campus, which adds all kinds of new terrors and unpleasantness to the situation.

Well, I had a real doozy just two nights ago.

I showed up at my new dorm room in Wright Hall down there at the Kent State University main campus. I was relatively pleased with the room—it was spacious and had a very nice balcony (before it was torn off by a pterodactyl). The floors were very sticky and the ceiling was spackled with mashed potatoes and gravestones. Then my roommate showed up. She was a very small Asian girl with cropped hair. She came in, said nothing, dropped her things off and left. For some reason I thought I was getting a single room. It was now apparent that since I left college nearly 20 years ago, the dorms had gone from separate men’s and women’s floors to co-ed rooms. I was even more perplexed when my roommate returned because now she was a skinny blonde haired girl named Jill. This turned out to be a good turn of events because she brought a TV set with her (it was made out of popsicle sticks and feathers and I was glad it was there since mine had turned into cockroaches) and also slept with an electric fan next to her head just like me (except her fan was also a toothpaste dispenser). I was further pleased by the fact that all the beds (there were eight or ten in the room) were king-sized waterbeds with soiled velvet bedspreads. As I was choosing my bed (I picked one in the corner of the room by the produce stand for a little privacy), I asked Jill how the bathroom arrangements worked with all the co-ed intermixing in the dorms. She was kind enough to point out a urinal on the opposite wall of our room (although that didn’t quite completely answer my question).

Then things then got really bad again, though. Additional roommates arrived (it turns out our room was a “quad”). The first was an elderly senior citizen lady who was wheeled into the room in a hospital bed pushed by dalmatians and Karen Carpenter. She did not appear to be conscious (I believe she was in a coma). Shortly thereafter a small, nervous girl arrived riding one of those multi-cup coffee percolators, the kind my mother used to pull out of mothballs when a lot of people were coming to our house. Despite the fact that the nervous girl didn’t have a face or arms, she did a good job darting around the room on her percolator, carefully arranging her ziplock bags of diarrhea. As for my belongings, they all disappeared suddenly and when I looked in a drawer where I thought I had put them, all I found was burnt toast, roofing nails and a time portal. I turned to ask Jill if she had seen any of my things (can’t remember if this was before or after my legs turned into bolts of upholstery fabric), but she was now Robert Preston (without arms or legs) and just looked at me with confusion and anger, then gently floated out the window.

I finally woke up in a complete panic when the dorm room turned into John Wayne Gacy’s basement.

Last night I tried to ask Dr. Jack what all this meant. Unfortunately, just as I started to explain the situation to him he turned into Carmine Ragusa with giant, pendulous breasts and began to weep uncontrollably.