A Malarone induced dream

Malarone, my anti-malarial medicine, costs $11 per little pink pill and so $11 a day. For the approximately 140 days I’m in Senegal. Don’t do the math. Its side effects include vivid dreams, hallucinations, and panic attacks, among other things. Fortunately I have as of yet only to experience the first. How do I know my dreams have been Malarone induced, you may well ask. Let me tell you, dear reader. I remember my dreams only exceedingly infrequently, as in on a time-scale of months. The last dream I could remember before arriving in Dakar happened in late November. In it, David and Liz got married in the Whitman Common Room. I’m not denying it was weird, but impromptu weddings in non-scenic locations have nothing on what I’ve been dreaming these past few weeks, sometimes multiple times per night. And those are only the ones I can remember…

The beginning of the dream I will be sharing in this entry is pretty normal. I’m walking down a corridor that looks vaguely like campus and very much like Hogwarts. Marian is with me and she’s telling me about how everyone’s job interviews and grad school applications are going. The corridor ends in an airport terminal because we’re flying to Minnesota to visit Marian’s family. We take out our tickets only to find that we’ve both been assigned the same seat. Half the seats are oriented in one direction with the other half perpendicular to them, so it turns out we both have seats, it’s just that the numbers in both sections are the same. We switch our seats so that we’re in the same section and almost sitting next to each other, with just a flight attendant in between us. All the seats, by the way, are in the middle of the terminal. There’s no plane. 

The dream then skips ahead, so that now the plane-less seats are flying over Lake Michigan and Marian’s getting very concerned about the water pressure. The seats are swooping low over the lake as though we’re in an IMAX film. There are red cliffs surrounding the water, and as the plane rises I realize we’re in Arches National Park, only Lake Michigan is still down below. But there’s Delicate Arch right up ahead. And there to my right is one shaped like a roller coaster.

The seats land in a snow-covered clearing at the top of the cliffs. The passengers disembark and begin to eat the snow, only it’s not snow, it’s actually icing. And the ground below is chocolate cake. Because we’re in Candy Land. So I’m scooping handfuls of chocolate cake from the ground and frolicking amongst giant lollipops and white rabbits and Christmas trees when I realize that I can’t feel anything. And then I realize that everyone is missing body parts. By this time I’ve wandered over to an area that looks remarkably like the Junior Slums where snow is actually snow and not icing and suddenly this intertitle appears in the dream with a list of all the passengers and the body parts each is missing. And it seems that some nefarious organization has masterminded all this and I hear evil laughter and wake up.