Dreams about college and a demon

Last night, I had a couple of interesting and slightly unsettling dreams. I think they kind of segued one into the other, but I couldn't swear to it, and it's the second one I wanted to mention particularly, but the first sort of sets the scene for it.

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In the first, I was in a college building, on a floor above ground level (the dream was not specific about which floor – dreams are infuriating like that) and initially I was working with a group and a tutor. There was some confusion about the time because one of the clocks in the two small rooms we were using as broken, and this upset me because I like to know what the time is mostly.

We were then given individual assignments, or else I'd finished the group task early and was allowed to go study privately. For whichever reason, I was looking for a quiet room on the same floor where I could work in private and alone. It started that I was just mildly frustrated because most of the suitable classrooms were occupied (curiously, by secondary school classes, not college classes), but then it seemed that I was being followed or headed off by some students (again, in secondary school uniforms) deliberately. All I wanted was to be left alone so I could study quietly! At some point, I started looking for a way back to the original rooms where I'd been with my group, and give up. I think the last part of the dream was where I decided to cut across the design & technology workshop (woodworking and metalworking room) to get back round (the architecture of the floor seemed to have the workshops in the centre with a corridor going all round three sides of them, and then rooms all the way around).

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The second dream, or second part of the first dream, was still associated with education and studying. This dream also had a couple of beds, and bedrooms, in it. They were big, open bedrooms, and they were double or king-size beds, though I'm not sure why or what they were doing in the college (it felt like we were still in a college).

I was lying on a bed in a light-coloured room with a woman about my age or a bit younger, and she was writing a paper on historical roles of women, and it probably had something to do with roles in enforced servitude or slavery, because there was mediaeval and US slavery mentioned. She was writing it from a feminist perspective, at least at first.

Suddenly, her demeanour changed, and her writing changed its tone, as I could see because I was following her work over her shoulder. The dream was very vague about our relationship to one another, but it seems as though it was very much a trusting, platonic, friendship because we didn't seem to be boyfriend/girlfriend (or even "casually fucking") yet we were apparently sharing a bed. Certainly, she was starting to behave in ways that I knew she wouldn't (she never had a name in the dream, perhaps because in the dream I would have known her name so deeply it never needed to be explicit to the "viewing me").

Somehow, it came to light that she was possessed by a demon. With another of her friends (who was the one who discovered the demon possession theory), I set about trying to extract the demon. We discovered that it could lie in wait in anything with an eye (I think), and could jump from person to person by eye contact. Once it was aware we were trying to destroy it, of course, it wanted to destroy us right back and things got quite scary.

Somehow, I hit upon the idea of using binoculars to look at the possessed friend, but it didn't work! The demon first possessed the binoculars, and then it tried to possess me.

At this point, or just before, we learned that the demon fed on people's success or potential for success, as apportioned by destiny. My feminist historian friend had been destined for great success, and the demon had been planning to feed on that and destroy her real success. So now, the demon tried to jump into me. I was knocked backwards (at least, my next view in the dream is of my two friends looking worriedly down at me). They looked worried because, of course, they thought I had been possessed. I opened my mouth and said something like, "Well, that's a reet bugger!" (very Yorkshire accent) and then they knew I was okay, because the demon had been very florid and fancy in the way it made people speak.

"Why didn't it possess you?" asked my friends, and I came up with a theory. "I have very little potential for success," I said, "So it didn't have anything to sustain itself". "How horrible!" was the reaction from my friends, to which I replied that I didn't believe in destiny, and "I'll enjoy trying to prove it wrong anyway! Besides, my definition of success may be different from the demon's, so it didn't recognise what I had as success."

Then we went downstairs to the other room, where there was another bed, and some light-hearted conversation went about in our little group.

Then my friend said, "Thank goodness that's over, now I can hand this in!" I said, "It'll need some – ah – editing first!" The demon had written a lot of things into it. Some of it was really good prose – the same language style as mentioned in its speech – but some was gibberish, and a lot was abusive, despicable language, basically internet troll type stuff about the women my friend had been writing about. And a bondage porn picture it had stolen from me while it was still possessing my friend, and had inserted into the document. In the dream, no one saw anything wrong with porn per se, but handing it in as part of an academic assignment would still not have been acceptable! So my friend had to go back and delete all the gibberish and troll comments from her essay (and the porn, too!) and then hand it in. She commented to me along the lines of "I liked writing this florid prose, but it's still really hierarchical in nature" (I remember the word "hierarchical" being in there).

Then I woke up.

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Make what you will of what those dreams might have meant! Armchair dream interpreters, go ahead and go!