Oh, but what a kiss

“It was all just a dream.” The class tittered as the professor said the words in a sing-song tone and then wrote the phrase on the board. He took his time, and he underlined the sentence using ochre-colored chalk. “Say these words aloud with me,” Professor Johnson instructed. The class echoed as one: “It was all just a dream.”

“Louder,” he demanded. He was charismatic. Crazy white hair. Mismatched socks. He liked call-and-responses in his classroom. Once he’d stood on his head to make a point about editing.

“IT WAS ALL JUST A DREAM!” the students bellowed.

“Great,” the professor said. “Now, pay attention. You may never, and I emphasize NEVER, use that phrase in any paper in this class. If you are tempted to end an assignment with ‘it was all just a dream,’ know that you will receive an instant ‘F.’ There is no living author capable of rehashing that old sawhorse in a new form. Trust me. You aren’t Shakespeare.”

Candace, sitting in the back row with her black coffee in one hand and her Wayfarers on, took this negative statement as a challenge.

Immediately after class, latest prompt in hand, she went to work in the library, researching the symbolism of teeth in dreams. Ladders. Spiders. Fire. Jungles. She utilized every resource the head librarian could dig up for her. From ancient tomes to hippy 1970's analyses to modern explanations involving brainwaves and electrodes. She read an article about whether or not snails dream. She wrote her first draft with the type of unwavering confidence one generally only has in fantasy. Each word resonated. The very letters themselves seemed to dance on her notebook page. For one breathtaking moment, it was as if she had synesthesia. Her words became colors. The colors shifted like kaleidoscope art.

Never. She had never taken a “never” as never before. She was the boundary-breaking type, and her headstrong attitude had always served her well. When teachers assigned work, she would touch the tip of her ballpoint to the theme and spin creations that made the essays by her peers read like ChatGPT on Valium. Slow and plodding. Expected. Thick words that oozed like molasses. Nothing Candace ever wrote was traditional. She’d once penned an entire paper backwards, starting with the conclusion and ending with the hypothesis. She’d entered an essay into an Excel spreadsheet. She’d woven drugstore receipts together so that the items she’d purchased made choppy sentences and the sentences somehow told a Hemingway-esque story.

If a professor assigned her a banal topic along the lines of “What I did on my summer vacation,” she would write about faking the moon landing, the exploding billionaire-filled submarine, or how to make the perfect flan, and yet her piece would still receive an “A.” That was the beauty of Candace’s style. Readers didn’t know what hit them. They’d be following along: topic sentence/claim/thesis/lede, and then suddenly it was as visceral an experience as a first kiss, his lips on yours, his hand in your hair, your heart beating in a way you didn’t believe it could. You were transported—backseat of a 1957 Chevy, the windows rolled down to let in the cool, jasmine-tinged night air, your body pressed to his, the radio on low, fireflies twinkling outside, his hand under your petal-pink cashmere twinset, and then… wait, what? What was that? Who wrote like that?

She knew that in order to not fail this time, she would have to put an extra amount of her own special powers into the piece. Would it start with “It was all just a dream? Or would she end with those hackneyed words?

Books were spread out around her. Hard covers. Paperbacks. Some that had dust on the spines. She’d dive into one and find out that dreaming about your teeth falling out meant anxiety or a lack of control while having a nightmare about spiders didn’t mean what you thought it might mean. It was webbier than a simple horror show, more about being overwhelmed or feeling trapped. Nudity, a common theme occasionally compounded with a return to high school, could symbolize vulnerability, or a fear of being exposed. She read that throughout the ages people had been known to believe that their dreams were foreshadowing portents of the future, and having your dreams analyzed by a professional could run you $185 to $250, especially if you lived in upscale Marin County, and….

The library was closing soon. Students around her were starting to leave. She bit her pencil and remembered a pivotal moment in her writing life. In seventh grade, her teacher had given her an “A-” on a paper that ended with “but it was all just a dream.” He said in his note, “This is a cop out, Candace. It’s a cheat. This is the one time you can ever use it. And you’ve used it. Move on now.” She remembered him fondly. He wore mocha-colored cardigan sweaters, either one single one or an identical one every day. She tried to imagine what Mr. Sliders would think about her latest exploitation of the term.

As an adult, she’d had a dream about that particular teacher. Which, she learned now, could have simply meant a desire for knowledge or a new path, but then why had he been dressed as a pancake?

She wondered if Professor Johnson was correct. Could no living author weave the words in a way that would make him reconsider an instant “F"? She was reasonably sure that many people could be bent even from their most stalwart beliefs. For example, when she traveled, she tended to stay solo, refuse advances from any strangers, but there was that one time in Albuquerque when a soldier had sent over a rum-and-coke. She’d been on her own, dressed in a red, polka-dot, 1950s number, gardenia in her hair. He’d moved down the bar to sit at her side and regale her with stories about foreign lands, and later they’d walked through Old Town together. The night had ended with a kiss in a doorway against a cold plaster wall, a kiss that never faded, insinuating itself into so many of her dreams afterwards, and what was the meaning of that?

She couldn’t be sure, although kissing in dreams sometimes meant a quest or desire for more meaningful interactions. Context definitely mattered. Knowing the type of kiss was crucial to the interpretation, but when she sat back in the library chair and pondered, all she could come up with was: Oh, but what a kiss.

Even as she gathered her research materials, her mind lingered on his lips. The sound of traffic on the main thoroughfare when she finally left the library brought her back to reality.

For nearly a week, she wrote her drafts by hand. Scratching out overused words. Replacing cheap adjectives with the glittering, five-dollar kind. She brought her notebook to one of her part-time jobs and worked in the small coffee room for her 15-minute breaks. It was a relief to give into the words in her head, a bit of peace from dealing with the hell of customer service at a busy department store. So many people complaining about nothing much at all. One gentleman had tried to return very dirty, very used pants with no tags as “new." She’d had a difficult time not laughing as he’d argued the catsup stain had been there when he bought them. (She didn’t ask him if there were fries in the pocket, and had simply felt grateful that the stain wasn’t blood, which it obviously wasn’t because of the mustard at its side.)

Walking home at the end of her shift, she breathed in the scent of the lemons growing in a neighbor’s yard. Her brain instantly reminded her that lemons in dreams meant resilience and transformation. Outside her apartment, she refused a date with the handsome son of the handyman because the paper was all she could think about. Her off-campus apartment building was Spanish style, stucco roof. She could barely afford the studio, but she loved living on her own. This was why she worked two different jobs on top of being a student. Why she ate ramen for every dinner and knew which banks served free donuts on Fridays.

As she walked the steps to her fourth-floor apartment, she thought about how dreams sometimes felt so real you couldn’t be sure if you were in a dream or not, and then when you ultimately woke up you wondered for a moment if you were the dream or the dream was you. Walking up stairs in dreams indicated ambition.

But what if you were walking up the stairs naked?

One paper she’d perused discussed the fact (was it a fact?) that you were all the characters in your dreams. Because your brain had written the script for each one. So if you dreamed about a villain—you were that villain. And if you dreamed about your mother, your professor, or the handyman’s hot son, those were all facets of yourself.

Her clique of girlfriends wanted to get together mid-week for a gossip session over cocktails—“you work so hard,” they insisted, “what’s one drink going to do?” “we’ll pay”—and she allowed herself a quick margarita, licking the salt off the rim and then regaling her buddies with the story of a tired-looking woman who had tried to return chandelier earrings she said had been bought for her by her twin sister, when it was quite obvious she’d bought them herself and had buyer’s remorse. Who invented a twin? Meanwhile, twins in dreams meant duality (duh), balance, and new beginnings.

The Thursday before the deadline, she pulled an all-nighter, typing desperately on the countertop that served as her desk, kitchen table, and a place to stack laundry. She made a pot of coffee around two a.m. A second one at four. When dawn broke, Candace unfurled the last page of her paper from the typewriter, shook the onion skin to dry the ink, and then sat on her fire escape feeling satisfied.

The view from the escape was of the university and the jacaranda trees lining her street. Her apartment was small but well outfitted. A place of her own. She’d handpicked every piece of art on the walls—scrounging through thrift stores, haunting flea markets. There was a row of colored glass vases standing on the mantel of the non-functioning fireplace. Whenever she filled them with flowers she played "Our House” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and imagined she was Joni Mitchell. Dreaming about celebrities meant so many things, from admiring qualities you thought they might have to understanding more deeply aspects of your own personality.

At eight, she headed down the hill to turn in the assignment. She felt buoyed by the knowledge that what she’d written was her best yet. Maybe Professor Johnson would give her an “F” anyway, but she didn’t even care.

That’s when the jungle opened and swallowed her down. Jungles could mean a sense of being overwhelmed, but how could that possibly help her now?

Toucans hooted in the canopy above. A lion let the world know his authority in the distance. Her paper in a folder in her hand began to disintegrate, but when she opened her mouth to scream, nothing came out. Silently screaming in dreams could mean that nobody was taking you seriously or that you felt unheard or ignored.

She watched in horror as all of her beautiful words melted like that green witch in the 1939 movie. Becoming a sticky puddle. And then she, herself, was transforming into dust motes, but she didn’t exactly die because you couldn’t die in dreams, could you? Everything she’d read said that experiencing physical death in dreams was an impossibility. Was she about to prove that belief wrong?

No… her roommate smacked the alarm to hit the SNOOZE, and Candace woke up in the top bunk of a cluttered dorm room. There were no colored glass vases. She didn’t live on her own on a pretty jacaranda-lined street. She was a freshman, sleeping across from a bulletin board featuring Robert Doisneau’s “Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville,” and she had never been to Albuquerque. She didn’t have a job in customer service. She’d never sipped a margarita or made out in a Chevy. But one thing was for sure: she hadn’t typed word one on the paper that was due this morning, and as she nearly fell out of bed swearing, the only thing she could think was:

… damn, it was all just a dream.