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Friends All Change And Forget Who I Am (S&D)

by Nicole Kim
(Potomac, MD)

Last night, I had a dream that all of my friends that I made in college forgot who I am. It was eerily realistic and movie-like: the dream started off from fall quarter, when I first became friends with people from my dorm and other classes. Although I knew that the "main character" in the dream was me, I saw myself meeting and hanging out with people, as if I was an observer. There were moments in the dream that actually happened, such as when I first became friends with Maggie (*Name is changed), when I went to my first Stanford football game, and when I went to San Francisco for the scavenger hunt. Everything was sunny and I remember tons of laughing and smiling, but not much more.


Flash forward. All of a sudden, I guess it was winter quarter, the weather changed from sunny to rainy and dark. Really creepy. All the doors in my hall in my dorm were bolted shut and everyone's faces seemed paler, as if they all looked sickly. There was no laughter. It seemed like a scary movie, where fall quarter was the foreshadowing to the actual scary part of the movie. My friends started to slowly turn from outgoing and friendly to zombie-like and scary looking. I don't remember much else except for the fact that I knocked on Maggie's door and when she opened the door, she forgot who I was. Looking at "me", I remember that I was the only normal looking person in my dream; everyone else looked like zombies. Getting scared, I remember running from room to room, trying to find my friends, but they were all changed and none of them remembered me.

Flash forward again. Spring quarter, I think. The weather changed back to sunny and happy, but the people were in this weird mid-phase where they looked ALMOST back to normal, but there was that underlying zombie-esque physique still. Everyone was so busy, whether if it was because they joined a sorority/frat, were involved in tons of different clubs or activities, or crammed with work. It seemed almost like fall quarter, except everyone had changed together, became increasingly busy, and forgot about me. I suddenly switched from being an observer "watching" me experience this to actually "experiencing" the dream as a first-person. The moment I woke up, I remember running towards a forest, kind of like the forest that was in the forest scene in the Hunger Games. I woke up scared so I think I was trying to escape. Then I woke up.

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