The truth about dream knowledge

My dreams have often been potent and overbearing, prone to long lingering and capable of tainting entire days in their melancholy shade. More than once I awoke from a dream with a sense of urgency that could only be resolved through its retelling, usually to the ears of my dream’s subject. One of these dreams took place when I was a teenager, during an afternoon crash-nap I’d taken to make up for lack of sleep in the late hours of the night. I remember the dream’s cold imagery wavering in my eyes and a warm wave splashing up against my insides like tea on an empty stomach.

I called up my friend Oren and said “Listen, I have to tell you this dream I just had.”
“This what you just had?” He asked with his mouth full.
“A dream, I just had the strangest dream about you, just now.”
“You dreamt about me?” I heard him smile faintly.
“No, no, not exactly about you, I mean, it had to do with you. I mean, I thought about you during the dream, since Lea was there.”
“Lea?” He asked, his smile audibly faded away.
“Yeah.”
“You dreamt about Lea? What kind of dream is this? Do I want to hear it?”
“Yeah, yeah, shut up for a second.” I said, and took myself back to the unreal corridors of the world that was still beating and sweating under a fog of lost details and transparent fingers. “Are you listening? Okay. So I’m in what I know is my elementary school, even though it’s nothing like my elementary school, it’s much bigger and nicer, and also scarier, but somehow I just know that it’s my elementary school, you know? I’ve got this dream knowledge about it.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know how that is.” Oren said, both impatient and indifferent.
“Okay. So anyway, I’m walking down one of these long marble hallways, and at the doorway of every classroom I see a group of boys or a group of girls our age, teenagers, and they’re all naked; naked and giggling like there’s some kind of joke going on, like it’s a huge prank and everybody’s in on it.

“The girls look so real, I mean, they’re a very believable naked, not too beautiful, not too ugly, just very real, and they’re all laughing kind of shy-like, they’re all covering their mouths with their hands and they’re looking hot. And the boys all have hard-ons and they’re all holding their dicks in their hands, like they’re waiting for something, I don’t know what, and they’re all laughing like delinquents.

“And I’m standing there, in the middle of this fucking endless hallway with more and more doors and naked girls and boys waiting and laughing, it just keeps going till it’s a tiny dot way off, and I look down and I realize that I have all my clothes on. I am the only person who’s got any clothes on. You get it? Isn’t that absurd? I’m having like the exact opposite of that dream that everyone has, where you go to school and you realize you’re naked. I’m at school and everyone but me is naked!

“So obviuosly I’m feeling great about myself, and really comfortable in my clothes, and then I see there’s a camera hanging around my neck. It’s a real professional camera, with a huge lens and a huge flash. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing there or what I’m supposed to be taking pictures of, so I just turn around and head for the stairs.”
“And that’s where you meet Lea.” Oren said dryly.
“Yeah!” I exclaimed. “How’d you know?”
“You said Lea was in the dream.” He explained without a trace of arrogance.
“Yeah, alright, but I never said when – never mind, it doesn’t matter.”
“It really doesn’t matter.”
“Yes.” I agreed. His sudden coldness confused me, but I knew that once I’d started I’d have to finish my story no matter what. “Ok. So, anyway, yeah, Lea was standing on the stairs, naked. She looked a little more mature than the other girls, I mean… her face seemed very mature, and so did the way she held herself, she was radiating maturity, but she had the body of a twelve year old, almost no breasts at all, just these two pale circles on her skin… you know? And I know it sounds bad, and I know her body isn’t like that in reality, yeah, but in the dream it was so sexy. I mean I couldn’t take my eyes off of her.

“And when I saw her my head was filled with one thought, my brain was saying ‘Take a picture of her for Oren, take one picture for Oren.’ There was nothing I wanted more in the world than to do that. You know how it is in a dream when you want something so bad, you just fucking need it? It was like that.

“She recognized me immediately. I mean, I don’t know if in reality she knows who I am. Does she know who I am? Does she know I’m your friend?”
“What?”
“Lea, does she know who I am?”
“She knows who you are, yeah.”
“Ok. Anyway in the dream I could tell by her face that she did, that she knew who I was and that she was really happy to see me, she had this look of someone who finally found a familiar face in a sea of strangers. When I walked up to her everybody around her left her, and she smiled and said ‘Isn’t it crazy here?’

“So I tell her I want to take her picture, and right away she’s objecting. Get this, she tells me ‘No, no, no! I always burn in pictures. It’s like taking a picture of the sun.’ Isn’t that beautiful?”
“Yeah.” He said. It would have been better had he said nothing.
“And I’m saying ‘No, I’m a great photographer, really. No one burns in my pictures.’ But she’s arguing, and she really does have this extremely pale white body. But I don’t care, I want this, it’s the most important thing in the world - getting you this picture, so I’m arguing and really fucking insisting, and she’s smiling and saying ‘No thank you, it’s not necessary’.

“I felt like I was going insane. It reached a point where she wanted to get down the stairs and I was blocking her way. She moved to the right and I moved to the right. I told her she couldn’t leave till I took her picture. So she gave me this look… I mean, you’d think she’d be mad but she wasn’t, she just looked… curious, puzzled, then kind of forgiving. She cocked her head at me like a dog. That just went on forever, until I woke up. I have no idea if I got that picture.”

I found myself catching my breath but smiling, as if I’d just run a marathon. “So what do you think?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, don’t you… I mean, don’t you have any ideas of what this could mean?”
“No.” He said.
“Aren’t you, I mean, about Lea…” I was lost. The dream had been told, but my sense of urgency was still there.
“Alright, enough.” He said sharply.
“Enough what?”
“Enough, enough.” He said. “Enough talking about her.”
“What?” I was surprised. “Listen, I didn’t mean, I mean, I didn’t know that you were like, I mean, you talk about her all the time, I –”
“Yeah, alright.” He cut me off, and for the first time there was gentleness in his voice. “Calm down, I’m not mad at you. I just don’t want to talk about Lea anymore. No more talking about her.”
“No more talking about her.” I repeated.
“Yes.”
“Alright.” I sighed. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say anything else. ”