Basement dream

I woke up an hour early from a lifelike dream. Well, not like my real life, but it seemed real while it lasted.

In my dream, I was at some gathering at the old school house. Each of us was given a piece of paper with a riddle on it. Supposedly it was random who got which. I quickly solved my riddle, which was four liters (1 gallon) of milk in a large container. Then we went down in the dark basement to find whatever it was. I thought it was a kind of test of courage. I was confident, for I knew the cellar of my old school. Or so I thought. And it wasn’t all that dark.

But in the fridges down there I only found 3 liters of milk, and some of it so old that I feared it was spoiled. Others had not had complete success either: I saw a frying pan which someone was cooking pasta in. The water was cooked away and the pasta would be burnt, if not catching fire altogether. I put the pan in water, as there was no one to be seen.

At this time I was quite upset and angry at the idiots who had arranged the whole thing, made it impossible to complete, and risked the house catching fire on top of it all. I opened a window and slipped out, intending to go home without being seen or seeing anyone.

But outside, I saw that it was still not that late, and I decided instead to go to the shop and buy the milk, even though I doubted the rest of the recipe would come together.  As I crossed the field, I saw there were people, and a large fridge and a counter out in the grassy field. On the counter was a suitable large container, and inside the fridge were four liters of fresh milk. The other people I saw had also found their ingredients. Everything was there, you just had to get out of the dark basement. My hellish mood changed accordingly.

I guess other people’s dreams are not obvious, so let me add that this strikes me as a parable on my own life.  For a long time, I expected to find things to be trivially easy, and when they were not (and other people were idiots on top of it all) I got into a hellish mindset. When I broke free, and yet decided to fulfill my mission even if it would require a sacrifice, I found that everything I needed was in fact made ready for me, just not in the closed rooms where I had expected.