losing daylight

this dream might begin when my real-life phone rings and for some reason i assume it’s Will calling me about some show, and when it rings again it must be Stephen, and they need instruments or my help somehow.
i’m in a skinny living room where everyone sits on chairs and couches against the side walls, opposite each other. it’s sort of like rita’s old shotgun, but more fratty. why are we here and these guys talking to us?
we go shopping at target or somewhere. there’s a long sequence of picking out toys and dresses and sheets. are we setting up our dorm rooms? the store seems massive and white and things are arranged sort of haphazardly and there only seems to be one or two of each item. me and another girl get into a tiff about who gets the baby mice toys. i feel satisifed that i’ve picked out good stuff and sit down to each with my friends and the guys from earlier, on the other side of the store. here is a long sequence that sees a lot of my plate and a little bit of hte table conversation, about the food, which is rice and beans. the beans are a very odd texture and a sort of clay dirt red color. they seem more like lumps than beans, but i still make a comment that they’re a complete protein. one kid has to go home to get more money, presumably for food. did he spend the rest on junk? i feel like everyone has more food than me, or keeps getting seconds, and i am the slowest.
by the time i’m done eating, i have forgotten what i put into my overflowing cart. i sit down in an opposite corner in the store (front right?) to go through what i’ve decided to buy. nothing seems necessary, and i can’t believe i was planning to buy all these things. i make a huge pile of what i need to put back, i can’t understand what i was thinking. here there is some detail from earlier that i’ve forgotten, about how for some reason i have my suitcase here, and a lot of my own clothes. so another problem is that a few of my own clothes have gotten mixed in with the stuff in my cart, so i am setting those aside, too.
in my cart i find a beautiful green dress, and i look forever for hte price tag. when i find it, all the numbers are sort of rubbing off, and it’s been marked down so many times i can’t tell which is the real price. it was once $796 or something ridiculous but now it’s... $80? i can’t quite make it out, and make the decision to put it in my suitecase with my real clothes. it will be an honest mistake. in the pile, i also find a cream colored slip that doesnt look like my style so i try to katherine if its one of hers. she has her back to me, and i suppose she is busy doing something that i can’t see, but it annoys me that she doesn’t answer me. i ask her a couple of times and maybe throw the slip over to her. i’m pretty sure it wasn’t hers either. then for some reason i’m looking on the bottom of this clothes rack behind me and i find what looks like an old halloween shirt of mine. then i see that it must be my shirt because it even has my old buttons on it still. then i find another shirt of mine, from kindergarten, that has a picture of the class on it, and i find my face on it too. i feel like i am trying to prove to someone that these are my old clothes, but i can’t remember who it is or if it was just to myself. then on the shirt, there’s a scene that scans the faces of the class, who are standing on some sort of float. below the float, there is a band playing in a little row for the picture. the accordian player is a guy from the frat (john katz?) and the guy standing next to him is his brother or twin or clone. they look older although i thought they were the same age as me.
i think this somehow transitinos into another section of the dream, in which i am in some sort of class, although the room is really dark and everyone is sitting cross-legged on the floor, and i think there’s a piano. the teacher looks like patti smith and when she asks who wants to read a poem aloud, i volunteer. a couple of lines in, she steps out. since i started reading, the room seems really loud, some sort of white noise that i can’t possibly speak over. my voice can’t get louder and i can’t be heard. it’s frustrating because i really want to do a good job reading this poem, but i also find myself really struggling with the language, tripping over my tongue in a way i’m not used to. perhaps this is the nature of the poem (ex. “Gilta razors razor lipsticker”) but i feel like i am mispronouncing words and really straining to read the words in the dark and there’s all this noise, and i’m about halfway through when two kids are simultaneously trying to pass me another poem that’s being passed around, and they’re both laying these two pieces of paper on me-- my arm and shoulder, two angles. i try to ignore them and keep reading a few more lines but it just becomes so insistent, wagging the paper on me and being completely distracting, and the room seems louder and louder, and i finally just say “FUCK, YOU GUYS!” and throw up the paper and walk out of the room. i walk down an eerie dark bluey sterile hallway, totally empty, and imagine what the kids are gonna tell our teacher. i make the decision not to go back to class today.