I went back to my kindergarten/elementary school. Don't know why. I guess it's just natural to want to see the places you grew up.

Walked around the campus. It was entirely different, but almost entirely unchanged, as things often are in dreams (how does that work? it's like the variable names change, but the values remain).

I wanted to go see my old music teacher, Mrs. Ceilly (I think that's how it's spelled). I hadn't seen her in about 18 years, and was anxious to say hi.

So, I wandered up to her class room.

I was in for a bit of a shock. You'd think it wouldn't be so shocking considering that it was my brain making all of this up, and that I must have known about everything ahead of time, but whatever.

Shock.

In the place of my old music room there was...

<drum roll>

A Starbucks Coffee.

Yeah. No kidding. The school had sold its music room to Starbucks.

I walked in, hoping to make a little bit of sense of what had happened. I looked around a bit, checked out the baristas, and realized that, with the music room gone, Mrs. Ceilly might be gone, too.

This got to be a little overpowering. You know - suddenly finding that your youth has been sold off to a line of coffee shops and that your old music teacher might have been sold with them.

I started to cry a bit.

I wandered around the shop, looking for Mrs. Ceilly, figuring that she was just hidden behind something.

It turns out she wasn't hidden. One of the baristas approached me and asked, "How are you! How is it going!"

Couldn't she tell?

"Can I help you!"

There were no question marks. Every question was clearly a joyful command.

I asked her about Mrs. Ceilly, and was told that Mrs. Ceilly would be right back...

... to make more coffee.

Yup. She had been sold to the coffee shop along with the room. This was just a bit too much. By now, I was blubbering like a child and looking for the exit.

Which I found. I'm good at things like that. Ask me to find a prominently placed door in a room, and I can do it.

After going outside, I searched for a restroom. I was feeling the pressure of a quickly expanding bladder, and felt that I should relieve myself in an appropriate place, rather than right there, in front of the coffee shop.

And I found one (I said I was good at stuff like this). I found a large steel door with the following words printed on it:

    MEN'S RESTROOM - MULTI OCCUPANCY

I guess the bit about "occupancy" was to imply that I wasn't going to be alone in there.

I pushed the door open and wandered into what was, perhaps, one of the more unique restrooms I had ever seen. The room was at least a mile long from one end to the next. The ceiling was domed, and probably hit its peak around eighty feet. The entire room looked as though it had been carved from stone. The floors, walls, and ceiling were all totally uneven and grey. "Cavernous" would be a word appropriate for describing both the appearance and size of the room. Little tiny "dungeon windows" had been carved near the high points of the ceiling. Light dribbled in like the uneven trickle of urine exiting a man with a swollen prostate.

I started off in the direction of what might have been urinals. They were so far away that it was hard to tell. I could make out other people, here and there, through the mist (I mentioned the mist, right?). There were toilets randomly scattered around the room, facing different directions, and sitting at slightly different angles to the floor (because the floor was so uneven).

On some of the toilets were what I understood to be teachers. Men with beards, reading the paper, not really minding that they were doing nature's duty in what was clearly a torture chamber designed for the purpose of completely robbing its occupants of the desire to live.

Then I woke up.

(Note to self - No more booze combined with greasy bar food just before bed time)