Strange young adult kinda dream

I was young, pretty, white.  I loved him and he was gone, my only lead--only REAL lead--a phone number.  So I dialed and found this weird network like nothing I ever experienced before.  And it wasn't him, but I was closer.  I dialed again and again, til I had to take a break.  I didn't like going out of his room, seeing his family trying to be normal while I was a stranger in their home so nothing could be normal.  Mom cooked, twin boys tried to play only to freeze when they saw me.  He got his parents to say yes to my coming by promising I'd stay in the kid sister's room, but I haven't done that since he disappeared and she looks at me with this longing like I'm still supposed to still stay up late braiding her hair and whispering Older Girl secrets.  Kid brother's worst of all cuz he's just a couple of years younger than us, all punk rock/skater hot and getting closer to me while we looked for HIM.


I'm getting out of that house and freeing us all, but just one more round of calls.  I hide out in the bathroom upstairs and dial.  There's an answer, it sounds like a party, and I thinking YES!  I'll be pissed when he answers, demand why he didn't just say that things were too intense...or no, I love him so much I can let him go without that scene if he just picks up the phone....But I see IT, one of the visions I'd had through all the phone calls, this a repeat of the first where he's walking along the shoulder of a dark road and van pulls up, he gets in, and vanishes...


There's a clicking sound on the phone and the party noises disappear.  The phone pressed to my ear rings as though I'd just dialed a number, and I can hear the echo of a phone ringing somewhere in the house.  My stomach seems to drop, an shadow of the sinking feeling felt throughout my soul.  Both rings stop and I'm already moving to hang up before I hear the little sister answer the phone.


There's a knock.  "Come in."  I'm scrubbing at my eyes when kid brother walks in, seriously hot, but not the one.  He holds up a portable phone.  "Were you...calling the house phone from a house phone? How is that possible?"


.....That last bit's not true.  It's already morphed in the recording.  It WAS the same number, so the best I should have gotten would have voice mail, but that's not what he said.  It had been something about Lucy thinking I might need something...I said, "Um?  Toilet paper?" and we both looked at the roll--not full, but full enough so that if I needed more I was probably about to go through something no one wanted in their bathroom.  I shared a smile with him, but it was almost like there were two of me--the one sharing a moment with him and the one still totally engrossed by the search for HIM.


The dream ended with flashes of vision and...a Damien Rice song playing on loop. 


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The dream that I had left this page open to write about was kind of like that.  In a way, it was totally different--the woman I was in then was more solidly grown, a woman of color.  There had been less urgency with no missing lover.  But it was the sort that, upon waking, I knew was a story, not some sort of working things out from real life.  I'd gotten up from that dream and wrote about it in a hard copy note book.  Then, I'd set about trying to build a plot around the character study I'd been given in my sleep.


That was about two weeks before NaNoWriMo had started.  We're a week into and I'l still trying to build a plot, plodding along well behind writing schedule.


There's still lingering urgency from this morning's dream.  I feel like I could figure out what was up with that phone network, and spend the day writing the book, each bit missing from the dream unraveling as I reach.  Reality's throwing cold water on that fantasy.  Having a lupus flare, I phoned in all of last week, so I cannot skip class today.  If I did, I would probably end up spending hours just trying to make sense of the phone thing alone, hours writing the opening (if I dove right in rather than hours spent outlining), and I'd hit the middle and run out of steam.


But it's recorded (shifts in tense and any other flaws) so I can come back and revisit this if I ever need/want to and you can see how this kinda, sorta works for me.  Sometimes.