dream :: teacher

Last night I had this dream:

I return to my old high school and meet Mr. C., my senior history teacher. He is still handsome after all these years, and I feel my old crush coming back. But I don't say or do anything. I am pregnant, after all, and he is much older than me. (In the dream, I am not aware of being married.)

We are going somewhere together; I can't remember where, but I think he is going to help me with something. On the way, he says he needs to stop for a moment. The setting becomes a bathroom. He says he needs to take a quick shower and that he will just be a minute. I sit down on the toilet seat lid to wait. As he begins to undress, I close my eyes and tell him I won't look. I reach somewhat over my head to take hold of a towel rack on the wall behind me. Somehow, this allows me to lean back and relax.

Then, with my eyes still closed, I feel his hands gently covering my hands and wrists, as if he were going to hold them there, and he kisses me on the mouth. His kisses are light, but electric, and full of promise, and they take my breath away. I am completely undone. And then he stops, and I am breathless, and my eyes are still closed.

At that moment, I woke up. I was breathing in and out so hard that you might have thought I had just sprinted around the block. I haven't been able to stop thinking about this dream, or (guiltily) wishing I could go back into it to see what happens next.

I tend to believe that dream characters like this one (so far-removed from the actual person) represent an aspect of my own personality more than they represent the actual person. What qualities of Mr. C. do I have that I might be connecting with in some powerful, passionate way at this moment of my life? (And why does this dream take place in a bathroom, of all places? And is it significant that my eyes are closed?) I don't have answers ... but it's giving me a lot to think about.

What I remember about him from high school, off the top of my head:
* He was handsome in an older, professorial type of way.
* He was in his early 40s, and his face was tan with deep-etched laugh lines at the corners of his eyes.
* He was extremely intelligent and scholarly.
* I'd heard he might have been born in Britain.
* He was the first teacher I had who encouraged us to strive to be "scholars," and I took that seriously.
* He was funny, and he could be cynical and sarcastic if he wanted to.
* He was married. (Did he meet his wife at Lewis and Clark? Was her name Rachel? These details are fuzzy - just like the picture I posted, which is the only one I could find during a Google search.)
* He drove a blue Honda Prelude.
* We toilet-papered his house one night.
* I was his teacher's aid the second semester of my senior year. I admit this did not help alleviate my crush.