Permission To Sit

Dream or Parable?

I’ve always loved dreams. They feel like my brain at its most honest about emotions I haven’t addressed while I’m awake.

I usually write them down so I can remember them and try to decode what Brainy’s trying to tell me.

According to the wild wild internet, chairs in dreams symbolize the need to live stress-free, recognition is coming your way (empty chairs), a push to be creative, getting out of your comfort zone, and a revelation of one’s true identity (wooden chairs).

Here’s a dream I had the other night that I had fun rewriting in third person.

A speaker is invited to speak at an event. A stage holds several simple wooden seats lined up in a row and in the center, one blue chair. After a quick intro by the master of ceremonies, a renowned and well-respected orator himself, the speaker is due to take her place onstage.

Unsure where to sit, the speaker eyes the blue chair on the stage. Is it for her? Should she wait for the MC? Should she stand in the aisles? Should she take a temporary seat until she’s introduced?

The room is massive but only a handful of early arrivals are scattered about in their seats. Seeing the scant audience, the speaker resigns herself to addressing a few disinterested people and scans the room for a seat until the MC arrives to officially begin the event.

The first few rows of seating face the stage, the dark mahogany chairs are the kind found in a house of worship.

Though unmarked, this VIP section, she’s positive, is reserved for event organizers and people who have laid out serious cash to be in front. The speaker does not belong here.

On the stage, the blue chair has somehow gotten more comfortable and more blue.

She ignores it and moves behind the VIP section to what looks like economy seating; row upon row of old school chairs with tiny desks attached by a metal arm that swings up to allow a student to squeeze onto the seat. Making up the majority of the room, each row, instead of facing the front, faces more rows of school chairs opposite, as if those onstage are too important to be looked at directly and audience members must instead face each other. Clearly these seats are for the audience, not for the speaker.

An aura has formed around the blue seat onstage, and though she’s tempted, the speaker refuses to go to it without formal introduction from the MC. Instead, she continues to move through the aisles in search of a temporary seat, and as she does so, more and more attendees flood the room and fewer seats are available.

The speaker weighs her options. Even if the blue chair were for the MC, she reasons, she could take it until he arrives. Audience members have spread out and have begun to take up two, sometimes three seats. Why bother trying to find a seat at all, which would only be temporary?

Without an answer the speaker approaches a few empty school chairs which two women have claimed with their belongings. The speaker barely makes a move before one waves her arms wildly, huffing about how she will move should the speaker sit next to her.

Already nervous to speak publicly and not in the mood for confrontation the speaker goes looking for another seat. Perhaps she’ll regret not fighting for her space, but soon she’ll have the last laugh from her place in the blue chair with the aura, where these women will be just another pair of insignificant faces in the crowd, forever regretting how they treated the main speaker of an important event.

The room is almost completely full and as the search for a seat continues the speaker sees the MC has been there the whole time and is in deep discussion with colleagues and fans, having shown no intention of sitting in the blue chair. What more does she need? The chair is clearly hers.

Yet she cannot bring herself to sit.