Carly woke up with a start, breathing hard and looking around frantically, grabbing at the heart-shaped locket around her neck; this was the last thing she had of her parents. “It was just a dream” she thought as she let out a sigh of relief. Moments before, in her mind’s eye, she was being cornered by a pack of what she thought were wolves but didn’t exactly look like wolves. They were thin with matted fur and she is sure she saw an extra tail or leg on a couple of them. What was going on? She knew the world was pretty messed up but was it really that bad?? She knew that the air she breathed was getting polluted and that soon, there would be no clean air left, but she just figured that everyone, human and creature, would adapt. Maybe that wasn’t the case after all, though what she had just seen was only a dream, wasn’t it?
Pouring herself out of bed, she started getting ready for the day. Her university class would start before she knew it and she was already running late from trying to analyze that dream. Good thing the class she was going to was an elective course on dream theory, maybe that would help her determine what it all meant. This was her first day of university, though she had been living in her dorm for about a month. Carly chose the early move in date so she could get a feel for the campus and figure out where her classes were in relation to the dorms and plan out the fastest route to get to each place in case she was running late, like this morning. This university was fairly new, this was only its 3rd year being open and had quickly become one of the most prestigious universities in the midwest. Carly still couldn’t believe she got in; her personal essay really must have wowed the admissions board because her high school transcript certainly wouldn’t have.
It’s not like Carly was a bad student, she just found herself distracted and prioritizing other things over her homework and, by senior year, she had showed up just enough to at least pass and graduate, but spent many of her days out in the woods in a circle with friends, smoking weed and drinking whatever alcohol they could get their hands on. Senior year of high school, Carly knew what she wanted to do with her life and it didn’t involve what she was learning in a public high school where the class sizes were too big for the teachers to handle and a lot of students fell between the cracks. Now, rushing to her first class in the next step of her life, she couldn’t help but wonder if she fell through the cracks because she chose to, or if it really was the student-teacher ratio. “Oh well” she thought, “can’t worry about that now” as she pulled open the doors to her lecture hall and quietly sneaked into the back row, hoping no one had noticed her.
“Ah, Miss Jamison, I presume?” She heard a voice from the front of the class echo through the room, speaking her last name. “Uh, yes, that’s me” she said, scanning the front of the room, trying to locate the professor and then realizing that he was standing behind the rolling white board in the middle of the floor. As he stepped out from behind the board, Professor Jackson spoke again. “I am so glad you could grace us with your presence, Miss Jamison. In the future, my class starts promptly at 8:30 in the morning and you are expected to be in a seat with your computer open to take notes. Is that understood Miss Jamison?” Carly wasn’t sure what to say, so she just nodded her head and slid down ever so slightly in her seat, hiding her face behind her computer screen.
Carly thought this class was going to be fun, learning about why we dream the way we do, and what those dreams mean, but Professor Jackson was such a proper man and spoke in such a way that made Carly want to fall asleep. Finally, class was over. Carly closed her laptop and stood up, stretching her back and arms as she did so, making sure she was awake enough to make it to her next class, one that counted toward her degree and that she knew she would struggle to pay attention in; Neuro-biology. Why she had chosen the path of neurosciences, she couldn’t exactly remember right now, but she knew she just needed to stick with it so she could get away from the hometown that felt like it was suffocating her.
Carly’s childhood wasn’t the easiest, and perhaps that was what led her down her drug-induced teenage years. Carly’s parents died in a car accident when she was 6-years old and she didn’t have any other relatives that anyone was aware of, forcing her into foster care. Her first set of foster parents were the worst she could’ve imagined. They made her sleep on a couch in the basement, took all of her nice things for their daughter and gave her ratty, old tattered clothes and shoes with holes that wouldn’t last longer than a week if she wasn’t careful. Carly finally came up with the idea to become a nightmare-ish kid, making the foster parents hate her so she could get placed elsewhere.