Airport. Like a high school play, attempting to convey a spectral atmosphere. One desk onstage, a gray woman behind the desk with the cold waxen face of an intergalactic bureaucrat. She is dressed in a gray-blue uniform. Airport sounds from a distance, blurred, incomprehensible, then suddenly loud and clear. "Flight sixty-nine has been--" Static... fades into the distance... "Flight..."

Standing to one side of the desk are three men, grinning with joy at their prospective destinations. When I present myself at the desk, the woman says: "You haven't had your education yet."

This dream occurred approximately thirty-five years ago, shortly after the publication of Naked Lunch with the Olympia Press in Paris in 1959.

YEARS LATER

I was taking a course. The students were all in an elevator or plane, it seems. We arrive at the third floor and here are about twelve students. I am sitting opposite the instructor on the floor. I was very uncertain as to what I would say.

Then suddenly the students and the instructor were gone and I was alone. I looked around for ways to get out. On the way to the room where the course was conducted, we passed through an area where there were about twenty women... whores, it looked like.

Then I went down stairs and then tried to get back up. There was a narrow ledge on which were various bric-a-brac: a clock in a block of glass, Victorian paperweights, and such things. I managed to get by them but there was no one on the third floor. I thought: This is the old snipe hunt.

Back down to the whore area. I was looking for a way to get out. I finally found a window covered with cellophane and managed to get it open and escape.

A woman followed me out and finally two fat men pinned me down to the ground. I realize before, someone asked if I could sleep here and I said no. I didn't have my medication. Afterwards I had some papers of H [heroin]. Spilled water on one of the papers. Snipe hunt Harbor Beach. The women.

"You don't have your education yet."

YEARS LATER

I am in a train at night, in my lower berth. The train is going very fast, I can tell by the way it shakes rattles and rolls. I have much fear of crashing. The train must be going ninety miles per hour.

"Oh well," I tell myself, "the engineer must know what he is doing."

"Not necessarily."

We are coming to the English frontier, and there will be a customs inspection. There is a paper of heroin hidden in my terry-cloth bathrobe. If it is found, I will plead with the inspector for a chance to finish my education.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Burroughs saw this recurring dream mantra (about why we're (stuck) here, in the Buddhist School of Hard Knocks) as important--he chose it as the title of his published dream journal. Ironically or not.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: My Education: a book of dreams by William S. Burroughs, 1995, p.1, 129-30, and 192-3. Passages untitled; title added to aid searches.

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