dreamlife of bees

there is something going on with my dreams. last night, i dreamt that i was chaperoning for a school trip, but it was some bizarre, the-entire-school-is-going-on-this-trip trip. we were in a hotel, a truly nice hotel, the kind in which the queen beds have feather mattresses and the rooms are decorated in this deep jewel tone...and the heavy curtains had gold braid sashes...
we, the teachers, because it was school day, were required to teach mini-lessons in given hotel roms. and i, joy tang had been informed of this particular requirement about 5 minutes before students were due to arrive. i had no materials, no books, no paper, no anything, and i had to teach something about folklore, and the joy in the dream was leaning her head against a chest of drawers thinking thinking about "what on earth am i going to teach them?" when it came to me (me in the dream).
i jumped up and started filling the tub with water. (in the dream, the tub was outside, sunken into the balcony, and the balcony was a polished all-wood contraption with a railing and a trellis with vines climbing all over it.) the tub was filling, and i was scribbling down some notes on a hotel pad. the students were coming in; the tub started overflowing; i had stephany diaz, a student, turn it off, and we began the lesson with water dribbling over the edge of the tub, onto the balcony, and pooling against the glass sliding door.
the lesson was designed to create hypotheses about how certain folktales about magical creatures, etc came about. the students were supposed to put their feet in the tub and observe how the water distorted their toes. "they look webbed, don't they?" i asked. everyone agreed. then, we had this discussion about how people came up with mermaids, etc. so on and so forth.
dream-joy was exceedingly proud of herself, and after the students left, she marched back into the room to share her happiness with another teacher. but linda trendell, Lee High School's school improvement coordinator, was in the room. the dream shifts a little here, because apparently, the room was her summer home, or something to that effect. the balcony became a full patio with a backyard. she was walking around the patio and complaing loudly about how some people just didn't know how to take care of things and look, look how the wood was stained and look at all these dead leaves. there were chairs strewn about the porch, wet and black and steamy, and she was straightening chairs and wondering which one of the teachers was so irresponsible. and i just stood there, looking very guilty and not saying anything. mary frazee, one of our elective teachers, was also there, helping her and commiserating, and somehow, i knew that she knew i had done this, but she wasn't going to tell. by sympathizing with linda, she was scolding me indirectly, but she wasn't going to tell on me, whereas linda was increasing the pitch of her fit.
i started helping and avoided eye contact.

the dream shifts again here. i'm walking across the patio with a chair, and then i'm not. instead, i'm walking across a kindergarten classroom with two, small, paper cups -- the kind you get at McDonald's for your condiments. i'm in kindergarten, and i'm going to my teacher to get more tempura paint for my art project. we're supposed to be painting a picture, anything we want. i'm asking the teacher for white and aquamarine.
"Is that enough, Joy?"
"A little more."
She pours more. "Is that enough?"
"Just a tiny bit more."
She pours more. She looks at me.
"Thank you," I say, and walk back to my desk.
Kindergarten-dream-Joy sits down to paint and there's this sense that she's completely overwhelmed by her colors. She wants to paint the colors next to each other so that the subject of her painting is about the colors, and she wants the colors to stand out against each other. She wants everyone to understand how vibrant they are to her. So, she uses her paint brush to paint irregulary shaped strips of color all over her paper, sort of blobs the paint where she intuits the blobs should be and uses wide strokes where she thinks swaths of color should be. She's very absorbed, and doesn't notice anything else while she's painting.
But then she finishes and looks to see what her neighbor is doing. Her neighbor has painted people and a house and a sun. Everything is very neat and the lines and figures are very clear. Kindergarten-dream-Joy looks back at her own piece of construction paper and realizes that her painting is actually just a big mess, that all the colors are mixed strangely and that there is nothing to look at. It's a disaster. It looks like a toddler could have painted it. She hates her painting. And there's this sense in the dream that ever after she is going to try and paint houses and people and other, more recognizable objects.

This is where I wake up, as dream-Joy is trying to discard her painting. I sit up in bed and think, "Weird dream," and then I realize that actually, the second half of this dream, the part in which I'm painting, is not a dream at all. It's a memory. I was younger than 5, and I was staying with a family by the name of Kirk, but the rest of it is true.