A Classmate On Fire

I’ve been getting a lot of school dreams lately. I don’t know why. I think school/Uni has really taken a toll on my life to such an extent. Would I still be a loser if I never gone to college and into debt in the first place? I think it’s the fact that I missed out on an entire social development cycle growing up. I never had friends in school or college. At most, I recognized some classmates and this dream I had the night (or rather this morning because I couldn’t sleep) is about one of them.

I was back in high school in my dream. Although this classroom was in a multistory building. Another reoccurring thing in my dreams lately is these massive schools even though my high school was single story. We only had one floor. It wasn’t until college that I had to start getting used to using the stairs and sometimes elevators but I had trust issues with those since they were always out of order in my Uni. Anyways, I was in a science lab classroom and I was in a group with three other students. I didn’t see any cute females or at least any that were noteworthy. My group in particular was all guys and I only remember seeing one guy that I vaguely remember. I don’t know if I feel right spilling details about him since he was kind of a “lolcow” within my high school. He wasn’t autistic or anything like that. Just a dork. At the very least, he at least got a girlfriend in his senior year (not a good looking gf to be fair) which is more than what I can say for myself as I was a loner that nobody talked to but I digress. He wasn’t exactly a model student. He was quite the slacker and at one point he was caught jerking off in class and he just shrugged it off like “whatever”. In real life, I only had one class with him and it was a computer lab college credit class thing I did in my senior year. So that’s sort of what I know about him. He was in this group project with me in this science lab for some reason and we were working with Bunsen burner doing some kind of experiment. I don’t remember the details of the experiment but I believe we were doing that classic lab where you use a copper penny to change the color of the flame. I have a personal story related to this as when I did this lab in high school, I actually ended up burning my arm when I dropped the heated penny with the tongs I was holding onto my arm and burned myself. It wasn’t anything serious as I carried on without reporting my injury from the experiment but I had a little burn mark on my arm for a few days. But that was due to me being clumsy with my tongs and working the lab on my own.

In this dream, I was being a lot more careful, keeping my distance away from the hot lab tools. My group was too, except for the dorky guy who was messing around. That didn’t seem out of character for him. I don’t know if it was me or one of my partners who told him to stop. He was doing something incredibly risky and stupid with the tongs. It didn’t help that he had a long sleeve jacket which should have been rolled up past the wrists. I have a really strong gut feeling that something is about to go horribly wrong in this lab and I’m just standing there, afraid to get anywhere close near him. At some point, he knocks over the Bunsen burner and the flame starts a little flame on one of the lab tables. He starts to freak out and stumbles knocking over another groups burner and that’s when his sleeves catch on fire. Instead of reaching for the fire extinguisher or doing the old “stop, drop and roll” (Does that method even work or is it old school fudd lore like the food pyramid?) he starts flaying his arms all over the place nearly hitting other classmates as he screams that he’s on fire. It doesn’t take long at all, just mere seconds before he is completely engulfed by a flame and that’s when his screaming goes from panicking to outright nightmarish. It was one of the worst screaming I ever heard. You could feel the pain he was going through while he was burning alive. My gut instincts were kicking as it was for the rest of my classmates and we all wanted to get out of there. We didn’t think about grabbing the fire extinguisher thought to be fair, I don’t think I even saw one in the classroom. We just didn’t want to burn alive like him. I turn around as I’m running out of the classroom which is slowly starting to go up in flames and I see my burning classmate, still screaming and running around as the classroom burns up with him. The suffering must have been too much for him, he smashes himself against the window and he falls right out fo the classroom, several stories down though I’m not certain how far he has fallen. All I know is that his screaming stopped the moment I heard his body hit the ground with a loud “THUMP” and I knew from that point he was no more. At least his screaming had stopped. I just wanted to get out of the building. The flames were getting out of control and everyone is rushing for the stairs. I could feel the heat creeping up behind me. The moment I got to the stairs, I woke up in a cold sweat from my dream and sighed in relief that it none of it was real. I just couldn’t believe what I had just witnessed. I couldn’t force myself back to sleep from how shaken I was from having that nightmare. Now that I think about it, it’s been a long while since I had a nightmare like this. I certainly had more disturbing dreams but this one was the worst one I had in a long while.