I was Marie Antoinette

Date: 3/22/2020

I was sitting inside a beautiful carriage when I heard that my husband Louis XVI had been executed. I was shocked, but I didn’t cry, and my first thought was for my children: Marie Therese, Louis, and especially my youngest, Katie (?). I was taken to a prison in a wooded box without a bottom carried by guards, and they were running, so I had to run to keep up. Inside the prison, I was brought into an oddly-shaped room with a bunch of other prisoners, who were playing orchestral music by candlelight (because it was night now, even though it had just been day). The guard bringing me in said that they were letting me be with other people as long as I didn’t reveal my identity, and it was dark, so they wouldn’t be able to see my face. I sat down in an empty chair and a woman came in with food. She walked around the circle giving everyone a hard-boiled egg, a handful of oatmeal (there weren’t bowls) and a piece of bread. Every time she passed me she called me “Your Majesty”, which I thought kind of defeated the purpose of not letting me say my name. I considered asking her to take part in a counterrevolution, but then I realized I didn’t have the resources to start one. She never gave me any bread, anyway, so maybe she was a revolutionary after all. After she left, one of the prisoners decided we should go around the circle and introduce ourselves. Dyanne from school was there, and she told this crazy story about how her father was a pirate from Lingapore (not Singapore) and she was kidnapped by missionaries and brought to France. When my turn came, I kind of panicked because I knew I wasn’t supposed to say who I was and said “IwasborninAustriabutm ovedherewhenIwas14” really quickly. One guy kind of raised his eyebrows at that, but nobody said anything. The next morning (or at least the sun was shining, I don’t know what time it was) I noticed a stack of books under the window. I opened the top one, and it contained a biography of every prisoner in the entire prison, including myself. Then the same woman who had brought in the food at night came in and took it away, saying, “Can’t have you looking at that.” Looking around the room in the daylight, I was shocked to see that it was decorated like an elementary school classroom. Not only that, but I realized the entire prison used to be the school that my youngest child, the nonexistent Katie, attended. I told my fellow prisoners, “I bet you guys are all organized according to Katie’s birthday. All the people on this side of the room were born before then, and all the people on that side of the room were born after.” (which makes no sense, why would the revolutionary government organize a prison based on a princess’s birthday, they’d have some sort of base-10 system). They all just kind of looked at me. Then I decided I would guess their exact birthdays, but they kept moving around, so I couldn’t figure out where they had been originally. Suddenly I was at the bottom of the big staircase in the high school with a bunch of my fellow prisoners. Ryan (who up to this point had not been there) seemed to be the leader. Somehow I gathered that we were trying to escape, and it should be easy because the school should be empty, but all these idiots were walking around like normal even though they knew there was a plague (so dream-me understands history AND current events? I’m impressed). We did a little scouting around, then Ryan asked me to write my last name in the Notes app on his phone. I typed in “Antoinette” (which wasn’t even a last name in the modern sense of the word, I should have written Habsburg or maybe Capet). He got all mad at me and said I had to act normal, I couldn’t go around telling everyone who I was. I agreed and said “I have to get into character”, though I’m not sure what that entailed because then the dream changed. I was running down the halls, still in the high school, searching for my phone. I looked everywhere I had been recently, but I couldn’t find it. Suddenly it was in my hand and I didn’t remember where I had found it. I figured I must have found it at some point and then forgotten about it, which really disturbed me. I turned it on and there were a bunch of texts from Leyla telling me “your phone is in Ms. Mundy’s room” and I couldn’t even remember if I had found it in Ms. Mundy’s room. I ran upstairs to where I knew there was a group waiting for me. The dream changed and I was in the airport. I don’t think I was Marie Antoinette anymore because I was walking around like a normal person, but the French Revolution was definitely still going on. I know because I was holding a biography of the duc d’Orleans, but its cover was that painting of Liberty Leading the People (which wasn’t even painted at the time). Toni came up behind me and said, “A royalist book with a revolutionary cover. Smart, now you probably won’t get arrested.” We were both walking towards a dark tunnel. I was a little ahead of Toni, and she started talking to someone with her, I think it was Avery. She was complaining about how she had to read the Scripture and the Shakespeare at church on Sunday. I turned around and said “Your church reads Shakespeare in their services?” but both of them were gone.