Desert Castle Artist Boy

Date: 12/3/2019

I and some people I knew were taking a tour of a castle that looked kind of like a Gothic cathedral. We were in the middle of the desert and somehow I knew we were in Arizona. The guy giving the tour was about my age (16), and I remember really hitting it off with him. The tour finished in the castle’s tallest tower, and we talked all the way down and out the door. Outside, there was a sort of craft fair where all these people sold handmade stuff out of these big white tents that were lined up in a row. The tour guide kid’s mom ran a table, and he went over to talk to her. I went over too, and saw that the table was covered in incredibly realistic pencil drawings of the castle and various areas inside it. I saw the boy working on another one, and asked if he had drawn all of them. He said yes and I told him that they were really good. He suddenly started yelling at me really angrily. He asked me if I could draw, and I said yes, even though I’m really bad at drawing, and he told me to prove it. Then he asked me if I could see color, and I said no, even though I’m not even a little bit color blind. He was being really aggressive and shouting really loud. Somehow I gathered that his last girlfriend had stolen a bunch of his art, and from then on he had decided that he would only date fellow artists. Throughout this whole thing his mom just kind of watched and sighed. Finally he walked away and I somehow felt like it was my fault. I went over to the tent across the row, where a woman was selling earrings. I started looking around for a pair to get as an apology gift to him (though I don’t recall his ears being pierced). There were a bunch of little kids there too, and they were opening and closing all these boxes of earrings, and at one point the woman running the tent leaned over to me and whispered, “I hate these kids. Mess up everything and never buy anything.” I nodded. I opened a box and saw a pair of earrings with little enamel elves on them. “Oh, that’s Elf Health!” said the woman, “put those on your elf and he’ll get healthier!” I considered them, but then looked at the back of the box and saw that they were $70. I told the woman that I didn’t have enough money. She opened a big fancy wooden box in the middle of the table and said that the stuff in there was cheaper. While I was looking through that, she started gossiping with the woman who ran the table across the way (the boy’s mom). She said, “You know, I’ve always liked that boy. His only fault is that he’s so stupid. I just can’t believe he rejected Candy.” In the dream it wasn’t weird at all that she knew my name. The boy’s mom responded, I can’t remember how, but she was really apologetic to me about how her son had acted. I looked for a pair of earrings to get him, but they were all either too expensive or too ugly. Then I saw an old book in the box that the lady had shown me. I opened it and it was a diary, part written in gorgeous cursive, part drawn, and part in a foreign language with a script I didn’t recognize. I immediately decided I needed it and the woman told me the price (I don’t remember how much it was, but it was very cheap). I completely forgot about the boy and walked away happily with my new book.