in prison, forgot the song but found the box

Dream:

not sure how but corey, chuck and i (and some unknown other guy) ended up in prison together, sharing a cell. it feels like it was drug related. i wanna say we only had to serve a year and a half. the warden had heard that i had written a funny song about some big rappers who bungled a drug deal and he said i could sing it to the entire prison population. except i hadn't practiced and i forgot how it went. in most dreams i have anxiety about performing but never dream about the performance. in this dream i was in front of a huge courtyard of felons and since i couldn't remember the song, i decided to wing it and improv the entire thing, and it was terrible. three or four minutes of me fudging around on an acoustic guitar. the crowd seemed agitated. eventually i stopped playing and said "well, i forgot how the song went, but the story was... blah blah blah" and everyone laughed.

later, one of the guards said he would help get me out of the prison if i helped him with a secret project. he let me out of our cell one night and while we were walking in the prison halls he told me to wait there and he left. within minutes i had 35 rifles pointed at my face and he had to talk the other guards down. eventually he brought me an old dusty box and asked me to sort through it for anything valuable. i agreed and we dragged this giant cardboard box into our cell so i could start. pretty soon i realized that the box had weird trinkets and mementos from my childhood home, including check stubs and important documents with my parents signatures, some toys and notepads and other items that once belonged to me. confused, i started to get angry but suddenly remembered one instance during college while clearing out the basement when some strangers came and asked for any boxes to be donated to the local prison. "they must have taken a box with stuff in it" i surmised.

then i woke up