While I Was Sleeping

While I Was Sleeping

A little dream interpretation for you. I haven't been remembering anything of my dreams for some time now. I used to and they were vivid and often hilarious (to me at least). Some may recall such classics as "Parker is the Eyemaster" and "Hope Next Year Is More Like Brazil." But those days of unconscious fecundity are gone. Since I no longer have access to them anymore, when one slips through and gets remembered, even in fragments, I might as well throw it out there for interpretation. Actually, this one is not all that complex, but I really have nothing else to say today.

It starts out on a rooftop in Ithaca, where I went to school. The people there are ones who I vaguely remember. Our time at school overlapped a bit, but they were all younger than me. I try to strike up conversation about people who played significant roles in my college experience, but they only mutter, "Oh yeah, him. I heard a him." Or, "Huh?" My nostalgia wanes.

After a while I go (or am instantly transported) to campus where I stand outside a classroom. Teaching inside is my graduate school advisor. He glances over to me and abruptly ends the class and skips over to me. My advisor, while being a rigorous and brilliant scholar, looks like Big Bird with a salt and pepper Jewfro. Skipping does not give his presence the proper intellectual heft. We walk towards his office and he begins trying to convince me to return to graduate school and continue my work in humorology. Now, I was not a terrible student and he is an excellent teacher, but the most considerable interest that he ever took in my academic work was to insure that I properly enunciated the umlaut in Max Müller's name. I don't think I ever did get it just right. But he kept asking me back, wanting me to continue this important work.

Now, while all of this is going on, my father suddenly appears sitting next to me on the couch in my advisor's office, eating a doughnut (powder a-flyin'), and telling me that we need to get to the San Diego airport (dream logic got us to SD) even though I didn't have a flight out of there for hours. Eventually we left with me having pangs for academia, though I know that returning would be a horrible mistake. The dream ended with us driving around and around San Diego in a slowly tightening spiral until we reached the airport for my eight hour flight to NYC (five hours in the air + three hours lost to time zones).