Anxiety dream unfairly early

I am rushing to get to the first lecture of the fall semester and make sure there is chalk in the room, the students are all there, and nothing is yet on fire. I get there just in time, greet the new students, then look down at my lecture notes and ... I've brought the wrong lecture notes. For the wrong class, the wrong topic. My notes are useless. I flip through the first few pages anyway just in case the correct lecture notes are in there somewhere. They are not. No problem, I think, I've taught this several times, I'll just wing it... but then I forget how the setup goes, I forget the important beginning-of-semester announcements. I am flustered, and I know that I seem flustered, and this enhances my flusteration. I have no choice but to lecture off the top of my head. I just plunge right in with the crux of the lecture and I can tell, from the moment I open my mouth, it is not going well.

The students start to be unruly. Now it is a nightmare.

One student is --- loudly, and frankly with excellent diction and vibrato --- standing on a wheely chair (danger!) and singing an aria from The Barber of Seville. Other students are just on their phones. In the corner, it looks like maybe some of them are catching Pokémon. Some of them are openly working on homework for other classes. How do they already have homework in other classes? --- it is the first day of class!

I cannot regain their attention, somehow. My usual classroom demeanor is not working, everything is out-of-control, I make a math mistake on the board and now even the handful of students who were following are confused and starting to check out.

Aaaaauuuggghhh....

... then I wake up and it is still JUNE, how dare my brain already have this anxiety prepped, this is outrageous. I flatly refuse to experience waking anxiety about the next semester when the entire summer is still ahead of me. It. is. not. fair.

(I blame this on residual anxiety from my extremely dramatic late-to-my-own-final-exam event last month. I will have anxiety dreams about that for the rest of my life.)


This post's theme word is squirl (n), "a flourish or curve, especially in handwriting." I compliment you on your elaborate and expressive squirl, which I assure you is NOT a Pokémon.

First-week-of-class nightmares

I dreamt I was walking along the street, and police officers drove by and shot the person I was walking with. I didn't know what to do to help. Thanks, brain, for this channelling of being mystified by the systems I must work inside. Plus reading the news. This dream was disturbing.

I dreamt I was visiting a friend in Toronto, and Canada got nuked. We became pedestrian refugees of a senseless attack. All the other pedestrian refugees were very nice, of course, but it wasn't clear where we should walk or who would help us when we got there. Or if the border was even open?
Thanks, brain, for this channelling of a feeling of powerlessness and despair, with generous helpings of the news, plus some flavor added from Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. This dream in no way constitutes spoilers for the book, or indicates any hostility towards Canada.

I dreamt I was called up for jury duty, and when I went, it was held on the top of a cliff. As I climbed the tenuous, slippery staircase, the final section of railing pulled out of the wall in my hands, and I slipped... and caught myself! On the cliffside. Which was not very grippy, so I briefly hung there, thinking "well, let's see if all that climbing helps me now...", then fell to the bottom of the stairwell, which started inside a building (unroofed, evidently). I managed only to sprain my ankles, but the person (also a professor!) behind me on the stairs dislocated one hip, broke the other leg, and had various spinal injuries.

While we were in the hospital, still in the dream, we were anxious that we would be penalized for missing jury duty. Then also the other professor was considering: if you sue the courthouse for injuries you incurred while attending jury duty, how will that be adjudicated? Thanks, brain, for this channelling of anxiety about fulfilling my adult responsibilities, with a little added bonus of "your hobbies are idle and won't help you in an emergency". (Double-added bonus for "and now I can't get back to sleep", which I will combat by "fine, then, let's start the day right now".)

Professors get anxious, too.


This post's theme word is tenesmus (n), "a distressing but ineffectual urge to defecate or urinate." Having a nightmare? Throw in some tenesmus for fun!

"Write it in your dream journal."

"Write it in your dream journal" is this season's witty riposte. Please help me disseminate it by hurling it --- with disdain, if you can manage it --- in reply to any conversational foray you desire.

For example:

• Misery poker retort:
  "I have three papers due this week!"
  "Write it in your dream journal."
• Cut off that annoying conversationalist:
  "I had such a crazy weekend that-"
  "Write it in your dream journal."
• Conversation ender:
  "Will you help me with this project?"
  "Write it in your dream journal." (accompanied by hair flip and smoothly walking away)

Hello, internet. I often remember my dreams, but the coolness of this is offset by the banality of the dreams themselves. Even to me, they are not that compelling; perhaps I have stringent requirements for characterization, plot, and style --- and my own imagination fails to meet these standards.

I recently had a dream wherein I kept trying to remember what happened in my dream, and almost remembering it, then feeling it slip away. When I woke up, I had this feeling... but then I remembered: that was exactly a dream! So it didn't slip away. I found the bottom of the inception stack, and what was there was, frankly, not that interesting.

I also recently had a dream where I noticed a very vibrantly-colored spider, with rectangular pastel markings that looked a bit like eye spots. It also had a very elaborate web design. (Possibly this dream comes from watching too many nature documentaries.)

... and now: they are written in my dream journal. Of sorts. May my continued public expression of private thoughts please you, my readership.


This post's theme word is: antimeria (n), "a rhetorical device in which an existing word is used as if it were a different part of speech." English is insidious about verbing nouns and nouning verbs, and mushing all together until the meaning must coalesce, as from a dream, out of a certain invoked ambiance.

Autodidactic somnolent piano

My dream last night had a plot, extras, fantastic BBC-style baroque costuming and between-scenes costume changes, a soundtrack, comic relief, and a 9-meter flood which had the modern characters wrapping their electronics in floating plastic bubbles. Most of the characters were not modern, so they were worried only about the dogs and how this would affect the estate's tenant-farmers, as well as the sons' marriage prospects.

Plus I discovered that I can't teach myself to play the piano in a dream. No matter how many times I started, my brain didn't have enough details to teach me how to place my fingers properly. My brain did have enough detail to make me hear my fudged notes realistically.


This post's theme word is kludge, "a solution that, while inelegant, inefficient, clumsy, or patched together, succeeds in solving a specific problem or performing a particular task." My somnolent mind formed a hilarious kludge of an Austin novel.

The Great Retroactive Blogging Project of 2012

I awoke this morning to formication, from a dream where I was repeatedly, and unwillingly, taken on expensive helicopter tourist-rides over a city. Then asked to pay, in euros. We were searching for -- or perhaps escaping from? -- a baby with the limp body of a plucked chicken. Interpret that as you will.

As I walked to the gym I listened to this Drabblecast story about a man haunted by his own abandoned kidney. The story's creepiness blended with my half-remembered dream and a mental image of the plucked-chicken-baby, so that my morning was full of vague unease, itchiness, and sweat.

2012 is half-over and I've taken a few minutes to reflect on my year's resolutions:

1. To be able to do one complete, unassisted pull-up.
2. To reduce the fraction of drafted blog posts from 50% to 0%.

Yes, that's right, you only see about half the blog posts I begin. I've made dismal progress on both of these. I'm gaining upper-body strength, but very slowly. And numbers suggest that I am actually losing ground on the blog front, as I have started many, many more posts. (But if you look to the right, you'll see that only a few of them have fully gestated.)

Yet I feel little guilt over these goals. I've accomplished a lot, and had several interesting thoughts, this year. Many of which you'll read about, if I ever finish the Great Retroactive Blogging Project of 2012.

For now, I'll just say that I'm having a great summer and thinking of all of you* and a much better pen-and-paper correspondent than blogger.


This post's theme word is inwit, "conscience; reason, intellect; courage." I'm also fond of mickle, "a large amount (n)," "great, large (adj)," "much (adv)," so let's feature them both! Mere spelling and mickle ingenuity separate the twit from inwit.


*Yes, every single one, even the anonymous readers following the blog for motives of their own.

Further uncanny glimpses

Lovecraft found very few things to be canny.

My previous dreams provided amusement; here's another.

E, a former rugby teammate, was dressed as Sherlock Holmes and acting like him, too. She had gone back in time to try to seduce Queen Victoria. Using deductive logic. She sat on an ornate stuffed chair while Queen Victoria sat across from her on an ornate stuffed couch, in an ornate room stuffed with ornate ornamentation.

Of course, stalwart Queen Victoria, dressed in mourning, would have none of it. The dream-seduction-by-logic was unsuccessful in the face of her stubborn refusal to be swayed by deductive logic. Although my dream version of Queen Victoria was not above a detailed logical examination of the frilly black lace on her black dress, an opening sally in the seduction.

Uncanny.


This post's theme word is captious, "having an inclination to find faults, especially of a trivial nature." Her captious questions stalled the deductive argument.

A glimpse into my subconscious

The imaginative boundaries of my dreams surely inform the limits of my subconscious. Or perhaps my imagination.

I recently had a dream that I was frantically running to get to a final exam on time. This was understandably stressful. Dream obstacles -- crowds obstructing my path, me forgetting about the exam until it was about to begin, not studying in preparation -- delayed me. This dream was clearly an expression of a long-fostered Student Examination Anxiety.

Unlike many such dreams, I did eventually make it to the exam! And then in the dream I sat down at my seat, with my tiny fold-out desk, and started to take the exam. My subconscious, author of the dream, permitted me to read just a few words on the exam before falling asleep in my dream. (How tired do you have to be to sleep in a dream?!) Then I woke up in my dream, in the exam, to the announcement that there were only five minutes remaining. Dream panic! I had not even written my name on the test booklet yet!

Determined to answer something in the remaining time, I resolved to read just... one... paragraph... of the exam. But lo! -- and behold! -- once more, my subconscious refused to author the exam, and I found my dream-self staring out the window and daydreaming.

That's right. Not only did I sleep in this dream, I daydreamed in this dream.

I awoke just as they were collecting my completely empty exam booklet, at Maximum Student Panic Stress Level 1: Total Frenzy (Red Alert).

Dream lesson the first: there are some things so boring that even my subconscious refuses to supply them.

In another dream, I was setting up a skateboard ramp with some alligator-people. Aliens, of course. The entire situation was so absurd that I realized I must be dreaming. Still asleep, I tried to do typical lucid dream actions. My stubborn subconscious refused to let me fly, or teleport, or breathe underwater. I awoke resentful of my own brain.

Dream lesson the second: there are some things so awesome that my subconscious refuses to supply them.


This post's theme word is nutate, "to nod the head," or "to oscillate while rotating (as an astronomical body)," or "to move in a curving or circular fashion (as a plant stem, leaf, etc.)." I nutated my sheets while dreaming about the skateboard contest.

Gelatinous ball of goo baby

I dreamed last night that I came across A. and his (dream) wife and their (dream) newborn baby sitting on a park bench. (In a dream park. In my dream.) So of course I went over and said hello and introduced myself to the wife and met the baby. And as I was looking at the baby, I realized something was wrong... it was shaped funny... too round... no legs... no face... it was actually a gelatinous ball of goo in a onesie. Yikes!

I tried to tactfully bring this up in conversation with A. (After nearly dropping the baby in surprise and revulsion.) He replied, "My wife was pregnant, and went into labor, and this is what came out! ... so it's our baby, and we're raising it."

I told A. about this after I woke up, and he said (in a reasonable tone), "It's growing! We just keep feeding it."


This post's theme word is: emuction, "to blow your nose" or really "to empty any bodily passage." Yuck, what emuction!

Apartment dream

I dreamed last night that C. and I were two personalities in the same body, Tyler Durden-style, alternately waking while the other slept.

In another part of the dream, E. was renting a new apartment in [the place E. lives] for us to live in together. I gave A. my keys and moved out without packing up any of my plates or bowls or tools from the kitchen. My new apartment was on the second floor of a 3-story house; the landlord lived on the first and third floors. Typical dream logic.

I arrived and looked for my room. E. and K. were sleeping in the two big bedrooms. In an auxiliary room was M. (also sleeping), and then there was the kitchen. I was lost for where to put myself. The apartment had stairways -- it was just the second floor of a house, recall -- but we the tenants were supposed to just ignore the open stairways that led to the first and third floors. And the landlord had build like a stair/ladder to skip over the second floor in this epic stairwell. That we were just supposed to ignore, as if it were a wall and not a huge open stairwell leading into someone else's life.

I have no explanation or context for this dream. Whatever.


This post's theme word is corniche, "a coastal road, especially one cut into the side of a cliff." The stairwell was a surreal corniche of plywood and wrought iron.

Dream inventory

Several times during my dreams last night, a clerk or attendant asked if I wanted a plastic bag to carry my [whatever] in. I had to say yes, because I'd forgotten my reusable fabric bag in the corner of my room.

And behold! -- when I awoke, and the reusable fabric bag was in the corner, and not packed in my purse where it usually resides. My brain is willing to release its grip on certain ties to reality while dreaming, but apparently my purse inventory carries over from one world to the next.


This post's theme word is cockaigne, "an imaginary land of luxury and idleness." I suffer from inadequate inventory in dreamy cockaignes.

Another dream

I dreamed last night about different approaches to try to compute this calculation I am working on. It's a real calculation, that I am working on in my waking hours; it made for a rather unexciting dream. In the dream, I was just as stymied and frustrated as I was in real life.

Sometimes my dreams are just a rehashing of the day.


This post's theme word is scoria, "in metallurgy, the refuse or slag left from smelting," or "porous cinderlike fragments of solidified lava." The scoria of my mind comprises calculations, symbols, and silly wordplay.

Wherein I dream about my future dog

I dreamed last night that M., E., A., a little white terrier, and I went to a fancy theater to see The King's Speech. The terrier was very well-behaved, as were the other members of the group, although the dog was the only one who had to be smuggled into the theater in my backpack. The theater seats were gross, so I had brought a folding semi-seat of my own, and sat upon it. Everyone jockeyed to be close to the center of the theater. The movie dragged on for hours -- there were two intermissions. (NB, this does not reflect my actual experience of the film, which was shorter, dog-free, and a third thing to finish this list.)


This post's theme word is leal, "loyal." This word is medieval, archaic, whatever. I had to look up this word the third time it occurred in George R. R. Martin's books, and then I noticed it everywhere -- "I am your leal servant," etc.

Inception

I like movies like calculus: complicated, with intricate and beautiful visuals, and difficult symbols that explain everything if you can just wrap your mind around them. I liked this movie. A lot. I liked it so much I want to watch it again, I want to buy the DVD, I want to play the associated video game, I want to participate in the message boards and go to the conferences where they do reenactments. It was really good.

Inception is a movie that makes you think, like Primer (that masterpiece!), Fight Club, The Matrix, or director Christopher Nolan's other works Memento and The Prestige. It makes you question what is actually happening in the movie. What is real. A movie is an artificial construct, of course: we call them "actors" and "scenes." But the cleverness of a movie that acknowledges this construction and uses it as a tool of moviemaking, and forces you to consider its use as a tool... that is what I like. An intelligent movie. The Awl review follows the same thought:

It’s the merest cliché, that a movie is itself a shared dream. The lights go down, and the audience shares a vision created by others. We are the real targets of the inception, here. ... The most fun part of this whole thing is that Nolan’s attempt at Inception has worked really beautifully, so far. He’s made an idea, “like a virus,” enter millions of minds...

Spoiler warning: go see the movie first. Now. Then read below.

I loved this movie: so clever, so dense, so beautiful. I left it with a few questions, although I was not dissatisfied. Why do the dreams obey physical laws so strictly? I have dreams where I run faster than possible, or fly, or travel through solid objects. I can see why you might need a complicated medical apparatus to invoke sleeping in reality, but if you're already in a dream, why use it? What effect can it possibly have? For that matter, how can the inner ear be effected by the physics of a dream? I thought the whole point of having an inner-ear-recall-to-reality was that the inner ear sensations were real. Also, if one of the group-dreamer's subconsciouses can populate the dream with an infinitely-spawning army of heavily armed Counter-Strike agents, why not just have another dreamer dream up an opposing army? Why does everyone think inception, planting an idea in someone's mind while dreaming, is so difficult? Cobb trains Ariadne in a dream, planting a whole slew of ideas in her mind that not only persist in waking, but that she consciously mulls.

Of course, these are only relevant questions if you take the very literal Tor.com review's reading of the movie. (I agree with all the praise in that review, and object to the criticisms: Leonardo DiCaprio's performance was good, the exposition was lightly handled and not tiresome.) I much prefer The Awl's metaphor, where every detail and mechanic and shot has two meanings (at least). If you're more interested in visual effects, I suggest reading this interview.


This post gets two theme words, it's that good: zwodder, "a drowsy, foolish frame of mind," and cathect, "to invest mental or emotional energy in an idea, object, or person."

[Update: Another interesting twist is that the soundtrack to the dramatic climaxes of the film seems to be the same song that the characters use to warn themselves to wake up, just slowed down -- perhaps indicating how many levels deep we are in dreaming! HT: postpostpre.]

[Update: Read this for an interesting take on how the act of movie-watching neurologically resembles coordinated dreaming.]

Schur's lemma

Last night, I had a dream. I found myself being interviewed by various professors. One of them told me it was vital that I understand and present a proof of Schur's lemma. I did not remember what Schur's lemma was until I awoke, anxious, and looked it up.

Why do I never (remember) dream(s) of relaxing things? Flying. My dreams are fraught with tension.


This post's theme word: pother, "(noun) a commotion or fuss; mental turmoil; a smothering cloud of dust or smoke," or "(verb tr.) to confuse or worry someone; (verb intr.) to worry or fuss."

A black-and-white dream

I dreamed last night in stark black and white, in animations. It was a dream that could have been written by Edward Gorey or Neil Gaiman. My dream's protagonist, observed from mostly third person with some occasional first person, was a young girl, sent off for the first time to a British boarding school/castle/rich relative's house (think Secret Garden). The setting was full of twisty secret passages, tapestries on the walls, ancient furniture and servants invisibly coming and going.

There were adults (relatives, teachers) about whom she kept discovering shocking secrets (affairs, personal indulgences, superpowers [think Orphans of Chaos]). And at some point, a kindly matron with a bust like the prow of a ship pulled her off a corridor and said, "You know, you're getting older, and it's almost time for you to find a mask." -- everyone was wearing masks, big ornate costume-ball masks with feathers extending in a wide radius, fancy partial-face-covering masks, masks held up on sticks and masks subtly interwoven into triumphantly ornate and voluminous hairdos. The photos on this site will give you an idea.

Right at the end of the dream, she found her mask. It was a meter wide or more, in the style of some Venetian masks, covering the eyes and the nose with a smooth, extended beak (a bit like this). The sides tapered off in a Katamari-like way, long and thick points (not cylinders). The whole mask was made of material like a surgical cast, and in a dark grey that was almost black.

Aside from really enjoying this dream, I was surprised to find that the entire dream was black and white, and in a pencil or charcoal texture. Not real at all. I remember reading somewhere that people who had black and white TV as children are more likely to dream in black and white. I wonder what strange depths of my subconscious this arose from.


This post's theme word: manichean, "of or relating to a dualistic view of the world, dividing things into either good or evil, light or dark, black or white, involving no shades of gray."

Old dreams

Sorry for the recent blog silence. I've been sick and busy, and planning a move at the end of the month. There are lots of draft posts just festering around here. Yuck.

In cleaning up, I recently found the following note, scribbled quickly upon waking, which pretty clearly is a record of a dream. But I no longer remember the dream, or even writing this note:

Dream 1.
Going to play. Everyone in car. I [illegible] a lot; too slow; do for A. instead.

Alarm. Dream 2.
I have dysintery (though no symptoms). Everyone knows. We go hiking. Find a pile of loose, unattended ground hamburger. Watch safety video lying on ground. Play on playground.

Alarm. D3.
Ski resort. C. & J. wedding. E. hat. S. in tux, tophat. Aunt D. -- full back tattoo of periodic table, blanking out letters but 'thank you.' I forgot dress!

And that's a quick trip into my subconscious.


This post's theme word: quaalude, "methaqualone," or "a sedative and sleep-inducing drug."

Dreams III

Last night I had to make a huge pancake, maybe 30 or 40 pounds of batter. And for some dream-logic reason, I had to make it as one single pancake, in a griddle bigger than a bathtub, across two full stovetops. It was a logistical nightmare! Also, how on earth could I flip such a beast?

This dream probably arose from all my cooking planning this week. I'm leading the Hot Yam! in a delicious Indian-themed lunch. Thursday, 12 noon, at the ISC. Be there or be sadly malnourished. Pictures to follow.


This post's theme word: gavage, "the administration of food or drugs by force, typically through a tube leading down the throat to the stomach."

More dreams

Last night I dreamt I was starting school at a new university, and as my "whimsy sport of the year" I was trying out for cheerleading. (Yikes, I know.) The cheerleading tryouts involved a week of putting on the intolerably girly/revealing cheerleading uniforms and then swimming laps for hours. It was weird. And when I went home at the end of the day, an old boyfriend was there and didn't understand when I tried to explain that it's the future now, and I have a new boyfriend. Weird.

Last week, I dreamt I was wading in a creekbed, trying to catch tiny fish with my bare hands. My cousins, parents, and some grandparents were there. We were very hungry, but we couldn't catch any fish because they were too fast. We needed tools, and we had none. A little bit upstream, some restaurant employees had big ceramic tools and were catching fish by the barrel-full.

The night before, I was invited to cook dinner for President Obama, but when he arrived he said he wasn't hungry. He said it really politely, but I could tell that he just didn't like my food.

Although the dreams are interesting, let's hope that this hot weather breaks and I can go back to my usual OCD dreams: travelling through a maze, visualizing air currents around a launching space shuttle, etc.


This post's theme word: stenotopic, "able to adapt to only a small range of environmental conditions."

Dreams

I've been remembering my dreams very vividly of late. And they all have ties to actual thoughts and experiences, so I remember them during the day. It makes me pause and think, "was that real?" It's sometimes hard to tell.

Yesterday I awoke still humming a song from a dream. It took me a few hours to figure out whether the song was real or just a figment of my dream. Preliminary Google searches suggested "figment," but then I remembered the words to a verse and it was real after all.

Two days ago I awoke from a dream that I was taking a long cross-continental train ride, and throughout the thing, gross wet stuff (dog pee, rotting milk, etc.) kept getting splashed on me, in one way or another. (Perhaps this was a mental echo of being sprayed with lobster juice during the day.) Also, the dog in question had untrimmed nails and kept standing (painfully!) on my feet. I think this was because (in real life) my sandals had worn raw spots on the tops of my feet during the day, and the pain came through into my sleeping brain. I tried to get off the train to escape, but it was in the middle of Siberia or the arctic -- very cold and snowy -- and as the train blew its whistle to leave, I realized, "I won't survive here!" I had to sprint to catch up and then leap onto the train. Only to be promptly hit with a drinks cart, soaking me in cups of flat soda and strangers' backwash.

Last night, I had a dream. I was going back to Japan, with a friend, to stay with my host family again. My topology professor showed up and tried to teach me game theory, insisting, "If you don't know this, you're unemployable!" -- but we couldn't find any empty blackboards. That's saying something, because three of the four walls in my bedroom were covered in blackboards, but E. had left notes and lists and diagrams all over them that I couldn't erase.

Robin Williams was in Japan, too, with a cockney accent, trying to pull off some movie-heist scheme involving my friend. (Note: some parts of my dream were close-up shots of his face while speaking & emoting, and I remember thinking, "This was shot with an HD camera! Look at that detail! Nice camerawork." in my dream.) He had a huge, cavernous lair with a concrete floor decorated by the imprints of tyrannosaurus footprints (laid in wet concrete). There was a rough layer of pebbles scattered on the floor, and at some point he gave them a verbal command and they self-assembled into a tyrannosaurus! -- starting at the footprints, and building upward. The pebbles were actually tiny robots! Eeeeek!

So we ran and ran and ran, while I wondered what algorithm the little robots were running to coordinate so well. And I woke up.


This post's theme word: ecumenical, "having a mix of diverse elements" or "universal; general" or "pertaining to the whole Christian church; concerned with promoting unity among churches or religions. "