fitful sleep
Music: Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here (1975)
Today I'll write about the invocatory drive, and hopefully will have a teaser to post later. Meanwhile, I'm recovering from a night of unpleasant, sweaty dreams--one after the other. Here's an "asleep" post, following the style of my friend BH:
dream the first: I'm driving a panel van through the Midwest toward the north, presumably full of my life's belongings. I get lost in a state park somewhere, and end up pulling into the driveway of a visitor's center of some sort. The parking lot and center is at the top of a very steep hill. I walk to the edge of hill and look below and see a vast lake. I walk back to the van and discover I left it unlocked, and everything inside has been taken but for a single suitcase. I am devastated. I go inside the welcome center and ask for someone to call the police. No one seems interested in helping me, as today is a Paul Revere holiday and they're trying to deal with a floodtide of people heading for the events on the lake, apparently a restaged battle of the beginning of the American Revolution on the water, in canoes instead of on horses. People swarm through the welcome center and the park. I start asking random people to borrow their cell phone, but they are worried I will steal them (apparently I don't have one myself; I didn't until about two years ago IRL). I give up, sit on the steps, when some person lends me their phone. I call the police; the police show up and we go to the van, only to discover my last suitcase has now also been stolen. The police say nothing can be done, but give me a map. I drive away
dream the second: [After waking, changing pillows, and moving to the cooler side of the bed five feet away] I'm driving the panel van through some crazy overpasses, sometimes the road travels vertically and I floor the pedal to escape the pull of gravity; I am lost again. I close my eyes and use my psychic powers to guide my van. I arrive at an old elementary school, where I have been called to meet a clandestine group of like-minded and aged adults--mostly scholars--for a production of Sweeney Todd. I go to my assigned seat. A friend is there, who begins to tell me he loves such and such an article I published, but here are fifteen problems he has with it. He congratulates me on having the courage to publish half-baked work, and for not being afraid to publish because I am stupider than "the rest of us." Across our lunchroom table is a vaguely familiar face, a young woman with coal black, short cropped hair. She sees me and anger fills her eyes. Sometime tells me that I got her fired five years ago. The woman starts to cry. I ask her if she would like to talk in private, and she nods yes, so we go out in the hall. The woman then begins to tell me that I evaluated her classroom teaching at such and such a point, but that I wrongfully criticized her for something and got her fired. Her face then changes abruptly like the ones in Richard Linklater's cartoon films. She cannot maintain a steady emotion, and flips from anger to passion. She comes in for a kiss, whereupon an older woman passing by says "what the hell are you doing?" She whips up the young woman and takes her off. I'm confused. The older, scolding woman comes back and says, "you should know better! That young woman has issues! Couldn't you see it on her face?" Then I decided to find my group, as other groups are heading into the theatre. I've not memorized my lines, and I'm carrying a backpack and loads of the few personal belongings I have left, such as my cherished ipod, and I don't want it stolen. I cannot find my "class." I'm upset, because I wanted to sing. The older woman appears and says she knows somewhere I can put my stuff. It's a classroom full of Asian students with an Asian teacher, and they are speaking the language of love. The teacher sits at a desk and smiles. She says something to me that is so kind I would rather stay and learn, but I am motioned to put my things in a corner. "Put your stuff here. It will be safe." For a moment I worry my ipod will be stolen by the young kids, but then something inside me says that it will be fine. I then wander the halls looking for my class . . . [and wake up].
Sometimes one worries Freud is of no use. My insecurities are boring.
Ok, time to write about drive theory.