Dream Weaver

Last night I was all hunkered down in REM sleep, and instead of having pleasant academic geek dreams about winning university honors in Latin, I had one of my Nightmares. (N.B.: I actually had that dream about university Latin honors once, and I was so proud until I woke up and minutes later discovered it wasn't true and that I was just some poor schmuck with a copy of Wheelock's Latin on her bookshelf like just about everybody else who took Elementary in college and still has to look up what "gerundive" means.

As a sidebar, yesterday while I was examining my booksehlves, I noticed that my copy of Wheelock's is next to a copy of Hatcher's Contraceptive Technology, which is a title, by the way that is going to sound really quaint and old fashioned in a century or so, not that it doesn't already. Any way, What could be better prophylaxis against getting laid than having a copy of a Latin textbook sitting on your bedroom bookshelf, I thought. Then I saw a copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason on the other side of the Wheelock book, and a copy of Critique of Pratical Reason right next to Pure Reason. It was then I realized there are indeed geekier things out there and that those in glass houses should not throw stones, even when making fun of themselves.

My Nightmares come in about three categories, so far as I can tell. There's the Wurk Nightmare, which typically involves a code in which someone is invariably yelling at me to Do It Right This Time, Goddamit (that, or simply waking up and going to work, depending on the day). The second kind is the Falling Off of the Universe dream, in which I jerk myself I awake just in time to avert tumbling off a ravine and dying tragically before taking my qualifying exams, or something. The third flavor is the one I'll talk about here, the School Nightmare. There's subdivisions in this category, like the Taking a Test and Not Knowing the Answers Dream (to counterbalance the Good Dreams in which I win university honors or a Fulbright) and then the kind I had last night, the kind that puts the fear of G-d into slightly-built, massively hand-eye uncoordinated weakling nerds like myself: the Phy Ed Dream.

Invariably, in these dreams, I am either playing a) volleyball or b) dodge ball, both of which I was miserably terrified of in elementary school and junior high, because I was just no good at these things, and why should I have to suffer this way, God, why? My hatred of dodgeball was formed early on in elementary school, after my face (glasses and all, as I recall) became the x-marks-the-spot target for one of those really hard red rubber balls that I hope they've since banned from the playground, because man, getting one thrown at your face and having it connect hurts like hell, not to mention the PTSD-acquired phobia I now have of dodgeball and large red rubber balls. I hope by now public school Phy Ed has evolved a little bit anyway, if nothing else to save the expensive eye-wear of myopic dorks like my young self who need those glasses in order to be able to read a whole lot and learn fancy words so as to grow up and write dissertations on Hegelian hermeneutics and save the world by curing cancer and stuff. In other words, I hope they've stopped teaching kids to play dodgeball in elementary school because what the hell are we teaching children when we say it's okay to use human beings as moving targets for projectile objects capable of inflicting bodily harm?

Last night's Phy Ed nightmare involved b) dodgeball. In this particular remnant of REM sleep, I decided I'd rather skip school than risk damage to vital organs. Not that I didn't blow off entire sections of grad school by formulating the theory that watching lousy NBC primetime was a better way to spend time than going to class, but at the tender age when dodgeball was constantly threatening to shatter whatever fortress of Newberry award winning books I'd built around me, skipping school was the ultimate sacrifice. I remember dragging my carcass to school with a pre-chicken-pox fever despite maternal protestations that I should stay home, because to miss school was so terribly unthinkable at the time that I'd rather infect all my colleagues with Varicella-virus than miss a day of Apple Logos programming and reading the next chapter of Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game.

Any way, when I got home (in the dream) my mom had left a note saying the dog smelled and to clean out his kennel, so I woke up thinking frantically,"Does the dog really smell? When's the last time he had a bath? Should I clean his kennel?"

Then I woke up to find the dog wasn't in his kennel at all (nor did he smell overlyripe) and when I let him out for his morning constitutional, I witnessed three deer promenading through the woods in my backyard. It's kind of like having your very own live-version of the Nature Channel.