tsujigiri

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Thursday, March 03, 2005

Dreams

I've had another batch of crazy dreams. Most of them are set in a recurring motif that I call the "Mega University," which is like a cross between a very large campus and Kafka's Castle, all wrapped into a massive high-rise building of apparently unlimited size. It also seems that no one can ever leave this university. There are also rumors of "lost departments" which have graduated no known students since atiquity, although they are still open for registration of new students. I guess students who sign up for those programs are never heard from again.

Primate Evolution. The first dream fragment is about a National Geographic article in which my doctoral advisor is, for some reason, quoted at length on the topic of primate evolution. "Why they hell are they quoting him?" I ask, "He knows nothing about this subject! He does this every time!" In the article, my advisor was quoted as saying,

It is now well-known that humans evolved from small primates, so it should not be surprising to find various hard-wired affinities that remain with us, particularly with regard to defensive and reproductive behavior. I expect we will discover that pedophilia is a natural consequence of our vestigial, genetically-coded fixation upon small primates.

Ballooning. One might naturally expect that it is a bad idea to go hot-air ballooning at night. The primary reason for this, according to my dream-self, is bats. This was not enough to dissuade my dream-associates from dragging me along on a nocturnal balloon ride, where to everyone's surprise we found that bats were no big deal at all. Unstable wind conditions nearly brought death to us all. I suppose I had this dream because my subconscious needed to warn me away from balloons.

Opera. After my balloon ride, I ran to report my findings to a grad student who lived in a corridor inside of an expensive restaraunt. His apartment turned out to also be a cafe, where an argument was in progress between a girl and a young man. The young man was the very archetype of "ass hole," and he was successful at pushing all the girl's buttons. My friend sat and watched from the bar (there was a bar).

Then, for no reason, I became a disembodied observer. The girl and the ass hole stormed out, arguing. Finally, the ass hole paused and magically said exactly the right thing, claiming that he couldn't help being an ass hole, but it wasn't easy being an ass hole, etc. The girl was moved by his words and asked him to take her with him to Monte Carlo. Away they went.

It then became apparent that my friend had been watching them, and emerged visibly sad from the shadows. A young man in a wheel-chair had also been watching. The two began arguing through song, using an adjusted version of the Guns'n'Roses song "November Rain." According to the song, the girl was my friends girlfriend or something, and he was upset that she hooked up with the ass hole in his apartment/cafe/bar. The wheel-chair guy provided some kind of sage advice that I wish I could remember.

I was completely enthralled with this dream. The jaded bohemian eternal grad student arguing with the young disabled man made wise through personal tragedy, screeching at each other through the shared voice of Axl Rose, all in the midst of a completely nonsensical story -- it was like watching Rent only funnier.

So those are my dreams. What do they tell me about my soul?