Milquetoast

The creation of a web page based on my Honors Essay was a pretty interesting task. It was kind of hard because a web page is different than an essay, but in this case has to be just as informative.
"Chunking" the paper into sub-pages was easy, but it was hard to get the different pages to flow together and to hold them all together. I used my old drafts a lot, to either figure out what to "chunk" or sometimes to directly quote. I tried to look at the webpage as a primitive version of the essay, since it was supposed to be more direct and less wordy.
It was cool that we could embed videos from youtube, and I included a scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that I quoted in my paper. There was a cool video that I wanted to include of the Acid test Graduation (I did provide a link) and I emailed Ken Kesey's son to see if I could get access to the Video, but he emailed me back that he didn't want people downloading the video. I thought that this was kind of contradictory to the ideas set forth by his father and the Merry Pranksters of sharing knowledge and experiences.

When I was young I used to have a recurring dream that I have only remembered since taking this course. I remember that the first time I had it was when I lived out on eastern Long Island, in Ridge, with my Grandmother but the bulk of them occured when I lived with my Mother, the gap between each batch of the dreams is about 6 years.


You know when you can feel that someone is watching you? Well in this dream I can feel that someone is walking behind me, and I know that it is a little scary man, about 2 feet tall. He is always in that one spot behind me that I can't see, as I turn he turns, if I bend down to look under my legs he hangs on to the ceiling.
I'm pretty sure no one else can see him, and I kind of can't either, I just know what he looks like. Either no one can see him, or no one is ever around.
The scariest part is always walking up or down stairs because I am scared he is going to push me.
Luckily I haven't had the dream in 10 years or so, and I hope that the little man never returns!

I AM SOOO NERVOUS!!

Hey y'all, the conference was awesome!! Everybody did such a great job. I know many people were nervous about getting up there and speaking, but it didn't show on the stage!! Everybody was well prepared and I think the audience was rather impressed!!
Congratulations to all those who won awards!!
The whole class is great!!

I've been getting pretty frustrated with my lack of dreams!! Now that its time to blog all these bad boys, they disapear. I think it's because I've been so damn busy with school and work. But I've been giving myself extra sleeping time in order to have some extra dream-time.

I had a rather odd dream where I was at work, like regular, and I found out that either my brother or my boyfriend, or both, was going to run away with this old lady at work. It kind of pissed me off, so I started saying things to the other employees like "This old lady over here is going to run away with a young man, and do what with her husband?" So everyone else got mad at me, and I was going to just walk out of work. As I was leaving, walking out into the sunset ready to start over with life, I had this flash of practicality that told me not to screw up my job on account of somebody else. I walked back into work and it was as though nothing that I thought just happened actually did. Everything was regular, and I just went back to work, confused.

Last night I had a dream that I was getting married to my boyfriend. I think we just decided to get hitched because everything felt very caotic and unplanned. There were a lot of family and friends there, one of which was Jimmy's younger brother. I haven't seen him in a while so I went over to say hello, and noticed that he was rolling a joint at the table next to my grandmother. I looked again to make sure and this time it seemed that it wasn't weed all over the table but cocaine. This kind of scared me so I went to find Jimmy. I found Jimmy, all pissed off because his parents didn't show up (they don't like our relationship), and I got so tangled up in looking for his parents that I forgot about his brother.

It was Soccer Day on Long Island. There were parades and soccer balls everywhere. My man and I were hungry, but all eateries were closing early for the festivities. The only open place was the diner that I used to work in, so we went there.
I was trying to hide from the bosses, since I never actually quit, I just stopped showing up. It was working until one of the bus boys recognized me, then he made a big hullaballoo over my being there and suddenly the whole diner knew I stopped by to visit. I needed something from the kitchen and sent this old bus boy turned manager who I hated when I worked there...and I grabbed his ass as he walked away from the table.
So we paid the bill and were about to leave (outside soccer balls were flying around like someone let a batch of balloons go), when the owner's wife calls me over to her table. She's over there hanging out with some family and friends, a bunch of Greeks, and OF COURSE, Jimmy has to know some of them, so he's over there giving out kisses and talking to people, and the wife tells me that I have to clean off the table that I ate on.
My table turned into all the tables, and then they shut the lights off, since they were closing for Soccer Day, and I had to clear tables in the dark.

Well, my dreams regarding my ex-boyfriend have apparently not yet ended, but at least this is the last time the blogs are going to have to hear about it. I don't know why it is that I can't stop dreaming about him, the dreams go away for months at a time, and them come back with avengence. The past two nights I have dreamt of him, but at least now I am no longer looking for him, now I am running from him.
Last night I dreamt that my sister was babysitting his dog and I had to go over there to use his computer. I saw his mom and I think I may have taken a picture with her, but then I left to avoid him. I stopped at some kind of fancy dress shop on my walk home and found this really brightly colored prom looking dress. It had stripes of extremely bright orange, purple, blue, and green, and looking back now it was pretty ugly, but I really loved it in the dream. The dress was $200 and I knew it would be a waste of money so I said to myself that I was just going to try it on.
Well once I tried the dress on I really loved it and I didn't want to take it off, so I just left the store with the dress on. I was somewhat aware that I had just stolen a $200 dress so I started to kind of trot home. I passed the lady that was working at the store, but she was out to lunch, so she didn't know that I had stolen the dress.
Then, I was walking in the street and I looked up to my ex-boyfriends car speeding towards me..HE WAS ABOUT TO RUN ME OVER. I jumped out of the way and as the car drove my I saw all my old friends packed inside. This made me jealous that I couldn't be hanging out with them and I started thinking that it was a bad idea that I broke up with him.
I had a bit of an overlap between my ex and the current boyfriend (I met my man when I still with the ex) and in the dream I started to think that maybe there could have been a way for me to stay with both of them. All these feelings of jealousy and regret came to me as I was walking backwards watching his car speed away.

the problem is that when I am awake and conscious of my thoughts I never wonder if I should have broken up with him....I KNOW I should have...so whats with the dreams?!?!

This dream takes place in the future, when my brother lives in Minnesota and I live in Kentucky.

For some reason I have to go to jail for a short stay and no one is around to watch the dog I just got. I live in Kentucky, so none of my family is around, and I am freaking out over what I am going to do with the dog. I remember the cops coming to my little farm house in the middle of nowhere, but I'm not sure what I had to go to jail for. Anyway, they give me some time to figure out what I am going to do with my dog, and they leave.
Next I am at the airport trying to load the dog into a box. I tell the woman that I want to send my dog to Minnesota and she says that it's impossible...all flights going to Minn. have to first stop in New York. This freaks me out because I am scared that somehow my mom will get hold of the dog, and I DEFINITELY don't want her to have it.
I guess I shipped the dog to New York though, because the last part of the dream was me searching JFK for my dog, which I never found due to the alarm clock.

Last summer when I received an email from professor Tougaw asking me to join the Honors Seminar I had been tempted to push myself as I never have before. I wasn't going to do it, because in my head I knew I wasn't smart enough, but I have always been intrigued by the subject of Dreams. I spent much of the summer pondering whether I wanted to get myself into what I knew was going to be a lot of work, but in the end I thought "Well, its not going to kill me, so I might as well try." Even now I don't know how I made it through the whole thing, I figured I'd drop out in the beginning like all the others [that dropped out]. Looking back on all the work I've done for this course since August I don't know how I stayed in, but I know why.
I have never worked so hard on an essay as I did on the Honors essay. Usually I just throw something together last minute and the professor, probably drunk at the time, for some reason would give me an A. But this was totally different, there were no grades, and there was no drunken professor grading it. Although my essay still gets revised every once in a while (nothing can be perfect) I have never been as proud of something that I created on paper as I am of "Dreaming and the Psychedelic Experience." For once I really feel that I know what I am talking about.
The blogs have been something else entirely. In the beginning I was really nervous of recreating my dreams in a public forum, I thought everyone would think I was insane. It really helped that the blogs were anonymous, but I was still aprehenisive. As it turns out everyone's dreams are a bit crazy, that is the nature of the dream world. It has been interesting to get the opportunity to look into other peoples dream-mind. I think the blogs functioned as a kind of field-work in our journey into understanding dreams. In the beginning I thought that the blogs were a stupid idea, and totally unneccessary to the course, but now my opinion has changed.
I think we needed the blogs because they weren't published dreams, like Irma's, but our own. The blogs made it possible to put our dream theories to practice!!

Thanks for a great semester everyone!! The classes were insightful and interesting, the trip to MoMA was fun, the Honors Exam was hard and a bit tedious, but the conference was a blast- we got to show it all off!!!
Have a Great summer, and don't stop paying attention to things that go bump in the night!!