Searching Buddha

I'm missing quite a lot of this dream, but it ends with walking around Manhattan with my SO, looking for breakfast. We find a deli and I go in, although he doesn't. There are two counters and two lines and I am having a lot of trouble deciding between them. I eventually choose the line on the right, where I know they're serving fried fish, but I long for the line on the left, which has a bunch of nice, light, vegetarian choices. I get to the front of the line and get my fried fish, with a bit of a knot in my stomach. I leave the deli, but discover as I'm going out the door that I've picked up someone else's bag with my own. It has a box of hangers in it. I think about keeping it for a second, but then go back into the deli and ask if anyone's lost their bag. Someone says yes, so I hand it over and leave again. I meet my SO outside before I wake up.

Interpretation: I'm a vegetarian that has recently added fish to my diet. I'm still a bit conflicted about that and sometimes I get sick when I eat it (from the relative greasiness of meat compared to an ovo-lacto vegetarian diet, I think). Yesterday at the grocery store, I bought a box of frozen breaded fish fillets after a lot of debate about it, and the fish fillets in this dream were the exact same ones.

No idea where the clothes hangers come from, but I was planning at stopping at Bed Bath & Beyond to get a desk lamp yesterday and never got around to it. :)

Within three pages of The Unconsoled, I found that I couldn't stop thinking of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. I'm not sure what it is about the prose or the story, since it's been many years since I read Death in Venice, but I keep wanting to go and read a few passages and see if this is just faulty memory or a real stylistic similarity.

I fought the text for the first few chapters, groping for a traditional plot where events spawned other logically flowing events. Seeing that this wasn't going to happen, I consciously let the expectation go and then found myself really enjoying Mr. Ryder's wanderings. Part of my brain is still wondering what all the point of it is, but I can see that each of his encounters reveals a little bit more about him and his concerns and is creating a detailed character portrait.

I still maintain that Mr. Ryder is my hero - my own psyche is appreciating his freedom to just forget about what he was supposed to do and never deal with any real consequences, particularly as end of semester deadlines are looming...

It's April in Paris and I am sitting out at a cafe with a large group of people that I don't really know. The women are all wearing Clapotis scarves, but that's the most I can really see of anyone. The figures are indistinct.

We go back to someone's apartment for coffee and tea and I am introduced to someone's elderly mother. She has an Apple 1e (yes, not a 2e, a 1e), and it needs to be fixed. She logs into the computer and types a bunch of stuff into a console window, leaving me baffled. "You're much better at this than I am," I tell her, "so I don't know if I can help you. This is very old technology..."

Suddenly I'm at the apartment of an old man and I'm advising him on how to get a cheap new computer. He has a dot matrix printer and I laugh about it, telling him that I haven't seen one of those in years. We get him a new computer, but he won't give up his printer.

In exciting news, last night I was the director of a play with a bit part. It was a play about Camelot and my cast was a bunch of intellectual ruffians.

We rehearsed over and over again in the dream, with each rehearsal going a little bit more wrong than last time, until we finally agreed that the actor cast as Arthur (who was me and not me at the same time) was just not right for the part. He moved off to the side and director-me took the part and we tried again.

Still not great, but then the alarm went off.

In a bit that I can't remember, I've met up with this power hungry couple. We go into a stadium, where they're going to introduce me to a sport that they've invented. We go into the stadium and the husband goes into the stands one way and moves towards these barricades in the seating. The barricades are evenly spaced and as he reaches each one, he kicks a ball onto the field, where a game is going on. The ball is somewhere between a soccerball and a basketball, but it acts more like a baseball.

I walk with the wife around the other side, sometimes, and sometimes I'm with the husband. They're explaining to me about how they invented this sport and it's done really well for them financially. They're generally repulsive with their excitement about having manipulated the world and their stereotypically nouveau riche attitudes (they show off all of their possession in the dream, such as the wife's fur coat and the husband's really expensive watch).

Wow, check out the date of the last post. How have three weeks passed so quickly?

Well, when you live in a carrel at the library, time does seem to fly. I'm considering having my mailing address changed to the Rosenthal Library, Basement Floor, Carrel 5C, but since the library and I are in a current disagreement over the fate of a library book that I returned in November that they seem to have lost, perhaps this is not a way of getting myself back into librarian graces.

Note to folks: avoid the book drop outside the library if you can. It seems to eat books. You will be lectured repeatedly by librarians for your irresponsibility and general disregard of the santity of the tomes within, even when you don't deserve it and have explained several times why you don't. Somehow librarians have a magical way of making you feel like you're five again and your mother just used your middle name.

But as for the actual paper, I find that I'm enjoying myself quite a lot. It's been a long time since I've written a real research paper and even longer since I've written a paper that has nothing to do with a work of literature. I keep finding myself fascinated and inspired by my topic, though I still maintain that it was madness to try and write a decent draft of it in a month, particularly while reading that "not long" book of 500-some dense pages. And, oh yeah, juggling the rest of my life.

I do think a good part of that is my fault for choosing a topic that requires so much research; I plan to spend the break actually reading the rest of the books that I'm using as sources. I've only been able to read a couple of chapters here and there from each one and I feel like I'm really missing something yet.

At this point, I feel like I've run a marathon. Yet, I just learned the other day of the existence of 37.5 mile races, which is probably the most apt analogy. The marathon is down...just that extra half marathon left to go. But won't the exercise burn feel good at the end, aching joints and muscles aside? And once we've forgotten the pain of that last sprint, we'll always look back at our glory days and talk about our accomplishments.

As Ani Difranco says, people are 90% metaphor. Does that mean that people are 90% dream?

While I enjoyed the Unconsoled, I think my main problem with it was that I didn't feel like I had learned anything by page 450 that I didn't already know on page 312. And, I think, if you're going to write such a lengthy book, there really has to be a solid reason to go on for an extra 200 pages.

(Sorry Professor, but I'm going to have to disagree with you about 500 pages being "not that long" since I think you'll find that if you compare it to the average book, you'll find that most finish the race at the 200-300 page mark. So comparatively, it's just a bit long. :)

My thesis here isn't entirely true; I didn't get a full sense of the Stephen-as-a-young-Ryder until Stephen decides to leave the crazy dream town. I also really enjoyed the scene where Gustav is outdances all the other porters. I feel like there was something remarkably significant in that scene, particularly since Gustav dies so soon afterwards, but I haven't quite placed my finger on it. Gustav is, after all, the only character to die in the book and, as he starts the book and ends it, he is in a sense the soul of the story.

What I like best about Gustav is how he always retains his pride and his dignity. Even when detailing his bizarre relationship with Sophie or playing with poor Boris, he is always a figure of dignity. He doesn't have a glamorous job, he isn't a natural candidate to be the role model of the town, and yet he is so much more noble than any of the upper crust. Perhaps he's just a working class hero, but he is a hero, especially to Ryder.

This was a recurring dream in most of the elements. In the previous version of the dream, the class and class structure was the same, but the teacher previously was an anthropology teacher that I'd actually had. In this dream, I have a new teacher, who is young and blonde and female (my actual teacher was an older gentleman). The class structure was very rigid; we are not allowed to talk or ask questions and we have to use our Visa cards as identification, although the teacher promises to only make a twenty-five cent charge to test the validity of the number. It's the first day of class and we are filling in the informational sheets on ourselves, including our Visa numbers.

I am conscious of everything before it happens and although I follow the format of the previous dream, I am making decisions to go along with the plot. I am aware that my SO is in the room, but we're young and it's many years before we get together. He's a jock and he's immature at this point. We have to answer some questions that are on the board, so I go and lie on the floor in the center of the room. I'm joined by a fellow that I took a few classes with and see every now and again. He grumbles about the Visa information and the teacher (literally) screams at us for talking. I get up and walk along the seats on the other side of the room, because I want to see my SO and I know he's over there (lucid?). The imagery at this point becomes very much like the animation in Waking Life, with the wavy lines. I see my SO walking back to his seat and he has a dark cloud over his head that extends behind him in wavy lines, every once in a while reaching near someone to threaten them. I don't think of it as an aura, but I do know that it's because he's not a good person yet. I make a conscious decision to share my love and light with the people I care about that are in the class, so a bright white light extends from my head (I bend over to help it move out). It reaches out to a few people that I care about (although I don't see them, nor are they identified in the dream), but I watch it pass my SO by. I know that our time is not yet, but that it will come.

(I was reading about the meaning of the word Namaste right before I went to bed last night, which might explain the "lights within you")

It's the last night of our class. Everyone else is going home and waving goodbye, but I head back to the library. The library's closed, but the door's unlocked, so I sneak in to do some work. I'm relieved that it's closed, because now I have the place all to myself, which is probably every booklover's dream. Only it's not the QC library -- it's my old high school library. I know that it has other floors, but the only one I see is the library in my high school.

Soon, the librarian comes to the door and I realize that I've left it unlocked behind me. I sneak up to it, gollum-style, and try to lock it before they notice me and they start pounding at the door for me to get out. I leave, abashed and frustrated.

The next night we're in class again and I leave and try to enter the library again. Tonight I can't get in because Phil Collins is there playing a concert. One of the partners at my firm is there too and he's looking for a cover to his teamug, because he wants to put his tea into the refrigerator and he doesn't want it to get stale.

"But it only cost you, what, fifty cents?" I ask, looking down at the cup and noticing it's Lipton (which is barely tea at all in my book). He gives me a look like I'm a nobody (something he's rather famous for in real life) and I go chasing after him with some aluminum foil to cover his mug. He refuses to take it, but puts his mug into the refrigerator with nothing to protect it instead.

Next I'm sitting on the floor in the class and someone points out the worst run in my pantyhose that I've ever seen. I laugh and say, "Yeah, this pair is ready for the trash," but look again and notice that my skirt (my favorite) has a big run in it too, just like the pantyhose.

"See how everything in my life is just starting to fall apart?" I joke, trying to make the class laugh.

I'm on the Jersey turnpike, driving back home with my Mom. Traffic is really super slow, because we're nearing that idiotic place on the turnpike where the two separated highways merge back into one in a single lane. Finally traffic stops and stays stopped, so people start getting out of their cars and walking. We're the first to do so.

I quite practically fold up my car and place it into my handbag, which looks like Mary Poppins' bag, but in a more tasteful black.

We get out and walk and walk with masses of people until we cannot see the cars behind us. Finally, around exit 4, we reach a building that stretches across the turnpike. It's a grand old mansion and we go inside. Inside are dozens of shops selling sculptured ornaments, but the only ones I remember are Winnie the Pooh bears. An older man is in there with the face of Santa Claus, but I know that he is just a German immigrant who makes a living by selling his sculptures. My mom and I are alone and I lose her, but eventually I find her because the sculptor has opened the gate that was blocking the highway.

"I bet he did it because he's racist," I think. (My brain probably went there because of Robert Moses' designs with bridges over the state parkways, which were done for racist and classist reasons, which I was just telling my family about when they visited for the holidays).

I start walking back to get my car (my handbag is long gone), leaving my Mom at the gates of this weird mansion. I walk and I walk and I walk until I wake up...