intellectual properties

all mimsy were the borogoves

jay got up at about 4:30am this morning to catch a flight, and sometime between then and when i woke up a few hours later, i had a crazy dream.

yesterday i read dooce’s post about her “college dreams” - the kind where you show up to a class on exam day and don’t know anything, or find out you’ve been registered for a class all semester that you never went to (note: i did actually have a couple of very anxiety producing experiences in college there were not quite as dramatic as NEVER going to a class you had registered for, but close, and so for me these dreams don’t feel like total fiction and do produce a lot of anxiety) - and i guess reading her post triggered the dream i had last night.

it was different this time: this time, i was no longer at UMich - i had gone to another school - somewhere in Florida? - for my senior year, perhaps due to having trouble of some kind at UMich. several of my other friends and college roommates (aimee j in particular) were there too. at the dorm in florida, i kept wandering the halls, asking everyone how i was supposed to know what classes to attend. there was no calendar. i did not have a class schedule. everyone else was coming and going but i felt stuck there in my pajamas, unable to figure out how to figure out my classes. it sort of felt like the time i was an intern in DC and my roommates all had these very important intern positions and had to be at their jobs really early and wear suits and my intern position was sort of …undefined… and so i slept in late and barely did anything and was always just laying around in my pajamas while they scuttled back and forth and did important things. anyway, in my dream i was begging people to help me figure out what i was supposed to be doing and they all looked at me like i was nuts as they ran off with their books and papers. i finally found some sort of playbill that had my name listed being in class for something like 4 days, like for a 4 day seminar - and i had already missed 2 of the days. i was confused because i thought that i had transferred for the whole year, but the schedule said i was just there for a seminar.

at some point i stopped caring about figuring out the class schedule and was trying instead to find my friend marc. i had a bouquet of flowers to give him - black flowers, tied up with black ribbons and bows and black tissue paper, like for a funeral. while searching for marc, instead i found shannon, who was swinging from the ceiling in the main entranceway to the dorm (a two story entrance hall made of dark wood, with stairways going up in all directions and stained glass windows), sitting inside a large wooden chandelier that was really just a very large spice rack - like, instead of lights or candles, there were little glass jars of spices, and she was sitting in the middle. she was swinging back and forth, totally enamored with her spices, singly softly. this makes incredible sense, because shannon posted about her new spice rack the other day. it was very Alice in Wonderland, the scene with shannon and her spicerack, with the winding staircases and whatnot, and i think she may have even been dressed like Alice(?), which also makes sense now, because at the disco camping event next weekend, we are having a very large Mad Hatter Tea Party for which everyone is going to dress up in character, and i was thinking a lot about what to do for my character yesterday.

my dreams are obviously very impressionable. everything i read, think, or see gets blended into them. it’s rather amazing, my dreamlife. i’m glad that last night mine ended on a whimsical note and not with the anxious “ohmygodi’mfailingoutofcollege” feeling, as i hate waking up like that. instead, i woke up thinking of shannon, singing to her new amazing spicerack.