Trompe l’oeil is no fun in dreams

Apologies; I know it’s a bit boring when I write about my dreams, but this one was weird even by my standards.  I dreamed: I am part of a large (possibly Jewish…too much Maus before bed) family of (I think) bakers.  We have a shop on the fourth floor of a building and everyone in the family works there.  For bits of the dream–the normal bits that make sense–I am hanging out in what seems to be a fusion of the basements of my two best friends, cutting paper snowflakes and watching something on a very fuzzy, staticy TV.  But then, I realize it is Christmas Eve and I have to get home to my family to watch “Charlie Brown Christmas”–I really don’t want to miss Linus and his blanket!  Instead of going home, though, I go to the bakery to close up.  I am the only person there, and consider stealing a couple of cakes from the glass case to bring home for the family (as though the family won’t notice I had stolen our own cakes). 

So here’s where the crazy approaches.  I take a chocolate from the case instead, and am about to shove it in my mouth, when I realize I am not alone.  My father-in-law (I wasn’t married, but that’s the way with dreams) who was in charge of day to day bakery operations is there.  I apologize, saying I was just going to eat this one chocolate because it was damaged.  He doesn’t say anything, just looks through me and walks into the back room.  Behind him, sitting cross-legged on the counter, is my narcoleptic cousin Eddie (don’t ask me how I know his back story, but somehow the dream filled me in; he fell in and out of sleep at the drop of a hat, staring vacantly into the air until he woke or something woke him.  He’d always been that way).

Now, the crazy:  I realize that, all those times I thought Cousin Eddie was sleeping, those were the times he was really awake.  And all the times I thought Cousin Eddie was awake, those were the times he was asleep to everyone else.  I realize I am a frickin’ figment in Cousin Eddie’s recurring narcoleptic dream.  I’m not sure I can adequately convey how upsetting this was.  In the next scene, Cousin Eddie is taking me to the window, his hands gently pressing on my back, saying “It’s all for the best now” and I am scared but not resisting.  I sit down on the open windowsill four floors up (it looks higher) and, just before I jump, I say “It was good, you know?”  Then I fall, and mid fall, thank God, I wake.        

I don’t know if I meant the chocolate was good, or the dream life while it lasted, or nothing at all by that last phrase.  The real question is:  Are dreams like this the product of reading wacked-out postmodern fiction (too much Satanic Verses, Lanark and Angels in America before bed) or are they its source?  Which is indispensible, which auxiliary?  Who creates whom: the mind, fiction, or fiction, the mind? 

And here’s the other question: Why can’t I have nice, respectable Victorian realist dreams?

The dreadful dream of the dead bloody nuns

I just woke up from the most upsetting dream I’ve had in recent memory.  It began as me (in the dream) reading a magazine article about a group of campers–Boy Scouts, I think–deep in the woods.  Before long I was no longer reading but was actually inside the story, standing in the long grass a few feet away from two young boys in Cub Scout uniforms.  The boys were joking with one another by the dim beams of their flashlights, probably (I thought) looking for a place to pee before bedding down for the night.  There was a rustling in the bushes at the edge of a wood not far away, and I noticed a sort of path in the long grass leading from the woods toward the boys.  Suddenly, one of them stopped moving and said hoarsely, in a deep, hollow whisper, “the dead bloody nuns are coming to kill me!”  As he spoke his face changed, growing sunken and gray and covered with open sores.  The other boy spoke too, in the same unnatural whisper, “they’re here, oh God, don’t let them touch me,” and he too looked corpse-like by the faint light of the flashlights.

And then it got scary.

I became aware, in the midst of my fear at being a few feet away from possessed Boy Scouts and invisible dead nuns, that I was dreaming.  I woke to find myself lying on my side with my face to the wall in my own familiar bed at home.  I breathed a brief sigh of relief, until I imagined that I felt the covers being lifted off my shoulders by a presence standing just behind my turned back.  Horrified, I decided to get up immediately and let light and motion and the internet dispel my lingering fears.  I rolled over and pressed the switch on my bedside lamp…again, and again, with no result.  The bulb must have burned out.  Disconcerted and still tingling from the imagined touch on the shoulder,  I leapt out of bed and rushed to flip the light switch beside the door and flood the room in…darkness; the switch didn’t work.  Leaning against the door in a panic, I realized that I wasn’t awake at all.  I was still caught in the dream with the dead bloody nuns, and one of them had touched me, was near me, and I couldn’t see her coming.  I pinched my arm to try to wake myself, but it was like trying to pinch an arm that has fallen asleep…I could feel pressure, but no pain.  Frantically, I tore at my body, trying to find a soft place where I could inflict pain urgent enough to wake myself from the nightmare.  Nothing worked.

So I ran.  Outside the door the dream continued as a brightly colored, sunny city street.  People were all around, on the side walks, at the booths of the street vendors, sitting at the table of little street-side cafes, and they were all of them dead.  Violently dead.  Slashed open and mutilated dead.  I ran through the dead city, fleeing a horror that I wouldn’t see until it sunk its claws into my back, still scratching wildly at my arms in a desperate attempt to wake up.

Suddenly, I became aware of lying on my side with my face to the wall in my familiar bedroom in my Morris apartment.  I rolled onto my back.  It sure felt real this time, but I hesitated to turn on the bedside light.  If it didn’t work…   …but it did.  Light.  I got up, turning on every other light switch I could find.  Motion.  With adrenaline still surging in my bloodstream, I sat down at the computer to purge the monsters with words.  Internet.  The three things I hoped would help me before seem to have helped me now, but it’s hard to be sure you’re awake when you’ve been sure once and found yourself still in the nightmare.

The Old English dream divination alphabet gives me this message of comfort: “One should not fear those who live in sin and intend evil.”  Take that, dead bloody nuns.  I’m not afraid of you!

Unexpected

I got an email today from Writing.com informing me that my poem “Northland Religion” had received a comment.  I had completely forgotten that Writing.com existed, that I had a profile, and the existence of the three items I had posted to that profile.  I recognized the tiny, six line poem when I read it:

Make it ten-thousand and one / for that little lake of tears / that baptized me / with reflections of the forest / and of the sun / and of the cloudless dome.

Simple, shabby, tangled in the language of my struggle to deal with loss of faith, and utterly forgotten, this poem had still reached someone who “really liked” it, a fellow Minnesotan who thanked me for its creation.

Although I’ve never completely given up on poetry, I know very well by now that creative fiction isn’t my realm.  Sometimes I feel like I’m betraying my old dreams; I was going to be a novelist and change the world with my ideas and my sparkling prose.  Sometimes it feels like settling to devote myself to the study of other people’s genius–“those that can’t do, teach” and all.  Yet I lack not only the aptitude but the patience and interest for writing prose, and I am passionate about academic English.  And now I find, when the ghost of ambition rattles her chains, that I can quiet her with silvers of approbation like today’s unexpected comment and go on, quite happily, in the less glorious path I am pleased to have chosen.

New beginnings and such

Almost all of my dreams in the past two weeks have been about babies.  Either I’m in charge of a baby, I have a baby of my own, or I’m pregnant.  According to the dream dictionary, babies may signify new beginnings.  The fact that I’m usually terrified, nervous, or overwhelmed by the (expected) babies could thus, I suppose, symbolize anxiety about new beginnings–which would certainly be appropriate.  Or, it could reflect the fact that if I had/were having a baby I would be terrified, nervous, and overwhelmed.  I don’t go for all this dream interpretation hooey anyway.

I do go for literary interpretation, however, which is what I’ve been trying to tell these folks in a non-hokey, memorable 500 words or fewer.  For those schools that allow me more space, I feel like I’ve got a good handle on what I want to say and how I want to say it, but I’ll be a blue nosed gopher (as my mother says) if I can figure out how to get my point across in 500 words.  When frustration sets in, I start to wish I could tell them how I really feel.  It would go something like:

“Dear admissions committee,   Please let me come to your school.  I want to do this so bad; more than I’ve ever wanted to do anything before in my life ever.  If not given the chance to pursue my PhD in literature, I’m pretty sure my mind will shrivel up and die of disappointment and will rattle around in my head like dried beans while I putter around at a boring job, possibly as the checkout girl at a grocery store or in clothing retail.  I have the serious intellectual passion, determination, and focus to accomplish my goals, but there’s no actual way I can prove that to you so I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it, although why should you when I’m sure everybody else is saying the exact same thing.  Please please please please please please please?    Love, KMN       P.S. That thing about the checkout girl/clothing retail was hyperbole…just so you know, I would keep trying to get into grad school in the face of failure because I’m so PASSIONATE and DETERMINED!

Don’t throw mud at my ivory tower!

I was reading an article on “the scholarship of engagement” today when I realized that I get really hostile whenever someone criticizes the academic status quo.  The article in question wasn’t even saying that traditional scholarship was bad–it was merely suggesting that is incomplete and there might be different and equally legitimate ways to conduct scholarly research.  As an open-minded thinker, I should be pro-alternative methods of thinking and acting–essentially, pro-progress.  However, as soon as I read “…mainstream academic scholarship has less…epistemological legitimacy because its claims to knowledge are made in isolation from social practices and public participation” I immediately lash out in my mind.  “But the public is, for the most part, kinda dumb!” I think.  “But the reason scholars carry out their research within the isolation of the academic community is because nobody else knows enough about the material to have well-reasoned insight into their topics of inquiry.”

I really don’t have a problem with engaged scholarship.  Pretty much, I just have a problem with anyone who even slightly implies that there is something wrong with my dream of sequestering myself in a book-lined office and plunging into a semi-private, semi-secret world that seems to me as exclusive and exciting as Narnia.  I don’t like the thought that the general public should be allowed to trample around willy-nilly in the magical forest to which I intend to spend the next six years winning entry.  To be honest, I don’t think most of the general public gives a rat’s hindquarters about literary research anyway.  But see, I can’t help clinging to this vision of academia that includes deeply intellectual cocktail-party conversation, musty yellowed pages, and tight social circles of tweed-clad eggheads, and I desperately want to get there before it vanishes (yes, I know I’m mostly already too late…but let a girl dream).

So that’s why I lash out at academic revolutionaries who want to change the way things are done in the world of professional scholarship.  I just need a few years in that magical forest–I need to taste the pipe-smoke, Foucault, and expensive brandy–before I can consider that the system may flawed and in need of radical change.

The Newest BoME

Applying to graduate school is the most current Bane of My Existence.  Like most BoMEs, it entails late nights awake and fretting, early weekend mornings on the computer, anxious conversations, lists, scribblings, spreadsheets, heart palpitations, and (hopefully) metaphorical gray hairs.  Over the past two greasy, pajama-clad mornings, I’ve come up with a list of 8 potentials: UW Madison, Uof Michigan-Ann Arbor, Brown U, Yale U, Northwestern, Michigan State U, U of Illinois, and Ohio State U.  8 schools, all of which require personal statements of varying length and content, writing samples of various lengths, ridiculous amounts of supplementary materials, and modest-to-exorbitant application fees.  I have regular nightmares that all 8 will respond to my applications with skinny envelopes containing variations on “no thank you” (except for last night, when I dreamed a completely non-grad-school related dream about kissing the rather elderly Sir Paul McCartney).

There’s probably a terrible heap of character to be built through this experience.  Lessons on perseverance, organization, hard work, and perhaps graceful acceptance of failure may be provided, free of charge.  Hopefully the overwhelming sense of overwhelmption* that I’m currently experiencing will hold off some of the less-worthy competition.  As for me, I don’t have a choice–this is the thing, the only thing, I want to do with my life.  So no pressure, right?

*Hey, if Shakespeare got to make up words and be called a genius…