How many people in the world, I wonder could have the sort of dream I had last night? Probably, they could be counted on the fingers of two hands. Though shrinks reputedly find dreams remarkably easy to parse, still, the particular personal vocabularies of dreams probably tend to be highly idiosyncratic.
So in this dream, I'm on a shuttle bus with a dozen or so other writers attending a conference something like Sycamore Hill or Rio Hondo. (The usual suspects, right?) We were driving into town to hang out for the afternoon. The next thing I know, the bus is parked in town and two of the writers, both heavy-set men, have dressed up in armor and are tumbling about inside the back of a garbage truck, wrestling for our entertainment. (We're watching through the windows of the bus.) Then suddenly we're all in a cafe checking our email, and the cafe's sound system starts playing a song one of us has written and everybody rushes to a dance floor (that I hadn't noticed was there) and dances to the embarrassment of the person who wrote the song. [You will notice, of course, that I'm not naming names here.] But the best is yet to come: I'm anxious to get to a bookstore, to pick up the latest issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society , because it's a special issue edited by Linda Martín Alcoff on-- get this-- the election of two women in their thirties to be President and Vice President of the US, one of them white-skinned and wildly redhead, one of them brown-skinned and wildly big-haired. (From the cover I couldn't tell which was the POTUS and which the VPOTUS.) So I leave the cafe and track down a bookstore that carries the journal, and I'm ecstatic when I find the special issue (in the dream, it had a catchy title, which I've since forgotten) and can still see the cover in my mind's eye: the new POTUS and VPOTUS in their inauguration garb-- knee-length, sleeveless dresses in tangerine silk, lightly belted, loose but stylish, with sandals. Both of them are smiling and confident. I'm certain the essays about the election will be fascinating and can hardly wait to tear into them. The dream, of course, has other ideas, and I'm thwarted.
Damn. I'd love to have gotten to read at least one of those essays. I don't suppose I'll ever get another chance...
4 comments:
What do you mean, Timmi, by "the sort of dream"? It certainly includes the kind of imagery, affect, and pacing that are characteristic of many people's sorts of dreams. And I've had that "Damn, I wanted to read that!" feeling all the time, although for me the work I almost got to finish or to read is always in a Dreamy genre --fantasy, sf, comics.
I'm not so interested in guessing which of your Syc Ill compatriots was doing what as visualizing people who could not have been there in those roles --Gardner, Chip, and Alan Moore; Ford Madox Ford, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Christina Rossetti, etc.
Yes, of course the style of the dream is absolutely typical of dreams (as far as it's possible t know such a thing). I meant, rather, that dreams can be have a personal vocabulary of the elements used. In this case, I suspect that the combination of Sycamore Hill, Signs, and Martin Alcoff is not one that is commonly found in most people's dreams. Needless to say, a dream set at WisCon is not uncommon for me, & I suspect that that's the case for anyone who regularly attends & I imagine lots of people who attend WisCon have been reading Signs for nearly as long as I have. As for people who attend Sycamore Hill... Hmm. I'm probably not the only attendee who has been reading Signs and other academic feminist journals for long enough to dream about them, but I bet there aren't many attendees who have. Martin Alcoff, obviously, was present in my dream because you quoted from one of her books to me in an email recently. My unconscious might have chosen to make her the editor of the special issue if you hadn't, but it seem likely that my unconscious would have thrown up someone else's name.
My having mentioned her in an email? You mean, LTD and LMA and Linda Gordon aren't in regular close contact as part of a feminist cell whose members all share that name? Damn, next you'll be telling me that not all Greek-Americans know each other.
The particularity of the part where you were desperate to get the latest issue of Signs definitely made me smile - not Homer Simpson's dream there. Though maybe Lisa Simpson's.
Every so often, after a theory binge, I have dreams where I'm writing a high-falutin' article and the dream presents the whole thing aurally, word for word, usually long and convoluted with lots of spectacular jargon. Of course in the dream it's brilliant and coherent. On waking, of course all that's left is incoherent fragments. But it felt so good.
Having recently experienced the peculiar frisson of immersion in a really awe-inspiring theory piece after a long time away, it does seem like never getting to read the article is way worse than losing the details on waking...
-Carrie
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