Saturday, August 30, 2014

20140830.0641

Despite going to bed at around 9, skipping my evening writing to do so, I did not get as much sleep as I would have preferred. This is in large part because of Ms. 8; she woke repeatedly during the night, crying because of a low-grade fever and pain in her mouth. I understand why, actually; the little bit of tooth emerging from her lower gum is sharp, indeed. But it made for a broken night, which is not the best thing for her also-running-a-low-grade-fever father. I will manage, of course, and I am glad there have not been many such nights. (I note with chagrin that my wife absorbed most of the work of caring for Ms. 8 during the night. But she is not sick at the moment.)

At one point, though, I was awakened from sleep by the end of a dream. I do not often remember my dreams, and I do not often wake because of them, so for me to have done so this morning is an oddity. In the dream, I was teaching a literature class, and one of the students revealed himself as a domestic terrorist leader, setting off a countdown for some kind of explosive device and ordering other students to pull out Uzis and begin to shoot people. I was not valiant; I ran to my department head and told him of the bomb threat on campus while students tried to clear their weapons from their backpacks.

It was at that point I awoke, my eyes snapping open although my body did not move or spasm. I did not thrash about, so far as I know; the bedclothes were not entangling me when I woke at half past four. But the lack of reaction worries me less than the reaction I had in the dream itself. I have heard that dreams work with our core beings, or as close to those cores as can be perceived and remembered by the waking mind. If that is the case, and I ran from threats in my dream, does that mean that I am at root a coward? Or does it mean that I am interested first in self-preservation (for I did not seek to save my students)? Or that I am overly conditioned to authority (given that I ran to my superiors)?

I am not a mental health professional. I cannot say with certainty that any of those obtain. But were I to read them as theses about the inner content of a story, to apply my skills and training to the dream if I were to take it as a narrative, I might have to consider some or all of them. They are not mutually exclusive. And I would have to consider that the narrator, if the narrative were presented as a dream-sequence, shows the effects of teaching long; dreaming of being in the classroom is a certain sign of it. How fortunate, then, that this is a three-day weekend; I can use the break already...

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