Dreams are real too

I had a weird but wonderful dream today. I was in some school and it was shower time. I headed to the men's bathroom but when I opened the door I saw only half-naked women. I closed the door for a second and checked the sign, it was definitely "Men's." But then I suddenly realized, with about the same amount of surprise one experiences when one sees a stoplight turn green after it turns red (for laymen: "roughly none"), that I was a woman. After this I didn't have any problem going in.

I spent the first few minutes inside just looking at the plethora of boobies. But something wasn't right. I must have been in Austin Powers' universe because I didn't see a single nipple no matter how hard I tried. I stared in vain into the various mirrors but they all pointed their reflections either too high or too low, giving me midriffs and faces and nothing satisfying. Finally I gave up and got to washing. I took off my shirt and had a second, equally un-shocking revelation: I had breasts. And not just breasts, playmate of the year quality breasts. I felt their pleasant pull on the skin of my chest. It was most educational. But when I turned to the mirror, I couldn't see them! I was looking at myself from maybe 5 feet behind. I had a nice body, smooth creamy skin and shortish straight black hair, though I'm pretty sure I wasn't Asian.

The sexual part of the dream ended at this point and nothing of interest happened afterward. But I did milk this dream for some conversation during my classes. Specifically, the dream got me thinking: why should I perceive memories of my dreams any differently than memories of experiences from time spent awake? Why should I always qualify my stories with "in a dream"? Why should I say "I was a woman yesterday for a short while...in a dream," instead of just stopping with the facts. I had the experience, a valid experience, filled with valid if optically challenging breasts.

I have a dream, that memories of dreams and reality will be treated equally, that experiences you rememeber will be differentiated by their content rather than the vessel in which they're delivered to us. Or else I demand that we qualify all statements about real events too:

"I blogged today...in real life."

Naturally after I expressed my views to my first student of the day and then attempted to follow my new rule, everything backfired spectacularly. We were just talking about whether urine being sterile makes it safe to drink when my student asked me if I'd ever eaten shit. I seized the opportunity, as I'd had two dreams about this during my short life. Both were as unpleasant as they were memorable. I confidently answered that I had.

Mark: yea, twice.
Arthur: what? Really?
Mark: well not on purpose.
Arthur: you really ate shit? That's disgusting!

At this point my resolve started to weaken. I imagined the horrible task of tasting a piece of crap in real life and felt embarrassed for what my student now thought of me. Martin Luther King would be ashamed of me for what happened next.

Arthur: how did it happen?
Mark: well...it was in a dream...
Arthur: ha, yea right!
Mark: really!

Whether he believed me or not, he made fun of me for the rest of the lesson. But I think my resolve is slowly coming back. I definitely want to try this again.

The knot of the day was the Round Turn and Two Half Hitches:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

If you have a dock, attach your mooring lines to it with this one.

I'd Make A Good Buddha

Had a bunch of weird dreams again.

The first: Some friend of mine is perched up in a tree and needs help getting down. The tree is pressed up against a rock wall. To help him get down, two of us partially climb the tree to bring our words of encouragement a couple of feet closer. We offer no physical assistance. A minute later, we're all hanging for dear life on branches, with our feet braced up against the wall. We're quickly getting tired, but my genius comes through. I start rationalizing: "Wait, isn't it...then it could only be...and that's why...therefore...QED," I say, ending up proving that the wall is actually the ground, and that gravity points precisely that-a-way. A few seconds later, when everyone is thoroughly convinced, we're all sitting on that wall which is now the ground, building a campfire. The moral: the placebo effect is all-powerful.

The last: Me and Paul are sitting on a cloud. We are on patrol for God knows what. The cloud is tiny, we barely fit on it. I'm curled up with my head in his lap, for protection from falling off rather than for sleeping purposes or cuddling/snuggling or proving how non-homophobic I am. I remember that we have some movies, including Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds (a boring, but fortunately non-existant movie). I have a feeling that on the ground I wouldn't tolerate such trash, but upstairs I'll take anything to distract me from the altitude. A leaflet drops from the sky. Paul catches it with a ninja-like flash of his hand. We look at it. It's some threat from aliens - they want us to evacuate Earth "or else." Curiously, it's in the form of a novel cover. Paul says something like "psh," and chucks the leaflet down. I start to protest, but then realize it's Paul, and he knows best. There's even a song about his all-around superiority. Then we confess to each other that we're pretty scared of being up there. I confess first. Paul probably confesses out of solidarity or empathy or pity or some other outdated motive. The scene is strangely unromantic given the situation. Apparently in dreams there is no "misinterpretation of arousal" - a wonderful notion from Intro to Psychology class that explains how shaky bridges make us think we're in love.

The next after last: I'm hanging out with some Russians (here's where I should have realized it was a dream) at MIT. We're in some bar/burger joint, but I'm off to myself playing charades with the word "aloof." They're getting ready to leave, I think. There's a wooden chessboard lying on the table in front of me, the kind that folds at a joint in the middle and holds the pieces inside. I'm trying to get the pieces in so I can close it, but they keep spilling out. I'm stubborn, but I'm pretty much channeling Sisyphus; the pieces just keep rolling out. Damn leaky board. The Russians are still getting ready to leave. Russians take forever coming to a decision when there's more than one of them. They live for the decision process. I played soccer with a bunch at MIT for a while - we would meet and by the time they figured out which field they wanted to play on it was morning in next September. Same in the dream. By the time they're ready to leave, it's time to stay and play more games and consume more liquid fire. Someone sees me struggling with the chess board and suggests we play chess. "No, you don't want to play," I say (stupidly, because this is my chance to hand away my Rock), "it's too damn complicated." The Russians find this extremely funny for surely no stranger a reason than placebo's victory over gravity. "Wow," one of them says, "you're a funny guy. You could be a good Buddha." And that my friends is how you tag on a happy ending to a nonsense story.

The bonus one: This one was boring. Just imagine saying that sentence over and over and you'll get the gist.

It appears that writing down dreams is the key to remembering more of them. I only planned on writing down one when I started, but then the Paul and Russians' dreams got green with envy and remembered themselves to me.

One Hour of My Dream Life

This morning, three hours after the morning I went to sleep on/in the comfortable chair at the Hatten hacienda, Mario shook me awake with a laser-guided stream of words: "Mark, wake up!" Since the phrase contained my favorite syllable in any language, I shot up like a bolt, only to hear "Do you want to go back home to sleep?"

Being a pushover, a genuinely nice person, and not wanting to walk the twenty miles back, I acquiesced to his request. So Mario drove us home, and I crashed immediately upon entry. I wasn't in any condition to do push-ups or pull-ups after the Thanksgiving feast, so I took advantage of the well-placed floor in the louge. For the next hour, I went through dreams at an unprecedented pace.

The first dream was a series, with a two-out-of-three victory for happy endings:

I dreamed I bit something, and suddenly felt a tooth go to pieces. A tiny metal ball came out, as well as another metal part, leaving me a useless crater/thimble. I would need to add toothpicks to my already overlong brush-floss-mouthwash-pray-to-God-of-Teeth routine. But then I realized with great the joy of waking that this was just a dream, and fell back asleep full of gratitude to this practical joke for being just that. This time I dreamed that I bit something and my tooth pretty much vaporized, if such a term is applicable to teeth. It is definitely applicable to dream teeth. I once again fell into misery and self-pity, and woke myself up with my funeral dirges dedicated to my tooth. I may have woken the neighbors as well. Anyway, happy again, I rushed to tell Mario about the experience. I told him about both dreams, and then, just before he could reward my story with a quote worthy of posting here, I woke up again.

That wasn't the end for me though. This was an hour long nap after all - three twenty-minute Uberman REM cycles. As soon as my head hit the floor, I was hanging out with Natasha in NY. Now, Natasha is a pretty impulsive person, even in reality, but don't worry, this was a PG dream. If you are imagining otherwise, that is your poetic reading license, and good for you (and write to me about it). My version was unequivocally clean.

So Natasha decides she needs to pee, and I don't question her. She gets on her back, tucks her legs in and assumes the Dreamed Natasha Peeing Position (to be featured in the next six Stephen Chow movies). Being a gentleman of outstanding wisdom, I say "I'll cover you," and sit on her knees with my back to her.

A second later, I feel warm jet washing my back. "Not cool," I think, followed by "where is your sense of professionalism?" But my thoughts do nothing to ward away the warm jet. It continues to polish the already smooth surface of my latissimus dorsi. I get up, because I have no wish to be more than the already 89% soaked with urine. I start running around like a boy playing pterodactyl, but with more practical reasons. To my astonishment, the warm jet pursues me. Knowing for a fact, or at least a damn good theory, that Natasha is not a guy and can't possibly possess such proficiency in the sniping arts, AND being too much a gentleman of outstanding wisdom to look her way and find out, I suddenly find a light bulb in my head and turn it on. And I realize that it's the two open water bottles I have in my jacket, upside down, left over from a previous dream. I dare anyone to say now that dreams are useless to remember! If I had remembered those water bottles, I would have kept Natasha safe from the everpresent NY spectators, instead of sacrificing her privacy to my undying love for dinosaurs.

Believe it or not, there were another two dreams during that hour. The first:

I dreamed that I was at Barnes and Noble's, but in some faraway land called dreamland. Some guy walks up to me and asks me if I'm the author of The Time Traveler's Wife. Stupidly, I say "haha no," though I undoubtedly had praise coming had I said "why yes, I'm Audrey Niffenegger." I don't remember the details of the rest of this encounter, just the vague feeling of being insulted with one of the more strange American children's-section-unprintables (CSU's).

And the second, otherwise known as the last dream, is unfortunately a CSU to its very dreamsoul. Or at the very least, the intent to commit a CSU. It never got past intent because Mario stepped in at that right/wrong moment, shook me awake with a cattle prod from the year 2312, and demanded whether I wanted a pillow. Are we sensing a trend? Count on Mario to ruin something that can only happen in a dream. And that leaves nothing to tell that wouldn't end on a cliffhanger, so I will spare you the unresolvable suspense.

Blog Entry 468

We moved into our apartment a week or so ago...technically. Daniel and Franco signed the lease and danced right in, while Mario and I stalled for a couple days, maximizing our abuse of his aunt and uncle's hospitality. For three or four days we'd make weak attempts to move, but the reasons to stay were numerous and just a fridge door away. We pretty much had no choice.

Yesterday I successfully made an ass out of myself trying to set up wireless Internet. I walked to Target (more than a mile away!) and bought one of those Cable/DSL routers. When I got home I threw four years of irrelevant MIT knowledge at the thing to try to get it to show me my mail. I eventually gave up and summoned the help of a real king among nerds - Gene, who by some freak coincidence happens to be my dad. Five minutes of teamwork later we deduced that the router wasn't actually a wireless router at all - it was just a bunch of Ethernet jacks held together by a "Cable/DSL Router" sticker. It was back to the store for me. Who would have thought that in 2008, when even plants are online (the sub-bark temperature of the 56-year old oak outside my window is a pleasant 76 degrees), non-wireless routers are still polluting the shelves of our stores.

We decided to try out Angel Food Ministries - this company that sells you packages of food at relatively cheap prices. The company cooperates with churches in different areas to handle the dissemination of Angel Food packages - yet another activity of the Christian franchise. Our church bears the innuendo-soaked moniker - "Love in Action Church." I'm expecting at least nuns in playboy bunny costumes. At best, I'll soon be a newly converted Christian. Anyway, starting on the 27th, I should be comfortably eating on $50 a month. I will update as to the success of this experiment immediately upon survival.

I've been having weird and unusually violent dreams lately. Not yet sure what they mean. The other day I dreamed about some psycho killer who I couldn't convince in time not to shoot Chun right in the throat. This is an obvious hint for me to work on my debating skills. The next part is harder to qualify. Chun made a miraculous recovery and the guy went on trial. However, to make sure his sentence was fair, he was a member of the jury presiding over his own case. In the dream, this frustrated me to no end, because he was obviously just going to walk. Anyway, I finally got him back by waking up. Now he's worse than dead - he's back to "never even existed."