Merry Christmas everyone! The last week or two have been quite relaxed. I’m grateful I could finally slow down and take a break, reflect, and spend time with family.
Frankly, I’ve been a lot busier in the nights than in my waking moments. I think the saying “beyond my wildest dreams” is a bit of a misnomer—the things I hope for are really quite different from what I actually dream about. Honestly, I don’t know where some of that stuff comes from. Among other things, I rebuilt a house that had been turned upside down piece by piece, failed the biology class I had registered for and then forgotten about, and (particularly jarringly) kissed and got violently karate’d by the same girl on almost consecutive nights.
The other night I was sitting in a church service, and when it was time for the musical number, the musicians got up on the rostrum and started playing “I Melt With You” by Modern English (which, for the record, sounded exactly the same as the album version.) I looked around at the other members of the congregation to see if anyone was going to say anything, but everyone just sat on their pews and listened as if it were completely normal, so I did the same, and started enjoying it. Then an older woman in front of me turned around and said that this kind of music was very inappropriate for a church meeting. I didn’t want to offend the musicians, but I also didn’t want to offend her, so I just sat there uncomfortably until I woke up.
Another night, I waited after class to talk to my Japanese professor because he hadn’t understood something about English stress patterns. (In real life, this man is far more qualified than I am.) I explained that English typically used right-originating trochaic stress (I’m not sure if that’s actually true), and he said, “But what about three-syllable words that have stress on the first syllable?” and I thought about it and replied, “Those must be the words that are descended from Native American languages.” Obviously. That class had been at 9:00 AM for some reason, and I had to go to English Teaching at 10:00, but on the way there, I ran into a teacher who asked me why I was taking syntax from the other professor (this was actually my high school biology teacher), and I came up with an excuse that I had to scan the textbook—which I then had to do, so I was even more late for my 10 AM. I woke up before getting there.
I present these examples as a non-exhaustive case against the use of dreams as a metaphor for one’s deepest wishes and goals. There are many things that I long for with every breath of my soul—but reorienting an entire kitchen only to be used for martial arts practice in return is not one of them. ∎
Image: One of Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts from the “Apocalipsis cum figuris” series, illustrating a scene from the biblical book of Revelation.