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I, too, felt a Porlock coming on. To play Dr. Freud for a moment -- dreams aren't always about what they seem to be about. Maybe the anxieties are not really about teaching! Think about it! On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 [log in to unmask] wrote: > Something in Bert's dream narrative brought back to mind the absurdly long novel, "Pinocchio in Venice," by Robert Coover. (Anxiously, I wonder if I've got the author's name right.) I bogged down about a third of the way through, and have worried ever since that I probably missed wonderful things in the later episodes of Error's endless train. In Coover's continuation of the Pinocchio story, the boy has grown up to be a distinguished, or at least industrious, professor of humanities, and late in life he has come back to Italy. His experience there is one anxiety dream morphing into another. > > Shouldn't a session in some conference be reserved for the retirees to entertain the ephebes with their real and make-believe dreams? Or maybe what we need is a Porlock Superbowl. > > Cheers, Jon Quitslund > > -------------- Original message ---------------------- > From: "A.C. Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]> > > Reading the anxiety dreams of others led me to have an anxiety dream last > > night even though I have been retired more years than I wish to remember. > > It was the standard dream: the deadline was soon approaching for me to give > > a lecture but I couldn't find the lecture room. I didn't have a manuscript > > to read; I didn't even know my topic. Often I ask for directions as I > > wander through a busy city but I never find the place. Last night the > > darkened city was deserted, and I met no one until I entered a > > fortress-like, concrete building where I met an elderly woman. I have met > > her in many dreams and know her as my anima: she is grey-haired, very > > short, very powerfully built, ugly and totally terrifying. Often she is > > behind a door to grab me as I enter a room but last night she directed me > > to a flight of stairs that led ever downward. After a while I realized that > > it was far too late to give the lecture, and also that I was deep > > underground. At that point I woke up. Bert >