D! S! T!
The half-time show was a celebration of daylight-savings time.
At the dentist, or barber
I went to see my old dentist, who was now working as a barber.
On the 166
I thought this dream was about the passing of time: you can’t go home again, as everything has changed. Elaine thinks I’m already dreaming about deportations.
A message
I was in a committee meeting with co-workers, all of us sitting at a conference table in a large otherwise vacant room. The subject under discussion was a letter from the FCC about the aroma of our new movie, which had been deemed unsatisfactory. We were looking at clips from older black-and-white movies to figure out an appropriate aroma.
Dad, i.m.
He showed up in a dream — not for the first time — on July 13. He tapped me on my wrist and said “Michael?” It was unmistakably his voice.
Siebold
And then I saw that I had misspelled Sebald as Siebold.
Laptop speaking
I opened my laptop and a message in the center of the screen began reading itself aloud: “Hello, Michael. Mr. Eisenhower” — or was it Adenauer? — “has been waiting patiently for you. He is interested not in injecting the incredible but in removing it.”
“Frost” and Frost
I was teaching a poetry class and getting ready for our first meeting after a break, when it’s always a challenge to get back to the realities of a semester. I realized that I had forgotten to bring the two poems we were going to talk about, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I printed out a copy of each poem in my office and went off to teach.
Bumping into an ex-governor
I was walking into an office building, and out came Andrew Cuomo. I recognized him, but it took me a second to put a name to the face.
Dream data
This phrase showed up in a dream: “epistemic data.” I have invented two possible meanings.
“White Rabbit” in Wal-Mart
Singing in the store.
Waiting for Bob Dylan
Dylan was playing an astonishingly good accompaniment, with all sorts of complex substitute chords. I was, as I said to myself, “agape and aghast” and began recording on my phone.
Evaluations
This is the twenty-seventh teaching dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. In all but one, something has goes wrong.
K clef
Corporate sponsorship of a clef.
Monkey jungle
The students were unanimous: they called it a jungle gym. I had always known it as the monkey bars.
Going to church
At some point during this service I noticed an illustration on my guitar that I’d never noticed before, down by the tailpiece: a cityscape of tall buildings with stylized windows — something that you might see in a Nancy cityscape.
TV in the classroom
“You know how in The Wire, Walter White shaves his head and wears a black hat and calls himself Heisenberg? Wait — was that The Wire, or Breaking Bad ?”
Dad, i.m.
He showed up in a dream in July, a couple of days before what would have been his ninety-fifth birthday.
With Clint Eastwood
I went to the register to buy three sloes and found the cashier beside himself. “Clint Eastwood is in the store,” he said.
Father’s Day
A dream.
Harold and Mel
Bloom accuses former grad student Tormé of murder.
Downtown
I drove to a conference in a city whose name began with A and found myself in a downtown square.
A witness wardrobe
We were putting up a witness in an upcoming trial. It was just for a day or two. She was blind, and she needed a wardrobe for court.
Woolworth’s
Night. We were standing in front of a Woolworth’s. We hadn’t been inside one for years. A month’s page from a calendar hung from a string in front of the store. It looked just like a month from my homemade calendars.
Lear, window treatments, pie
This is the twenty-fifth teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. In all but one, something has goes wrong.
Doorbell
A boy stood on the other side of the storm door, three feet tall, roundish, wearing a mask.
Dreaming of Paris
There we were, in a restaurant. Everyone was speaking French. How great!
Dream chords
I was showing my friend Rob Zseleczky a beautiful set of chord changes: the chorus of “California Girls.” It’s a simple pattern up and down the neck of the guitar. I like the first chord for each vocal line as a major seventh. It’s not that way in the original. I don’t care.
4:17?
“I am doing what is called lecturing,” I said, and I was doing quite well.
“Mike, hi!”
“Mike, hi! I’ve only ever seen you in black and white!”