During a week of spectacularly imaginative and theatrical protests and demonstrations across campus, my younger colleague X was taking the lead, staging one brilliant idea after the other. One involved standing on successively on squares in which the 10 amendments of the Bill of Rights were engraved. We never knew what he would do next, and I felt admiration and even envy for the generative power of his mind.
Upon awakening I realized that all these ideas had sprung from my own mind: I was the dreamer, after all! My colleague, in waking life, does nothing at all like the things that I had ascribed to him, and his talks on campus tend to be abstractly theoretical. Though I feel generously toward him, as these dreams indicate, it is unclear why I needed to give him credit for my own imagination.
***
Earlier in this sequence of dreams, we had been in a car in the countryside with another female colleague. We were parked by the edge of a stream when I saw that an enormous torrent of water was about to come down on us from upstream. I exited the car (a convertible), scrambled up a hill, and yelled from them to join me on higher ground. They ignored me for a few minutes but finally saw what was happening and jumped out of the car to join me. The water came, causing great injury and destruction and setting my colleague's convertible on fire. We began to make our way home, having to take a series trains or buses beginning in the next town over. It was unclear to us whether this event had actually happened, or whether in fact he had parked his car at one of the train or bus stations. The flood might have been a dream.
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