Lemonade

A night of lengthy and intense dreams. 

 I was teaching and I asked a question. One kid shrugged his shoulders, and I called him out: "Don't shrug your shoulders; make an observation about the text." The other students applauded me. We were on zoom but I could see all the students, as though they were in classroom.

Then we decided to go for lemonade in a bar across the street. A woman in the class, older than the rest of the students, collected dollars bills from each of us to pay for it. I thought there would be tax so I tried to give her an extra dollar to cover that; she refused. In the bar I was attempting to pour lemonade into a huge plastic baggy on  the floor. Of course, most of it got on the floor and not in the baggy. I wondered how may dollars worth of lemonade I had spilled. An employee come over with a mop to clean up my spill...  

In the department office, there was a table with papers and junk on it. I took it upon myself to clean it up. I felt very virtuous in doing so, because others were standing around unaware of this mess. It seemed as though I wanted their approval. 

***

Dreams do not represent us at our best or our worst, but simply how we actually are in our own self-constructions. I am not better when I am cleaning up a mess than when I am making one. I am not a better teacher when students are applauding me. I am not even a worse one. 

***

Not a dream: I downloaded a dream diary by Nabokov on kindle: really just a sample that I didn't have to pay for. Of course, the sample consisted of all the preliminary material but none of Nabokov's diary. This has happened to me a lot. This is not a "sample" of the book, but simply an arbitrary number of pages at the beginning. In one case the sample was a long table of contents with none of the poem in the book. 

***

The dreamer interprets the dream. Even selecting the details to list, and giving the telling a certain "slant," is interpretive. There is no intention in the dream, in the sense of a conscious desire to say something in particular. There can be intention in the retelling of it. I could want to impress you, or show you my weakness, or skew the interpretation in a particular direction. The dream is not particularly enigmatic; its themes are usually desire and anxiety in the usual combinations.