A student from Spain wanted to work with me a year in Kansas to do his PhD dissertation, but without enrolling in our program. He explained that it was a "doctorado ???." I couldn't catch the last words, and he explained that it was a "doctorado EB," where the student did course work first and then went abroad to work with a professor. This seemed normal to me, since a student did come once from Spain to work independently with me, and another one is now applying for a Fulbright to do the same. This guy's dissertation, though, was on the novel, and our interests didn't seem to mesh very well. I mentioned Vicente Luis Mora to him, and he called him "ignorante." I began to school the student on the virtues of VLM's novel Centroeuropa, the historical research that had gone into it and also the very rigorous process of writing Vicente had followed. He also couldn't name any Spanish poets. I also doubted whether this student could write the entire thesis in year. He said not to worry, since he had already written four books...
As I was waking up, I realized it was dream, but only gradually through a process of reasoning it out. It had to be a dream because it had happened at night when I was sleeping. The dream shows ambivalence. On the one hand, I do like it when people want to work with me, but on the other hand this guy was arrogant as well as out of my field, quite unlike the two women who actually have wanted to work with me without being students in our department.
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