Dreamlife

  In this dream, I’m back at my previous grad school, from which I
was expelled for my unacceptable taste in reading. I walk into the
seminar room on the second, or was it third?, floor along with several
of the students. These aren’t my classmates from back then but fresh
recruits. Two of the professors are present in the room. I begin to
discuss important authors like Hamsun. The professors’ reaction is
disapproving, as expected, although more muted than it would be in
waking life. But afterward some of the students express enthusiasm for
the ideas I brought up.
  I hope there’s more to this dream than meets the eye. It’s so
silly to dream of converting bigots or to curry their approbation.

  In the dream, I’m at home (but I don’t think it’s my home in waking life) when Hector arrives. Although I had other plans, I find myself going out with him to hunt for CDs (a wonderful habit we had back in college). I then find myself at a shopping center and my spectacles are missing. I want to ask for Hector’s help but he has disappeared; I search apprehensively for them and finally, despite my blurry eyesight, descry them in the center of a large (by shopping center standards) fountain. I retrieve them and then exit the shopping center through an underground access to the subway. Suddenly, I am jumped by a long-haired Oriental teenager who proclaims he’s a Kung-Fu practitioner and starts raining mock blows on me. In the dream, he is a completely ludicrous, rather than threatening, figure, although I imagine in waking life I’d be more nonplussed by such an act, even if the blows did no damage. Then somehow I’m watching a television screen. A newscast reports two acts of violence. One of them turns out to be the murder of the Kung-Fu teen. They show footage of him in the subway station where I encountered him; he’s been shot. I don’t appear in the footage nor does the newscast connect me with him in any way. I wonder, though, if my dream isn’t implicating me in his unwitnessed murder.

At the end, I’m riding the subway with a female companion and am quite uncertain about whether the route we’re taking will lead us to our destination.

The bus I’m traveling on is passing through a bookshop ample enough to accommodate traffic. A large sign indicates an opera section. I’m uncertain how close I am to my destination but what I see on display is so seductive, I get off anyway. Something, I don’t remember what, thwarts my intention of acquiring new volumes. (Perhaps, in a Kierkegaardian mode, I discover it is the sign itself that is for sale?) I’m not especially dejected; being in the shop is in itself exhilarating.
When I arrive home, I have an unexpected visitor waiting for me, an affable, dark haired man with a moustache, slightly older than me. Even in the dream I know I haven’t met him before (I think he’s a friend of a friend) but I take an instant liking to him. The fellow tells me he’s blind (I sense this is a very recent and temporary affliction or perhaps I even suspect him of faking it) and asks me to read him a certain story. I open up the book and begin reading to him. It’s a violent detective story but it also teaches me a lot about Beethoven. Further, (shades of Michael Ende!) it appears to be writing itself as I go along.

  My family and I enter what appears to be a huge, sprawling
store. Once inside, it eventually turns out to be a hotel cum
convention center as well. I am looking for esoteric literature. I then
retire to the living quarters here, perhaps to read. These quarters are
very squalid. The walls and floors are bare and grey. The communal
restroom sports a toilet in each corner. The bedroom I retire to also
appears to be communal, since it contains a number of flimsy wooden
beds. Only one other bed is occupied at the moment, though, by
Carmelita Avila, a red-haired airhead I knew in high school, and the
simian boyfriend who made a practice of trailing her. None of us seem
surprised at the lack of privacy. I don’t recall what I read. Later, I
am alarmed by some impending danger and shut the windows. That may have
not been the most effective safeguard, since a black mastiff of
sinister aspect later appears in my room. Although it makes no overt
menacing motion, I take fright and hurry out. Eventually, I find myself
in the more public part of the place, which is as opulent as the living
area was squalid. In a large hall, a multitude of people throng around
a few who are giving out something. I join the crowd and find that was
is being distributed and enthusiastically received is political
literature pushing some kind of agenda. I find this vacuous and
uninteresting. “The crowd is untruth”?

  In this dream, I am introduced to my son. Curiously, he’s not a
newborn infant but appears to be already several months old. Cute kid;
the tenderness I feel toward him is genuine, deep and different than
what I’ve felt toward anyone else but falls far short of unalloyed
elation. I wonder what I can do to guide this lad to a eudaimon
adulthood. The length of the task weighs on me; I think I doubt my
resourcefulness. The mother is a respectable looking brown haired
woman; I don’t know if I’m married to her in the dream but, in any
case, she doesn’t play any significant part. Even in the dream, I
recall the claim Sarah repeated, that one is always overcome with
affection for one’s child upon sight and feel a twinge of sadness that
I don’t have that response.
  Was this an unsuccessful compensatory dream? Or is my
subconscious telling me that the Ice Queen’s rejection hasn’t
foreclosed certain life choices but simply , shall we say, emptied them?