Saturday, October 13, 2012

Stress dream?

This is the dream I had just before waking up this morning:

I was checking into the hotel for the Big Giant Pseudology Conference this year, and since I'd never been there before, I quickly got lost trying to find my room.  (It was one of those floor plans with little mezzanines up and down, so it was hard to know what floor I was on, sometimes.)  I was wound up about looking competent and professional around my colleagues, so I was trying to hide the fact that I had no idea where I was in the hotel, and couldn't find my room.  Naturally, the more that I tried to find the room and avoid making a fool of myself, the more colleagues and friends of friends I ran into, until I seemed to be at the center of a knot of people.  We were having an animated conversation about language and pedagogy – one of them noticed that I spoke a particular language – and I tried to keep up my end of the conversation while sitting down on the floor of the confusing lobby and opening my laptop so I could try to figure out from a web page or something where the hell my room was.  And all the time, more people that I wished to impress favorably kept passing by and stopping to chat.

And throughout the entire experience, I was completely naked, and was constantly trying to hide this fact from everyone by sidling along walls to hide my rear and using my courier-style computer bag to strategically hide my front.  I had no clothes on at all, so I don't know whom I thought I was fooling,  But in any case, I felt pretty much trapped by the time I was sitting (naked) on the lobby floor, since I had taken the laptop out of the bag and had the laptop balanced on my lap.  (Strategically.)  I seem to recall rising anxiety that someone would suggest a restaurant for dinner or check the conference program and try to take the computer from me to get the logistical details.

Now that I'm awake, out and about, I can't tell which fact offers me more relief: the fact that I'm off for all of next week for CBU's fall break, or that I'm clearly wearing trousers right now.

2 comments:

  1. I'm jealous that you get a whole week off. I am not jealous of the terror-filled dream.

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