Nice relaxing and thoroughly uneventful Thanksgiving. But I think that my home has become some weird kind of conduit for my dreams, specifically my dreams of what I wish the profession were like. Last time I was home, you may recall, I dreamed that all the English grad students were ninja assassins competing for a magical dagger. Well, nothing quite that odd this time.
Instead, this dream was all about theory. For those of you not in the academic world, there's this "hot" topic currently in vogue, called the "posthuman." No one is quite sure what it means, but I think it has something to do with how we relate to shit like dogs, and zombies, and robots, etc. You know, win them over so they don't try to enslave mankind. (But forget about the dolphins. There's no placating those bloodthirsty fuckers.)
Well, in my dream, all of academia was abuzz because someone had just written an article that supposedly clearly solved the problem of the "posthuman." Not just a debatable article, either; this was the "key to all mythologies" of the posthuman, something that definitively settled the problem forever. But for some reason, I had the only copy of the article (I didn't write it in my dream, I just had it), and all these competing factions wanted it. Some wanted to embrace the posthuman, others wanted to destroy the article and thus erase all records of the problem ever being solved. Massive conspiratiorial shit was going on in my dream. I guess the original author was dead, or lost his backup copy, or his hard drive got destroyed, who knows.
No real resolution to the dream, sadly. Just yet again a sense of increasing competition and espionage within the academic world. I guess I subconsciously find our lifestyle boring, and could do with some more ninjas or spies or whatnot.
And the kicker? I couldn't even figure out the article in my dream. I guess I don't even subconsciously understand theory. All I knew was that it had something to do with WALL-E. Figures.
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4 comments:
this reminds me of romy and michele's high school reunion when one of them dreams that they invented post-it notes.
my crazy ex-stepfather wrote a novel (shockingly unpublished) about dolphins kidnapping the president and keeping him in some kind of hideout under the sea.
so yeah... dolphins.
also, i think you should quit school and write movies. i'd watch them.
Whoa! Really, about the dolphin novel?
i like how your dream was used on the grad list as a plug for those mellon workshops.
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