Saturday, April 21, 2007

100th Post and Interesting/Frustrating Dream

It just snuck up on me. I happened to glance at the Dashboard before starting this post and saw that I had 99 posts to my blog. So that makes this one "Old hundredth". Indeed, "Praise God from whom all blessings flow...." It's also the 363rd day of my blogging adventure. If I remember, I might mention something related to that on Monday.

Anyway now the folderol is out of the way I can get on to posting. I didn't sleep well last night and had an interesting dream just before I woke up. This is one of those dreams that are interesting to the dreamer but not necessarily to anyone else so I'll understand if you don't care to read about it.

In my dream I was living in a new frame house in a nice neighborhood, like a Cambridge Homes development for them that know them. I had just written a research paper on the theology of cataloging. The theological focus was on the Word unlike the paper I wrote last year in real life that focused on creation as organization and on humans as imaging God by being subcreators and orderers. In the dream it was a nice warm day and I went outside and read the paper to Anthony, the guy who was living with us for a while, while we sat on the curb. I read the whole paper and it was good except for a few typos I noted. Then the scene shifted and I was downstairs in the old student center at St. Olaf preparing to defend my paper before a group of students, faculty and regents. They were calling us up by topic. When they called for "Theology of Library Cataloging" I headed into the room and realized that there was someone else going in carrying a paper. Some girl had also written on the same general topic and would be defending her paper as well. She was better prepared than me and had brought copies for the examination committee. We decided that she would go first. She had just read her title and begun to engage another student who was arguing tangentially that the idea that cataloging was unnecessary thanks to Google was silly and I woke up.

It's really frustrating to have written and read an interesting paper on a subject in a dream and to wake up and the only details you remember are irrelevant ones about the defense and the other student, and then not even the point of her paper. Oh well. I've been wanting to expand my paper from last year and maybe this dream will give me some impetus. I had planned to do more research on the cataloging side due to major developments over the last year but the theological side can probably bear more work as well especially along the lines of the canonical order of the books and collections like Proverbs, but maybe there's something in the Word as well. There was this morning anyway.

2 comments:

ann said...

I think the dreams you can remember very well when you first wake up, but then not so well later, are some of the most frustrating. I know people who keep a dream journal with them so they can write things down when they first wake up and can still remember them. I am not one of those people. But then, I don't usually have noteworthy dreams, or so I remember.

Everett said...

That was the really frustrating part. Even if I was inclined to keep such a journal it wouln't have helped. The part of the dream I was most interested in retaining, the thesis and structure of the paper, was precisely the part I couldn't remember when I woke up.