Friday, October 21, 2016

quick check-in

Longer post to come later....I have to do a workout and then get over to school to do a little grading and check my plants.

But, here's one of those "brains are dumb and weird" things. A lot of the "bad dreams" I have aren't all that plausible in the daylight, but when they are happening, they are totally plausible to my brain (I suppose it's because that part of your brain that judges reality is turned off).

Well, anyway, here it is: I dreamed that I hadn't kept up my lawn "right" (either by watering it or mowing it often enough, it was unclear) and it turned out that was a capital offense (!) in the world where I was living, and I was caught, convicted, and sentenced to death (by drinking poison, that was how the death penalty worked in this world). For some reason I was being kept in a hospital-like setting* while I was running through appeals. My main arguments were:

a. This law was not made sufficiently clear to me
b. dear God, I work full-time, how can I be expected to have a perfect lawn?

The funny thing is, the fundamental injustice of the law (in our day-to-day world, murderers, child molesters, and rapists wind up eventually going free; death penalty cases are fairly rare) never came up as an issue.

Anyway, shortly before I woke up I was getting word that the appeal had been denied.

While I didn't do what I sometimes do after bad dreams - get up for a little bit and stare at The Weather Channel or something - it took me a while to get back to sleep.

(*Probably because I half-watched a couple episodes of "Trauma: Life in the ER" last night. Stuff like that has a way of worming itself into my brain)

After that dream, I had one where I was having to re-defend my dissertation, only this time in front of a committee that was half my original committee, half my current colleagues. And when I tried to open the Powerpoint file of the presentation based on my research, the computer kept pulling pictures of Ponies off my hard drive (perfectly innocent pictures, no rule 34 or anything weird) and I kept getting increasingly embarrassed because of a combination of not being able to do what I needed to do and also revealing my odd childish obsession to the people I work with (and who will be 'judging' me).

It's good to catch up on sleep but I could do without the bizarre brain-dumps.

1 comment:

purlewe said...

OH DEAR. I sometimes wish we could talk back to our brains when they pull weird stunts like this. How is this RESTFUL I would say. How is this HELPFUL in any way?