He had a vision Freudian,
And though he was annoyed, he an-
Alyzed it in the well-known styles
Of Doctors Jung and Brill.
I’m in a hotel in St. Joseph, MO on my way to the Nats. I just had the most bizarre dream I’ve ever had. The following issues were on my mind when I went to bed:
1. I had just composed a poem in a conversation on SSW which started with the chemical composition of Brodak contest hot dogs—particularly their molarity, but which morphed into Charles Dodgson’s affinity for little girls. I was proud of having rhymed, although imperfectly, “Canadian”, but I was ashamed of the meter. I think poetry should have rhyme and meter, such as the above excerpt from the story of the opera Thais. Being tired from a day of driving through Nebraska is no excuse.
2. I was wondering what TUT and Igor timer settings to use upon arrival in Muncie to calibrate the backup prop I’d installed before departure.
3. I have been having leg cramps in my sleep. I needed to decide to which muscles to allocate my one heating pad based on the propensity for cramping of different muscles and the relative pain of cramps among them.
The dream began as a concert or audition. I’m not sure which; I couldn’t tell the size of the audience. The audience would pick a country on a world map, then I would play the national anthem of that country on my electric stunt plane. I would then play the national anthem of an adjacent country, and the audience would color it in on the map using a color different than that of any contiguous country. Being asleep, I didn’t realize that the map color problem was trivial, hence the deck was stacked against me. We got to the Balkans and the game became very rapid.
The dream morphed. I was the commanding officer of the United States Air Force Thunderbirds. I received an irate phone call from my own CO. “The Thunderbirds perform all over the world,” he said. “You cannot require your pilots to pay for LiPo batteries for each country’s national anthem themselves, as you have been doing.” “Batteries are the tools of their trade,” I said. “They have to furnish their own. Besides, it’s not the batteries that are unique to each anthem. It’s the ESCs.” Being sleepy, I had: a) sassed my CO, and b) not realized that it’s not the ESCs, but the software. That’s the problem with dreams. You just don’t have your wits about you.
I enjoyed my first cramp-free awakening in several mornings.