Given the subject matter I teach, and the way I teach it (which is with a lot of repetition and pattern modelling in class), it's actually surprising I don't dream "in debate format" more often. Well, last night, I dreamed I was involved a debate. But there were many peculiarities, as are inevitable in dreams.
Foremost, I and everyone one else were stylized like Japanese anime characters. Actually, there was a point in time last year when I was toying with the idea of trying to draw out in manga format some of my teaching experiences, but I was profoundly displeased with my drawing ability – that's probably where the visual aspect of the dream came from, in part. Next, the setting was not where I work. It seemed to be taking place at some giant transportation terminal – a large bus station or airport. Last, the topic was somehow earth-shattering. The details weren't clear, but a lot of points hinged on proving deception on the part of media and government. At one point in the dream, I was explaining that the massive "government report" in the binder I was holding up was created by a machine, and that if you studied the information in it carefully, you would realize that there were patterns that proved it was all random and computer-generated, and therefore was useless to prove what the debate opposition was claiming it proved.
In the middle of the debate, my friend Bob showed up and wanted to have lunch. He was quite charming, drawn as a cartoon character – he looked a little bit like an itinerant zen monk. We sat down Korean style (crosslegged on the floor at low tables) and ate borsht and rye bread. He said that I was taking the debate far too seriously. I offered him some cheese, but he didn't want it. He said he had to go back to work, researching something.
I went back to give another speech for the debate, but one of my students was presenting quite adequately in my place. I felt proud. Then I realized the audience was mostly animals: cattle, horses, sheep. They were not being attentive, either. I turned to my other students there, waiting their turn to speak nervously, and noticed that the opposition speakers had all disappeared. I went to look for them, and ended up in a large institutional bathroom. There was an old woman inside, mopping the floors. I tried to ask her if she'd seen the opposition speakers (who suddenly included Obama, I realized as I tried to describe them) but she only spoke Korean, and became quickly incoherent and angry when I kept asking.
I started looking in the stalls, but the woman chased me away with her mop. Back in the hall, the animals had begun to leave, too, and my students looked to me for guidance: continue speaking? Give up? I looked at the large report I'd been describing earlier, and noticed that the pages were gradually losing their words — becoming blank. Not all at once, but like a screen-saver was operating on them.
I abandoned my students to look for a new version of the report. But then I woke up.