I awoke from a transparently symbolic yet overwhelmingly simple dream this morning. Most everything in the dream was the same as in "real life," except that my name was Job, not Jared. There were a few moments in the dream when I was reading an article on wikipedia about Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. There was another moment when I stood in the classroom, and the students were asking me something, addressing me as "Job-teacher," with a long, pure, Minnesota-inflected /o/.
Upon awakening, I looked up The Grapes of Wrath on wikipedia, but the article wasn't the same. The novel wasn't even the same as in the dream–not that I remember quite how it was different, there. Somehow the dream version of the novel was less Steinbeck, more Melville. Waking up with echoes of Job left me with neurons firing associated Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom. I looked those authors up as well, and then wondered if it were possible to be a gnostic atheist. How would that work? It seems like it would lead one down a path toward one or another of those crazed conspiracy theories. Bloom, in turn, lead me, via David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, back to Alasdair Gray, whom I've mentioned before, here, I think.
The pun that is central to the dream is embarrassingly obvious, given my unhappiness with my job. I'm very glad that Freud is dead, as I'd not appreciate his making a case-study out of it.
