Sometimes I have a dream that is so strange, yet so evidently autobiographical and symbolic, that as I caress its memory traces upon awaking, I think to myself, “people will think I made this up – no one dreams like that.”
So I must aver at the outset, I really dreamed this dream.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t make it up, too. Of course, as we awake and shuffle past the curlicues of fog that shrouded our sleeping state, the memories shift and take on form as a narrative that wasn’t really present in the dream. At least some if not most of the creativity in dreaming gets applied here, maybe. I don’t think, however, that that means I made the dream up, in any intentionalist sense.
I hesitate to report it, because as dreams go it was so very strange. But I will tell it, nevertheless – because that’s one of the things I do on This Here Blog Thingy™ that almost no one else does, and somehow, doing so thus means more to me vis-a-vis asserting my bloggish individuality over this peculiar format than most of the other things I do here.
I had decided to return to graduate school. In the dream, it was clear this had been a very fast, impulsive decision – perhaps taken over a long weekend, perhaps taken while drinking soju with coworkers. I had made the decision out of frustration with the current trajectory of my life.
I was accepted into UC Irvine. Keep in mind, in my real life, I have never even visited UC Irvine’s campus, but it has a certain plausibility around it, given my Southern California links. The year I spent working in Long Beach was actually, mostly, a year spent working at a client location in Costa Mesa, only a few miles from UCI. So it wasn’t something utterly random, perhaps.
I packed my possessions out of my apartment here in Korea (where somehow all my possessions in storage in Minnesota were also crammed into my apartment). I loaded everything into my Nissan pickup truck that I owned from 2001 until 2010, and drove to UCI.
I drove. It wasn’t something strange, in the dream. Just driving from Seoul to Orange County. It took a long time – but no more than a day or two. It was like driving from Oregon to Orange County.
When I arrived at the campus, UCI was in a Mexican beach town, but a rather posh one. I suppose that’s actually a pretty accurate description of much of Orange County. It was much greener than what we think of as Mexican beach towns – the green hills around the campus resembled northern Baja in winter, when the rains make everything verdant but trees are sparse. I remember looking down a long street as I parked my pickup truck and thinking there were a lot of nice sailboats in the harbor.
I went into a large, glass-faced office tower to find it divided up into various departments. Oddly, most of the departments were “city government”-type departments – a police department on one floor, a sewer department on another, yet another area had the offices of the city bus system. There was also a retail area with some upscale shops, like the Costa Mesa mall, and a food court, and alongside the food court was the Comparative Literature department. This is the first time in the dream where I knew what subject I’d returned to graduate school to study.
I met a friendly woman at a desk, there. There were stressed out grad students dozing in very stylish-looking cubicles made of polished blonde natural wood, decorated with tasteful personal effects. The woman began introducing me to various people in the department, although remarkably, there were no professors. “The department is run as a collective,” she pointed out. One of the other students muttered something about Juche (the North Korean ideological system). Really?
I was self-conscious of being so much older than most of the students. I was introduced to a man half my age who would be my “mentor” – he had the remarkably fitting dream-name of Earnest Young. He had blond hair and a goatee. He asked me to tell him about myself. I began to tell him a rather redacted personal history, in Spanish, but after a while we ended up talking about my negative experiences with graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. At some point he said, candidly, that his Spanish wasn’t so good, and we switched to English. I had the feeling that maybe he wasn’t impressed with my Spanish and had offered to switch out of pity, but he’d said very little in the language, so I decided I was being paranoid.
We were interrupted by the woman from the front desk, who took me around to meet some of the other students. Then, I was introduced to an older woman with graying hair who was apparently part of the building’s janitorial staff, but she was being treated as a full member of the group. She was laughing at humorless in-jokes being made by a forceful younger woman with “Occupy Philosophy” written on her tee shirt.
I bowed to the older cleaning lady and greeted her in Korean. This impressed the other students, but the cleaning lady returned my bow and offered me a large plate with exactly two orange cheezits on it. I took the plate politely, and was about to eat the cheezits when I saw that written on them were the words “아무것 없다” [“There is nothing”]. I looked at the woman with alarm, but she just smiled shyly and enigmatically, and returned to her cart of cleaning supplies and began dusting an unoccupied cubicle.
I was feeling uncomfortable by this secret message I’d received, so I put the plate of cheezits aside on the desk that had been assigned to me, and resumed my orientation chat with Earnest Young.
He was explaining that we had to teach our own classes under a sort of rotating leadership. My first class that I had to lead would be about Witold Gombrowicz [this is very significant in the context of this dream, but very hard to explain – Gombrowicz is connected in my mind with the problem and aesthetic of apophenia]. There were some administrative details I didn’t understand, but I decided to let it slide for now.
Then I looked back at the plate of cheezits after a few minutes and there was a very small sculpture of a monkey gazing at the cheezits, as if it was hungry. The monkey turned its head and met my eyes intelligently. I shivered, feeling a sort of nervous, conspiratorial fear, as if the universe had shrugged and uttered, “Gombrowicz, indeed.”
I was tired. “Where will I sleep?” I asked.
The earnest Mr. Young glanced at me, surprised. “Oh, you don’t know. We will probably assign you to ‘Camp One.'”
I asked for an explanation. “We take the collective nature of our undertaking very seriously,” he explained, earnestly. Apparently, they lived like Occupy protestors, in large recycled Army tents in the modernist plaza outside the building, where there was a large sculpture in the style of Picasso’s amazing work in Daley Plaza in Chicago [That sculpture is a recurring character in my dreams].
“The views of the mountains are excellent,” the young Earnest pointed out. “And the outside air is invigorating.”
I shrugged, but remembered a problem. “I don’t have a sleeping bag.”
He looked at me, eyes bugging out, as if to say, ‘how could you neglect to bring something so important as a sleeping bag to a comparative literature graduate program?‘
I apologized, and mumbled something about how Penn had obviously habituated me to a different sort of graduate program, altogether.
He grinned, forgiving me. “Yeah, we don’t follow that old Penn style. We’re progressive.”
I nodded, and added for no apparent reason, “Like Columbia?”
“Maybe. I haven’t been there. This is a different world,” he said, gesturing around. The signs were in Korean, now, in the food court, and a large number of people were emerging from what was clearly a Seoul subway station stairway. Yet peering out a large window I could still see the green hills and the harbor with sailboats in the distance. So I had to agree it was a different world.
“I’m really tired,” I finally said.
“You’ll get to sleep, soon. But first, we’re meeting to watch cartoons.” He described a restaurant or bar location across the street from the tents where I would be staying. “Let’s meet there in about 30 minutes.”
“What are we watching,” I asked.
He waxed enthusiastic. “Oh, it’s a fabulous new program,” he exclaimed. “It’s called ‘pork the orkville opiates.'”
This title for a cartoon was so bizarre, so incongruous and yet hilarious, that I began to laugh.
I immediately woke up. Am I the only one who has noticed that a dream state cannot sustain an active, laughing subject? Do I begin to “sleep-laugh” in actual fact, when these dream-laughs occur?
“Orkville,” by the way, isn’t just some random name. When I was maybe 7 or 8 years old, I had a collection of stuffed toys that were perhaps intended to be alligators, but they stood upright and came in unusual colors, like blue and red and yellow. I had decided that these were definitely not alligators (even then, alligators!), but rather “orks.” My mother, a fan of Tolkien before Tolkien fandom was a thing, asked me if Orcs weren’t horrible, brutish and unkind creatures. I told my mother in no uncertain terms that no, those were “C-orcs, spelled with the letter ‘c’.” My orks were “K-orks, spelled with the letter ‘k’.” I clarified that K-orks were, in fact, vegetarians, and lived a communistic life in an amphibious riverine utopia named Orkville. I drew several maps and wrote a constitution for the place. I later invented a language for them, with an abjad writing system. I had one Ork named Barnabus York, and another named Merriweather Shadow. They were metaphysical detectives. I drew geneologies for them stretching back 50 generations, to show they were related.This was when I was 7 or 8. I was smarter when I was a child.
What I’m listening to right now.
Penderecki, “Viola Concerto.”
