CAVEAT DVMPTRVCK

Most dreams seem like rehashes of old material, poorly or incompletely executed at best. But occassionally something really strange comes along. This morning I was dreaming something like a crime-procedural (a la CSI). But the specific situation involved investigating a dead person's past work history at a university library. This latter is the connection to my subconscious's accumulation of experience – I spent far too much time in university libraries, when younger. But I was the investigator, in this dream-story.

I had found a book that had been checked out by the deceased person in 1979, with those old-style check-out cards, and it had a date-stamp and their name written by hand on a list glued into the front cover of the book, in that old style libraries used to use to check out books, before computers and bar codes and all of that. So I wanted to take the book as evidence of something – I'm not sure what, but in the dream, it was important, as it showed something critical to the case I was building. But taking the book was a problem – I went to check it out, and the first thing that happened was some idiotic student worker at the library said, "…well, this book hasn't been checked out since 1979, so we need to put in a bar code and a new computer-printed information page."

He moved to remove the sticker in the front of the book with the deceased person's name on it. And I said, "Wait! That's the part that I need – that's why I want to check out the book."

This boggled the mind of the student worker, so I asked to see the supervisor. No one could even understand what I was talking about – even when I began referencing the fact that there had been a murder and that I was trying to get this book as evidence. I considered just taking the book as evidence through some kind of crime-scene confiscation scheme – but for some procedural reason I didn't have access to that pathway of action.

Finally, I was talking to some head librarian. "Why won't anyone help me solve this problem?" I asked. The woman was memorable – she resembled someone I actually knew in college. She didn't even look up from her work. She grimmaced, as if to say, 'how could this man be so ignorant?' And she said, simply, "You put a crook in their craw."

I woke up with a start. Why? The phrase was striking, and puzzling. Was it a real expression? It seemed familiar, to me, as I mulled it over in my waking-up brain. I couldn't shake the expression – it was sticking with me. Finally, I googled it. Nothing for "crook in their craw." A hits few for "crook in his craw" and "crook in my craw." There are enough hits – mostly in the comments parts of websites – to believe that it's a real expression, and not just a conjuration of my overactive imagination. But it's definitely not very common. It seems to be a southernism – perhaps it entered my mind while in the military, or via my mother, who occassionally lets her youth in Arkansas show through her layers of dialectical detritus. What is a crook in a craw? It's something that bends you out of shape. It's something that annoys you.

So in the dream, I was annoying those people. And I still don't know why, as I was distracted by the language used by the person who was trying to explain to me that I was annoying them. Is that annoying?