Torpedoed
(I wrote this yesterday, but am late posting it because I've been having some weird technical issues. For some reason, when it's cold and/or rainy, I have trouble connecting to the Internet. Weird, no?)
Today's entry title is a reference to the dream that woke me up at 5:15 this morning, heart pounding. This is not really what I'm looking for in a Sunday morning--or any morning, frankly, but for some reasons Sundays in particular seem they should have a special kind of restful languor to them, a concession to decadence before diving into the work week. (Leaving aside, of course, that my schedule-free life makes this notion completely irrelevant. Consider it cultural conditioning.) "Restful languor" and "torpedoes" really are not mixy things.
As you can probably guess, though, I'm in a bit of a panic. Time is in a weird state, somehow expanding and contracting all at once. I have approximately 1.4 gazillion things to do in the next six months or so, and trying to figure out my priorities and how long each of those things will take is more complicated than I think it should be. Most of those things have to do in some way with my dissertation, so I will spare you the details in the hope that at least someone will emerge sane from this process. I was telling Dario about my dream earlier, and then later in our conversation he asked how my dissertation was coming along. "It's the torpedo," I told him. He thought that was funny; maybe it will be once the mention of it stops making my heart pound all over again. ("It" in the previous sentence refers, in this case, to both the torpedo and my dissertation. I take their similar effects on my cardiovascular system as further evidence of a connection.)
I'm not generally very good at remembering my dreams, so my recall is a bit fuzzy. Mainly I remember sitting on my living room floor in front of a strange contraption with lots of mysterious colored wires that seemed to be attached to an even more mysterious black box. There was a numerical display, and if a time appeared on the display I was supposed to push a button to keep... something from happening. I don't remember exactly why I had this contraption in my living room, or where my mission came from. I do remember worrying that maybe I hadn't understood my instructions completely, since pushing the button seemed to do nothing more than reset the timer to 0. Still, I somehow knew that this job was important, even though it meant spending what felt like hours just sitting in front of a usually blank display screen.
Mostly I think this aspect of my dream is just a sign that I've been watching too much Chuck (a show I am loving more and more every week, by the way).
Anyway, as assignments go, this one was a piece of cake, right? Well, I thought so. In fact, I started to get bored; staring continuously at a digital whatsit wasn't terribly compelling. My dream mind started to drift, although I was sure I was paying close enough attention to keep pressing the buttons when numbers appeared.
There are three possibilities here, and dream me wasn't sure which one was right. Either a) I was given false instructions, b) I was given the right instructions but somehow got mixed up, just as I feared, or c) I wasn't being as attentive as I thought. In any case, the end result was the same: a shadow fell over my living room, I looked up, and my huge window gave me a perfect view of a huge missile bearing down on me. I launched myself to the right, into the kitchen, just as it came crashing through my window and plowed through my apartment, continuing through the rest of the building. Parts of which were already starting to collapse as they found themselves suddenly without key support elements. Somewhere, even my dream brain was wondering about gas mains and electrical fires, and water from broken pipes was quickly filling the room.
I woke up panting, terrified about Fred--where was she? would I be able to find her and calm her enough to get her out? was she hurt?--and my laptop, the other center of my universe.
Both were safe, but my morning wasn't off to the best start. And that torpedo? Totally my dissertation. Which, uh, is calling right now.