August 29 Dreams

1. I was climbing on boulders that had split off from layers of rock. I thought of the forces which had lifted up the mountains and felt grateful for the teachers who had led me to understand such things.

(This part was longer but I only rehearsed it in my mind after waking and didn’t write any of these down until later in the day.)
I was hanging around the Geology Department because, although I am not a geologist, my training in physics helped me appreciate the forces within the earth and their effects.
A professor and the department secretary were discussing plans for a surprise party for another professor who was retiring.

“It will have to be on a Thursday.”

“Well, it can’t be tomorrow, because there’s not enough time to prepare.”

“Then it will have to be next week, because that’s the last Thursday in April, and after that everyone will be busy with finals and graduation.”

2. I got a receipt from Central District Conference for our church’s latest contribution. There were several penciled cursive notes from the conference secretary on the form. She noted that it was more than our previous contribution and wondered if we had a new member.

She had written the names and addresses of our only members that she knew about, which I recognized as the last two people to join. One of them was a veterinarian and she asked if he should be listed with the title of Dr. The notes ended with a request for me to complete the membership roster.

3. When I got home there was a lot of mail to go through. The telephone company had sent a thin phone book in a white cover dated 10/05 with just the Ames listings, and a thicker one in a similar cover dated 12/05 with the usual contents.

I opened the thick book to see where area code 563 was.

Notes after the fact

During the daytime I was climbing over rocks just like that. (This was along the Yuba River in the Sierra Nevada mountains.)

 

My sister teaches geology at a community college (but she’s nowhere near ready to retire!).
The receipt looked just like the carbonless duplicate form that I include when I send a check to CDC.
If the dream was detailed enough to include the names of the recent new members, I don’t remember them, but one of them might have been of Japanese origin. A book I was reading this week included a Japanese man who was passed off as a veterinarian. (And now I can’t recall what book that was, unless it was Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut.)

I got a missed call from area code 563 on my cell phone during the trip, and at the time of the dream I hadn’t found where the list of area codes was hidden in the phone book in the motel. (Later I found it in the yellow pages under Area Codes rather than in the front matter.) (Someone at church suggested it might be meaningful to look at number 563 in the hymnal.)

Those are the only private meanings I can assign to these images. I’ll be interested to hear what they suggest to the rest of you.

(One of our members is a dentist who had to retire due to disabilities and has been somewhat at a loss as to what he is to do with his life now. The question in the dream about whether someone is still entitled to be addressed as Doctor seems to me to be a very obvious reference to this, but nobody else caught it.)

[Dreamed in 2005 and originally published in 2006.]

 

 

Tags:

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 13:03 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.