I woke up this morning in the middle of a vivid dream, in which I'd come up with a new beginning paragraph to a research paper I'm working on in my real, daytime life. As I began to fully awaken, I realized that while this was not the
best opening paragraph I'd ever come up with, it involved accurate and relevant citations, dates, and authors. It was even a not-half-bad way of introducing my subject (again, the subject of an actual paper I'm writing for a class I'm really taking) using topics readers would already be familiar with. In other words, it's official. I now work in my sleep.
Beats worrying about work in your sleep. I have nightmares about losing control of classes I'm teaching, and the students just end up laughing at me. Also about showing up to school a week late, because I got the calendar wrong. Give me a good relaxing dream about a footnote any day of the week.
ReplyDeleteI've had both these kinds of dreams--composing papers, and failing to write papers by the deadline, which happens to be tomorrow, for a 1000-page paper, which omigod I didn't even know was assigned and omigod omigod I'm not wearing any pants! I've also had dreams in which I speak fluent German, a skill I do not possess in waking life.
ReplyDeleteWhat was amazing about this dream was that it was *not* an anxiety dream, just paragraph-composition. Which I guess is a bit like your dream of speaking fluent German.
ReplyDeleteTangentially related: one of my students mentioned to me that she's had anxiety dreams about my class. Is it wrong that I find this kind of cool?
I once dreamed that I'd solved a math problem I was working on---i.e., against which I'd been banging my head for the better part of a day. I got up, wrote the idea down and went back to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I'd forgotten the whole event, until I went to my desk and found a really elegant solution sitting there on my scratch pad.
ReplyDeleteWas it Fermat's Theorem?
ReplyDelete