Nerd dream

I've been having especially vivid dreams lately, a development directly attributable to pregnancy. Usually I don't remember much of my dreams, if at all, but recent mornings leave me feeling confused, like I've just dropped out of an important new part of my life. Some are stressful, some are pleasant, and almost all of them are richly detailed and complex.

Surprisingly, hardly any of the dreams are about the baby. A lot of them have been teaching related, where I either have a great teaching experience or have a panic-y dream of not being prepared for class. This week I had an elaborate mountain climbing dream, in which I was a team member on a serious expedition up a near-vertical mountain face. I also had a drawn-out dream about shopping, of all things, where I find this fantastic coat (that in the light of my awake brain I think supremely ugly) and have to go through all sorts of complications to get one in my size.

But my favorite dream so far is so deliciously geeky that I had to share it. I am my current self, but back at my undergraduate institution for some sort of general assembly of students and alumni. At the end of the assembly, the president announces that they have prepared a special overnight assignment for every person in the room: we are to report to our areas of study, and meet with a professor. We are to select a book, read it overnight, and write a paper on it the next day. 24 hours only.

I guess it says a lot about me that this was not a stress dream: it was a happy dream! When I get to the literature conference room after some delay (I think because I have to find someone to watch Gabriel?), sitting around the table are many of the professors who I had never gotten to take a class with but always wanted to--both from undergraduate and graduate school. Each of them has one book to promote, and I get to sit at the table and hear them talk about a wide selection of books, many of which are outside of my specific area. I end up selecting a medieval text, which (in my dream) I had heard this professor speak on once.

I don't remember how or when the dream ended, but I remember being eager to get home and have a completely sanctioned all-nighter for reading and writing. And I distinctly recall waking up and wishing the dream were real. I know specifically who some of the professors were, and even find myself wishing I could remember what the books were because they all sounded awesome. So. A book geek with her book-geek dream. If there's one sad part about achieving a PhD, it's that I probably will never again get to take literature classes in the same way that I did as an undergraduate and master's/doctoral student--indiscriminately exploring what interested me, having a legitimized excuse to read madly, widely, and deeply.