Actually, no, I didn't get blood, love, or rhetoric, or even any skulls. It would have been a better dream if I had.
No one should feel obligated to read the ensuing description.
My dreams when I'm stressed (as I have been and will be until, I imagine, I finish and deposit the Goddamned Dissertation) tend to revert to school. Junior high, high school, college, grad school, all kind of churned together, so that while I was panting around the halls of my high school trying to find the class I was supposed to be in, it was a college level class (and my husband, whom I only met in college, was taking it, too), but the person who offered to give me directions (and I said, breezily, "No, no thanks, I'm fine," which is exactly what I would have said to that question in high school and it would have been as much a lie then as it was in the dream) was a substitute teacher I had a crush the size of Rhode Island on in junior high. And papersky and someone I was friends with in junior high were very indignantly filling out complaint forms in the women's bathroom about a graduate-level rhetoric class structured around Melville. The teacher of that class was both the Duchess and the current chair of my department (and a more un-Duchess-like woman I assure you it would be hard to imagine), and the Duke, who was also sort of Lussurioso, was lolling around in bed with a chef named Caput--who does not appear in the play, nor in my memories of school, and I don't know what on earth he was doing in this dream. And I don't know what the Duke's bedroom was doing in my old high school anyway.
Looking at my own description, I see I did get rhetoric. Sort of. And love. Sort of. If you count mad teenage crushes. (Or whatever the Duke and Caput were up to.)
But I don't think there was any blood. Often in these dreams I'm menstruating, but I can't remember if I was in this one or not. Although part of the dream did take place in a women's bathroom, so actually the odds kind of go up that there was blood, too.
ObTomStoppard: "They're hardly divisible, sir -- well, I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can't do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory -- they're all blood, you see."
Right now I'm rather grateful for the fact that I lay my head on the pillow at 11 p.m. and 6 hours later a cat tells me to get up. Nothing seems to happen in between, and maybe just as well.
You know, I have this too. When I remember a dream, it's invariably a nightmare, and since I remember about one dream every two years, they tend to be the sort of nightmares that scar you for life.
Like the one with the flesh-eating thalidomide babies. Man, my subconscious is a dangerous place.
I rarely remember dreams, and now you mention it, they're usually the bad ones! Ho hum. There was a whole series about rats biting me and hanging on to my leg or arm, and a series of 'waking up and then waking up again' dreams, which weren't unpleasant but frustrating.
Same for me. I used to dream and remember every night, but not for quite a while, unless it's especially vivid. And I have to admit I'm curious because don't we all dream every night at a certain level of sleep?
It's also true--at least to a certain extent--that you can train yourself to remember your dreams. I know I didn't start remembering them as vividly as I do now until I had a creative writing teacher in high school who assigned us to keep a dream log. After doing that for a few months (and I kept doing it after the class was over), I found I remembered more about my dreams, and I also started to be able to do lucid dreaming, at least occasionally, which has more than once enabled me to defuse a nightmare before it really started rocking and rolling. My dreams also developed a greater tendency to have a plot, which is either a really good thing or a really bad thing, and I still haven't decided which.
But there are also plenty of nights where I don't remember my dreams at all.
The Revengers Tragedy is as much a black satire as it is anything else. (And I'm not very impressed with a professor who wouldn't point that out--I was introduced to it by my undergrad Ren. drama professor, who noticed I had a thing for the gory and morbid and said gleefully, "Here, you'll love this.") Like many other plays from the period--many of them in my dissertation, come to think of it--it mixes the morbid and the comic and the horrific and the farcical together with a fine disregard for what other centuries' standards of generic decorum would make of the ensuing chimaeras.
I don't know why classes in non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama have to be so lethally stultifying. It's not the playwrights' fault, with Marlowe, Marston, Ford, Webster, and Shirley around--not to mention Tourneur and Middleton. But the class I took was just as dreadful as the class you describe.
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2003-08-13 07:17 am (UTC)I hope your dreams weren't all blood, love, and rhetoric, but I imagine they were.
Was there a skull in a box, too?
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Date: 2003-08-13 07:34 am (UTC)No one should feel obligated to read the ensuing description.
My dreams when I'm stressed (as I have been and will be until, I imagine, I finish and deposit the Goddamned Dissertation) tend to revert to school. Junior high, high school, college, grad school, all kind of churned together, so that while I was panting around the halls of my high school trying to find the class I was supposed to be in, it was a college level class (and my husband, whom I only met in college, was taking it, too), but the person who offered to give me directions (and I said, breezily, "No, no thanks, I'm fine," which is exactly what I would have said to that question in high school and it would have been as much a lie then as it was in the dream) was a substitute teacher I had a crush the size of Rhode Island on in junior high. And
I wish Vindice had shown up, but he didn't.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-13 07:40 am (UTC)But I don't think there was any blood. Often in these dreams I'm menstruating, but I can't remember if I was in this one or not. Although part of the dream did take place in a women's bathroom, so actually the odds kind of go up that there was blood, too.
Great. Now I'm even more disturbed.
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Date: 2003-08-13 07:49 am (UTC)-RAGAD
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Date: 2003-08-13 07:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-13 09:34 am (UTC)Like the one with the flesh-eating thalidomide babies. Man, my subconscious is a dangerous place.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-13 10:04 am (UTC)Um, congratulations?
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Date: 2003-08-13 11:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-13 12:46 pm (UTC)The doorbell dreams were just ... peculiar.
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Date: 2003-08-13 05:48 pm (UTC)Hmmmm.... wonder what I'm missing?
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Date: 2003-08-13 05:53 pm (UTC)I didn't know that until I commented to a friend that I never seem to dream, and she explained it. She's smart. *g*
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Date: 2003-08-13 07:06 pm (UTC)But there are also plenty of nights where I don't remember my dreams at all.
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Date: 2003-08-13 07:23 am (UTC)Eek.
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Date: 2003-08-15 05:20 am (UTC)I don't know why classes in non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama have to be so lethally stultifying. It's not the playwrights' fault, with Marlowe, Marston, Ford, Webster, and Shirley around--not to mention Tourneur and Middleton. But the class I took was just as dreadful as the class you describe.