oddly_specific_recurring_dream epitome of incomprehensibility Picture a town trapped in the name of a past prison. Most outsiders won't know that the two syllables refer to anything else, if they know their sound at all. But if you take in the whole panorama, say on Wikipedia, you see trees and houses and cars and a history stretching out before and after. In the blur of early 2021, a sample sentence in your online German exercise mentions Innsbruck. You've heard the name before, but it strikes you as peculiarly British-sounding for something mentioned in a German lesson, and you interrupt your lesson to find out where it is. You prefer not to use Google, over fears of further distraction, so you heft up the old National Geographic Atlas of the World, the one you opened to stand on Antarctica when you were six. Index. Innsbruck. Austria (everything_relates_to_Austria). You turn to page 154. G-12. It barely escapes the crease between pages. From there your eye travels up. Nearly due north, inside neighbouring Germany, are the six letters of the place you condemned an avant-garde Austrian composer to die in. You feel...wrong. Not about the composer exactly - she's imaginary - but about the town. And you're annoyed at the distraction this engenders. Why are you always distracted by emotions? Also, why the emotions? Who gave you the right to be emotional about this? Anger ensues, tries to be diverted, but it's like the Danube, drawn to a certain course. As expected, your brother finds your riff on a joke out of Valois_Park objectionable; you really shouldn't point to the town on a map and tell him it's where the people with ADHD should go. He's got good people-intuition and can sense submerged self-hatred. Also, you're simply pissing him off. Better to go to your dad in his study and distract him from his work with angst that he'll assign to the confusing realm of teenage bleeding_calculators. "Why didn't the town change its name?" He doesn't understand why it upsets you. But first you chose to attack your brother with the atlas, in an abstracted act of violence. Is this why your guilt throws "Dachau being in the wrong place" into the recurring-dream pile? It's not constant, but it's happened at least five times. A few nights ago. You're at the Cornerstone art store in Kingston, where you see a miniature wooden paddle and decide this should be a present for your brother. It's like his real-life present from the summer camp, in honour of ten years of working there. Gracefield is one of the two camps in Quebec run by the Presbyterian Church of Canada, speaking of oddly specific things. The clerk wraps it in brown paper, and you're about to give her the address. But she says - trying neither to frown nor to smile excessively - "Oh yes, I know, it's rather infamous" and she scrawls "Dachau, Quebec" on the paper. Permanent marker. (No street address, I notice now.) Of course, it doesn't always show up in Quebec. Sometimes it's in Ontario. Once it was in its actual place, and I'd slept in the town without realizing it. But it's never about the horrors straight on, about 30,000 people dying; it's mostly the name, the fear of going new places, and guilt, irrelevant guilt. And these days, as 2022 slowly turns the dial from winter to spring, one cannot simply avoid marking essays. One has to attack the dream from the side by spending an afternoon on the piano composing a review of Trout Mask Replica set to the tune of Pachelbel's canon, just to address the third song: If you think there shouldn’t be Anything like World War 3, Do what Captain Beefheart did With the velar fricative; He turned it into a “Stop! Please don’t let the third one drop; That would be quite awful news— Call it Nagasaki Blues." Phonetics explanation: he pronounced it "Dakau". Better than what you came up with back in the summer of 2019: dash-OW, with the accent on the wrong syllable and the fricative palatalized. Wanting to make things more palatable. Is that the problem? Is humour the issue? Which of the four? Horsemen of the apocalypse? Doing a whole review with multiple songs would be slightly funny, in a meme-ish sort of way, but sometimes it's time to sleep. 220306 ... kerry [e_o_i, i drank this up with my morning coffee. it seems like so often we're the only ones who actually find our own dreams interesting. you have a knack for bringing them to light (life? both)] 220306 ... e_o_i Thanks! I've been interested in hearing about dreams since I was a kid. I remember being in my elementary school lunchroom (grade 4 or 5), absorbed in the talk at the next table because people there were retelling dreams. So I was surprised to hear dreams stereotyped as a boring topic of conversation. And pleased to see, years later, that blather_red denizens tend not to share that view. I guess it depends who tells them, in what context, and what the hearer thinks...but I could say that about anything. ... This particular one I wish would go away, or provide some closure, or explain itself. No explanation was needed for the syntax-tree dreams. I'm doing advanced syntax in the fall, I think, so perhaps I'll start dreaming about advanced trees. :) 220307 ... e_o_i Last night, my last night in Arden this summer. Because of the other guests, I left the "suite" and stayed in a mattress on the floor of my aunt's room. At first I thought I'd have trouble falling asleep. My nose twitched from dust allergies. I was lowered in the world. But my mind slowly wound down into sleep mode. It just tore me awake early, before the rooster crowed. Dream: my parents were in Munich, Germany for a conference. Mom called to say that they arrived there safely and they were staying in a hotel in Dachau because it was cheaper. No, I said. Don't. You won't be able to sleep. I thought: please don't drag Dad to see the concentration camp museum; he said he already saw Yad Vashem and that was enough. Mom: I don't see what the problem is. We're just staying at a hotel. Me: But it's bad luck... Mom: Is that fair to the people who live there? (or maybe this was my own thought) Anyway, I woke up, heart pounding. The white wardrobe at my head towered like a monolith as I lay on my back, looking up. I closed my eyes, telling myself to stop it about that town. What about alternately being afraid of living forever and dying forever? I asked myself. Isn't that what you're supposed to angst about when you wake unexpectedly? But I don't care about eternity, returned my mind unexpectedly. I mean I can't feel anything about that. It's abstract and this is real. And then the image of light fading behind my eyes melted-melded with what I'd been looking at often that week, wax pooling and drying on fabric. I fell back asleep, to wake again with the rooster, and then to snooze until 8:30. ... Even last year, I avoided writing about this for a while. Avoided saying it was one of the things that made it hard to sleep on the 2021 trip to David's mom's house in Toronto (in 2020, I was only terrified beforehand - going new places + pandemic nervousness though cases were at a lull - but I slept well once there). And then I got a dream that made it darkly amusing rather than scary...and though anger/guilt kicked in at my mind associating innocence with violence, I thought such a thing would be worth exploring. But the Gracefield connection is stupid coincidence, just due to one English word having the catch-all meaning of an away-from-home place that people might stay overnight in groups: Gracefield is like Dachau in that you heard about the "camp" before the town, okay, I get it, very funny. Blame Sapir-Whorf, who seem one entity, like a swirl of wax applied too liberally on a still-forming batik. 220820 ... e_o_i (at least my dream_mind got the geography right, though not my dad's environment-based reluctance to fly overseas again) 220820 ... e_o_i This is annoying. Last night again, after I was pleased to note I'd been dreaming about finding surreal things in the motel room, including a "nest of crabs" when a square tile was removed from the floor. They were being cultivated for eating or scientific study, and a biologists type came in to separate two fighting ones. But in a dream soon after, I was walking out of a screening of a horror movie, angered that they'd set a scene in you--know what place: "They didn't put children in bubbling liquid poison. It was bad enough without..." "Didn't happen," cheerfully interjected a plump and confident woman who was sitting in my group. She reminded me vaguely of Shannon, although black instead of white. She pulled up her sleeve covering her shoulder to reveal a tattoo of two white lightning bolts like the SS logo. Then I was in some Concordia hallway telling this to the Sociolinguistics prof. "Not that she can do much with it" ("it" meaning her racism, apparently) "as a black woman in Canada. No offense," I tacked on, realizing I was speaking to another black Canadian who might not like the phrasing "not being able to do much" (I meant that it'd be hard for her to get accepted by your typical white racists). "No, you're exactly right," said dream-Jacqueline. That's why I dream - to have folks tell me I'm exactly right! But this recurring theme is wearying and I don't know WHY it's happening. Something to do with Shannon? The novel? My fear of going places? Superstition about "bad luck"? Maybe it's just self-perpetuating at this point and I need to stop worrying. 220821 ... e_o_i I think I figured this out. Somewhat. It's about guilt - "irrelevant guilt," as I wrote back in March. The idea that my past violence has indelibly stained my character, just as others' violence clings to this town's name. Now that I've written that down, it sounds ridiculous. Who's making inappropriate comparisons? I am/was - which also seemed to be the conclusion of my last dream about this, at least judging by the incongruous purple curtains (or maybe dark red - my colour_memory isn't great). But it starts out as England-related dream_travel, with me as a dream exchange student: I wake up in a shabby room in dream Oxford. I'm at the bottom of a bunk bed, staring up at the ceiling. Across from me is another bunk bed. I'm telling my roommate that Oxford starts later than other universities, so I still have two weeks to travel. "Yeah," she says, adjusting her blond ponytail. She looks young, a newly minted undergrad. I'm an undergrad too, but more my real age. "But," she adds, "it starts in more like one week." "Oh." Perhaps I should be buying books instead of what I'm thinking of doing, which is dashing off to Hamburg to meet up with David when he's at a conference there. Julia is in the bunk above mine. She peers over the side. A couple of curls drape over her forehead. With some anxiety, she asks me if I've canceled the two classes I began at Concordia before I left. "N-no." I didn't think that was necessary. I thought the university would understand I was no longer taking them. "You need to do that," she admonishes. "Like right now." Instead, I end up somewhere in northern Germany. The square I'm in looks like the one around Mount Royal metro, and indeed I'm near some sort of travel hub, though I don't know what town I'm in. My task is to seek out bus and train schedules so I can get myself to Hamburg, but I'm distracted by two large rectangles on an outside wall that isn't really a wall. It's either the side of a stalled boxcar, or a cardboard barrier set up to aid construction. Inside the rectangles are pictures. The one nearest me is framed in purple or burgundy curtains. Heavy, carnival-style. Inside seems to be some sort of cabaret, with people singing and dancing on a stage behind it the rectangular peephole. The surface changes to a flat screen showing grainy, black and white film. A line of men in grey striped uniforms shuffle past the camera's fixed gaze. I can't see their faces because they're looking down, dazed or dejected. This is from or about Dachau; now I see the name written in all caps below the screen. The initial cheery song disturbs me, as do the purple curtains. They seem incongruous. They seem like me. But the picture/play/video reminds me of my plan: visit the Dachau concentration camp museum, so I can stop having dreams with that name in it. (Logic!) I'll have to do this before David gets to Hamburg, so I can get to see him in time. But it's becoming increasingly uncertain whether I'll see him this trip. He wasn't at Oxford either. I'm wondering how many transfers I'll have to make to get there. Where is that train/bus listing? I walk farther away from what looks like Mount Royal station, and a few steps in that direction brings me to the second rectangle in the wall. The image inside it is similar: all men, except here they're looking out, starved and anxious. "That's better," I think, just because there's no music or circus curtains. More appropriate. But I see the label underneath - Buchenwald - and think, "No, no, that's the wrong place." 220924 ... e_o_i That last one... I don't really think dreams are prophetic...or only prophetic insofar as they mix up already experienced/imagined things and life has a way of repeating itself somewhat...but consider: -I'm planning to meet David in England this June before he goes to a conference in Hungary. -I'm going to Germany first. In three and a half days. And the above dream was before I thought of going there for a language immersion class. I think I heard about the Kassel program in November. -My classmate who did the Kassel program last year is also named Julia. -Dachau IS the wrong place. It's Sachsenhausen. That's where the course people are taking us the day before the Queer Berlin tour - and I guess specific outings are optional, but why was *fear* my reaction? David is right: "It's not like they also have a time machine!" Because it did upset me back in, when, January? when I noticed "Sachsenhausen" on the calendar and suspected what it was even though I couldn't remember hearing or reading the name before. At least it couldn't get lodged in my head as much because of a) the aforementioned unfamiliarity and b) my sound-meaning interface strives to redirect it to Stockhausen, avant-garde composer. So I can return to my fear_of_flying, or not flying, or forgetting something...like sleeping. I should remember to sleep. (How_to_sleep, that IS the question.) 230428 ... e_o_i I thought of writing up "dream_camp" yesterday but I was afraid I'd reinvite this dream. Well, it happened last night anyway - only slightly. The focus was mostly on wacky situations and creatures like dream_dog. But there was a part near the end where my novel character Tamra told me matter-of-factly that she survived Place with Medial Velar_Fricative. I tried to convince her, "No, that's impossible - you've lived in Canada your whole life." "Yes, but it *was* in Canada." Forehead furrowed. /gɹejx.fild/? But immer_immersion Miriam, real person, had family die in not-Gracefield, bringing this too close in another way. Still far, but too close. 231204 what's it to you? who go blather from