I dreamt last night that I was about to hand in my thesis. (I am in fact writing my thesis at the moment, however, I am not supposed to hand it in till February.)
30 minutes before I turned it in, I was suddenly informed that I was expected to give a defense of my thesis on that same occassion. I have always been told that there will be no defense - my thesis will be graded solely on the basis of my thesis paper. So I was very surprised and somewhat alarmed to find out about this, especially because I was told that I had to give my defense in English (which is only my second language), preferrably in a Welsh accent. I knew for sure that I wasn't going to be able to pull off a Welsh accent, but even without the accent I couldn't see how I was ever going to be able to put together a defense in 30 minutes, and I was very nervous.
To make matters worse, I was constantly distracted by my surroundings and couldn't find the time to sit down and actually get something down on paper or put together a power point show or whatever. I found myself at a huge castle-like building, and somehow I ended up in a public bathroom in the basement where there were a row of showers. My elementary school teacher was there for some reason, and she showed me into one of the shower stalls. Unlike the other stalls, it was locked, but she had a key and opened the door. It was a cold, damp, room with white tiles on the walls, and the and the shower in this particular stall looked more like the interior for an old silent movie about a mad scientist conducting ruthless experiments in his lab than a shower: Underneath the shower a big cage-like thing, made of dark, massive iron was erected. My old teacher told me that the shower had been built in the 1920s as a special shower for children who were stricken with polio-induced paralysis. My teacher's own sister had apparently had polio, and my teacher had often helped her to use the shower, sitting in the cage which would hold the paralysed child upright while the water poured down on her. My teacher then showed me a short music video she had made with one of my old class mates from elementary school, in which the kid was seated in the cage, while classical music played. It was a strangely beautiful video, meant to thematicize the difficulties of being young and different, and I commended her on it.
All this took up so much of my time that I actually never got around to writing my thesis defense, and I woke up before I ever got to the part where I had to give the defense.
18.10.2009
06.10.2009
Last night I dreamt that I was in an Indiana Jones movie. On the fictional level at that - I was one of the characters. I'm not entirely sure what my part in the movie was, but a real-life ex-flame of mine, Giovanni, was also in the movie, as the villain.
The rest of the characters included Indiana Jones, Indiana Jones's father Henry Sr. (as played by Sean Connery) and Willie from Temple of Doom, and the artefact they were after in this movie was some kind of holy/magic book, possibly the Bible. To open the book, however, you had to find some kind of rock and a fake moustache (?).
Indy had succesfully retrieved these two objects somewhere in Syria and in the scene I remember most clearly, Indy, Willie and I were opening the book by putting the rock into some kind of hole and then placing the fake moustache next to the book. However, the book proved to be so powerful that it started burning after Indy opened it, flames emerging from its pages. Being mineral, the rock was unharmed by the fire, but the flames quickly devoured the fake moustache, and this caused Indy to worry: Henry Sr., who was not in this scene, had been after the rock, the fake moustache and the book for years, and Indy dreaded having to tell his father that he'd managed to destroy the fake moustache.
This was the set-up for the subsequent scene where Indy was reunited with his father and had to tell him what happened. He gleefully told him about the book and the rock, but hemmed and hawed like a nervous schoolboy when he came to the part about the fake moustache. He finally admitted that the moustache had burned, but to everyone's surprise, Henry Sr just. shrugged it off: "Of courshe it burned, Junior, it'sh a moustache! What did you exshpect!" he said in that Sean Connery way of his. As it turned out, you could use any old fake moustache you wanted to open the book - it was only the rock that mattered. Duh!
There was also a scene in which Willie had some dialogue, but I don't remember what she said. All I remember is that I noticed that she seemed to have undergone a personal development and become more mature than she was in Temple of Doom. In a very meta moment, I made a mental note to myself to remember to post an entry about this on the imdb message board for the movie. Being the girly girl that I am, I also noticed that she looked a lot prettier than she did in Temple of Doom: She was wearing a stylish red and black dress and her curls were softer and less frizzy.
Finally there was the last scene of the movie. In the scene, Giovanni, Henry Sr and I were all present while Indy bid Willie a tender goodbye, and Willie said: "Well, gee, Indy, thanks for all the adventures then... and, well, thanks for all the sex, I guess." A very random and inappropriate thing to say with everyone standing about, and Giovanni, Henry Sr and I all gave each other looks of WTF. Willie shrugged at our reaction and exclaimed "Well...!", and that's the last thing I remember from the dream. Something tells me that nobody is going to call me up and ask me to be a co-writer for the Indy 5 script.