The Thesis Defense

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.