Dreamwork

I'm not one to leave questions unanswered, though sometimes it takes awhile. Here, Theo, are my Dreamwork answers (see post I Quit My Job...).

Theo wrote: Ah! Dreams! Now you have stumbled into one of my life-long pursuits. As a practitioner and advocate of dreamwork, I would recommend "working" this dream a bit and not being content with the rather simple conclusion that your subconscious is telling you to be happy with the job you have. (Though that is not a bad conclusion, mind you.)

Answer some questions:

Q: Who is this math teacher to you? What qualities do you identify her with? What virtues or weaknesses?
A: She isn't even a teacher. She's another Orthodox single mom in town. Actually she isn't someone I know well; I would like to get to know her, which is not automatically true of OSMs--people think, somehow, that all OSMs think alike and must all band together but that's not so. She is back to living in a small garden apartment, which is something I'm determined not to do...I'm going back to renting but something bigger. She posts a lot about getting out of the house and having fun, which is something I ought to be doing more of. I see her as having a lot of strength to have to live in the same small town as her ex.

T: Other than being where your sister lives, what are your associations with Las Vegas (Sin City!)? Why is this the background against which this inner drama takes place? How do you FEEL about Las Vegas?
H: Actually, I don't have a Sin City association with LV. I love my sister but we have little in common. I've only been there once, in 2003, and it was with parents, sister, child. My life is mind-numbingly clean (remember, I am Orthodox and have a young child) and if that changed it would not be in LV. I have postponed visits there the past few years since my sis moved there, though, because of post-graduate work and airfare shooting up.

T: What other interactions have you ever had with this assistant super? Other than scary, what qualities do you associate with her?
H: I don't think she likes me, probably because I'm not a shrinking violet. But I've become one around her. Two years ago, after I was forced to stand for three hours straight to proctor a test and sat down for one minute because my back hurt, still keeping an eye on the students, she walked in and tried to get me reported. Luckily someone intervened and it didn't happen.

T: Did the building with the long hall this took place in remind you of another building, or a combination of other buildings in your waking life? What are your associations with those buildings? What happened there?

H: The only building I can think of is one at MIT, that has one of the longest corridors in the world. The other long one is Ceaucescu's Palace in Bucharest, and while I have seen it I've never been inside. I was in the MIT one in the 80s with a boyfriend who went there (the one over which you had to hold my head as I was throwing up from drinking too much over...was that 1994? and then you and Szilvi dragged me to the Ipoly cafe across the street. What a memory to dredge up).

So, assuming the endless corridor has to do with the ex-boyfriend...well, I don't see a connection. I did use to have an annoying variety of dreams on the same theme--his rejecting me again. But those mostly stopped when I got married, and stopped altogether when I found out that in real life he was the one being rejected--that after all his fancy degrees he couldn't even make it in academia and is teaching middle school in a state with a lousy ed system. But again, the corridor/building I was in looked neither like MIT nor Ceaucescu's Palace.

T:What was the overall emotional tone of the dream or the parts of the dream? How do you feel to remember it?
H: Mostly I felt confused...like why is it taking us so long to reach someone in this corridor? Anxiety--I need to get settled already! When the supe told me that there were no jobs there, I struggled and struggled to wake myself up, was really trying to pull myself out.


So there you go, Theo. Have fun with this one.