> [clip]
> Carrol's nightmare. This is quite funny.
Chuck didn't notice that I had sent the post off-list to him, so the list doesn't have the dream. Here it is.
======= I have to tell this tale to someone, though the non-written dissertation in it was in a dream. (I started grad school in January of 1955, got my degree in November of 1964, so that was fairly long.) The story.
After the events of the late '60s I ended up as what I tended to label a "tenured temp" for quite a few years. Heavy load, no advanced classes, few raises. Then in 1985 I go a major article accepted at _Milton Studies_ and more or less reentered the human species. I was beginning to take anti-depressants at about that time, and one side effect of ADs is that they generate super-realistic nightmares (so realistic that sometimes it's hard to remember whether or not the events of them actually occurred or not).
The Nightmare.
I was at a party of some sort. All academics. Quite a few of whom I did not know. I was in my '60s (my actual age at the time was 55). I was still working on my dissertation. I was desperately trying to find a brief parenthetical way of 'explaining' that fact. That is, the problem (as defined in the dream) was to explain/rationalize without seeming to be explaining/rationalizing. That is why it had to be parenthetical, off the cuff as it were. I couldn't let myself appear as wanting to explain (as 17th century aristocratic poets couldn't appear to want their poems published) but had to sneak in an explanation without appearing to explain. It is the only dream in my whole life which continued (and even continues 15 years later) to make me shudder.
Addendum: There was a man at Michigan who finished his degree when he was over 60. He died of a heart attack the summer after he finished.
Carrol