And those weren’t the oddest features of an absolutely splendid dream I had last night, call it Formal Dress in the American Southwest (FDAS for short). The formal dress was for two simultaneous culminating events of the dream: a formal ball in celebration of a (female) student of mine’s successful defense of an ace PhD dissertation on the texts of German lieder (with special attention to Mozart’s songs); and my marriage to a fabulous Latino named Tony — who strongly resembled the Nick Torres (Wilmer Valderrama), charming and smell-the-testosterone hunky, of recent episodes of the tv show NCIS. (My current imagined dream lover is always named Tony, whatever his race and ethnicity; he used to be called Joe; and before that, he had other names. But the FDAS Tony isn’t just one of my dream lovers, he’s amped all the way up, just as the landscape of the American Southwest is in FDAS, and just as a dissertation celebration and a wedding are in FDAS.)
FDAS was about the lead-up to these dual occasions, set in a stunning hyper-real endless-vista version of the American Southwest, where folks got around in small planes and battered trucks, as well as on horseback, lots of horseback. I’m now pretty hazy about how we all ended up in the red canyons of the Four Corners, and various details have vanished: what was my student’s name? what university were she and I at? how did Tony and I hook up in the first place?
Well, some details in dreams are intensely vivid in ways beyond real life — the locale of FDAS and my FDAS husband, for example — while other crucial details are elided from the dream world, so that a lot of it is just baffling (see the “Nightmare Song” from Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe). There’s not much point in trying to figure out why some things go one way, some the other. But it could be revealing to puzzle out where some of this material might have come from, and it can provide some personal satisfaction to see how a particular dream fits into the larger picture of your current life.
So I’ll tell the story of my last night, which will account for some details of FDAS (like the Mozart songs), as well as showing how FDAS created an enormously satisfying resolution to a difficult, exhausting night. Let’s hear it for the restorative subconscious!
Yesterday, Tuesday, was too hot (90F doesn’t work for me). It was way too hot on Monday, a fact I didn’t discover until I went to edge the ivy on my patio and was nearly done in after getting a foot and a half trimmed. So Tuesday I did the rest of the job at 7 am; incredibly tiring, but I limped through the day.
To bed at 8 pm, Fell asleep almost immediately, but then kept waking up fretfully every 20 or 30 minutes, uncomfortably warm and sweaty (the air-conditioner, in the front of the house, performs poorly in the bedroom, in the back). By 11 I was miserable and my mouth was bone-dry. So I got up, got myself some icewater to sip on, and sat up in the recliner chair in the living room, where it was cooler.
Slept there for three hours. Went back to my bedroom to sleep lying down. My Apple Music was working its way through the complete songs and arias of Mozart — this takes quite a long time — and had reached a recording (by the Chorus Viennensis) of all of Mozart’s secular canons, starting with “Gehn wir im Prater” (“Let’s go to the Prater”, the Viennese amusement part), almost all of which have some characteristically German scatological vocabulary in them, so they are both delightful little pieces and quite memorable.
That’s clearly relevant to FDAS.
I slept more comfortably in my actual bed until 4 am, which was, sort of, 8 hours of sleep, but I didn’t feel at all rested and thought I’d sleep just another little bit.
I was then impelled into this amazing dream, which consumed 2 solid hours. Until I woke, chuckling with pleasure (also desperately needing to whizz). And feeling wonderful. Saved by the dream!
Pictures from dreamworld. Well, I can’t, of course, pipe in any images from my dream. But I can show you real-world images that appeared as transcendent visions in FDAS. Three of them. (Nothing really satisfactory for the formal ball to celebrate a successful defense of a PhD dissertation — an event that, to my knowledge, has never happened in the real world, at least in linguistics.)
The locale of FDAS. The canyonlands of Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado, but (in FDAS) breath-taking in their extent, stretching vast distances under endless skies. The real-world model is something like this:
(#1) From the Off the Beaten Path tour site, on their Supreme Southwest! tour: Capitol Reef National Park in south-central Utah
The FDAS lover. The real-world model of the Latino dream lover Tony is someone like the charming and hunky-hot actor Wilmer Valderrama (a Floridian with a Venezuelan father and a Colombian mother, now gracing tv on NCIS):
(#2) WV on 9/30/12: shirtless in Miami (from the Just Jared site) — openly body-proud, with an easy smile
The wedding couple, Tony and me. In formalwear. In FDAS, I am of course as charming and hunky-hot as Wilmer Valderrama. The real-world models are couples like this one:
(#3) From The Knot wedding-planning site, a gay couple in midnight-blue suits, from a formal Tuscan-inspired wedding at Sunstone Winery in Santa Ynez CA
