My latest dream

"His hands, moreover, were rather broad, but ended in long tapering fingernails; and he used them when he spoke (and he spoke in an almost incessant stream, although Hans Castorp could not quite comprehend what was said) in a series of exquisite gestures that reviewed his listeners' interest--the subtly nuanced, well-chosen, precise, tidy, cultured gestures of an orchestra conductor--a forefinger bent to form a circle with a thumb or a palm held out wide, but with tapering nails, to caution, to subdue, to demand attention, only to disappoint his now smiling, attentive listeners with one of his very robustly prepared, but incomprehensible phrases; or rather, he did not so much disappoint people as transform smiles into looks of delighted amazement, because the robustness, subtlety, and significance of the preparation largely compensated, even after the fact, for what he failed to say and produced a satisfying, amusing, and enriching effect all its own"--The Magic Mountain

"Are you Prince Philip?" "Oh, bugger off, you tit!" "I knew it was him!"--Spitting Image

Last night I dreamed I was visiting London to accompany a group of schoolgirls led by a Dickensian schoolmarm, then getting separated from them on the subway:  the doors closed on me before I could board the train they were already on.  Then I went to street level and wondered where to find them, then I met some French schoolgirls who knew where they were because they'd heard it through the grapevine. (I referred to my own schoolgirls as "the little monkeys," and they knew what my reference meant!) I also said that it was exactly ten years since I'd arrived in London to research my Ph.D. thesis, though it's actually over twenty.  I was admitting that the thesis was a dead end for me and wished I could get a job as a librarian in a place that specialized in history books!

Later I dreamed that I was trying to write this dream down in a book that was already largely full, in the Mount Allison University physics building where Father used to have an office, wearing a blanket in a snowstorm and having to leave our Sackville house because the federal government was forcing brownouts to reduce global emissions,. (I also dreamed of explaining what happened in Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-Four.)