8/28 Notes

Now I am not sure if Professor Sexson wanted me to do this but over the past three years it has become habit to pay special attention in his classes and make my notes more detailed than I do in other classes. So here is my notes from the introduction session of our class.

Classmates, please forgive me if I don't get your dream absolutely correct or your name. I was so engrossed in your dreams that I forgot to write them down right away and so did this by memory. If I don't have your dream on this list, I will add it later as well as link it to your own blog about your dream.

• Logan dreamed about Bill Crosby's heading floating while he, Logan, stood on the edge of building. Good ole Bill encouraged Logan to jump until Logan finally gave into peer pressure and did so.
• Ashley has stuck to tradition and involved puppies into one of the class activities that we will all most remember. She dreamed of giving birth to a black puppy after enduring the longest pregnancy known to man as I have never heard of a pregnancy lasting years.
• Hannah's most memorable dream showed her parents being kidnapped by the Sesame Street Monsters to the basement and the subsequent rescue attempts.
• Rachel introduced us to the idea of lucid dreams. Her lucid dream incorporated clones of her family and her quest to kill the clones while finding her real parents and brother. It was very relieving to find that she succeeded but disturbing that she had to repeat the process with her entire town! 
• Derek told of his childhood dream of sitting alone on top of a hill and being able to look out and see nothing but land before him. 
• Abbie spoke of her dreams within a dream.
• Sara will be showing a film of her dream at some point this semester.
• On retrospect, I couldn't quite remember Jenny's dream as for some reason I can only remember that she dreamt it in Idaho this summer during the fires that raged over this part of the nation.
• Matthew dreamt about Reggis and him hanging out.
• Lana won a gold medal but the part that has stumped us all is for what she won this precious prize.
• Pirates are the thing that Hunter's subconscious had him dream about. He told us a tale of pirates and being hung to death on the ship.
• Sydney revealed to us her fear of fish and how she is forced to face this fear in her sleeping state. 

Professor Sexson spoke of Charles Addams and his skill with nesting in his cartoons, specifically the one using mirrors in a barbershop. He asked is any of us could find it. I have found one but I am not completely sure that this is exactly the one but check it out any ways as it is pretty cool looking. Click here to link to a better copy of the photo that I wasn't able to copy onto my blog. 

Another place that we have all see nesting throughout our life is on the Quaker Oats box. Look carefully next time you go to the grocery shopping and you will be able to see how the label has been nested indefinitely.

Midsummer Night's Dream

• 4 levels
• Gods (Oberon & Titania)
• Aristocrats (Theseus & Hypolita)
• Normal everyday people
• Bottom or Rude Mechanicals
• Only Bottom is able to associate at the top
• Thus the top goes to the bottom and the bottom goes to the top
• A.S. Byatt
• Djinn in the Nighting Gale's Eye
• speaks of her love of the Arabian Nights or the 1001 Nights of Scherazade

Assignments for Thursday 8/30/2012

• Research nesting box, nesting,  strange loops, etc...
• Read 1st Act of A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Blog about "What do you know today that you didn't know before?"
• Blog about the dream that you described in class

My Trial Dream

 The dream that I spoke about in class today was a fairly recent one, which is understandable as my mind has understandably been more focused on the future since the ending of last semester. At the end of last semester, I was embarking on the final year of my undergraduate degree. I have reached the point in time that all of us must face the facts that MSU will no longer be my home, my haven, and most of my world. My universe will soon expand beyond my sorority obligations and routines, beyond having bosses instead of professors, and beyond the comforting fact that while failure is an option, I always have support to cushion the damage. Once I throw that cap in the air and receive my diplomas, I will officially be a part of the "real world". So having a dream that illustrates those fears is completely normal.
To give a little more of a background before going into the dangerous place, that is my mind, you, my dear readers, need to know a little about my life. I am entering my 5th year at MSU as well as my 5th year as an integral part of Alpha Gamma Delta sorority at MSU. At the beginning of my sophomore year, I learned of Leadership Consultants. This is an ideal job for anyone who love AGD, wants time to figure their life out after graduating, and loves meeting new people while traveling. Needless to say, I was instantly intrigued and have worked ever since in order to become a candidate for these coveted positions. In order to get to the point where I feel like I have done everything possible to be in the running, I have ran the finances for the Chapter, been President for 2 years, and been most kinds of -Cat on campus such as E-cat and AdvoCat.
 But now to the part that you are truly interested in. My dream started out with me filling out the application, making it to the next round of the selection process with a conference call. Both the application and conference call went fabulously! My recommendations were superb, I had studied to make sure that I was up-to-date on all AGD facts, trivia, and procedures. I was completely confident in my ability to make a good, not make that a wonderful, impression on my interviewers. I would even go so far as to say that I was probably so confident that I was smiling and looked smug in my dreaming state! I finally arrive in Indianapolis and walk into the interview room. It is a medium sized conference room with a long table and one lone chair sitting facing the table. At the table was a mix of familiar and new people. Some I had known from a far, some I had had personal contact with, and some I had no idea who they were. All of them looked perfectly groomed, professional, and a little intimidating. The head of the committee asked me to sit down in a flat mono-tone voice. The kind of voice I had previously associated with principals inviting in naughty children. My apprehension immediately started. The first questions they asked were pretty basic, like my name, did I have a good flight, what offices I had held, etc... But then they started to get progressively harder but I managed to stumble my way through them. A cold sweat had now started to run down my back. The questions got harder again and I was starting to fail as well as lose all of my confidence. As I started to think that the interview must be ending, they asked a question about a program that I had never even heard about and my voice deserted me. It was at this point, the point of complete and utter panic, that I woke myself up from my dream.
 Now many of you may be thinking that there is no way that my dream could have been that minutely detailed and you are partially correct. As I think is the case with most of us, we don't remember the details of a dream but the feeling of it. This is one of the connections between art and dreams. We can't always remember the details but we can remember the emotions evoked if the connection is strong enough. I have filled in the details somewhat in order to make myself feel those emotions again as well as in an attempt to help you understand the what I was feeling.