I’m still in the recovery stage from simultaneous flu and sinus infection. Illnesses with fevers give me strange dreams and, since I tend to drift in and out of sleep at those times, I remember more of the images. Thinking about the dreams reveals a little about my life. For one particular dream, it showed not only some of my frustrations, but how my writing life blurs with my day job.
I pay the bills by teaching computer programming at a local college. One of the most difficult parts to teach is data abstraction. For programmers, like everyone else, abstraction is when you boil down a class of things into the characteristics common to all instances of that class. A software developer who can define classes really well becomes a very efficient, capable programmer capable of making software for almost any purpose. Teaching people to think this way is a pain in the backside and a source of great frustration.
In my dream, I stood before an unknown class in an unknown classroom, trying to get them to find the common features from a set of scenarios. Every time I got them to see the commonality of one part, they seemed to lose any previous understanding.
The scenarios were actually scenes from a screenplay. Each scene had:
- a location
- a time
- a primary character
- a message for the primary character
- a secondary character who misunderstood the significance of the message
- a reference to the next scene, i.e.: where to go next.
This sounds like a scene to most people I know, and at the same time, it seems like a record or class definition to most programmers I know. Why were my mystery students so confounded by the idea and why did it frustrate me so?
During the semester, I write negligible amounts; the day job takes too much time. When I don’t write for a while, it makes me cranky. If there is any psychological interpretation of the dream, I guess it is probably about the lack of writing I do when class is in session. It makes sense. During the summer break, I can turn out five thousand (first draft) words a day. When classes start, I can occasionally find time to knock out a couple of hundred. My brain is just too locked down on the subjects I teach.
At some point, I will have to find a way to maintain balance so I can write throughout the year. It will be good, but may take a while. Maybe when all my courses have stabilized and the supporting materials are all in place, the day job won’t take up so much of my time. Until then, it’s occasional short poems and writing notes till break.
As for the screenplay in the dream; that was disturbing too. Apparently, my subconscious mind has developed opening scenes for a very dark, gritty version of Saban Capital Group’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers™. The location for each scene is where a previous Ranger died in battle. The people showing up and getting a message are the teens selected to become the new Rangers.
The people misinterpreting the messages were relatives of the deceased Rangers. One thought the message meant the new Ranger had just killed the Black Ranger, his big brother. Another listener thought the new Ranger was the reincarnation of her Red Ranger son who died in a battle so long ago.
The Power Rangers show arrived long after my morning cartoon age, so I have no idea why my brain picked and developed this story. There is probably a reason, but I may not want to know it. For now, I’ll stick to my self-analysis regarding work-life balance.