Memorandum Of Sorts
Nov. 25th, 2003 09:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynDear Subconscious Mind:
Our association has been a long and fruitful one, both waking and sleeping. When I have been awake you have performed analyses of which I have not even been aware, passing them to the conscious mind or not as you see fit. Your occasional outbursts of insight have borne your peculiar, distinctive stamp for as long as I can remember, and have been the occasion of merriment for myself and my comrades many a time. When I have been asleep, you have toiled long and hard to deal with the assorted mental dreck floating through the conscious mind. While this has occasionally resulted in dreams with which I would rather not deal, on the whole your balance of 'entertaining or fascinating' to 'terrifying or undesirable' dream production has been very clearly in favour of the first category.
That having been said, I am going to have to request that you strive just a bit harder than you did last night. Inaccuracy in your rendering of the laws of physics and anatomy can be permitted, since the ability to fly or run on all fours is distinctly welcome. Inaccuracy in matters of geography, however, is really not nice no matter how closely it may reflect your perceptions of my current interests. In future, when one of your dreams presents me with a fictional character as respectable as Dr. John H. Watson, M. D., kindly refrain from fiddling with the names of places in my brain.
If I recall last night's dream correctly, while the good Doctor and myself were waiting for Mr. Sherlock Holmes to find the reference book that would explain to us exactly why he believed the serial-murdering doctor we were chasing had left the mainland of Britain, you had Dr. Watson ask where it was I hailed from. At that point I found a globe with a detailed outline of the eastern United States, which managed somehow to expand the area of interest when touched. Granted, such a zoom capability on a globe would be fascinating, but I would really rather that any further globes of this nature be both labeled and accurate. Your globe provided no names for any divisions smaller than the state level, not even for major cities such as New York, Boston, or Washington, D. C. Furthermore, said globe gave a very distorted image of the border between New York State and the State of New Jersey; I may be wrong but I believe it may have left out Hudson and Union counties.
Beyond that the globe was satisfactory. However, the knowledge in my dream-self's head rather distressingly conflated current interests with real-world geography. Regardless of how fond I am of the nation of Canada, or the name of the river that separates New York State from New Jersey in the vicinity of the island of Manhattan, there is no Hudson's Bay in New York State. I believe the bay your globe displayed for Dr. Watson was, in fact, Jamaica Bay- a body of water both significantly smaller and probably infinitely more smelly than Hudson's Bay. In fact, in the early 1980's Jamaica Bay at low tide had such a stench that it formed my mental point of reference when I first encountered Pratchett's descriptions of the Ankh-Morpork Civic Smell. Jamaica Bay is located in the area of Queens named Flushing, and is flanked by La Guardia International Airport and Shea Stadium; Hudson's Bay is rather farther north than that. It is my belief, given what I recall of the globe, that my dream-self was in fact indicating the Jamaica Bay area on the map.
As the good Doctor nodded and said 'ah, I see' when I told him where I had grown up and how I had driven past 'Hudson's Bay' on the way to school every morning for two years, I am forced to conclude that you deceived the poor man for the sake of providing me with surreptitious Canadian content. Should this continue we are going to have words. For now, however, consider yourself reprimanded and at least make some token attempt to keep your geography straight - unless of course the dream being provided features a Trickster motif or is of the running-away-from, then-outwitting variety. Since cleverness and/or deception are a key component of those, you may do as you like with what I tell people in them.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
The Conscious
Our association has been a long and fruitful one, both waking and sleeping. When I have been awake you have performed analyses of which I have not even been aware, passing them to the conscious mind or not as you see fit. Your occasional outbursts of insight have borne your peculiar, distinctive stamp for as long as I can remember, and have been the occasion of merriment for myself and my comrades many a time. When I have been asleep, you have toiled long and hard to deal with the assorted mental dreck floating through the conscious mind. While this has occasionally resulted in dreams with which I would rather not deal, on the whole your balance of 'entertaining or fascinating' to 'terrifying or undesirable' dream production has been very clearly in favour of the first category.
That having been said, I am going to have to request that you strive just a bit harder than you did last night. Inaccuracy in your rendering of the laws of physics and anatomy can be permitted, since the ability to fly or run on all fours is distinctly welcome. Inaccuracy in matters of geography, however, is really not nice no matter how closely it may reflect your perceptions of my current interests. In future, when one of your dreams presents me with a fictional character as respectable as Dr. John H. Watson, M. D., kindly refrain from fiddling with the names of places in my brain.
If I recall last night's dream correctly, while the good Doctor and myself were waiting for Mr. Sherlock Holmes to find the reference book that would explain to us exactly why he believed the serial-murdering doctor we were chasing had left the mainland of Britain, you had Dr. Watson ask where it was I hailed from. At that point I found a globe with a detailed outline of the eastern United States, which managed somehow to expand the area of interest when touched. Granted, such a zoom capability on a globe would be fascinating, but I would really rather that any further globes of this nature be both labeled and accurate. Your globe provided no names for any divisions smaller than the state level, not even for major cities such as New York, Boston, or Washington, D. C. Furthermore, said globe gave a very distorted image of the border between New York State and the State of New Jersey; I may be wrong but I believe it may have left out Hudson and Union counties.
Beyond that the globe was satisfactory. However, the knowledge in my dream-self's head rather distressingly conflated current interests with real-world geography. Regardless of how fond I am of the nation of Canada, or the name of the river that separates New York State from New Jersey in the vicinity of the island of Manhattan, there is no Hudson's Bay in New York State. I believe the bay your globe displayed for Dr. Watson was, in fact, Jamaica Bay- a body of water both significantly smaller and probably infinitely more smelly than Hudson's Bay. In fact, in the early 1980's Jamaica Bay at low tide had such a stench that it formed my mental point of reference when I first encountered Pratchett's descriptions of the Ankh-Morpork Civic Smell. Jamaica Bay is located in the area of Queens named Flushing, and is flanked by La Guardia International Airport and Shea Stadium; Hudson's Bay is rather farther north than that. It is my belief, given what I recall of the globe, that my dream-self was in fact indicating the Jamaica Bay area on the map.
As the good Doctor nodded and said 'ah, I see' when I told him where I had grown up and how I had driven past 'Hudson's Bay' on the way to school every morning for two years, I am forced to conclude that you deceived the poor man for the sake of providing me with surreptitious Canadian content. Should this continue we are going to have words. For now, however, consider yourself reprimanded and at least make some token attempt to keep your geography straight - unless of course the dream being provided features a Trickster motif or is of the running-away-from, then-outwitting variety. Since cleverness and/or deception are a key component of those, you may do as you like with what I tell people in them.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
The Conscious
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-11-26 05:43 am (UTC)Your subconscious is probably just going to go "Neenener Neener Neener!" at you. 'Cause it's like that.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-26 07:25 am (UTC)- the Running Away From Something Dreadful dream becomes much more entertaining when it suddenly morphs into Hey, The Thing Chasing Me Can Be Outwitted, Let's See What Happens If We Double Back And Catch Up With It, Maybe It Will Tell Us Its Secrets (an approach which once netted me an offer of apprenticeship from the Smoking Man on the X-Files, before we found out just how petty his role really is);
- violating the laws of human anatomy is fine but trying to figure out how those violations work is an amusing way to make me fall all over myself and scrape off half my chin, since Running On All Fours is a more common motif in my dreams than Flying ever was;
- going naked in public does not count as an anxiety dream because inside my head nobody notices as long as I act like I still have clothes on - but previously unknown warning lights on my car dashboard, shrivelled and dried up contact lenses, and broken or decayed teeth do count;
- I am apparently more terrified of doing poorly on a school exam than I am of waking up on an airplane that has just landed seven thousand miles from its intended destination, with no way of contacting home and no idea where I'm supposed to go next; and
- for all my kvetching I will almost certainly put up with messing with respectable characters' heads just because actually having Dr. Watson pay a visit to my brain is a new and innovative experience.
Bah. bloody subconscious.