Class & Dream

I think class went well. If it didn't go well, it was at least not horrible. I kind of blathered on a bit too much at the beginning, and so had to rush through some slides at the end. I said "um" a bunch too, and got my tongue twisted a few times. However, I think I looked relatively comfortable and in-charge, and I think (I hope!) I connected with the students.

To overcome my bad-dream vibes, I started the morning off with a handful of chocolate chips (before my shower, even), then I wore my cute, delicate, gold elephant bracelet for luck, and the silver froggy necklace my mom and B brought back from Mexico to have them with me (in a way) too. Then, when I got to school, I had one of those fancy-expensive Starbucks hot chocolates. Today's Savage Chickens cartoon seemed appropriate, so I put that on the screen while I was waiting for the clock to tick over.

So, my dream. My dream is about my family's cabin in northern Manitoba. I spent my summers there growing up. There are other cabins on the lake, but none near ours, and you have to get to ours by boat. If you take the batteries out of the clocks (which I do as much as others will let me), all you can hear is nature. It's wonderful. It is a place of solace and refuge for me. That the cabin exists, and is available for me to visit, is very important to me, and is comforting, even when I'm not there.

In my dream, we had been approached about a possible development near our cabin. It would just be a few cabins, and not too close. Since the request seemed reasonable, and we didn't want to prevent others from experiencing the same thing we did, we agreed to allow the development. However, the development was *very* close... it was all around us, and really tore up the forest. There was a busy construction road placed about ten feet from the cabin's back door! (The geography was a bit different than in real life.) The cabins were within easy sight of ours, and packed together like sardines. In addition, there was a resort a bit to the west, and several wide paths with lots of foot traffic were cut between the new cabins and the resort. In addition to all of the trees removed for the cabins and paths, I could tell that the soil was going to get trampled away very quickly (there's only a few inches of topsoil over sand up there), leaving nothing but barren sand... and that this was going to cause massive erosion, and soon the whole area would be sterile. Plus (it just kept piling on!) there was this... mall type thing... it's one of those weird dream-contradictions where you're both inside a mall, and outside in the forest. We were all horrified at the destruction of the natural environment, the noise, and all the people, but we were powerless to do anything, because we had signed permission. I was in a panic and desperate, and so was running around, destroying store displays, in the hopes that they would give up and leave. I was being chased (sort of). I felt *horrible*!

Note to self: get rid of the stress *before* trying to sleep!