Dream Log: Horrible Literary World

I dreamed I was living in some nightmare version of New York City, visually somewhat like the Gotham of Tim Burton's Batman movies.

It was dank and dirty and rusty and it always seemed to be night.

Inside this horrible city was a horrible university full of horrible would-be writers. Whether the relevant department was called the English Department or the Creative Writing Department or something else, it was filled with thousands of would-be writers. Many of them were middle-aged or downright old, and had been students in this same department for decades, ever since they had been undergraduates of conventional age. Like ghosts, they haunted the dim hallways and auditoriums of this university department which was full of Burton-esque shadows. In the entire dream I did not see a single professor or other instructor.

The fatal flaw in this writers' program -- a fatal flaw for the students, perhaps a vital method to an evil administration bent on keeping enrollment and revenue high -- was that it was completely self-referential: the student-writers' reputations were created and raised and lowered entirely within the department itself. None of them cared anymore what anyone wrote or said outside of this nightmarish university building (yet another one of those huge buildings which often appear in my dreams). And presumably, relatively few people outside of the department cared much about what they wrote.

And yet, for some reason, I was there, inside that building, among them. I was neither enrolled nor employed at the university. I did not plan to stay there long. Why was I there at all? I'm not sure.

Many of the students had dopplegaengers of similar height and proportions made of brightly-colored plastic. The art department whose students made these sculptures and installed them in the hallways and classrooms of this department were one of the few interactions of the outside world with this place. The student-writers who'd had a sculpture of themselves made generally seemed to take it as an honor. But I found the sculptures to be especially grotesque, and I wondered whether they had intentionally been made that way, as an attempt to wake the writers up, and warn them that they were living in a nightmare, and that they should flee.

My activity while I was there seemed to center mainly around fighting, physically fighting, with some of the biggest and strongest male students, in order to try to get them to release hoards of books they had stolen from the department library. At some point it occurred to me that this was a rather strange endeavor, since, if I succeeded in releasing the stolen books back into general circulation among the student-writers, it would tend to encourage them to think more favorably of this place, when what I thought I should be doing was was to warn them and cause them to flee to places where there was day-time part of the day and people were not obsessed with meaningless literary distinction; and yet I kept fighting. I fought like Batman, only with my fists, not with any weapons. (I should say: like some versions of Batman. In other versions he uses guns.)

I took a break from the fighting to catch my breath, sitting on a teacher's desk and looking at some of the plastic sculptures. They really were hideous. I asked myself why I was fighting. In waking life, I haven't been in a fight since 1978, and I'm proud of having stopped fighting. (Not that I was in so many fights before that. I can think of 3.)

Then, all of a sudden, I realized that the sculptures were ugly in order to warn anyone, including me, to just get out of this place, that we could only help these student-writers from outside. Then I woke up.