Dream Log: Dogs and Academia

 

I dreamed I was in a dog park in a beautiful wooded hilly area in autumn. There was no COVID-19 in this dream. I had no dogs, but other people didn't seem to mind my playing with their dogs. One grey-haired lady who was there with several dogs (I'm grey-haired irl. That's weird.) tossed me one of her several frisbees and encouraged me to play with one of her dogs. I don't know much about dog breeds, but I'm going to say that this dog was huge and yellow. 

After a little while I threw the frisbee back to the grey-haired lady and said I had to go. She informed me that the big yellow dog was mine now, but I refused to agree to that, although she was rather insistent. I told her that I was sympathetic to the situation of the dog needing a home, but that I was not the best person to provide that home.

I walked a short distance to the campus of an Ivy League university. Which university it was, was not specified in the dream. I do not know whether any of the real-life Ivy League universities is situated in a rural, wooded, hilly region like this. I also do not know whether any Ivy League universities have campuses a long distance from their main campuses. But in the dream, although I did not know exactly where I was, it felt somehow as if I were a long way to the west of the East Coast Ivy League. 

At this point the dream became weird and dreamlike. The university had a walk-in virtual-reality catalog of courses. When you walked toward a course which interested you, the course display expanded to surround you.  Written text and pictures went from the floor to the ten-foot ceiling, and audio description of the course began.

The written texts and the descriptions were in English and Latin. You didn't have the option of switching between languages: there was just one version, part English and part Latin. Both the English and the Latin were very badly written, with many quotations both unattributed and badly chosen, many clumsy original phrases in both languages, and many grammatical mistakes. 

The images were odd also: for every course, from algebra to zoology, there was a big picture of a baroque paintings of fleshy humans struggling with fleshy animals. If there was ever a conscious relationship between a particular course and the painting associated with it, I couldn't see it. I was still puzzling this over when I woke up.