I dreamed I was working in an office. I have no idea what sort of work we did, or were supposed to do. Nothing appeared in the entire dream which resembled work which people do for a living.
Regular readers of this blog know that my age varies greatly from one dream to another. In this dream, my age varied greatly from one moment to the next, as did the age of one other employee in the office.
In the dream, I was very depressed. I'm not depressed now, in waking life, but in the dream my depression had become so severe and so obvious that everyone in the office was concerned, and was trying to cheer me up. There were 8 or 10 of us altogether. Our boss was a woman, possibly in her 40's (I'm no good at guessing people's ages). I was significantly younger, mid-20's perhaps, and so were most of the others. There was also one man who was in his 60's or perhaps older.
The other person in the dream whose age was going to changed looked like Keanu Reeves. In real life, Keanu Reeves is 57, but he looks a bit younger because he's in very good physical condition. At the start of the dream, this guy looked the way Keanu Reeves looks now. He had long hair and a full beard, both streaked with grey.
In real life I'm 60 years old.
The others in the office kept reciting platitudes to me, of the sort that seem to thrive in corporate culture. The things they said just made me feel worse because they were so trite, so stupid. But I didn't want to say that. These people were being nice, trying to help me as best they could. I didn't want to verbally slap them in the face for their trouble.
Then they had gathered in the office of the man who was in his 60's or older, and they called me to join them. Grinning foolishly, they gestured at the other man's desk, and pointed out what a contrast it made to mine. My desk was huge and heavy, made of hardwood. It was old and darkly lacquered. This guy's desk, by contrast, was pretty much just a tray table. My colleagues all made statements about how "efficient" it was that this guy used such a tiny desk.
I was completely unimpressed by this, and I was afraid that I might not be concealing how I felt.
Then, suddenly, I was no longer in my mid-20's, but my real age, 60. I was talking to the guy who looked like Keanu. He still had long hair and a full beard, but suddenly he was much younger. Not a grey hair in sight, no wrinkles. That gaunt look which older athletes have about the eyes and throat was gone.
He was looking at an entry in the index of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein. "This has got to be a misprint, don't you think?" he asked, and showed me the entry: "Wittgenstein, Jeanemmanuel."
"Shouldn't Jeanemmanuel be hyphenated -- Jean-Emmanual -- or two separate words?"
"I don't know," I replied. "The only person I can ever remember hearing about who was named Wittgenstein was Ludwig. As far as whether that name is 'correct' as it's printed on that page... Hmm. Well. you see, there's some controversy over the topic of 'correct' language. Some people, most definitely including me, don't believe that there is such a thing as 'correct' language use. There are conventions of use, and when these conventions are broken -- well, in the opinion of those like me, it's not the end of the world.
"That leaves the question of how Jeanemmanuel himself spells, or spelled, his name. If he spells it as given there on the page, then I'd say the index entry is correct, period.
"Except that it's also not even that simple. Because, some people spell their own names differently on different occasions. and even then, I'm not inclined to insist that a mistake has been made.
"Do you know the most famous instance of a person writing their own name differently on different occasions? Shakespeare. These idiots who insist that Shakespeare didn't exist, sometimes their Exhibit A is the different spellings in different Shakespeare-autographs. But these idiots don't know that a lot of people spelled their own names differently from one occasion to the next 400 years ago. It wasn't uncommon at all [...]"
And I went on and on, feeling better, talking about something at last which I found so much more interesting than anything usually to be found in the usual corporate culture of that particular office, wondering whether the now-young Keanu lookalike was also sincerely fascinated, or had only been trying all along to cheer me up...
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