Mid-December Snapshots: Dreams and Waking Life

I feel a bit fragmented, but in a good way, the kind of fragmented that comes from doing a variety of tasks, being interrupted, going back to tasks, and through this weaving accomplishing what must be done.

Let me record some reflections, however fleeting:

--Last night I dreamed I was sewing by hand, sifting through a variety of beautiful blue cloth.  This morning, I used that image in a poem.  The dream was lovely, but the poem is dark:  an older woman, sewing in a besieged city.  Aleppo is very much on my mind this week.

--I also dreamed about the extensive paperwork necessary to hire someone.  That dream was not as wonderful as my sewing dream--but it reflects my waking life more accurately, as I work on contracts for Winter 2017 quarter, hiring new faculty, and other types of tasks along these lines.

--For a brief minute in one dream, I was thinking about what it would take to update an academic essay that I wrote in the 90's--I realized I didn't really have access to the kind of academic library I would need to update the paper.

--I noticed that a bio of Queen Victoria made one of the NYT's book reviewers best books of 2016 list:  Victoria, the Queen, by Julia Baird.  I just heard a microreview on my NPR station--another rave review.  And it's a bestseller on Amazon.  Maybe that will be my next big book.  It will likely be cheerier than Timothy Snyder's Black Earth:  Holocaust as History and Warning.   As a younger woman, I couldn't fathom why people didn't work harder to rescue the Jews and others in danger.  This week, I'm fairly sure that future generations will wonder the same thing about Syria.

--I don't have a good answer.