Tag Archive for 'teacher'

Dreaming about saving Iceland

Published by
flyingsquirrel
 in dream. 0 Comments

I had a dream that I took a plane to Iceland. When I got there the country was in a perpetual twilight, the sky an interesting pale red. There was a huge army surplus store right outside the airport so all the idiot tourists, who hadn’t realised that “Ice Land” would be cold, could buy warm clothes. The owners of the surplus store thought every visitor to Iceland was an idiot, including me, but were very pleased about it as they made a tidy profit from them. The dream was set in the near future and there were no children around - some kind of atomic accident had rendered all the people infertile, no new people had been born for over twenty years in Reykjavik and only a few fools, mostly old people, and fearless explorers ever visited the country.

Anyway, back in the army surplus store, the shopkeepers became interested in me when they noticed I wasn’t looking at the woolly clothing like all the others but checking out some curious little devices they’d always assumed no one had any use for. They were nothing too special, pen torches, flares and glow sticks mostly, but I needed them as the final components for a larger device I’d made to rid Iceland of radiation poisoning. I’m not quite sure how it came about, but by the end of the dream I had hundreds of followers waving me off as I set out across the snow to plant my device somewhere on high and transmit some kind of cleansing signals that would cure everyone of their infertility.

After walking for a while I recognized that my progress stopped; I couldn’t move anymore. However hard I tried, I couldn’t make a step. Suddenly I started to hear some strange repetative noise coming out from somewhere. I realized it was my snoring, and as soon as I realized it, I heard these words: “When you are snoring, you are not dreaming”. I tried to approach the source of the voice, but couldn’t. “You have to be able to animate ALL the bones in your foot before you can use it”, - said the voice. And suddenly I could move. I went in the voice’s direction and there was a man. I asked him: “Who are you? What are you doing here?”, and he claimed to be my teacher. I thought about that for a moment, and then realized that he wasn’t somebody I know. So I told him: “I AM dreaming!”. He said “Congratulations” in a calm voice, fell backwards and disinegrated. Then I woke up.

flyingsquirrel

Other posts by flyingsquirrel

Socrates unsatisfied, or a pig satisfied.

Published by
David van Ofwegen
 in memory. 1 Comment

As with the previous post, this one too is not a memory per se, at least not in terms of a recollected story. Rather I’m writing down the awareness of having changed, of really -seeing- the world in a different way. Any state of mind at a certain moment in time could be considered a memory; since that’s what memory is: stored experience.

So today I write about the memory of being a staunch anti-intellectualist. A sentiment fed into by years of unhappiness in education. I remember almost vowing to myself that one day, if given the means, I would plead and fight for childrens’ freedom. From a young age they were taken away from their parents, from their home, from safety and all that is good in life.  It may sound overcharged, but this is literally how I experienced the first day of school, and many mornings after it. As if being put on a daily train to Auswitz for day-camp (back when it wasn’t yet a tourist attraction, of course). The teachers were  cruel sadists, venting their frustrations and lust for power on children who only wanted to be children. Children that like play, explore the world and retain their innocence. Instead, you were cornered between a pack of 30 other little wolves (children are indeed savages to one another) on the one side, and parental/educational pressure perform on the other side; made to counter-intuively think and cram al sorts of facts into your mind. The result of which was a hampering in respectively moral development and mental stability.

Then came university with its pretentions. I saw pretentious professors who placed their self-esteem in the study and reverance of other, dead intellectuals. Pretentious students,  having gained the right to study by forsaking their childhood, ready to find a guru, embrace a philsophy and look down . This is the problem with intellectuals; they condemned themselves to an unnatural life, hunched over in chairs, skulking in libraries, destroying their eyesight. And what do they do? They praise and other iuntellectuals, who similarly gave up their life, or had none in the first place (being perhaps debilitated or just plain anti-social). A vicious circle of people who dare not bite the hand that feeds them.

Needless to say, anti-intellectualism is not a very popular view among intellectuals. I felt priviliged to be the lone ranger that saw through this facade.

Continue reading ‘Socrates unsatisfied, or a pig satisfied.’

Other posts by David van Ofwegen