24 September 2006 Sunday

Math like butterflies

Dream involved some sort of class and group assignment…

School/class-related dreams disconcert me a bit, actually… this one wasn’t like the others, but I have had dreams about life in academia where I think I’m back in school and have been neglecting one/some of my classes and all of a sudden all this work is due or I haven’t been attending any of my Tues and Thurs classes or I haven’t turned in any math homework since the beginning of the semester. Those are not comfortable, and while I don’t panic in the dream and seem willing to figure it out somehow, I am ever so glad to wake up and reason out after a few minutes that all of it was not real.

Okay, but while last night’s(/this morning’s) dream had to do with class/assignment, it wasn’t really like the others…

This was an outdoor class, at least for this day. Some sort of assignment overlooking a farm or something? nearby a forest or something.. Teacher giving instructions.. we each had a paper with the problem on it (I think….) and were split into groups.. My group was four. Myself, a boy from highschool whom I was never friends with but I did have classes with; he was one of the very brightest at our school.. but also quite uptight.. probably interesting, but unfriendly nor personable. Let’s call him Tommy. Then there was another guy in my group.. don’t know him.. quiet.. and turned out there was also a girl in my group.. she turned out to be very nice/gracious.

I remember they were spraying something (assumedly pesticides) on the farm crops below.. The crops did look beautiful, but the sprays were quite a turnoff.

I wandered a bit while teacher was giving instructions.. stayed mostly nearby, but in my own world.. At some point a flock of bugs were chasing some of the other students.. and then they were coming near me so I got a headstart on them and ended up in the woods.

Once I lost the bugs, I found the class had broken up into the groups and had started working on the assignment.

I found my group. Tommy seemed displeased with my tardiness and hardly acknowledged me.. I felt guilty as it was, and a bit confused about the assignment and catching up.
Very graciously, nice girl in our group showed me what she’d written so far for me to copy and catch up.. I didn’t feel good about copying it but I did try to understand it.. I didn’t really.. seemed like some sort of math problems.. diagrams.. about 5-7 of them on her page, that were similar in style to the original problem on the handouts we were given.

There was something about drawing a tree then… I still didn’t really undestand the problem/the math/what the heck we were doing or why, but I tried to contribute to the group where I could, and ended up providing the drawings and making the connections and explanations that arrived at the thorough answer and resulted in the best project answer of any of the groups. Tommy really appreciated me sometime between the middle and the end, and that’s what I was most proud of, though unwarmed that he’d been so dismissive of me in the first place.
Actually, the real Tommy did openly acknowledge/congratulate me for a success during highschool.. I remember appreciating that at the time for similar reasons.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it for that story. I still don’t know what the math problems were about.