moving into dangerous ground here, because we all know that dreams are completely boring except to the people who had them--and their therapists

Last night I had a dream about my friend Ivan. I met Ivan in my freshman year of college and was immediately smitten with his incredible intelligence and quirky sense of humor. He was also really sarcastic and snide, qualities which appealed to me but also scared the shit out of me. While I loved to hang around him, I was always worried that I wasn’t bitter or quick-witted enough, even though his geekiness should have canceled out my concerns. Somehow he managed to be an intimidating geek. Somehow he worked the geekiness in his favor. That's how cool he was.

Since college, we’ve gone our separate ways, he into the exciting world of academia, and I into the exciting world of…um…. Anyway, it’s kind of a shame because he’s gotten much nicer over the years. I would say he’s downright kind at this point. He has an awesome wife and twin daughters whom I've never met and now that I think about it, I really do miss him.

So in this dream, Ivan showed me a paper he was publishing on some obscure facet of Victorian literature. It was like 50 pages long—which, fine, some people find that stuff interesting. The problem was that he was including all of his edits in red—strikethroughs, insertions, changes in punctuation, the works—as a design feature.

That’s the way he explained it to me when I questioned him. “No no no,” he said. “It’s going to be really cool. It’s a design feature.”

And then the goddamn cat woke me up because she can't seem to find her way to her food dish on her own, and even if she could, it just wouldn't taste the same without my jostling the kibbles a little bit to release all of the chickeny goodness into the air.

I was really pissed at her, because I never got to find out how the dream ended. Would Ivan refuse to listen to the voice of reason? Or would I be able to convince him to publish a clean version of his paper, thus saving him from professional embarrassment? Would a giant rat suddenly appear, smoking a cigarette, and then lead us onto a boat where my fourth grade Talmud teacher was baking cookies with Carol Burnett? It was a total cliffhanger, and thus it shall ever remain.