Robert Manners

Dream Statements

So last night, or rather early this morning, I was dreaming I was staying in a dorm room in a college somewhere... I forget why. But the students in the dorm room asked me why I had gone to San Francisco State instead of UC Berkeley, which is a much more prestigious school and also closer to my house. I gave them the Official Version, that to get into UC I would have had to take another semester of French, another of Science, and have gone much deeper into debt on student loans than I am now... I have always said that UCB's English Department wasn't any better than SFSU's (and it may very well not be, it's not one of the departments that Berkeley is famous for), and so it wasn't worth the extra effort and expense.



They (the students in the dream) didn't believe that was all, so they pushed me until I also said that I preferred the more relaxed atmosphere of SFSU... being a non-prestige school, people weren't quite so wound up about their success-rates as they are at the more demanding UCB. I didn't want the competition, really.



But as I explained this to the college students, I let out a phrase that struck me so profoundly that it actually woke me up and I've been repeating it all morning, even in the dreams I had after I went back to sleep: I said "I would rather be a single star burning in the dark than to be eclipsed in a galaxy." My context was, I suppose, that I wanted to go to a non-prestige school so that my intellect would shine brighter among the mediocrities than it would at a prestigious school where I would be just one of a number of low-end geniuses in any given classroom. But I love the way my dream-self phrased it, it applies to so much more than just my college choice. It's kind of poetic, too.



So poetic, in fact, that I keep wondering if I've heard that phrase somewhere before. It doesn't sound like me.



I'm just glad I got the sleep. I haven't been sleeping well this week, it's been shockingly cold at night and I've been losing an hour or two every night, unable to get to sleep before 1 a.m. but with my alarm set at 8. This morning I let myself snooze a little longer than usual, so I feel a little better. Still, when I get tired like this, it colors the rest of my life, and makes me not like my life or myself very much.



Well, today is going to be a busy day. I have to go pick up my car at the shop (the rack part of the rack-and-pinion steering went flooey, and that's as technical as I can get), get snacks for the meeting at work this afternoon, write a lot of checks, make up and print an agenda for the meeting, and hopefully find time to get my nails done so it will be easier to hold a pen and take notes during the meeting. I'd really rather just get my car, get my nails done, and then come back here and get into bed for the rest of the day, but that's not going to happen. Oh, well.



I would rather be a single star burning in the dark than to be eclipsed in a galaxy...