i woke up feeling very satisfied with myself, which is rare these days considering that any day now my fate for the next year and a half will be determined arbitrarily by a piece of mail, and that my brain has entered superscramble mode from doing every variation of a craigslist search for the "SWEEET BKLYN 1BR SUblet (byebye manhatten)" of my future.

i suspected that i did something impressive in my dream, and, sure enough, about five minutes into my shower it came back. i had gone to jury duty, which didn't look at all like jury duty. there were all these little tables with nice chairs in a darkened room, and people were scrunched around them talking intently. it was like a hotel dining area with the impersonal edge taken off—no febreeze, no offensive minimuffins. i squeezed myself into a group at one of the tables, and a friendly 40something fellow was talking about what the experience of jury duty should be like. a blond woman piped in, very excited about the idea of people coming in to little tables and talking and learning from each other. 'i could learn languages,' she enthused. and, rather unnecessarily, 'i could work on the language that so many people speak here in america.' spanish, of course, but she didn't think it PC to say as much. normally i would scoff at a declaration of this sort, but the energy of the group was so earnest and engaged in the ideas themselves that i didn't even mind. this was totally a liberal-arts circle jerk.

yes. in my sleep, i invented the academic's jury duty, which apparently combines the highbrow intimacy of a bistro with the democratic expansiveness of a walmart. the whole affair was very much in the style of those self-consciously clunky believer inquiries, like, 'what for are english departments?' except this time it was, 'what for is jury duty?'

it was one of those self-reflexive moments where we were participating in the very scene we were inventing, right as we were inventing it. sort of a phenomenological chicken and the egg performance—the kind you can walk in on in any upper-level english class. i can't remember whether i thought it was brilliant or shameful that all these people were so engaged in a conversation that would never reach high enough on the bureaucratic ladder to effect any change. was it enough that these people felt like their voices were important, or did they actually have to be important? is there a difference? there wasn't one in this case, because the thinking was the doing, and that was the point of the exercise. in the dream i tried to imagine the infrastructure that would carry people's ideas up the civic ladder, more as a perfunctory ass-covering measure than anything. you know, in case anyone demanded that reality actually match what was in their heads.

some people dream in black and white. some dream lucidly and have wild crazy sex every chance they get. this morning pretty much confirms that i dream in caricature. five years ago it was the fashion to be self-consciously self-deprecating (which is probably redundant, but then, that's in style too). what to do with a person who is subconsciously self-mocking? if someone wanted to make fun of me, they could hardly do better than to write a little one-act in which i turn a bland symbol of civic responsibility like jury duty into an opportunity for indulgent self-reflection among the citizenry...unless they have me holding a sweat lodge in the camping section of walmart.

it seems like my brain is manufacturing its very own grad school curriculum while the turbo digressive lush in me is asleep. totally the opposite of college, when i would dream i was writing a brilliant paper (i swear the phrase 'donut darwinism' really meant something at the time) just so i could keep hitting snooze on my 3am alarm.