Somehow or other, I managed to read both the beginning of Shelley's Frankenstein and watch the episode of Wild Russia on the Arctic on the same day. (If you don't know, the frame story of Frankenstein takes place on a boat in the far north of Russia, past Arkhangelsk and the White Sea). I rather assumed any dreams I'd remember would have been about endless white landscapes and harsh colds.

They weren't. I had a rather odd one, really. To set it up, I should mention that while my academic writing is all done under my own name, most of the rest is done pseudonymously pseudonomically... under a pen name.

In my dream, I'm walking down a street in the town where I went to college. Except this street doesn't actually exist. It was a side street along the main drag which isn't really there; it was all white stucco and tall wooden doors and milk bottles and weeds, like something in Belsize Park.

Anyway, I'm walking down this street with my friend Jamie, who for reasons that remain unclear, is wearing a medium purple pants suit, rather like Hillary Clinton on an old TV set in need of knob-twiddling. We are on our way to a film opening.

Which is in a little cafe that's all brushed steel and glass-top tables. We settle in somewhere in the middle, just in front of a group of people I knew. I don't know who they are now, but they were all people I recognised then. I *think* they were all people I went to undergrad with, which would at least be appropriate to the setting.

And these people are sitting around reading and tearing into a script I wrote. Ruthlessly. I don't know where they got it, and it's clear they don't know I wrote it, but it makes me hugely uncomfortable, and I spend a good few minutes trying to figure out a) how to communicate my discomfort and b) and to tell them I think it's rather good.

The dream itself peters out about there. It's odd because I throw around a fair amount of scripts to people and -- often being harsh in reading others -- expect people to be just as harsh with mine. I'm thick skinned about it, because it's foolish not to take good advice. But apparently I'm not quite as thick skinned as I imagined, at least subconcsiously.

In any event, the next dream I had involved me losing control of a minivan on a slippery road and crashing into a tree. This was also in Chapel Hill -- I could show the exact spot, down to the tree, on Franklin Street going down onto 15-501 where it happend. Weird little book-end...