With the coming of a new dawn I finally slept, and since my schedule was so thus jacked, I even set an alarm so I wouldn’t sleep too long. But I woke up well before it went off, because

Dream woke me.

I can’t do it full justice; I won’t try and I don’t need to. A sketch then.

High up in the mountain town. The roads looking like the earlier dream where we were late for the interview and maybe even lost.

But this was a still better town, the right town.
There was no interview. Not even any applications.
I was on my own and I wasn’t lost. Instead I looped the roads until I understood them almost completely.
And I stayed up there, abided a while. Not in my own house. A beautiful house, and more than I could afford to own, but mine for weeks, a few months maybe. Upon reflection, let’s say three months, plus one week.

While I was living there, I created. I sang on a stage with a friend in public for the first time.

Among these other things, singing and stalking the dirt roads, I dashed off a satirical piece of the kind I used to do all the time just for fun. It was a film this time, short and brilliant, and it was, symbolically, about professor work and what happened to me there.

Apparently it was seen by the very narrow target audience …
because I was invited to the usual stupid first departmental meeting by the dean.
But at this meeting, the dean screened my film, emceeing the performance of it with some deep appreciation, and pointing out the rich details, including what appeared to be two women kissing in the background in one scene, wasn’t it?

Based on this tour de force, he said, I was back. My point had been proven by my art.

I couldn’t understand the details, but I kept asking questions and getting pieces of them.

No one else understood either. One old guy in particular, maybe the Automotive Technologies chief, objected vociferously to some perq I was said to be getting. He didn’t know anything about me, or what had happened. He just had a crippling sense of grievance and felt ill-used by comparison. His beard was scraggly. He was playing the part of the old me of the immediate past.

Finally I learned that I was replacing the chair. This was part of why I was finally being paid right. What happened to the old evil chair, I asked. Oh, he was dead. Very dead. Most satisfactory. The best news of all. Living well is the second best revenge. Winning is best.

In real life, this is about the fact that a few years before the evil chair took over, I had been asked to take that position, and I refused it as diplomatically as I could, basically because I didn’t want to become a claw of Leviathan; professional, managerial. I just wanted to do the job I had, and teach it well. Which I did, until everything hit the wall.

In the dream, surrounded by congratulations and acclaim, I began to remember this refusal, and other things like it, and I started to ask more questions, not out loud and to them, but of myself, silently. The main one being …

If I hadn’t wanted it then …

Why the fucking hell would I want it now?

It was obvious to the dullest understanding that I was a genius auteur. I didn’t need to join Leviathan. I didn’t need these sad little people for anything.

It was finally true, in all the ways, that they needed me far more than I needed them.

Dream woke me. Shifting.

Resist. Dream woke me.

It’s ten-thirty on a Friday morning and my schedule is fixed by extraordinary means.

The reality of who I am really is upon me.

This is what appreciating it as much as I should really means.