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No wonder I hate sneezes
Published 7:46am Tuesday, October 27, 2009I had the most realistic dream last night. I was in a crowded movie theater (okay, because of home flix and rentable dvds, movie theaters haven’t been crowded for ten years, so maybe it wasn’t totally realistic). In this crowded movie theater, I sneezed.
It was a surprise sneeze. It wasn’t something triggered by a cold, or any other virus. It was a sudden tickle way up my nose that immediately morphed into a pretty ordinary sneeze. Dust in the theater, or something. I barely caught any of the sneeze in my hands, and way missed catching it in my elbow, which is this year’s fashionable target.
Sneezes are a teacher’s worst daily reminder that human beings are walking, talking plague spreaders. Even general practitioner doctors aren’t exposed to as many illnesses in a day as are teachers. Students come in feverish to the point of glassy eyes; ill to the point of throwing up in the bathroom next to the classroom (uh huh. That’s a real teaching moment, you bet); and either just coming down with Upper Japanese River Fever or just getting over it.
It has been my observation that 18- and 19-year-olds take some sort of twisted pride in their total enjoyment of Olympic-caliber sneezing. I’ve watched them in a crowded classroom cock their head at a 45-degree-angle in order to get maximum spread of explosively ejected snot particles.
Really. I’m not exaggerating. I admit, though, that if I’m outside, I love to really get behind a good strong sneeze, throw it to the winds, sneeze so hard I peel some skin off the back of my throat.
But every one of my students seems dedicated to doing that in a crowd, to getting the teacher ill so a few days of school are cancelled.
Every one of them. And there are so many of them.
So anyway, I sneeze in this theater, and the manager comes over and tries to place me in citizen’s arrest for it
“You’re what?” I asked him. I thought he had said he was arresting me for sneezing in a public place.
“I’m arresting you for sneezing in a public place,” he told me.
Oh. That’s what I thought he had said. Odd, to be arrested for sneezing. Even in the dream, I was trying to figure out where all this was coming from. What weird Freudian connection had spawned this sneezing dream.
After I woke up (I beat the accusation by saying I would have sneezed into my sleeve if he had provided me a dream with a sleeve in it. As it turns out, it’s pretty difficult to prove or disprove sleeves in dreams.) I remembered several connections.
One was a little girl the day before with her mother waiting at the druggist’s for medicine. She had on a germ mask, even though she couldn’t have been four years old. It was kind of cute, the way she kept being a little kid even though she evidently masked to prevent her from initiating the next pandemic. She was sitting there, kicking the chair rungs and questioning her mother about all kinds of stuff, even though she had on the only face mask in the place.
So the second thing that popped into my mind was H1N1, and that she may well have had it, and maybe we’re going to see a lot more face masking if that stuff really goes epidemic. This may make it easier to rob a bank, so there’s an upside to everything. “Did you get a good look at him, sir?” asked the cop of one of the people in the bank, who himself had on a face mask.
“Yessir I did. He had on a blue face mask.” This is going to make convicting bank robbers kind of hard.
So maybe pretty soon we’ll all have on masks. Part of the dream could have come from that. Part comes no doubt from my room full of sneeze athletes.
The rest of what drove this dream becomes more interpretable by Freud. Maybe what this dream really means is that my life is full of frustration, and the frustration is manifesting itself in buried childhood memories of contradictory attraction-repulsion to the mother-father-child sexual triangle, or maybe, it indicates a tangled web of front-lobal subjective strain based on the fact that I was toilet trained incorrectly, or maybe even the its because of the unalterable results of having been the first-born child, thus doomed to a life of over-responsible paradigms governing society’s expectations that I likely fall short of.
It’s scary to realize that your entire life now, all these years later, could be based on one poopy diaper back in 1945.
It’s no wonder I hate sneezes.
