Dreams and Nightmares

Though it looms four months away, the qualifying exam is already beginning to weigh on my mind. I’ve been studying on and off in spurts since the spring and just last night I had my second study date over at Anna’s place. The first date, I studied thermo and stat mech exclusively, but this time I worked on quantum instead. I wanted to figure out the delta function potential needed for one of the problems in my qual books. So, after we made a dinner of vegetable masala (Indian style!) we had some wine and set to it.

Everything went well and afterwards the wine and food caught up to both of us and we passed straight out. The interesting aspect of the evening, though, was my dreams.

In the first, I was observing a boxer preparing for a fight. Because I sometimes listen to the Rocky music when I preparing for a difficult exam, I think this character indirectly represents me despite appearing Asian, with dark hair and a beard. At one moment, he was sitting on the sidelines talking to his girlfriend or wife, drinking a beer (Fosters for some reason). Then, later, he gets up to fight and just starts unloading punches into this tall fighter’s stomach.

The second dream was a bit scarier. I find myself waking up in a room of some sort in a hotel. Something is wrong. The power’s not working. Bullets or lasers start shooting through the windows and I have to hide behind furniture. I meet a woman and we try to escape, but she gets shot and I see part of her face melt into green plasma as she falls to the floor.

I wake up after this, but I’m still in the dream. It’s like I hit the rest button on a video game. This time, I take off down the hall, but there are gunshots and bullets there too. On the third iteration, I try the same thing but run really fast towards the elevators. It’s really dark that far down the hall, though, and I can see someone or something standing in the shadows. When I run too close, I once again rewake in the hotel room. In my mind, I was under the impression that aliens were attacking.

Strange, but very interesting! That’s all for now.