the interpretation of dreams

I was just now sound asleep when I was awoken by a phone call (which was good, because I was not meant to be sleeping). After I had approximately a one-minute conversation with my sister, I turned on the light and rubbed my face and generally returned to full consciousness (well, full awake-ness) and began to remember fragments of the dream that had just been interrupted.

Most of the dream was already lost by this point, but the premise seemed to be that there was this Irish rock band that were essentialy the Cranberries, if not officially the Cranberries, whose latest album, or project, was to have a song about every place (town?) in Ireland.

This involved, in the first place, identifying every place in Ireland, which required a gigantic illuminated map in one of those rooms like you always see in movies about the space program or nuclear war, where there are long rows of desks facing a huge screen along one wall of a room. Except the only thing on this map was Ireland which was, in the dream, vast and uncharted, with lots of tiny towns that nobody had ever really been to.

At the particular moment of the dream when I woke up, the band was on some kind of radio program explaining that their song "O' Maigh Trareyha" was about a town that none of them had ever been to and no one they knew had ever been to and most people had never heard of. Someone had apparently called in to let them know that it existed, and they had found some independent verification that it was a real place and they had located it on the map (a tiny glowing dot on the giant screen, among lots of brighter dots) but basically no one had ever been there and the band just sort of had to imagine what this most-forgotten of tiny Irish towns was like.

This ties in a bit with a major recurring topic in my Travel Narratives and Ethnography class, about how no one ever really goes any where real, they only go to places that they imagine. Which is to say, if you go to Tahiti, there's no notion of seeing "the real Tahiti," you're always just going to find sort of what you expect to find there, some version of your own imaginary Tahiti.

The band was actually performing their song about O' Maigh Trareyha at the moment I woke up, and I had some dim notion of the song being exceptionally beautiful, although the words just seemed to be "O' Maigh Trareyah" song with dizzying gusto over and over again. Did I detect a slight pleading note? The spelling I've given here is approximate, although I could see it clearly in the dream. The issue of gaelic spelling seems to tie in to the fact that, just before I went to bed last night, I was reading something about, among other things, how hopeless it is for an English speaker to try to figure out how gaelic words are pronounced using Roman characters.

In any case, it occurred to me, on reflection that, however you might actually spell it in gaelic, the words that I heard in this song over and over again were, for all intents and purposes, "Oh, my tarea." Which is to say, "Oh, my homework." Which is, of course, what I should have been doing instead of napping.

As Freud would observe, dream distortion is the "guardian of sleep."
As Calvin would observe, "my dreams are getting way too literal."