Dreaming in Math, and Related Matters

Last night, in my dream, I was sitting next to a woman who had a little tiny newborn that she was breastfeeding. We were seated close to each other at some sort of counter or terrace overlooking what might have been a beautiful landscape, or it might have been a street scene viewed from a plate glass window, like what I see when I'm having lunch at the counter of Chain Bakery and Lunch Place with French Word For Bread in its Name that is near my office. I turned to the woman and noticed the baby, and commented on how little she was. The woman pointed out, politely, that the strap from my purse kept touching the baby's head (which is exactly like something that might happen at French Lunch Place, since it's always so crowded). I pulled my purse closer to me, apologizing, and asked how old the baby was. The woman answered something like, "A hundred and twelve hours." (It was definitely in hours (!), and somewhere around that number, although I can't remember exactly.) Then I did all these calculations, quickly, in my head, to figure out how many days that was. I remember very distinctly thinking that three days was 72 hours, and that if you double that to six days you get 144 hours, and the number the woman said was definitely less than that. So then I said, "Oh, she's less than a week old, then."

I can't remember if, in the dream, I felt as smugly pleased with myself for calculating that on the fly as I did once I woke up and remembered doing it. Probably not--in the dream it all seemed matter-of-fact, not even unusual to me that the woman would report her infant's age in hours. But, in waking life, there's something very pleasurable about remembering doing the calculations--I don't know why, something about my mind working so logically like that in the face of an illogical or unusual dream-situation (which of course I had also created). And the fact that the calculations were actually right--it just amuses me somehow.

Dreams are so mysterious, anyway. Who knows why I would have this dream and what all the different components mean, together and separately? I mean, I can surmise, but I think I'll just let it be.

In another part of the dream, someone who was supposed to be my mother but sounded like or somehow reminded me of a former therapist (and maybe someone else, too, some other adviser-like person in my life that I can't really place), said, "What if you imagined yourself as part of a committee in charge of self-improvement, or of doing things to get what you want?" Something like that, anyway--again, I can't really remember the exact words, but the little nugget of advice coming from my dreamed-up adviser seems worth noting and holding onto.

I had a lot more very engrossing, highly narrative, episodic dreams last night, and woke up a lot. I have a cold and had taken Seriously Syrupy Cough and Cold Medicine, which I think does strange things to one's brain. I think I'll risk experiencing the cold symptoms tonight--better than taking the chance of having to calculate something really difficult in my dreams tonight. (!)

Sometimes an Afternoon Can Seem Like a Lifetime

Usually people don't talk too much in yoga class--it is supposed to be a meditative journey, after all. But sometimes we joke around in between meditative moments.

At my class last Saturday afternoon, we were getting near the end of the sequence of poses you do on your back. The teacher announced that it was time for happy baby pose. She described it for those people who weren't familiar with it: knees bent, feet flexed so that they are parallel to the ceiling, then you reach across the inside of your legs to grasp the outside of your feet, and roll around a little bit, grinning happily at the ceiling as if you were a baby in your crib. When the teacher said the name of the pose, she just said it like that: "happy baby pose." One of the women laughed and said, "There's no Indian name for happy baby?" For some reason, in my sleepily content, muscles-and-brain-relaxed state, I thought she was asking whether there was a Native American name for happy baby, and I didn't even wonder why she would be asking that. Then, I realized, oh, she means, Indian as in the Sanskrit names that the teacher usually repeats after the English names for the poses.

The teacher laughed and said, "I don't know, there must be one but I don't know it."

Then she added, "It's also called dead-bug pose."

Puzzled, the woman asked, "Bedbug pose?"

Then we all laughed, lying there on our backs and waving our feet in the air like happy babies or soon-to-be-dead bugs, as the teacher said, no, "dead bug."

"Dead bedbug?" someone else asked.

We managed to settle down in time for the stillness of the last pose, shivasana. Or, in English, corpse pose.