"all that we see or seem...""

Before I forget completely, I should mention a dream I had not long ago. I'm not trying to transform this blog into a dream journal, but while I am on the subject and all...
I dreampt I was walking in a forest and I found a corpse with its severed head laying next to it. I was frightened, but I reached through some branches of a fallen tree next to him and pulled his body out, found a place to dig a hole and buried him. A week later some guiding force within me told me to unbury him, take his remains to another spot for proper burial. So I dug him up and he was in a big gray plastic container where people usually store sports equipment or toys and I carried him through a marsh (very reminiscent of the marsh in our yard in Downers Grove). While wading through the reeds and water I turned into Leonardo DiCaprio. That is all I remember.
My ability to remember dreams vividly is getting better after a long absence. A life without dreams feels like a life without music in some ways. I think of a Tom Waits song, a certain line that goes: "Life is so much different than it is in your dreams," and while I understand the metaphorical context of that saying, I always take it quite literally. Example: This morning I awoke from a dream in which I was flying above a colorful little town and caught on to a sky-tram. Delightful as it was, I woke up feeling sad that I could not fly and immediately I thought of the line from that song. Last night I was hit with a whole assortment of dreams. In one of them I invented a viral strain... maybe it was of Ebola? Yikes...
Last week I was taking a nap between classes and dreampt I had a bacterial infection and I was performing a series of diagnostic tests (much like I have been doing in microbiology with a set of unknown bacterial types) to identify what it was. I narrowed it down to two species and was set to finalize my tests when I awoke from an incoming phone call. It was my friend Simon who goes to UC-Davis. He told me in his Cantonese-twangy voice that my dreams of bacteria were "crazy" and he ought to let me get back to them. Was it methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)? Yikes...