Varieties of self.

In this dream, I am in yet another library, one with its very own cataloguing system. Somehow I discover one of my old family photo albums in the stacks, shelved according to its call number. It's not the album I'm looking for, though: I don't want the one where I'm still a child. I want the one with photographs of me as an adult.

The bathrooms in this library are inexplicable: some stalls are like office cubicles, so that one can see right over the tops of their walls. Others are like little closets into which no person could fit. Men and women mill around. The whole place is reminiscent of an airport; people mill about, come and go, seem to know exactly what they're doing. I spend no small amount of time circling the bathroom, trying to figure it out.

After this dream, which in itself wasn't really unpleasant, I awoke into what was largely a stupid day--then redeemed it, in the evening, by finally seeing that whizbang of a riddle of a biopic of a fiction of a legend I'm Not There. From the opening point of view shot to the closing footage of harmonica-playing, I was sold, even when I didn't have the faintest idea what was going on. I walked home with my friends all afizz. "Are you always in character?" my Canadian friend said to me as I launched into an explanation of how the movie's final shot had made me think of Spiegelman's Maus. My first answer: yes. My later answer: no: this is just the way I am, the way I have always been. I go to eleven, that's all.