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2010-02-11

Do Anglophones Dream of Magar Phonecalls?

So in the dead of dreamland I am at a school function, a kind of picnic-outing when my mobile phone rings and I get a recorded message. In the dream I am aware of the background of what is going on so I am not surprised by the call: someone important is having a birthday soon and the idea is to create an aural birthday card with people recording themselves saying their names and then these spoken names will be the "signatures" on the aural card. So i know that the telephone message I just received says in effect "Please call the office and tell them you are calling to record your name for the birthday card," even if I didn't really understand the message as such. So in my dream I dial the number I am supposed to dial, and then someone answers speaking Hungarian, and I realize I have absolutely no way to explain to this person who I am and what I am doing. I remember being able to say UH UH UH a dozen times, then finally saying my name and "angolultanar" (English teacher) and then saying UH UH a few more times and then just hanging up.

A few moments later one of the people at the event speaks to me in English, and I glomm onto him to see if he can help me out. For some reason he is about 8 feet tall, and I have shrunk to about 5 feet, my attempt at conversation is like shouting up to the moon. I am trying to explain the concept of this card to him, but he is hung up on the idea that the phone calls have to be in some kind of special order--like a rank ordering of names. And I am trying to explain to him in English that, as far as birthday cards are concerned, it makes absolutely no difference in which order people sign their names, since the signatures appear in any configuration they please on the card: horizontal, slanted, vertical, and that there is no rank order of signatures. To illustrate, I grab a scrap piece of paper (something akin to a leftover post-it, only one of the rectangular kind, not a square one) and I fold it in half to make a sample birthday card, and proceed to scribble sample signatures onto it.

Just then my cell phone rings agai; it is someone from the school calling me back, using the caller ID from my previous call. This person has some English knowledge, and I explain that I was just trying to call to leave my name for the aural birthday card. Then the person says that there was a mistake, today is the 11th, and I am not supposed to call them to record until the 14th.

There was more detail to the dream, color, men (mostly unusually tall) women and children (lots of children), some kind of playground. All this happened after an earlier dream in which I was in the Army and was enrolled in some kind of training camp and my fellow conscripts and I knew we were going to be in trouble with the authorities because we were not lining up right...we were too close to each other.

So, there is no escape to dreamland; even there I am pursued by the demonic frustrations of everyday life.

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