Celluloid memories

Last night I took a sleeping pill in an attempt to get myself back into a somewhat normal routine. As it turns out those little blue pills work very well on my body and I slept for about 11 hours. I seem to have been in R.E.M. sleep (yes, the band. I was dreaming about the band) for most of the night as I remember dreaming constantly. As is normally the case, I don't member most of my dreams except for jumbled parts of the last one.

In this dream I was visiting a friend who is at dental school, only the school wasn't his school. As it turns out, his unschool was right across the street from Washington University, only it wasn't Washington University. At the unWash. U. I visited with Dr. Brown...only it was my Poli-Sci professor from my undergrad years, glass eye and all. The sham Dr. Brown proceeded to parade me before a table of professors who looked like students of Oxford University, cigarettes and all. They asked me why I decided against going to Wash. U. and during my explanation I somehow ended up in the shamDr. Brown's house eating dinner with his family...and based on what I know about Dr. Brown this wasn't his house or his family (Well? How did I get here?...) I finally woke up from this dream that was quickly becoming a nightmare and then dozed one or two more times before collecting enough energy to get out of bed.

I bring this up because I am reading about one of the masters of surrealism, Luís Buñuel. I received his autobiography, My Last Sigh, from interlibrary loan today and the first chapter blew me away. I'm going to quote it heavily in the intro to my chapter on his film Viridiana. Take a gander here, it's quite short.

I rather enjoy the tone of this chapter and, of course, the subject matter. If you know me at all you know that memory has been central to my academic work for some time now. Still, there is something disconcerting in these pages. Buñuel writes that he didn't start experiencing traces of memory loss until he was near 70 years old. The first full paragraph on page 4 and the first half of the second paragraph describe me at the age of 29, while writing me thesis. Good professors of my committee, if you're reading this, you will understand part of the reason why you haven't seen any of my work yet, it seems impossible to organize because I forget half way through where I was going with x train of thought.

This is worrisome but I hope it will go away soon, or at least when I'm done with graduate school and have no legitimate reason to stay up late and wake up early. I suppose that one way of seeing this is that at a young age, I've been given the gift of understanding the importance of memory.