Moody Dreams

Weather affects mood. No direct research at hand to prove this, but plenty of empirical evidence, and my theory for the weird limbo that was Sunday.

Most of Sunday was spent under a seamlessly grey clouded sky, invarying in brightness and hue, so at any waking point in a day that I spent mostly in bed I could not look out the window and figure out what time it was. I would drift out of sleep, stare blearily at the sky (which is the only part of the outside world visible from a vantage point sunk 2 inches into a cosy bed), and not know if it was morning or afternoon, early or late. And drift right back to sleep. (One valiant attempt was made to get out of the house, but a combination of rain and the inexplicable disappearance of every taxi forced me back indoors)

Days like this make time seem malleable, and bring the past closer to mind - after a while, it feels like the same cloudly day you've been living for a long time. Which probably explains the dream.

In this dream, I was talking to my old tutor from school, Mr Thomas Katzenbach. The dream seemed to have been set sometime after my time in the army (however, see later comment) and before my time teaching, because at the end of it all, he dropped me off at my old home. We were having a little reunion and catching up, and everything was normal and fine - except that towards the end I realised he was driving an army 3-tonner truck. With his daughter. (as far as I know he has a son, born when he was teaching here, but I don't recall him having a daughter) He was teaching her how to drive the 3-tonner. With me in it, looking at this 8 year old girl driving a 3-ton truck.

And that was it. The only other thing of note in this whole dream was me mentioning to him that Miriam, another of his students, was currently in Perth with her grandmother. This last bit stretches the timeline of the dream a bit, since this didn't happen until a bit after, but then again, it is a dream. Oh yes, the truck was left-hand drive (steering wheel on the left, driving on the right side of the road), which is definitely odd for a right hand drive country.

Not the weirdest of all dreams I've ever had, but certainly one that catapulted me back to a completely different timeframe. It made me get out of bed and discover that googling "Thomas Katzenbach" returns too broad a series of hits to effectively search, for example (he left Singapore some time ago, and I've lost track of where he went: it's been more than 10 years)

After a series of weekends spent geocaching, K and I seem to have run out of steam. Other than sleep and have weird dreams, I spent the weekend catching up on watching Rahxephon, which seems more and more to be Neon Genesis Evangelion re-packaged - inscrutable alien invaders, massive destruction, something odd happening to Tokyo, all overlaid with religious mummery to give a gloss of "depth" to a Giant Fighting Robot anime (alright, I overstate the case a bit, given that NGE has a some genuinely sensible bits).

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Comments

ampulets said…
Tym and I were both taught by Tom Katzenbach too! Mr K, as he told us to call him in case we messed up pronouncing his name. We read Robert Lowell with him...and some Shakespeare. He was supposedly brother of that Disney Katzenbach. I wonder how he survived in Singapore with that beard of his.

Thank goodness I've never dreamt of Mr K. Tym?
wahj said…
I didn't realise he was related to that Katzenbach. Hmmm. Any idea where he is now? I feel like dropping him a note to say hi.
Tym said…
Never dreamt of him. For sure ;)

Don't think he was directly related to Disney's Jeffrey Katzenberg? What I remember him declaring proudly is that there were only like 50 Katzenbachs in the world, so they were all somehow related to each other.

Last I heard (in the late '90s), Mr K was at Horace Mann School, but he doesn't seem to be there anymore...
Anonymous said…
Nope. He is at Horace Mann now. I just had him as an english teacher this year and decided to search his name and found this. He always talks about how much he loves Singapore.

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