Sylvia's Journal

I woke up from what felt like a parallel life. My dreams were so vivid, so real and,except for Axel and myself, populated by people I either don’t know or who I see very little, like minor characters or extras in my life’s play. There was the scene at the beach, a bit like Rockport but but different: the sea was shallow and the land had fjords; an amalgam of Cape Cod and Norway. A friend with a baby in her belly, who looked a bit like Fiona who also (still?) has a baby in her belly, came to visit and we talked about great places on the ocean to take babies too. The best place, we concluded was anyplace as long as you brought a nanny, while I looked out over the water of an inner harbor that was full of enormous water lillies about to break through he surface. The water was so clear you could see them growing to the surface. There was a younger woman who claimed to have worked for a store called ‘Best Leather.’ She did not know Tessa? I did not ask about DJ because it seemed so obvious that she would know him; no use wasting a question on that.

Earlier or later, temporal sequences seem meaningless in dreams, I went to what looked like a bank but was really a place where you could ‘re-balance’ your votes, the way you would re balance an investment account. I traded in my one 100% vote for one candidate and received in exchange 3 votes of 33.3% for each of three candidates. I think our district’s legislator himself did the exchange, which did not strike me as odd. I could not do the exchange for Axel though, that was illegal. These weighty things had to be done in person but the place was about to close. I got all sorts of forms for Axel to fill in. He was supposed to be waiting for me outside in a car (that looked like the old Peugeot 404 that my father had) but when I walked out of the building he was gone and I realized I did not have my cellphone with me. I walked up and down the block and then into town. At some point streams of people walked out of a building onto a street towards buses. I scanned the place from higher ground and followed a man who looked like Axel but later morphed into someone else. Eventually I found him and there was an exchange of some angry words I suspect. I can’t really remember, the images are popping like soap bells – gone!

The dreams and deep sleep were probably triggered by another very, very long day that consisted mostly of a 7 hour workshop on negotiation and conflict management, offered pro-bono to us by a local consulting firm. It was followed by another 3 hours of doing the work I couldn’t do during the workshop, getting me home 12 hours after I left it in the morning. I had brought my computer to the hotel meeting room where the workshop was held in the hope that I could do some work feigning to take notes, in the back; but the room was tiny and I was too exposed. There were long periods of lecture where I would have liked to do something else as my level of panic about everything that had to be done before I get on the plane next Wednesday mounted steadily.

I am still wondering whether it was a good use fo my time. What was good about it was the opportunity for me to be a participant and experience the event from that side. I heard my colleagues mumble before we even had started what they hoped no one would ask about expectations (we were asked as good protocol demands). We also got to gossip about the facilitators (we sometimes forget about that). It was a good reality check. This is what I was reminded of: Seven hours with a working lunch break is not good, if you cannot cover all the material, remove some rather than stuff things into the allotted time. Cases do little for me and they never capture reality like real life does. Theory before application requires so much more time lecturing. Energy in the room matters, etc. etc. Since I am doing a TOT (training of trainers) in Kabul next week, thiswas a good reminder, but it was a bit of a costly reminder of things I tend to stress anyways in my teaching. They did teach us a nice model about roles and decision making that I think I can use when there is tension about these things.

I came home to an empty house which was actually fine. With a beer and fajitas Tessa had prepared me I collapsed in front of the TV where I watched the end of one Agatha Christie mystery and then watched another mystery from murder to resolution. Halfway through it Axel came home and he watched the last ending with me. I tumbled into bed and remember nothing more except for the dream bubbles that I grasped before they vanished.