Last night I had a dream about time travel, a first for me. Time-travel stories are notoriously confusing and paradoxical, and logical coherence isn't exactly the dreaming mind's strong suit. Put the two together, and you can readily imagine what a hot mess it makes.
I can't even begin to summarize the plot, which was very long and convoluted, but it involved me visiting various points in the past (but always still in the modern era), with what seemed in the dream to be momentous consequences, mostly musical in nature, for the present.
At one point, I introduced someone from the Hershey chocolate company to Walt Disney, which somehow resulted in Walt's having revolutionary idea that his animated features would be more popular if he put music in them.
A much more important mission involved going back to 19th-century Europe and presenting a Jewish composer of that era (no names were used, but going by his appearance I would say Gustav Mahler) with an invention from the future. The invention? Manuscript paper. You know, that paper that has pre-printed musical staves on it, handy for composing. I mean, one can only imagine how stunted Mahler's musical career would have been without this futuristic high-tech wizardry at his disposal! It seemed that even in the dream, manuscript paper was quite precious and hard to come by, and I was quite proud of myself for having successfully got my hands on some and brought it back to the 19th century.
(I haven't used manuscript paper since my twenties, but I recently found myself wishing I had some when I wanted to jot down the melody of "Cast your bread upon the waters." That may have inspired this aspect of the dream.)
After the time-traveling adventures, I returned to the present and found that I was late for work, but that it was okay because everything had been delayed for a funeral. The identity of the deceased was not clearly defined, but it was someone I knew well. The school was empty except for one man, who was one of the few who knew I was a time traveler. His grief was attenuated by the knowledge that the deceased wasn't really gone, since I could still visit him in the past.
"We've just finished the funeral," he said. "We can't see him now."
"And I can only see him not-now," I replied.
That line felt like a very satisfactory conclusion, like the end of a movie, and I woke up.
The afternoon after the dream, I went into my classroom and found that one of the students had arrived early and was sitting at a desk writing out a musical score by hand on manuscript paper. I can't remember the last time I saw someone doing that, and it made the dream feel mildly precognitive -- but not convincingly so since, as noted above, the manuscript paper in the dream could also have been inspired by a recent past event.
I don't know anything at all about Mahler's music, so I googled him. It turns out that his Sixth and Seventh Symphonies are (or were before Will Ferrell) the best known uses of the cowbell in music.
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