Last night my dream mind invented a mycologist. He was a friend of mine, but I am not sure if I was a mycologist also or just someone interested in fungi. He was a generalist in mycology and was complaining that he couldn’t get into the lectures for more specialized studies of fungi. He kept throwing out terms that my dream persona did not understand.
My question is: why would I invent a mycologist? I have had very little interest in mycology in my waking life; it is as interesting to me as most other science. Though almost all scientific fields of study catch my attention at one time or another, I cannot remember a single specific instance in which the study of mushrooms was my central focus. I took microbiology a long time ago, but that had way more to do with bacteria than fungi. I just finished a class in medical terminology that had one or two terms out of more than a thousand that had to do with myco anything. So once again I am stumped as to what goes on in the upstairs part of my anatomy during my conscious downtime.
Maybe the gnomes who live up there kicked over a box labeled unused information, and were a little careless in their cleanup, leaving mycologist like a stray scrap of paper on the floor. Maybe dreams are just where the sweepings go when the gnomes make everything tidy before my consciousness opens the shop for another days work. Or maybe dreams are what my conscious mind finds on the floor when it comes in, heaped in a corner with some memories about a banged up Toyota minivan and some parental regret, a discarded reference to mycology. And, consciousness, being so anal about things making sense, has to sit down and build a story out of the random pile.
My conscious mind is a little lazy and just kind of slaps things together in a rather sloppy fashion and says, “Good enough.” Because it knows the weirder the story the more I will be occupied with it, and leave him to catch up on his sleep. He is basically an underachiever and often lets the gnomes run the show. I get a lot more creative when the gnomes are about, but I would hate to see the mess if they were in charge all of the time.
