Riding a bicycle backwards and then forwards

Everyone's had that dream where they are on a bicycle, heading to some important event, fleeing some tragic fate, or otherwise riding for some gripping cause.  In the phantasmagoric world one's forward journey becomes increasingly sluggish.  Then, quite suddenly, frantic peddling is met only with retrograde motion.

 

I also have a similar dream which is draws on my time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison lakeshore dorms.  Particularly the Bradley Learning Community (BLC, also known as the Bradley Liquor Cabinet) and to a lesser extent Tripp Hall.  In the waking world of my first year I had a rather uncomfortable pair of dodgy leather shoes which quickly blistered my feet.  When those blisters got ones of their own, I upgraded my footwear.  Most of the time I walked from the BLC to the Humanities building via the Lakeshore path, which is unpaved gravel.  At the time, the route took me about twenty minutes, and before and for sometime after I replaced the shoes, caused my feet considerable anguish.

 

In slumber-land, I also walk from the lakeshore dorms to lectures and tutorials via the lakeshore path.  I'm rushing to make it on time.  The pain of the blisters remains, perhaps amplified but also disembodied, memory like.  But the cause is different - this time I'm barefoot.

 

Now these dreams might suggest that I am about to engage in some inane, pseudo-Freudian, quasi-psychological analysis of my subconscious.  I am not. 

 

Instead, today I feel a particular kinship with this disembodied sleeping self.  The cause of my consternation is a chapter on Rousseau's neo-Platonic debts.  I had finished this chapter, save for a few loose ends, or so I thought. 

 

Upon further review several substantive sections need serious reworking, and I've changed part of the analytical framework for a third.  I also have to incorporate or point toward the fusion between Lockean ideational thought, and Platonic sublimated Eros.  I had not argued for this synthesis when I drafted the chapter in my second year.  All this adds up to more revision than I expected.  The good news is the chapter will have a more interesting thesis than in its previous incarnation and will fit cheek and jowl with the next.

 

Once more into the breach,

 

Ben