The Cuttlefish

He had the same dream at the beginning of every, fresh semester. He dreamt that he was lecturing another surly set of students about some poem or story or novel they probably hadn’t read. Many were asleep. Some were furiously texting behind the sleek camouflage of their laptops. A precious minority was actually listening to his baffling burbling. He turned to the white board to make a note.

Instead of feeling his hand, clutching the black, delible marker, begin to sully the snowy countenance of the white board with cursive characters that few of them would be able to decode, he realized—this happened each and every time; it was a fixed and inevitable element of the dream, but it always shocked him—that he was making notes by unusual means. His trouser snake, his John Thomas, was jetting black ink onto the white board.

At first it was legible. Then it became a cuttlefish gusher emanating from below his belt. The force of it shoved him back on his heels. The bored youths were indifferent at first. A few began to murmur, to giggle and gesticulate. He worried about the impact of this scandalous weirdness on his teaching evaluations. Precarity percolated through his dream, making it brittle and nervous.

The jet became such a catastrophic cataract that it lifted him into the air. His body deflated, blasted not backward but upward, soon to be pulverized against the ceiling. The disgust and contempt in their upturned eyes eclipsed their alarm as they gaped at him. He awoke, moist and cold, like a fried fish cooling in greasy newspaper on a counter. Every year, the same nocturnal nonsense. It was terrible and predictable.

Analysis and interpretation: he was supposed to be good at these things, but he could not make much sense of the dream. The shame and confusion that coursed through him as it unfolded lingered after he awoke like an ashen, whiskey splashed hangover. That was about all he could build from the wet, black fragments: themes of humiliation, stunned shame and fear.

Ejaculation and micturition were the special powers of his member in waking life. Should he construe the dream as a sign that he was pouring something essential into his work to no good end? Shooting blanks? That seemed credible. Tenure had rolled into the gloomy tunnel before he could reach the platform. The pandemic had eradicated the best parts of his work and caused the worst parts to multiply and proliferate like fungal spores. Teaching online was revolting. He had stared at too many galleries of ghosts on a screen.

His father had warned him that he would eventually have to become a holistic therapeutic facilitator instead of a lecturer: “You will have to triage tortured minds and bandage brains and try to help them settle down and think most of the time. Serious talk about books and words and ideas will be as rare as a spirit moose. It doesn’t help that you’re a cis white male. Most will see you as an oppressor, privileged and smug. They won’t care that Ireland has never had a colony, or that most of our ancestors would have sold their ears for a pint of plain.” He’d been right. His most pessimistic prophecies always came true. It was infuriating.

Rigorous pedagogy had been usurped by sunny, vacuous customer service. Most of his students majored in complaining and minored in sulking. There were always a few who could and did read, though. A few who loved thinking and imagining and could write elegant sentences that sparkled with insight, which were drops of milk in the burnt espresso of essays inspired by deadlines and lately, written by mendacious robots. They kept him from despair, which would have been simpler—smoother, somehow. It took grace to admit defeat. Instead, he just kept dreaming.

Was he pissing it all away? His energy, his attention, his time, his life? Sure, but who wasn’t? After a plague, people relish the rush back into the arms of habit and custom. Seldom do they ask if what they were doing before was worth doing. He suspected that most of his efforts were futile, but some were amusing. All he could do was emit his ink at the obstinate absurdity, waking or dreaming.