My high school English teacher, Mrs. Knebles, was old school, who thought the semicolon was the key to the punctuation universe and believed that diagramming sentences was as important as the theory of relativity.
She had this wonderful technique for teaching us how to write: first, we were to summarize a short story in 500 words, then in 250, and then in 100. It taught us how to make every word tell.
I thought I was the perfect student for the perfect technique. But then last night I dreamed that on her final exam she instructed us to take no more than 50 words to name our 50 favorite books, and to do so in French. This was impossible. What does this dream mean? I suspect it means that I was more of a failure in high school English than I’ve been willing to admit. I can’t be sure. That’s the enigmatic fun of dreams—we can never be certain what they signal or portend.
