On The Interpretation Of Maladies

An anonymous reader of this blog had made a request yesterday that the Transparent Ironist publish his signature as one of his posts. Since he does not have access to a scanner at the moment, he is instead publishing one of his dreams here. This is because he believes that an analysis of this single dream will take the reader much closer to who he 'really is' than any number of dissections of his signatures.

Last night, I dreamt that I was in Cambridge again, but this was not the same Cambridge from which I had matriculated in 1998. Gone were the dreaming spires rising up into the transparent sky, the blue flags fluttering breezily in the nippy air, the clock with its deep chimes resonating down the hollow corridors, and the polished green grass shining in the mellow autumn sunlight. Instead, I found myself in a gigantic hall that was brilliantly lit from all corners with a number of lights of different colours, red, blue, green, purple, and yellow. I saw a number of my old college friends, and they all came running up to me with the same remark, 'I just read your autobiography. It is awesome.' To all of them, I gave the same reply, 'My autobiography? Where on earth did you read that?, and they retorted, 'Why, it is there in your pigeon-hole at the other end of the hall!'

I rushed down to the brightly-lit rows of pigeon-holes, and desperately tried to find my initials. When I eventually found my pigeon-hole, I looked into it but could find no autobiography there. I ran back and started asking those friends if they had really seen my autobiography there, and they all assured me that they had read it there just a couple of hours ago. I frantically dashed back to the pigeon-hole, but could not find it this time either.

I woke up this morning in a cold sweat and found my beautiful black dog lavishly licking my face, trying to wake me up. I rushed downstairs and told my grey-haired housekeeper at the door that I had no time for breakfast, leaving her faintly muttering something about how self-absorbed and solipsistic men had become these days. I went to my office, and my secretary told me with a twinkle in her blue eyes that there was something waiting for me in my pigeon-hole. It was a sweet-smelling neat brown package, and I opened it hurriedly : it was a fresh copy of my autobiography from my publisher with a note from her inside it, 'Dear Mr Ironist, I hope you shall now finally find yourself.'