An American girl in a British law school--one of Oxford's colleges, I think--is facing her final exam. In a grand old Victorian lecture hall, all carved wood filigree, students must stand and answer hard questions on the fly--no research, no notes! The professor singles her out for a fiendishly specialized question. She answers triumphantly and unexpectedly, not from legal theory but from personal knowledge of the subject! I think admiringly "He won't underestimate her again!"

Wrong. The professor slaps her down. "Your analysis is shallow, Miss X." Prompts others to give quite different answers adding up to an approach that's legally plausible but is in fact weaker, for it ignores the detailed inside knowledge she evinced.

She stands up again, visibly gulping and sweating, and interrupts: "You are biased here, not only by your ignorance of a subject you yourself chose, but by lies told you by Mr Y, your teaching assistant. He's been punishing me for rejecting his advances. I had planned to let it slide, but now that I see he practices academic blackmail as well as sexual harassment--"

A wave of muttering round the hall. Her classmates don't believe her. She's nervous, shifty-eyed. She must be lying.

But then... we're at the graduation party. And curiously enough, Miss X is here. She passed that exam and got her degree! It's a huge pin of beaten gold: a hollow bear's paw! Her classmates whisper "it was awarded her just to avoid scandal" and "she's the blackmailer here..."

She circulates just as if she's not being shunned. But she knows.

Yet she's here, defiant. And why not? She told the truth. Mr Y came on to her, and hinted he'd get her flunked if she said no; then did his best to act on his threat, via bad reports and false grades--up til the final, where she faced her prof directly and could accuse the TA publicly.

I can see why her professor underestimated her--he was being lied to. But why'd the TA figure she'd be too ashamed to stand up and speak out against him?

But then, as I listen to these English students gossip, I start to understand. He was used to English shyness, English whispering, English sexism, English shame. American bluntness--or perhaps sheer foreignness--gave her strength.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• The law school, lecture hall, getting called on to answer fiendish questions: from the old movie The Paper Chase I think
• Brit vs American: I've always thought of myself as introverted and shy (in person at least--if I SAW you reading these words, I couldn't write them). This dream suggests there's a side of me that CAN speak up when needed, regardless of gossip or sanctions.
• Sexism, harassment, underestimated girl: I've been reading Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld books. They're full of male dominance games--women are adjuncts, prizes. Yes, his fictional premise requires most of his men to be sexist: with all humanity resurrected, the majority are from the deep past. But still...
• The hollow golden bear-paw:
  1. Huge bears by Nick Cage, made out of old sweaters--saw at Yerba Buena Center.
  2. Strange hollow ceramics with negative curvature, from Scandinavia, also in YBC.
  3. Paw-prints were pressed into the concrete walk outside YBC, in Moscone Park.
  4. The Golden Snitch, the little winged ball whose capture wins the game of Quidditch in Harry Potter. The Paw was just its size. And "snitch," of course, is what the TA was doing--and what the American girl did right back to stop him--and win the game of shame.
• ACTION: practice disagreeable public speaking, despite my distress--for only truth-telling wins the Golden Paw.

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sk - Sl-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites