Wednesday, September 20, 2023

This school wants me to describe all the ways in which I am like Hitler. (dream)

Image by Midjourney


DREAM

I attend an old English school that I don't take very seriously, but I find that I am the only student in the area when an important meeting between students and staff is about to occur. So I decide to represent my people and go. 

I enter the room. There are very few people in there--staff only. No students. 

The furniture is heavy. A huge wooden table in the center of the room makes it clear that this is a boardroom. There are no windows. The lighting mainly consists of a couple incandescent lamps. There are some bookshelves with some books, fake flowers and busts on them. I review the materials on the shelves. They don't seem relevant to what I think goes on in here. 

I look at what's on the table. There are some Beatles lyrics printed out and hopelessly jumbled. 

As I rifle through the papers, a white-bearded man in a tuxedo says, "See anything you like?" 

I smile and nod. I do. But I don't have forever to linger here when I could be doing something else. I'll wait another ten minutes for this meeting to get started.

Finally, another student, a boy, shows up. I've just been passing the time playing with various plastic toys mixed in with the paper lyrics. I ask how many classes he is taking. Four intro ones. I'm talking about how great his future is, when the Beatles show up. 

The white-bearded man turns and says to me, "So, describe to us all the ways in which you are like Hitler." 

I definitely feel as though I am being interviewed for a job. Did he ask me that just to see how I'd react, or is this actually an important question I need to consider carefully? 

I guess there are a lot of things I have in common with Hitler, although the knee-jerk reaction is to say... NOTHING! But realistically, we probably both like scrambled eggs for breakfast. We both like art. We probably both like tons of little everyday things like that. So every single human on Earth has tons of things in common with Hitler! Why would anybody ask a question like that? It's a trap!


INTEPRPRETATION

I think this dream mixes anxiety about job interview questions with how I listen to a random mix of Beatles songs on Spotify all the time. I used to have an app that would record your answers to common interview questions so you could play it back later and see how you did, and it was quite difficult for me to get good results from myself. 

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