Relaxed

I dreamed that social relations across the board had become radically more relaxed. I had to adjust to a new set of conditions. An intercollegiate swim meet, for example, would no longer have timed races. It would just be a group of kids driving over to another school and hanging out with swimmers there. They would still have races for fun but not keep track of the results and not do things in a very systematic way. This is just one example that I remembered upon waking up. I had to educate young children in a very non-intimidating way.

This change was related, somehow, to the operating system of the ipad, where "apps" replaced "applications." Perhaps also to an anecdote I had read in Charles Bernstein's Attack of the Difficult Poems the night before about an essay that got rejected from the PMLA because it did not conform to academic norms. In my dream I had to make changes myself, but these were largely pleasurable. There seemed to be no point in resisting the mood that the society as a whole had adopted.

I tend to remember a mood from a dream rather than a series of events. In this one our neighbors in one house next door had suddenly moved away and the mother of our daughter's friend was going to come over to fix our blinds. These random events have little to do with the relaxation of norms, but they have some emotional valence the somehow relates.