The Mathematician's Dream

Had a weird, highly detailed dream about myself … or myself in an alternate universe.  I was a successful mathematician, but not just a teacher or a college professor, but one who had made significant discoveries and was a popularizer of higher math, like Brian Greene or Michio Kaku are for cutting-edge physics.  I had a couple of books published and was a niche celebrity of sorts.  I had an office in a New York City college (Columbia?), an Indian wife (?) who taught biology at the college that paid my salary, and a house on a lake up in the Adirondacks.

Go figure.

But the oddest part of the dream was how detailed my collegiate journey was.  It seems I was an autodidact, especially so during summer vacations.  I had calculated 80 credits to get a math degree, and at 16 hours a credit that worked out to 1,280 hours of study in my major, or 320 hours a school year.  I took it upon myself to study / learn 4 hours a day 6 days a week during the 90 days of summer (in addition to the part-time shelf-stocking job I had), accumulating an additional 320 hours or so a summer – one full and condensed school year of learning.  Thus, when I graduated with my four-year math degree, I had 2,560 hours of the subject which so filled my heart with glee under my belt, twice as much as my colleagues, so I literally could pick and choose where I wanted to go to grad school, and they all eagerly shopped me.

Remember the Rule of 10,000 thing that makes such profound sense to me?  Well, though not explicitly stated, it was there in those hour calculations that I dreamt about.

Yes, in another corner of the multiverse I am a mathematician / physicist.  This dream, I think, was him, patting my somnific self’s slumbering shoulder, reassuring me that while Hopper-sub-writer may be floundering, Hopper-sub-scientist was doing just fine.