Teaching an intense winter camp is something that of course affects you, especially when things like materials requested a month before don’t show up. No matter who’s to blame, nothing can be done about it except to weather the problem and make do, sometimes. Well, the stress of dealing with that, as well as just being together with a bunch of kids for a lot of the day, is bound to have some effect on your mind.
For me, it’s been weird dreams. The wierdest one involved me being picked up by mobsters—Italian mobsters who live in Busan, South Korea. I think such a thing is unlikely in real life, but in the logic of my dream, it made perfect sense. So did walking past the storefront of a shop I saw in Toronto, near Chinatown, but which had somehow relocated to Busan, South Korea.
The Italian mobsters picked me up and demanded that I write music for a Broadway musical that they were having put on in Korea. In English. The weird thing was how absolutely 1930s it all was: traditional type plot, hokey lyrics, all-American pride, and all. I was somehow supposed to set it all to music worthy of Gershwin or Rogers & Hart.
I was talking with a couple of other camp teachers, in the dream, asking whether they thought I should do a good job of it, or a not-so good job of it. A good job, they reasoned, would bring the guys back and would mean increased demands and pressure. Of course, a bad job would be liable to get me beaten up.
I think in the end the gangsters decided the thing wouldn’t sell and canceled it all at the last minute, before they even tried out the music I was writing, but then the dream ended and I don’t know what was coming next. All I know was that it was a damned weird dream.