I Have a Dream

Perhaps the rigors of ICLP have reduced the number of ridiculous adventures in my life, but there is one thing that has increased dramatically in number: naps.  After a full morning of class followed by lunch, it is rather difficult to be mentally functional enough to do homework efficiently.  For this reason, if you enter the ICLP lounge in the mid-afternoon, you are likely to find yourself facing this sort of situation:

(I'm on the left in the middle)

It's true, ICLP students are not only diligent scholars of the Chinese language, but also apparently champion nappers.  Are the "couches" in the ICLP lounge comfortable?  Ha!  Not in the least, but we cannot be deterred.  The unfortunate side effect of afternoon naps is that one has to stay up later to finish homework, necessitating a nap the next day as well.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is a vicious cycle...just a sleepy and slightly inconvenient one.  Also it opens one up to the possibility of unconscious photo-ops:

Will falling asleep with my textbooks improve my Chinese?  It might be possible.  This afternoon I apparently took a pretty solid nap at ICLP, because I had a very vivid dream.  In the first part of the dream, I dreamt that I had a purple pool noodle that I set down on the sidewalk, and when I turned my back it disappeared and was replaced by weird old soggy pool noodles.  But that part is not important.  The rest of my dream not only featured several of my classmates, but also in the second part of the dream Sharon and I were walking together, and she used a specific grammatical pattern/vocab word combination that we learned in the last chapter ("感到不安“, which means "to feel uneasy"）.  When I awoke I felt slightly silly for having so much ICLP on the brain, but also totally proud of myself for dreaming not only in Chinese, but in textbook sentence patterns!  My teacher is going to be so impressed.