Spirit Of Salt

I’m hoping to dispense with the dream journaling presently but for the moment…

I dream that I’m in college, senior year of my undergraduate.  College is a long time past now, and it’s rare to find myself back there in my dreams.

I’m contemplating my final chemistry project, something to do with the properties of light.  Cardboard cartons filled with little reagent bottles of photosensitive chemicals cover the table in front of me, hundreds of bottles, hundreds of experimental processes and measurements to execute.  I’ve put it off dangerously long, I’m not entirely clear on the procedure, my laboratory notebook is in disarray.  But I think I will yet manage, if I get right to it.

I awake in a state of anxiety and remind myself that I delivered my final presentation and received my degree in chemistry almost a decade and a half ago, an altogether plainer affair, pure research without a lab component, though it did involve light - a solar-generated hydrogen process that never went anywhere, though I read about something that was clearly built on its foundation not long ago.

Asserting the present reality does little to ease me, though: I understand that my dream experiment is merely a stand-in for a dozen contemporary realities that vex me.  Always, something needs doing.

Oh, for the simple science of yesterday, model processes executed by the book, strictly on the bench scale.  This daily life is an experiment without instructions or controls, the results uncertain and unreproducible, and only these poor records to attest.