Racoon Professor, remote dream by Michael Matthews
I was a PhD student in mathematics and I got a paper back that had ridiculous comments on it (I was writing a proof that related the Fibonacci series to the differences in successive squares, and in the dream, I saw the connection), written in pidgin English with lots of misspellings. One of them said “these stupid thought, stupid, stupid”, and another said “vury confusing, ow” and at the bottom of every page was a percentage, usually 0% or 4%, and at the top of the first page was written 64%, which made no sense whatsoever, because it was neither the total of the individual percentages, nor the inverse, and that’s what set me off.
I looked up from reviewing my paper and the professor was a raccoon, standing upright on a desk with little black rimmed glasses that accentuated his mask and a tiny labcoat. He was lecturing the class on the poor work they’d done and told one woman “you stupid face, small brain”, and he had a really annoying, raccoony voice (i.e. a little more bass than a chipmunk, and with a bit of a drawl). I started mocking the way he was talking, and he threw a pinecone at me, so I started throwing everything around me back at him, and several of my classmates (who had just previously been cheering me on), started saying “aw, he’s so cute! don’t hurt him” and things like that, so I began pelting them with debris too. Finally, I worked my way to the front of the classroom under a withering hail of pinecones, grabbed him and tied the sleeves of his labcoat like a straitjacket and hung him by the collar on the coat rack. While he gibbered and chirruped angrily, I wrote out a proof that I actually used in 10th grade to make fun of Don Ricklefs (my supposed teacher) after he’d had to copy out of a book the proof that 1 does not equal 1. This made the raccoon furious and I started rubbing the chalky eraser on his little black nose, but then my girlfriend came in and gave me a “really, now” look and I grabbed her by the hand and we ran out of the building.