Church Dream

Last night I had a very odd dream. Among its weird events and baroque details was a church service that I found really striking. The service went as usual until a given point in time - say, the stroke of 9:00 - when suddenly, whatever we were saying or singing stopped in mid-phrase, the lights dimmed, and everybody went over to the Parish Hall for coffee and refreshments. When that rigidly-scheduled ritual had been completed, we all returned to the sanctuary and picked up the service where we had left off.

It reminded me of "second lunch" when I was in high school, at a big-city school that had three lunch periods. Depending on what your fourth-period class was, you either ate before it, after it, or (in case of "second lunch") during a break right down the middle of it. If you missed your time, for whatever reason, you were out of luck. You got the same content regardless of the break in the middle of the class; but I always felt it took away from the seriousness of the learning process. It was as if the things we were studying were only so many formal motions we had to go through, and none of them mattered even as much as what was for lunch...