APRIL 3, 2026 – Here I sit, a quirk of evolutionary biology, an aggregation of roughly 30 to 37 trillion cells, a majority of which are in the form of red blood cells, in partnership with approximately 38 trillion . . . are you truly ready for this? . . . bacteria. And my mere existence isn’t the only “quirk” afoot. Considering my DNA, a lifetime of interaction with the world around me, and the power of randomness, there’s a whole lot that’s . . .“quirk-y” about me besides astronomical numbers of cells and bacteria.
I mean, for example, what other label but “quirky” would you assign to my recent dream in which I was preparing to depose none other than “Uncle Joe” Stalin in a case where the big legal issue was the inadequacy of money damages?(!) To my mild surprise in the dream, Koba appeared at my office a few minutes before the appointed time of his deposition. He was alone and unassuming and without counsel. He wore his signature military tunic and trousers stuffed into dull black boots. I anticipated that Stalin would be a cooperative witness, but I never got to find out—the dream led elsewhere before the court reporter arrived and the deposition could get underway.
As it is written in the vulgar vernacular of texts, WTF?(!)
Apart from the improbable and therefore, especially noteworthy, appearance of Stalin as a witness was what has become a highly familiar (in my quirky world of dreams) theme of my dream: litigation. Though I’ve been involved in a fair amount of litigation in my career, including a few week-long, full-blown jury trials, that avenue of practice has not been the throughway of my legal life. Yet, at least several times a month I have a “litigation dream,” much as I—and many people—have experienced some variation of a “school dream,” usually involving a distressing exigency, such as having skipped every single class in the course after the first session or not having turned in a paper or being critically late for an exam or the worst—not being eligible to graduate with the rest of the class. This last one is always baffling. How can it be that I was allowed into—and out of—law school (faits accompli in the dreams), if I hadn’t passed all the requirements to graduate from college?
The litigation dreams are all over the map regarding the stage of a case. In some, I’m meeting for the first time with a prospective client who has some apparent grievance. In other dreams, I’m wallowing in notes, papers, and documents or tracking down subpoenaed witnesses who’ve gone AWOL. I’m often at a loss over some critical piece of evidence that I know I’d seen or heard and that had once been within my custody or control but is now lost to the winds. In yet other dreams, I’m in court with the trial about to begin, and I’m flying entirely by the seat of my pants, with my only props being an old-fashioned pen critically low on ink and a blank yellow pad.
In my case, these litigation and school dreams are entirely symbolic—or very nearly so; in real life, there was the occasional figurative fender bender in school and court (and one instance where I “totaled” matters yet avoided irreparable harm (see Chapter Six (“My Murder Case . . . and the Redemption of Vladimir Horowitz” of my War Stories series)[1], but at the end of each phase of my real-life formal education, I managed felicitously to graduate; in every case of actual litigation, I likewise survived to fight another day . . . for justice—or injustice, I suppose, from the point of view of adversaries.
So, I wonder, what is the symbolism behind my quirky—and discomfiting—dreams that feature school and litigation? The more obvious choices: latent anxieties that roil my subconsciousness; smoldering regrets about squandered opportunities; uneasiness about work-related matters beyond my control. What intrigues me is that none of the symbolism seems to reflect my very real concern about the fate of our world; about such worries as anthropogenic climate change; dismemberment of our country’s body politic by the body in the Oval Office; the war that has no plan or happy ending; the threat of recession; the threat to free and fair elections . . . and so on and so forth. When the sun rises, my brain is purged of worry about news from the day before and relieved that my “school” snafus or “litigation” missteps were random fictions of the quirky world of my dreams.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
[1] https://writemakesmight.net/war-stories-chapter-six-my-murder-case-and-the-ultimate-redemption-of-vladimir-horowitz-part-i/
