Today’s prompt is about a strange dream we’ve had recently. As I write this a week before the actual prompt, I’ve just woken up at three am after a series of odd ones that ran into each other as they do. The first involved attending a neighborhood lecture from Dr. Michael Sugrue, who I encountered over a decade ago. He had an excellent lecture on Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, so good that I downloaded the audio to listen to on walks and such. I later found more of his work on western philosophy in general, and wish the demands of life didn’t prevent me from diving into his body of lectures in full. I haven’t listened to him recently, but my brain decided “Hey, let’s pretend we’re listening to him give a lecture on rhetoric and communication in that house down the street, and then you’ll play taxi driver to him and a couple of other students on a run for food and musings on nature, particularly flowers.” This shifted into me discovering that there was a sale on Wendell Berry books on Amazon, including one where he recollects his adventures putting various things (stones, cheese cubes, etc) on his neck, and ended up with an imaginary scene from The Sopranoes in which Tony, wearing a grey shirt with a white “W” on it, explains to Dr. Melfi that W stood for Winston, i.e. Winston Churchill, and that he admired Churchill as a leader.
So…yeah. This is Dr. Michael Sugrue if you’d like to listen to his voice, and then listen to the entire lecture because it’s so good.
Reading Freely 
Thanks for the video. Right up my alley.
Glad you enjoyed!
What a lecture, I got an ebook, on Unlimited and have read it. I got bogged down in Epictetus and didn’t try Aurelius before now. His mistake was letting his son succeed him instead of adopting like all of the four good emperors.
Stoics argue about that. Aurelius was the only one of the ‘good emperors’ to have a living son at the time of his death: had he denied Commodus succession, the little toad would have undoubtedly tried to take the throne, anyway. I can see Aurelius choosing the most prudent/stable option, not realizing how unstable Commodus was. I can highly reccommend Hays’ translation of the Meditations. I’ve read three and find that one has the best balance.
It’s always cool when dreams run into each other like that.
That’s a very cool dream. I love it when real people show up in mine, even if it sometimes makes me very irritated with them when I wake up.
Dreams running into one another can make for an interesting sleep.