Debate Dream

I had a really bizarre dream last night. What’s so strange about it is not that it was weird — all dreams are weird — but that I remember this much of it, 24 hours later.

I was back on the high school debate team again, after a multi-year hiatus. (Mind you, I haven’t done anything with high school debate in about six years.) My high school debate coach, Dana, was still the coach. We were at a debate tournament at Washington High School in Cedar Rapids, just about to begin competing in the tournament. My friend Amanda was there too for an art competition. (She’s a graphic designer so that made sense.) As I was walking through the halls to see her art competition, I saw a stack of boxes full of debate evidence, about ten feet high. They were sitting on a giant dolly cart about ten feet high as well.

Before the debate, I was putting some cards (evidence) together in Microsoft Word. I was introduced to my new debate partner, who was a sophomore. Neither of us had done any research yet, so we had no evidence except the stuff we had saved from my last year debating (1997).

We went into this debate, and were put against another team of two who were also probably both sophomores. So even though I was out of practice, I didn’t have that much to worry about. The girl had a really thick accent, but she spoke slowly and enunciated, which was helpful. Apparently both of the teams decided to change the structure of the debate, and I won’t bore you with the details except to say that I still remember the structure we agreed upon in the dream.

I was on the negative side of the debate and wanted to present an argument called Topicality. But because we only had the evidence saved from 1997, we didn’t have any negative Topicality arguments — we only had affirmative responses to Topicality! So I got on a bicycle and rode down a great big hill, heading toward a library to get a dictionary that would have a definition for “substantial” or “substantially.” At the bottom of the hill, near a parking garage, I got hit twice by a rude taxicab with a bad attitude. But his name was written on the side of the taxi, so I figured I could call the company and complain. I don’t think I found the definition, so I went back to the debate tournament. Fortunately the dream didn’t include the hard work of pedaling back up the hill.

That’s about when it ended. How strange!