Here is this morning’s dream.  I have no idea where this came from.

The dream starts in a Chemistry laboratory with wooden lab top benches but otherwise modern services supplied. On the bench in the water bath of a rotary evaporator is a round bottom flask it is being rotated by the evaporator mechanism. There is a thermometer in the water bath and I can see a liquid in which a white compound is partially dissolved. It is dissolving. I am with a man in a white lab coat. I note that he is not wearing safety specs. He asks me what I think the intermolecular forces are in compound being dissolved. He says that at one end it has a cyano group. So I suggest that there may be a dipole involved. In a nearby tank is another flask similarly set up. He says that molecule also has a methyl group meta to the cyano on a benzene ring. I say that that would mess with the orientation of the dipole. He comes back to the near flask and says that para to the cyano group is a dimethylamino group. I say that given the push-pull effect that the intermolecular forces are probably dipole dominant but that there may also be significant hydrogen bonding with solvent at the amino end. I say that it is dimethyl-amino-benzonitrile DMABN. He says yes. He asks me what the reactivity would be. I suggest that maybe the ortho positions might be weakly reactive. I say that in a prior life I knew a bit about DMABN and that it can form TICT, twisted intramolecular charge transfer states in solvents of the right polarity. I probably know more about this molecule than is necessary.

I show him a reaction vessel on one bench. It is on a stirrer-hotplate and the flask is not stoppered. On the next bench behind me is  similar flask. The liquids in each are being stirred and one can see a mild vortex in the centres. I suggest he watches the far flask. I take a small pipette and add some liquid to the first flask. On addition a faint pink colour appears which fades. In the far flask a UV-purple colour appears. I say to look at the UV. He says it must be blue for us to see. I say OK look at the emission from that flask a part of which is just inside the blue edge of the visible spectrum. It is a form of unknown chemical transference. A type of remote chemiluminescence. He is surprised.

I am joined by a man roughly my age in a tweed like suit he ushers me off around the building. We are in one room in which a young man is brought in with two academics. He is to have a Ph.D. viva. I wish him good luck and we leave. I am then shown various offices and the underground chemistry stores. I can see banks of gas cylinders and empty basement rooms. He takes me back to the lab. I am there advised to put written labels on the experiment I have going, there are now new lab protocols. Ok I agree and write some out to be fixed to the bench. They ask me when was the last time I made a molecule. I say it must have been when I was ~22 say around 1986. I wanted a molecule that could not be bought so I had a go at making it myself.

I am told that I will need to participate in the Oxford chemistry outreach day due soon. I can use my fancy new experiment or see the man in the teaching labs downstairs. I am escorted down there thinking he might have something on molecular spectroscopy. This would be much easier and safer for me.

As we are going down the back stairs to the teaching labs it suddenly occurs to me that in some weird surreptitious way I am having an interview, I am being interviewed, implicit is for a job. I think to myself that this is fucking weird and that there is no way that I could teach nor could there ever be a sensible fit. Something is being manufactured, cobbled together, in a roundabout tortuous way. It does not bode well. It is a bit daft.

As the dream ends I come to thinking WTF, where did that come from?