Winifred Napers Nephew

I have a few drafts of unfinished blog posts saved. I just browsed through them, and found that this post was pretty complete. This one was from 2/8/10, about a month after I'd returned from a trip to New Orleans with some friends. After watching Inception last week, it's kinda fascinating to me again . . .

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I had an interesting nightmare last night. I was flying home from a trip with some friends, going through airport security, when a female TSA employee asked me a strange question, something about petroleum engineering, that had one of two answers. One of the answers seemed obvious, but I thought about it a little more, and decided that the less-intuitive answer was actually the correct one, though I knew that I had little knowledge about petroleum engineering. Apparently, I gave the "right" answer, and then was asked to come into a small room for further screening.

At this point, a man who's personality reminded me of the US Marshall on LOST began interrogating me, as the answer I had given was suspicious given that I'm not supposed to know anything about petroleum engineering. He asked me who I was, and claimed that I was not who I am, but instead a woman named "Winifred." He showed me a card, that had the name, "Patricia Napers Nephew" on it and asked me to read it. I read it, "Winifred Napers Nephew," and he said, "Aha, you are Winifred! You just gave yourself away!" And I said, "No, I just misread it because you had just said the word Winifred, you mislead me. And I used to live in Naperville, so the word 'Napers' was familiar to me." He did other things to try to trick me into saying "incriminating" things. He asked me about my parents and what they did. He sat me in front of computer with a recording device and asked me to say "important things" about myself, then left the room. I spoke into the computer and talked about being a Christian, my church, being a doctoral student, and my career goals. He came back in and asked me again how I knew the answer to the petroleum question if I wasn't Winifred. I told him that I was a doctoral student and very smart and was able to make an intelligent guess about it. Then, another student from my program came into the room and told me that another friend of ours had picked up the friends I was traveling with. Then, the man interrogating me said that my trial would begin next week. "Trial?!" I exclaimed, "What did I do besides answer a question?"

At this point I woke up. The entire nightmare was more interesting than scary, until the very end. At the point when the man mentioned me being put on trial, I was struck with fear, set into some sort of Kafkaesque scenario in which I was falsely mistaken for someone else and unable to prove my true identity. Now awake, I looked around, and reminded myself that I was still in bed, and told myself that this nightmare was just a dream.