Last night I had a long, vivid dream about moving to Israel.

This itself probably seems strange, but it gets worse.

Not only do I move to Israel, I move to a settlement in the disputed territories. Then, I not only join the Army, but an elite Special Forces group within it. (Throughout the dream, the Israel/Palestine conflict is vaguely conflated with the world of John Scalzi's books "Old Man's War" and "The Ghost Brigades," but despite that, the Special Forces are still made up of regular ol' humans.) All this is at the same time as I am vaguely aware in the dream that my political views haven't changed at all. Since a lot of my friends were there, I think I may have moved out there, joined the army, etc., just to hang out with them...or possibly to watch their DVDs, since the DVD collection we built up in the dream was massive.

In any case, not only do my lefty-peacenik qualms about mideast politics not stop me and my associates from kicking all sorts of ass, but I am in fact promoted to General over the course of the summer I spend over there. Then I decide that it's about time to go back to the States for a while.

The pivotal moment comes at the airport gift shop in Tel Aviv. It is, for some reason, *very important* that we all get "Israel Defense Forces" t-shirts, much like the ones that in real life I've seen undergrads walk around wearing at the University of Miami. But, for some reason, in the dream, the airport gift shop will, by government policy, only sell those to genuine IDF veterans. (Needless to say, five seconds of internet research verifies the obvious fact that in real life, not only do they sell that exact t-shirt to anyone, but they sell them in, e.g. children's sizes.) Furthermore, not only do they not have a standard system for checking this (like, oh, I don't know, running your ID against a computer system or something.) Rather, you have to talk to a grizzled old general to see if he's heard of you.

This should be fine, given my recent service and meteoric rise but suddenly...crisis...I realize that I don't quite remember what my unit was called. A horrible thought occurs to me: was it all just a dream? Maybe I was never really in the IDF at all. Then a girl who I remembered from the first part of my dream is there, and she tells the old general about our unit and our settlement and everything. Crisis averted? But then, whne it gets to be my turn, he doesn't remember any of the battles I was in. Then he asks for my last name again...and he repeats it a few times under his breath, muttering...and remembers with a start that I kicked some important goal in the Army-Navy soccer game. I get my t-shirt, and I can go home.

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I just read Freud's "Dream Psychology," and I honestly have no idea what he would say about this one.